The majority of cloud computing revenue in 2012 was generated from vendors with sales over $75M (66%) and who are privately held (77%), with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) projected to attain a 41% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2016.

Market Monitor, a service of 451 Research, is also predicting 36% CAGR in cloud computing, growing from $5.7B in 2012 to $20B by the end of 2016 in their Cloud-as-a-Service overview report. Other research firms including Gartner have much higher forecasts for cloud computing in general and IaaS, PaaS and SaaS specifically.

Market Monitor relies on a bottoms-up forecasting methodology that includes revenue analysis and forecasts from 309 cloud-services providers and technology vendors across 14 sectors. Their taxonomy defining Cloud as a Service is shown in the following graphic:

Here are the key take-aways from the report:

• The cloud computing market will grow from $5.7B in 2012 to $20B in …

Two separate pieces of research released this week have found its way to CloudTech HQ, and both have come to the same conclusion: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is miles ahead of the competition in terms of providing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) services.

This isn’t surprising in itself, but let’s not forget these companies Amazon is skinning are among the biggest on the planet.

Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant, on IaaS, unsurprisingly put Amazon in its leaders category, well ahead of its competitors in both ability to execute and completeness of vision.

The analyst house cited AWS’ product portfolio and pricing structure in particular, and estimated that its operations are five times larger than a dozen of its major competitors combined.

Want more proof? Q2 data from the Synergy Research Group painted a similar picture, putting AWS’ quarterly revenue at over $600m …

Talkin’ Cloud has come up with its yearly Talkin’ Cloud 100, comprising a century of cloud’s best and brightest players. And, in a fiercely competitive field, it was Salesforce.com who came out on top of this year’s list.

Salesforce beat Amazon into the silver medal position, with Microsoft, Oracle and Google completing the top five.

Admittedly, it says something about the strength of the ecosystem where SAP (6th) didn’t make the top five and Workday (11th) the top 10. Terremark, Rackspace and NetSuite came 8th, 9th and 10th respectively, with SoftLayer finishing 7th.

For SoftLayer of course, now read IBM – a fact the researchers acknowledged which cropped up during the writing of the report.

“Amid all that activity, it’s clear that VARs (value added resellers) and MSPs (managed service providers) have warmed up to cloud computing, rather than fearing disintermediation,” the report notes, concluding: “Overall …

Are you one of those independent executives that uses strategic foresight to gain a decisive lead over competitors that tend to follow the crowd? Granted, it takes courage to make bold moves — and follow the path that’s less traveled. Big rewards tend to go to the confident, not the cautious.

What’s your business technology investment strategy for 2013, and beyond?  Does your corporate foresight anticipate success, based upon your ability to deploy quantum-leap technological advances — like managed cloud services?

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the economic slowdown in China has driven them to lower their expectations for worldwide IT spending growth this year. IDC now forecasts IT spending growth of 4.6 percent in constant currency for 2013. That’s down from the previous forecast of 4.9 percent growth and a sharp deceleration from last year’s growth of almost 6 percent.

Despite the lower forecast …

It’s been one of the biggest stories of the summer. The battle for a lucrative CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) cloud computing contract between IBM and Amazon has featured attack, counter-attack, and all manner of legalistic name-calling as the two giants battle out for federal cloud supremacy.

While most of the talk has been in the sanctity of legal offices, a lawsuit from Amazon against the Federal Government, made public this week, reveals the true extent of the imbroglio.

The story so far: the CIA initially awarded its $600m private cloud contract to AWS back in Febuary. IBM, not surprisingly, protested against this, as reported by FCW in May.

In June, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report examining both sides of the argument and, whilst admitting that Amazon’s offer was at the time “the best value” and a “superior technical solution”, made the can-of-worm-opening recommendation that the …

Rackspace Hosting has announced a new offering for its Managed Virtualisation Service hosting a VMware environment, entitled ‘Dedicated VMware vCenter Server’.

This is an interesting change, given how Rackspace’s most recent focus has been on OpenStack technologies instead of VMware.

Currently, the Managed Virtualisation service offers partial accessibility to vCenter’s features, but not full management capabilities. The theory, according to Rackspace, is that the dedicated environment will be an extension of the customer’s data centre.

What does this all mean? Essentially, it’s pushing more into Rackspace’s hybrid cloud policy.

“This new service has been designed to enable customers to migrate workloads out of their data centre and into a Rackspace data centre,” said John Engates, Rackspace CTO in a statement.

“Utilising Rackspace’s hybrid cloud portfolio gives customers the choice to find the best fit for their applications and workloads, all while offloading data centre …

By Russell Crawford, Regional Director UK&I, Netherlands, Africa, Cortado AG

The use of cloud services is rising continuously for both private and public companies. In fact, analysts predict a growth in the enterprise cloud market from $18.3 billion in 2012 to $31.9 billion in 2017.

This rise of cloud services is due to the increase in the use of smartphones and tablets. These devices usually only have a limited storage capacity, but are often used as PC replacements when on the go, both privately and professionally, which is why mobile users like to store their data in the cloud and access it conveniently via the internet. With the cloud, all relevant documents can be accessed in just a few clicks, and can be shared quickly with friends, relatives or colleagues.

But many companies are still undecided about the cloud. The biggest obstacle is the significant concern over …

Synchronising new product development, supply chain, production and Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (MRO) strategies across Aerospace and Defense (A&D) manufacturers while reducing costs continues to make cloud platforms a viable option in A&D.

With sequestration having an impact on these industries from both a budget and merger & acquisition (M&A) perspective, the economics of cloud computing are becoming even more attractive.

Teri Takai, CIO of the Department of Defense (DoD) published the DoD Cloud Computing Strategy in July of last year and many of its findings are reflected in the current state of cloud adoption in A&D.  She recently published the presentation DoD CIO’s 10-Point Plan for IT Modernization, which is available for download from the department’s website.  The following is a summary of key DoD IT Modernization initiatives.

It’s ironic that two industries who are highly reliant on collaboration often have the most siloed …

Today it is generally accepted that businesses large and small are actively embracing cloud computing. Speculation is over and today companies are getting down to the real business of incorporating cloud services and platforms into formal IT portfolios.

Cloud is no longer seen as just a nice to have; it’s considered an enabler of business transformation – with even Gartner predicting most enterprises will have adopted cloud by the end of 2013.

Tasked with looking beyond IT that will simply get the job done, the CIO is the person driving this transformation and making decisions with the wider business context in mind. In fact, by 2015, IDC estimates that 90% of IT investments will be evaluated based on the strategic goals of a business, which means that the role of the CIO is set to become not only very challenging but much more strategically important than it is already.

Today …

Company execs have long since worked out that the cloud can be beneficial for all manner of industries, from the faster moving technological sector to the more glacial banking and healthcare divisions.

The charity, or Third Sector, is no different, according to a report from exponential-e entitled “Third sector reaches for the cloud”.

Yet it needs to be pointed out that the revolution has still got a long way to go. Whilst 42% of respondents said their companies had used software as a service (SaaS) based applications over the past 12 months, 39% admitted they hadn’t considered cloud as a solution at all.

30% said they were using infrastructure as a service (IaaS), whilst 15% were using platform as a service (PaaS).

In the majority of cases, budgetary constraints were the reason behind lack of deployment. Given charities are traditionally not the most cash-rich of companies, this may not …