The cloud continues to expand and develop at a phenomenal rate. Here’s a roundup of five recent developments in the field and what they mean for business.

There is a consensus that the cloud and cloud software is now unavoidable. Little surprise then, that vendors and technologists alike are constantly pushing the boundaries to create new products and services.

1. IBM invests $8 million in Spanish cloud data center

Computing giant IBM is keen to regain ground lost to Amazon and Google who were quicker to market with their cloud propositions. To this end, IBM has opened its 26th cloud centre in Spain at a cost of $8 million.

So what? By making greater investment in cloud infrastructure, IBM can improve their global coverage, service offering, competitiveness and price.

2. Cloud-powered vending machine improves customer personalisation

SAP Hana has developed a new touchscreen vending machine that uses cloud software …

Tim Jennings, Chief Analyst & Research Fellow, Enterprise IT

Oracle’s September 2013 customer event was notable for a series of announcements designed to help the company’s customers improve the speed and agility of their information systems. The flagship news revolved around Oracle’s core competence of database technology, with forthcoming releases of an in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c that promises to significantly speed up analytic queries, and of an enterprise-grade Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering, part of the Oracle Public Cloud. The latter is reaching a new level of maturity, assisted by the acquisition earlier in 2013 of cloud infrastructure specialist Nimbula.

One of the dominant themes of the conference was machine-to-machine (M2M) technology and the Internet of Things (IoT), and here Oracle is positioning its Java technology as an end-to-end platform for solution development. It also announced an upcoming new version of its Java as a …

Trick or treat!You’ll be hearing this a lot soon. Halloween may be all about ghosts and goblins, but businesses have much bigger threats to worry about… such as losing the critical business data that’s stored on their employees’ computers and in-house servers.

To put you in the Halloween spirit, we’ve gathered some of these terrifying stats into one spooky infographic. So brace yourself and read at your own risk! But don’t panic! There are solutions that can help protect your business from the terrifying prospect of unwanted data loss or exposure.

Take a look at how SherWeb’s solutions can securely back up your data and make sure your emails are compliant with regulations such as HIPAA and SOX. If you have any questions, call us any time at 1-888-567-6610.

Cloud computing has become a major part of how IT organizations are approaching infrastructure requirements. To better support critical applications, networks, and websites, cloud infrastructure through CSPs, managed, and self-service models have become the go-to resource for a range of associated benefits.

However, given the ease with which it can be utilized, cloud infrastructure has appeal beyond the IT department. In fact, many other organizations within businesses readily jump into cloud usage to support their applications, creating a rogue IT that runs throughout the enterprise. While there are associated negative ramifications, the ubiquity of cloud also suggests that IT really is a more horizontal part of how all business units function.

Product management in particular is well suited to cloud usage. Given the speed with which product organizations are expected to produce applications, features, and updates to support growing user bases.

However, there a few key ways in which cloud …

Nishant Shah, Senior Analyst, Government Technology

Since its October 1 launch, HealthCare.gov – the $400m portal through which uninsured Americans are supposed to be able to enroll in Obamacare – has experienced widely reported technical problems, prompting President Obama to publicly express his anger over the situation and promise a “tech surge” to fix the site.

There have also been Congressional hearings grilling the contractors and federal Health and Human Services (HHS) staff involved. Warranted or not, rarely has an IT failure received this kind of mainstream attention from the public and the media.

If HealthCare.gov – the public-facing portion of one of the White House’s signature achievements and highest priorities – is suffering from major IT failures, one can imagine the level of systemic dysfunction that plagues non-public-facing IT projects that do not receive the same level of scrutiny. Clearly major departures from the status quo are needed, and this …

Research from recruitment specialists Robert Half Technology has revealed that cloud computing is the most lucrative skill to have in the IT job market today.

Cloud topped the bill in the survey of 100 IT directors and CIOs across the UK, with 39% of respondents citing it as the most important.

Security (37%) and project management skills (33%) were the next popular, with virtualisation (29%) and network administration (27%) rounding out the top five.

Interestingly, coding and development skills were mentioned although not as popular; knowledge of C# was cited by 15% of those polled, compared to 13% who said Java.

This translates into the hiring of staff, according to the research. Nearly half (41%) of IT directors said they would hire specialist staff to support cloud initiatives, although the same number of respondents said they had enough employees for their cloud projects. More than four in five (82%) of …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

SAP and SAS announced a new partnership to create a joint product roadmap for in-memory analytics solutions. The aim is to make SAS’s advanced analytics software run smoothly on SAP’s HANA in-memory platform, helping joint customers run bigger, more complex, and faster analysis workloads.

The combination of technologies is potentially compelling for customers looking to mine intelligence out of Big Data. However, depending on which side’s perspective you take, this is a curious tie-up between two fierce analytic rivals that each market and sell their own in-memory platforms.

It remains to be seen whether this partnership can bring out the best of SAP and SAS’s core analytic strengths and competencies so that both parties gain, while also creating compelling value for customers. Historically, this hasn’t always been the case. Nevertheless this is one of the more interesting high-profile …

The latest cloud study, this time from IBM, has revealed that companies who use cloud computing as a competitive advantage can expect to have their revenue margins doubled compared to those who don’t have high adoption.

In the global survey of over 800 business decision makers and users, IBM found that leading organisations are moving to the cloud to move away from their competitors in a crowded space.

The report puts companies into three categories: pacesetters, who are “deploying cloud on a broad scale”; challengers, who are at a similar level to pacesetters yet “lag on differentiation and market responsiveness”; and chasers, who are more cautious on cloud.

And the research also details the three areas in which the pacesetters are taking charge: strategic reinvention, such as improving business models and rapid product innovation; making better decisions; and deeper collaboration.  

In particular, these companies are 117% more likely to …

Recently Gathering Clouds’ friend and cloud computing expert David Linthicum dug into a few ways in which AWS continues to create gaps between its offering and businesses.

While Linthicum focused on cost, contract, and utility-based computing issues, we thought we would explore a few other obstacles that still keep AWS from full enterprise adoption.

While we are sure AWS will eventually figure out how to crack the enterprise, (especially as enterprise IT becomes more comfortable with the cloud) there are aspects of the service that still don’t go far enough to fulfill the requirements of the businesses that are still tentative about cloud adoption.

1) Compatibility issues: AWS created*planned* conflicts with integrating with other systems.

Without any  compatibility between AWS-specific tools, platforms and environments with in-house systems (no matter which platform a business is running in house – VMware, Windows, Citrix, etc., Amazon won’t be compatible), businesses either …

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) comprise the ‘engine room’ of the UK’s business economy. 

Recent figures from the Department of Business Skills and Innovation underline their importance and reveal  that SMBs make up 99% of all businesses and account for 59% of all private sector employment and 49% of all private sector turnover, so there’s nothing ‘small’ about their role in contributing to the economic recovery.

It’s also encouraging to see that the number of UK SMBs has grown hugely in the past decade, rising from 3.5 million in the UK in 2000 to 4.5 million in 2011, according to the Federation of Small Businesses.

But despite renewed optimism and growth, SMB organisations have endured tough times through the recession and must continue to maintain a tight rein on operational costs and overheads. Budgets for key areas such HR and IT remain closely guarded and …