For bankers, mobility has become key. Customer-facing mobile banking applications are increasing the flow of traffic through digital channels, which is eroding traffic in bank branches. But it does not stop there: the mobile-enablement of services to increase the productivity of banking employees and drive sales effectiveness in remote locations is also on the rise.

The digital channel revolution is having a significant impact on banking via physical channels, and mobile apps for banking employees will play a pivotal role in this. More and more, branch-based employees move around with their tablets and smartphones to assist customers, while mortgage brokers, financial advisors, and corporate bankers increasingly conduct duties and work with clients outside branches.

In cases like these, remote access to corporate systems is essential. Salesforce has now launched Salesforce1, a “CRM+ platform” (or, as Salesforce calls it, a “Customer Platform”) for developers and software vendors focused on mobile app …

Senior executives have been waiting for actionable insight from the mass of information that their IT departments already gather about their customers. But many have become very impatient — because they want to see results, now. Do you anticipate that data analytics and real-time visualization will advance next year?

Ovum expects a significant wave of business technology ramp-ups in 2014, in response to the market demand. They predict a growing third-party vendor and IT services ecosystem that creates Big Data and Fast Data tools and solutions for the enterprise data warehousing and applications markets.

This growing trend is occurring as SQL and Hadoop platforms are diversifying, adopting multiple personalities, and providing overlapping functions. According to Ovum’s latest market study, SQL queries can now be run against Hadoop, and many SQL databases will be able to handle JSON document-centric queries.

And as silicon-based storage — DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and SSD/Flash …

The latest report from Synergy Research has claimed that Amazon Web Services’ quarterly revenues continue to be greater than its biggest rivals combined in IaaS and PaaS.

Amazon grew by 55% between Q212 and Q213 to over $700m of revenue in the quarter, with Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Google combined making over just $600m.

John Dinsdale, of the Synergy Research Group, noted that the battle for second place will be of more interest to analysts.

“We’ve been analysing the IaaS/PaaS markets for quite a few quarters now and creating these leadership metrics, and the relative positioning of the leaders really hasn’t changed much,” Dinsdale said.

“While Amazon dwarfs all competition, the race is on to see if any of the big four followers can distance themselves from their peers,” he added.

With the worldwide market expanding 46%, it appears the competition isn’t making much of a …

In honour of the upcoming holiday, we wanted to spend a little time exploring how application development and product management can leverage managed services as well as (or better) other parts of the organization more traditionally associated with such outsourcing partnership.

Smaller organizations have few, if any infrastructure-specific employees, but instead focus hiring product and development roles to improve the development cycle and strength of features for an application. This makes a lot of sense, especially when provisioning cloud-based infrastructure has never been easier.

Yet, even with outsourced infrastructure, the actual responsibility of managing the more traditional parts of IT fall on the development staff. This is obviously not optimal, given the differences in product development within  infrastructure management.

Where does that leave an organization with an over-taxed development team and not enough infrastructure management knowledge internally? Managed services, of course!

Utilizing an MSP means more than simply offloading work …

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

Salesforce announced a private SuperPod hosting of the Salesforce offering for HP at Dreamforce. This announcement appears to open the door to a more nuanced hybrid delivery model where the distinction between public and private cloud services is becoming a matter of customer choice.

The SuperPod may provide a bridge that enables some customers to access the benefits of SaaS while keeping data in dedicated infrastructure. Enterprises, however, need to be careful about wishing for a “private” cloud.

Unless there are definite and unavoidable regulatory or legal drivers, the better path is probably to learn how to live safely in the public cloud. That, after all, is where the real economies of scale and scope are to be found. It is also increasingly the destination of choice of both customers and employees.

Introducing the SuperPod

Dreamforce 13 was, as usual, an impressive …

Nine in 10 respondents claim the primary reason their company uses the MySQL database is because of its open source nature, according to a survey from SkySQL.

And there’s bad news attached to that statement: a whopping 94% admitted they would move to MariaDB if MySQL lots its open source power.

The survey opened up some interesting thoughts on the development of MySQL, which has only been on the market since 1995. More than half (57%) of respondents have used MySQL for between three and 10 years, with over a quarter (28%) using MySQL for over 10 years.

This gives an indication of the longevity of the system, and the loyalty of companies using it – but the tide may be turning.

Perhaps the most worrying statistic was that four in five (79%) organisations only use internal resources to support MySQL. 9% used Oracle, with 8% opting for survey creators …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a series of updates to its expanding database services portfolio at its AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, reinforcing its ability to run multiple database workloads with elastic scale in the AWS cloud. While AWS offers a comprehensive menu of best-of-breed cloud services, Ovum would like to see a more integrated platform approach. AWS has disrupted the price barriers for large-scale data processing in the cloud. But cost will become less of a differentiator as customers look for richer and more orchestrated database services to fully support their enterprise data-processing needs.

Momentum and growth continue for AWS database services

Since the launch of Amazon S3 in 2006 as a simple online storage service for software developers, AWS has broadened and deepened its cloud services to cover virtually any type of workload in the cloud – compute, networking, storage …

Kevin Noonan, Research Director, Public Sector

Although there is general acceptance that cloud services are here to stay, a number of enterprises are still skeptical about whether cloud computing is really up to the job when it comes to delivering big and complicated government services. Against this backdrop, the New Zealand government’s successful national census provides valuable lessons about how to drive a large-scale cloud implementation, as we explain in our recent report Driving Government Innovation Through Cloud Services.

The national census has always been a big and complex undertaking

The national census is one of the oldest and most complicated peacetime activities that a country can undertake. The sheer logistics of the exercise has confounded many governments over the centuries, and even now it is just as complex. In many developed economies, the scope of each census has continued to expand as countries try to gain an even …

With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) firmly built into how enterprise IT operates, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) seems a distant third for how big businesses are accessing cloud.

But should that be the case?

When we think of PaaS, you typically think of smaller companies starting up applications in the cloud. However, PaaS has a role to play in companies at scale.

According to Joe McKendrick:

“In a recent survey of 262 enterprises I helped conduct as part of my work with Unisphere Research (and sponsored by Oracle), we found that PaaS is now prevalent among one-fifth of public cloud adopters and half of private cloud sites. Among oublic cloud adopters, PaaS adoption has jumped from 18% to 20% since 2010. This is much higher for larger organizations in the survey — those with 5,000 or more employees — with 31% report adopting PaaS.”

Why is PaaS playing so well in the enterprise …

The negative press surrounding the cloud computing industry following the NSA PRISM leaks in June wasn’t a huge surprise.

But there are usually winners and losers in every situation – and Swiss cloud service providers stand to gain the most from the scandal.

Due to the country’s more stringent data privacy laws – a formal request from a prosecutor would have to be sent off before a CSP allows access to data in Switzerland – those at the eye of the storm are experiencing greater uptake.

Artmotion, based in Zurich, is one of these companies: in the month following the scandal, revenue went up 45%.

But as CEO Mateo Meier (left) points out, the advantages of storing data in Switzerland have been there from day one.

«Most companies ask themselves about the level of risk when it comes to the discussion where to store their data,” Meier tells CloudTech in an …