Mark Little, Principal Analyst, Consumer

In the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense. Telcos and OTT players have worked to establish a satisfactory level of trust with their customers, but as Big Data creates new opportunities for monetizing customer data, even a little more aggression in its exploitation risks driving mistrust among users.

Customers who are aware of this exploitation will become more concerned with their privacy, and with the transparency and control of their data. To exploit customer data more comprehensively, businesses must develop a much greater level of trust with their customers. Ovum calls this approach “Big Trust,” and outlines it in detail in the report Personal Data and the Big Trust Opportunity. Big Trust creates new …

In September 2012, the European Union released its “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe” document, aiming for a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2020 and a gain of 2.5m by the rollout of cloud.

A full 15 months later, the response by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) was published. The ‘Cloud Standards Coordination’ report, requested by the European Commission, aimed to analyse Commission VP Neelie Kroes’ opinion there was a “jungle of technical standards.”

ETSI asserted that cloud standardisation was “much more focused tha[n] anticipated” and added the landscape was “complex but not chaotic.”

The executive summary outlined the state of play in the key areas. Important gaps in standards had been identified, with new standards encouraged, whilst the legal environment for cloud computing remains “highly challenging.”

ETSI believes cloud standardisation will mature in the next 18 months.

“Though …

A recent study completed by Gartner titled Survey Analysis: Adoption of Cloud ERP, 2013 Through 2023 published on January 24, 2014, written by Nigel Rayner advises CIOs and application leaders of financial services institutions to “consider cloud ERP as a potential replacement for aging core ERP systems that are out of support or running on an old technology platforms (such as mainframes).“

The methodology is based on a survey of Gartner Research Circle members from North America, EMEA, APAC and Latin America from companies that range in size from $10M to $10B.

Key take-aways of the study including the following:

• Including the 2% that already have core ERP in the cloud, a total of 47% of organizations surveyed plan to move their core ERP systems to the cloud within five years. This is because their ERP requirements tend to be focused around administrative ERP (financials, human capital management and procure-to-pay …

This blog post is for informational and educational purposes only. Any legal information provided in this post should not be relied upon as legal advice. It is not intended to create, and does not create, an attorney-client relationship and readers should not act upon the information presented without first seeking legal counsel.

In a profession notorious for being slow to change, cloud-based solutions for many of the traditionally office-based systems like calendaring, matter tracking, remote access to email, document storage, and backup are gaining traction with law firms, especially small and mid-sized law firms.

A recent survey by LexisNexis, a popular legal research and services provider, indicates that half of the small law firm lawyers who responded to their survey were more likely to use the cloud for their practice in 2014 and that more than 70% of attorneys who responded believed their law firms would move aspects of their …

Karen Liu, Principal Analyst, Components

Open Compute Summit V, held last week, was a birthday party for open source hardware. The movement seeks to map lessons learned from open source software to the hardware world. Open Compute Project (OCP) has grown beyond serving the unique needs of its hyperscale founders and playing in the sandbox of open source architecture.

This year’s announcements got down to business, with designs adapted to fit more traditional enterprises. The goal is no longer just to demonstrate new hardware, but to offer a path to migrate from old to new data centers. Two partners, ITRI (Taiwan) and University of Texas at San Antonio, have set up compliance certification labs. OCP appears – despite its anti-standards rhetoric – to be taking the best of the standardization world as well as the open source world.

Time to market is a primary motivation, but standards do have their uses …

Although healthcare was once considered an industry that would not adopt cloud computing due to systemic security, legal, and privacy issues, that no longer seems to be the case.  Those in healthcare IT are moving even farther into the world of cloud computing.

The use of cloud computing in the world of healthcare seems logical to me.  Healthcare providers, and payers, are cost sensitive.  They are also experiencing rapid change, thus they could use technology that’s more agile.  Finally, they pay close attention to regulations and compliance.  That’s all good for the cloud.

The problem is that most in healthcare don’t understand the value that cloud can bring.  Instead, many push back on cloud computing, both private and public, typically due to assumptions that are incorrect.  However, there are those who are beginning to push back on the FUD to take advantage of cloud computing.

Information around …

While it is generally recognised that virtualisation is an important step in the move to cloud computing, as it enables efficient use of the underlying hardware and allows for true scalability,  for virtualisation in order to be truly valuable it really needs to understand the workloads that run on it and offer clear visibility of both the virtual and physical worlds.

On its own, virtualisation does not lend itself to creating sufficient visibility about the multiple applications and services running at any one time. For this reason a primitive automation system could cause a number of errors to occur, such as the spinning up of another virtual machine to offset the load on enterprise applications that are presumed to be overloaded.

Well that’s the argument that was presented by Karthikeyan Subramaniam in his Infoworld article last year, and his viewpoint is supported by experts at converged cloud vendor VCE …

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier is to retire after eight years heading up the open cloud provider, with co-founder Graham Weston stepping back into the breach on an interim basis.

Weston, who was chief exec from 1999 to 2006, said in a blog post that “what we build from here, we will build on the shoulders of a giant.”

In a conference call with analysts, Napier noted that “now is as good a time as any” for him to step aside, citing confidence with development of OpenStack and progress of hybrid cloud as the key reasons.

“While there’s still work to do, I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made, the increased capability of our hybrid cloud offering in the way that it qualifies just to compete for much larger opportunities,” Napier said in prepared remarks as reported by Seeking Alpha.

“The transition has been challenging and has taken …

Savvy executive leaders are already prepared for the shift to more progressive business technology deployments throughout the enterprise. Open hybrid cloud architectures, big data analytics and mobile applications are high-growth platforms at the center of this shift.

In particular, the emerging mobile applications must be integrated, flexible, and adaptable to constantly changing business conditions. This is the new normal in many fast-paced industries. That being said, are you ready for the mobile data deluge that’s inevitable?

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index global mobile data traffic forecast for 2013 to 2018, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase nearly 11-fold over the next four years and reach an annual run rate of 190 exabytes by 2018.

The projected increase in mobile traffic is partly due to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections — such as personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections — which will exceed 10 billion …

It’s that time again: here are CloudTech’s six favourite stories from around the web.

No prizes for guessing which story dominates the selections, but this month’s gamut is a mix of seat swapping, storage and smack talk.

1) Microsoft chief goes back to the future [Financial Times]: There wasn’t any other place to start. The biggest job in the IT industry was announced last week, and it’s not a coincidence that the new man in the hotseat, Satya Nadella, moves up from executive VP of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division.

While most articles make that connection, this FT analysis examines the “boardroom dance” Redmond now faces. Reporter Richard Waters is less than convinced that Nadella will have a clear run amid the prying eyes of Microsoft’s two previous CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, although noted Gates’ new advisory role is “subtly diminished …