Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider SoftLayer has been making all the right noises since its acquisition by IBM back in July.

Earlier this month CloudTech reported on the health of the IBM-SoftLayer relationship, with many IBM divisions reputed to be actively collaborating with the SoftLayer team to migrate existing apps and develop new ones.

And for Jonathan Wisler, EMEA general manager, speaking at Apps World Europe earlier today, things couldn’t be any smoother.

“It’s been really good,” Wisler tells CloudTech. “In the short term, it’s opened up a lot of opportunities with customers, and the customers are asking for cloud, which is a great place to be.

“And then also IBM is deploying some of their software as a solution on their stack, which is another validation of their belief in the platform,” he adds.

It’s a straightforward enough value proposition; SoftLayer, as a “purely …

Hybrid cloud is an awesome concept for the world of enterprise IT and beyond. But a question remains as to whether hybrid clouds are truly being created in the current state of business IT infrastructure deployments.

One true definition?

Most businesses have their own data center and then they have cloud. Very few have really created a true hybrid yet that achieves the promised functionality.

So if businesses aren’t currently completely achieving hybrid deployments, what is it? The truest definition of a hybrid cloud entails having the ability to easily move and put back workloads between dedicated and outsourced/cloud environments – seamlessly.

So what’s the hold up?

Broadly, true hybrid cloud faces a few major challenges.

First, depending on the cloud provider you use, your business will experience more or less ability to integrate outside platforms and tools. For instance, you can’t really hybridize cloud at AWS …

Dennis Moore, SVP and GM, master data management at Informatica, speaks to CloudTech about the data sector, the big players in the database space, and how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing everything.

Plenty of column inches in the past months have been focused on the various solutions vendors have put together for databases.

Oracle and SAP, the big traditional enterprises, have made plenty of hot air with their in-memory solutions – but only time will tell if the ripples on the market match up. Then you’ve got the NoSQL players, such as Couchbase, Mongo and DataStax.

It’s an area which has the potential to be hugely disruptive – and the cloud’s thought leaders are queuing up to have their say.

Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold, one of the biggest players in non-relational database structure, not surprisingly told CloudTech that “over time the market is going to move towards …

In the third annual Global Cloud Index, Cisco forecasts that global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data center traffic, is expected to grow 4.5-fold — that’s a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) — from 1.2 zettabytes of annual traffic in 2012 to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017.

The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2012–2017) was developed to estimate data center and cloud-based Internet Protocol (IP) traffic growth and trends. The Index serves as a complementary resource to existing network traffic studies, providing new insights and visibility into emerging trends affecting data centers and cloud architectures.

The forecast becomes increasingly important as the network and data center become more intrinsically linked in offering cloud services. Overall global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually by 2017.

Approximately 17 percent of data center traffic will be fueled by end …

With Oracle, SAP and IBM fighting for precious market share on the in-memory relational database market, and the likes of MongoDB, Couchbase and DataStax putting together momentum in the NoSQL space, it almost feels like whoever wins the battle will win the war of database customer buy-in.

Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold told CloudTech his company’s position was that the market was going to move to the “disruptive” NoSQL technologies that “ultimately are going to dominate.”

This, of course, may not be a hugely surprising admission – although the tone of it raised eyebrows – yet according to Matthew Finnie, CTO of cloud service provider Interoute, the incumbent legacy vendors should definitely be looking over their shoulders.

“For the incumbents of this world, they have a recognised revenue stream that they have to maintain and retain,” Finnie, who is speaking at Apps World Europe next week, explained in a call. “And they …

Back in July, a study released from the Ponemon Institute cited cloud-based storage and mobile applications as the typical sources for cloud security concerns within many healthcare organizations.  However, it was not understood if this worry was around just the concept of cloud computing and mobile computing, or if these organizations are dealing with true issues.  I suspect it was the former.

“The study, ‘The Risk of Regulated Data on Mobile Devices in the Cloud,’ which surveyed 781 IT and data security practitioners, found that 33 percent of respondents said that they need to access protected health information (PHI) to do their work and yet few understood how to keep data secure. For example, 15 percent of those surveyed knew about HIPAA’s security requirements, but 33 percent of respondents indicated that they work for a HIPAA covered entity.”   Figure 1 is a depiction of the outcome of this study …

The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community.

Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform.  And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community.

(To be clear, Salesforce and the other companies mentioned in this post are not clients and never have been.  I track this area out of personal interest.)

The last four years I’ve made a point at every Salesforce Dreamforce event to spend the majority of my time in the developer area.  Watching mini hacks going on in the DevZone, mini workshops, the Salesforce Platform and Developer keynotes over the last few years has been a great learning experience.  An added plus: developers are often skeptical and want to see new enhancements help streamline their code, extend its functionality …

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Enterprise Solutions

At the Oracle OpenWorld annual user conference last week, Oracle announced enhancements to the Oracle Database 12c platform, including a new in-memory option for both analytics and transactional applications and an extension of its engineered systems portfolio to cover backup and logging. The new Oracle Database In-Memory Option is targeted at improving performance with analytics and OLTP (online transaction processing).

The in-memory enhancement is in line with overall trends that Ovum has identified with data platforms adding the capability to handle more diverse workloads. Oracle also announced a new appliance with a long – but very descriptive – name: the “Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance.” It is designed to make backup and recovery more manageable, reliable, and up to date.

The latest addition to Oracle’s engineered systems line does not add new capabilities beyond those available from software-only solutions from providers like Informatica …

The five highest-performing cloud computing stocks as of Q3, 2013 in the Cloud Computing Stock Index have proven prowess in closing enterprise-level deals, expertise in compliance and security, and years of infrastructure experience.

Twelve of the nineteen companies in the index delivered a positive return in the first three quarters of this year.  NetSuite (NYSE:N) leads all companies in the index with an annualized gain as of calendar Q3 of 88.69% and has a dollar value of $16,078 on $10,000 invested on January 2nd of this year.

Workday (NYSE:WDAY) attained an annualized gain of 81.49% as of Q3, and has a dollar value of $15,617 on $10,000 invested on January 2nd.  Qualys (NASDAQ: QLYS) attained an annualized gain of 49.33% and delivered $13,498 on $10,000 invested from January 2nd to October 2nd of this year. 

The following table lists …

Ian Redpath, Principal Analyst, Network Infrastructure

The 10th Ethernet World was held in Prague September 30 through October 2. The global enterprise Ethernet service market continues to grow robustly. For full-year 2013, Ovum projects a $34bn Ethernet service market worldwide, growing to $62bn by 2018 at a 13% CAGR.

Ovum chaired the cloud services and data center day at the conference. The industry discussion on cloud services continues to mature based on new business model constructs, a growing body of compelling use cases, more data center–optimized connectivity, and growing high-capacity mobility deployments. The industry has been openly discussing impediments to cloud adoption to date, enabling a productive discussion on potential solutions.

The promise and allure of clouds: new Ethernet traffic generated

Three years ago, cloud was an over-hyped marketing term. The industry still uses the term, but it now rests on a firmer, more down-to-earth foundation. Cloud colloquially means …