A survey from Capita IT Services has revealed that CIOs see cloud computing as a key enabler to business innovation, yet boardrooms are “nervous” places where execs have to convince them cloud adoption is the way forward.

The research, a combination of roundtable sessions and surveys featuring nearly 150 CIOs, found some interesting points regarding cloud adoption. More than three in five (61%) believe that improving the company’s innovation is now one of their highest priorities, with a further one in five (20%) believing it to be a low priority.

Not surprisingly, the report discusses the shift of CIO from chief information to chief innovation officer.

“The ‘C’ in CIO now represents communication, collaboration, change; ‘I’ represents integration, interfaces, investment; and ‘O’ means optimisation, organisation and operations,” the report trumpets.

“In order to assert themselves at board level and become strategic business influencers, CIOs need to align themselves with …

Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Software – Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

Microsoft is betting heavily on the cloud for delivering self-service BI capabilities. Power BI builds on existing Microsoft Excel building blocks, including Power Query and Power View, to provide a single self-service client based on the familiar Excel spreadsheet as the user interface. It is a welcome simplification of Microsoft’s often confusing BI product stack that includes overlapping capabilities. The Power BI for Office 365 is priced competitively versus Tableau Online, the closest comparable product.

Making BI native to Excel

With many millions of users, Microsoft Excel is arguably the world’s most popular BI tool. With Power BI Microsoft sharpens its focus on the BI end user by leveraging the ubiquity of Excel, allowing users to load data, manage queries, visualize the answers, and manage connections to a variety of back-end data sources inside the …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

Interest in in-memory computing platforms is rising. Until now, the primary driver has been the “need for speed,” helping companies to process relatively modest data sets more quickly.

Both traditional and newer in-memory vendors are looking to scale-up these capabilities with innovative platforms that promise to meet the increasing demand for more accelerated, operationally driven analytics against Big Data residing in Hadoop environments.

Their efforts promise to overcome the limitations of traditional analytic architectures and, if successful, to bolster Hadoop’s credentials as a mainstream option for operational enterprise computing needs.

Two magnitudes of in-memory play into Hadoop

Two “magnitudes” of in-memory stand out – processing speed and data scale. In-memory has more or less proved itself as a viable platform for processing data more quickly – at speeds that traditional technologies simply cannot handle. For companies that require realtime analytics, in-memory computing is certainly …

UK-based hybrid cloud startup Zynstra has announced the launch of O365Connect, aimed at helping SMBs with a managed IT solution which brings the best of both on-premise and cloud worlds.

The product was developed in association with Microsoft – the name gives that one away – and HP, who is an OEM partner of Zynstra, and is aimed at businesses between five and 250 employees.

Zynstra O365Connect handles various tasks, from networking to file management, to Office 365, as well as maintaining a full backup of cloud-managed email and file data, plus providing a disaster recovery option in Windows Azure.

The partnership with HP doesn’t end there either, with all of Zynstra’s cloudy server appliances built on HP ProLiant servers, alongside Zynstra’s software to create the mix for IT workloads to be run in a virtualised Windows or Linux environment.

Nick East, Zynstra CEO, explained to CloudTech that many …

When head of Rotherham Council ICT Richard Copley recently called for a Local Government Digital Service, I immediately thought “that’s an ambitious idea and welcome thinking”.

We should always be open to bold new approaches that challenge the status quo and are driven by a genuine desire to deliver a better and more cost effective service for the public. After all, the central Government Digital Service (GDS) was such an idea and look how award-winningly successful that has been.

However, I’m also mindful of Mike Bracken’s comment at a 2013 SOCITM conference that «it was the devil’s own job to get 24 departments to agree to adopt Gov.uk». As Richard Copley himself admits, it would be a serious challenge to scale that task up to 326 councils/local authorities and their digital departments spread right across the country.

So could there be a more pragmatic …

A new research report from cloud identity management provider Okta has revealed that nearly four in five (79%) UK IT decision makers are looking to increase the amount of cloud applications in their company through the coming year.

Yet the report, entitled ‘Identity Management in a Cloud and Mobile World’, also found that data security remains a concern of cloud adoption for seven in 10 organisations.

Not altogether surprisingly, the report from an identity and access management (IAM) firm focuses on how companies are struggling with security and identity in the cloud. Yet there are interesting facts to be pulled out from interviews with more than 200 IT decision makers.

Security was found to be only the second most important driver of IT strategy, polling only 60% of the vote compared to cost reduction (62%). 86% of respondents also believed the adoption of public cloud apps was important to their …

When SAP announced its fourth quarter financial results last month, the focus from analysts and the media was on one particular aspect.

Never mind a fourth consecutive year of double digit growth, or a 69% increase in full revenue on its HANA platform. Everyone’s eyes turned to the mid-term outlook, and specifically this titbit: the company has revised its target of between €3bn and €3.5bn revenue in cloud, as well as its 35% operating margin target, from 2015 to 2017.

“SAP anticipates the fast-growing cloud business along with growth in support revenue will drive a higher proportion of more predictable, recurring revenue in the future,” the company explained in a statement.

The conclusion drawn from this, naturally, was one where the German business software firm was enjoying rip-roaring success from its cloud solutions, but at the expense of its on-premise sales, the company’s traditional money maker – which …

IT vendors had a golden age before the invention of the cloud. It was essentially a risk-free implementation. Customers required a product, sales would propose a solution to which the customer would sign and commit, the customer would pay upfront, the vendor would start manufacturing, and eventually the solution would be delivered to the customer. Once delivered, it was unlikely the customer would suddenly drop the technology, and move on to something else.

At every step of this journey the vendor took steps to prevent its risk. The contract was negotiated per customer, thereby ensuring the deal was profitable. The customer paid upfront so the vendor didn’t need to borrow money or risk the customer defaulting on a debt. The contract commitment was made beforehand, so the customer took the risk that the solution might not be used. And finally, the customer was told when delivery would be made …

The cost benefits that cloud computing offers to its users is something that has been discussed ad nauseam.

In a study conducted by researchers from UC Berkeley and INRIA, France showed that cloud computing can offer savings of anywhere between 40-95% depending on resource usage.

This potential for cloud based systems to bring about huge savings in their annual expenditure is what has been driving the massive migration from in-house server based technology sytems to cloud based alternatives. According to Mary Ellen Power, the VP of marketing at Silanis, a major client for cloud vendors like Amazon AWS, the cloud based services could be seeing as much as 50% growth rate annually in the near future.

However, what impact is this causing to the cloud vendor companies? While the mass migration to cloud helps customers avoid upfront technology investments and thus save money, vendor companies are now in a bind …

While it is fun to watch the 800 lb Gorilla squash every one, Amazon has to face competition at some point.

Even just for the sake of something to write about! While AWS is fundamentally amazing, it’s now quite a well established and therefore boring facet of the market. It’s far more interesting to explore who might rise to give them serious threat, and how.

My bet is on Google, who else. They’re eating the whole world so why not Cloud hosting, and who does large-scale data centres better? These guys are the ‘Titans of Cloud’, they’re fighting it out on a playing field far above any one else and once they go at it, this will be like a boxing match between Zeus and Odin!

One key point I’ve highlighted to folks about Google IaaS is that in contrast to its other products, like …