Keeping up with the day-to-day HR needs of a growing workforce can significantly affect your efficiency. Paperwork, approvals, requests for information and staying compliant: all take you away from your strategic focus. A cloud-based HR system can help remove the administrative stress from your growing HR needs and allow you to concentrate on your business.

You already use the cloud

It’s amazing how many people are aware of ‘The Cloud’ but don’t know they’re using it, over 75% of businesses are in, or are looking to move to the cloud for a variety of reasons.

But first, if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, shop online or bank online you are actually more familiar to the cloud then you already know. They all use the cloud because it’s simple, it’s mobile and pretty much anyone can use it, working in real time makes your life easier …

January is always a strange time of year at CloudTech HQ; the Consumer Electronics Show signifies the last vestiges of the holiday break, with the industry firmly awoken from its hibernal slumber to press ahead with 2014 deliverables.

As a result there’s plenty to find across the web – here are our favourite pieces from the last fortnight:

1) Salesforce CEO praises Oracle, slams Microsoft, and hints at analytics acquisitions [Venture Beat]:  Amid the Vegas glitz of CES, over in Manhattan Salesforce kicked off its Salesforce1 World Tour. The ensuing roundtable provided a litany of quotable opinion from CEO Marc Benioff.

Benioff called Steve Ballmer’s resignation “a very good decision…but it’s probably five years too late”, while adding that Microsoft “need[s] to push the rest button on vision.” Yet the Salesforce chief was more salutary about Oracle, saying that its tech was “an important part of …

Anniversaries are always a good point to take a step back, reflect on the past and think about what the future holds. That is something I have done this week as we head into the third calendar year of G-Cloud by taking time out to reread the document which lays out the government’s Cloud First Strategy as published by the Cabinet Office in 2011.

Looking through the document it is striking how frequently it refers to a vision for commodity IT services and a move away from customised solutions as part of a drive for lower costs and greater competition. But is this move towards commodity buying really likely to change buyer behaviour and deliver those benefits?

As things stand right now, I am not so sure.

I’d even go so far as to say that commoditisation could end up being a barrier to the delivery of lower …

Tech giants Verizon and Oracle have announced a partnership whereby customers can use Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware on Verizon’s cloud.

“This deal represents two market leaders coming together to create a compelling cloud offering that will help enterprises succeed in a highly competitive market environment,” Oracle president Mark Hurd trumpeted in a statement.

He added: “Combining Verizon’s unique enterprise experience and capabilities with Oracle’s best in class cloud products will provide customers another easy and cost-effective choice for embracing the cloud.”

Big words, yes, but what are the facts behind it? It’s worth noting that Verizon Cloud is currently in beta, with the service announced only in October. There’s also no information on when Verizon’s solution will hit full release, but with the latest announcement covering software as a service via Oracle, it’s certainly an interesting proposition.

More than anything, this …

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

Momentum for cloud services adoption in government grew solidly in 2013 and looks certain to accelerate in 2014. We believe that growth in cloud services adoption by agencies will drive a change in the core logic of whole-of-government IT strategy. Cloud services offer a less risky win-win-win path towards IT modernization and intra-agency collaboration. Big bad experimental whole-of-government IT projects are dead. Long live the new logic of cloud services: find solutions that work well in individual agencies and then adopt them more broadly across multiple agencies. Simple.

Stop the horror story of whole-of-government IT strategy experiments

IT strategy in government too often resembles a horror story because of a passion for big projects which become mad experiments that go bad. Under pressure to cut costs, whole-of-government CIOs pursued adventurous and experimental shared services and common application and infrastructure strategies. While the …

Sony has announced PlayStation Now, a service which allows gamers to stream a variety of PlayStation titles across a range of devices without a console in sight.

The announcement was made at CES, with games from Sony’s previous three consoles being utilised and the service available on the PS4, the PS Vita, as well as Sony’s Bravia TV sets.

The technology for PlayStation Now came from Gaikai, a company which streams high-end video games. Gaikai was bought by Sony in July 2012 for $380m, a clear sign of its cloud-based future.

This is not to say the user experience has been completely seamless, however. The Verge reported “a slightly perceptible lag between button presses and the corresponding action onscreen”, yet added that “you’ll never think of gaming the same way again”.

Similarly Sid Shuman, social media manager at Sony Computer Entertainment America, admitted that “pixel counters and …

In recent years two technologies have combined synergistically, the cloud and mobile. Without the cloud many of the mobile apps we have today would not exist. They rely on the existence of powerful cloud-based syncing and storage technology to provide a compelling cross-platform user experience. Cloud-based notifications are an essential part of the mobile ecosystem. Without cloud compute, devices wouldn’t be capable of tasks that require advanced processing like speech recognition and image manipulation.

Mobile devices are growing ever more powerful, but they still lag behind desktop and server hardware in processing power and storage, so in order to provide the experience that users expect, a symbiosis has developed between mobile devices and the cloud.

But mobile is just the beginning. As processors become ever smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, they are finding their way into objects that were not traditionally “intelligent.” The smart toaster is something of a …

Hong Kong has launched the Government Cloud Platform, joining an array of countries with established cloud computing initiatives.

Yet the scheme, named GovCloud, is different from the US and UK initiatives as it is only for internal government use.

“GovCloud is the government’s first major private cloud computing initiative and is important central information technology infrastructure with full cloud computing functions,” a spokesman for the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) said, adding: “With robust and fully resilient infrastructure, GovCloud provides a stable and reliable environment for bureaux and departments to develop and host their e-government services.”

According to OGCIO, there’s a lot of capital in this venture: a total of HK $242m (US $31.2m) has been set aside to implement GovCloud in the next five years, with the doors opening on December 27.

Hong Kong is of course a major area for growth in …

Mike Sapien, Principal Analyst, Enterprise

Cloud services have been available for several years, and any provider of enterprise services or hardware is now a cloud service provider. Recently, new services have been emerging that offer different versions and types of cloud–network integration (CNI) services. Most cloud services are networks of cloud services or “clouds of clouds.”

To perform well, applications require strong integration and bonds between cloud services and related network services. This includes end user access to the network, as well as network connectivity between the different cloud service resources and vendors. Any telco that wants to remain strong in enterprise managed services must have a roadmap to CNI.

US telcos launch cloud–network integration

Telcos have long claimed to have an advantage in cloud services based on owning the network, but until recently there was little evidence of the benefit this brought to customers. This is changing …

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

With SAP having focused on building up the HANA platform, it has been later to the game in articulating its Big Data strategy. Over the past few months, several important pieces fell into place. SAP announced the extension of Smart Data Access, its federated query technology, from Sybase to the HANA platform, and announced OEM deals with Hadoop platform providers Hortonworks and Intel.

This is still early days for both initiatives – for instance, the Smart Data Access technology, while well-established on Sybase, is still in its first release for HANA and Hadoop. While SAP isn’t alone in promoting federated query, extending it to HANA injects welcome realism into SAP’s data management strategy.

Venturing beyond in-memory

Until recently, SAP’s positioning of HANA emphasized its role as a destination platform for analytics and transaction-processing applications. SAP’s focus on HANA as both …