Companies are failing to update their software, meaning that because of the strain being put on old data centres, they suffer debilitating network outages on a weekly basis.

That’s the verdict from Brocade, whose latest research found that one in three businesses suffer “multiple” network downtime instances per week. Further, more than nine in 10 (91%) of IT decision makers admit that they have to ‘substantially’ upgrade their infrastructure in order to keep up with the demand of cloud computing. Shockingly, 16% of those surveyed said they experienced daily outages.

On average these outages last around 20 minutes – according to the research 2% of those polled say they’ve encountered downtime of more than an hour.

And in terms of the consequences, more than one in three said that these outages meant their SLA wasn’t hit, which in some cases led to customers looking for reimbursement.

Companies upgrade …

Attention CIOs – the hybrid cloud is enterprise ready. In fact, according to a GigaOM article, the hybrid cloud has been enterprise ready for the past couple of years, and that in 2011, the majority of participants in a cloud-use survey anticipated moving to the hybrid cloud in the future.

The future is here.

To prove that enterprise is using a hybrid cloud infrastructure, consider this. According to a Rackspace blog post, more than 50 percent of cloud buyers are planning hybrid deployments to take advantage of cloud efficiencies and satisfy security and compliance needs.

“It truly delivers the best of both worlds: the elasticity, scalability and agility that the public cloud brings, but also the control, visibility and security that the private cloud offers,” said Larry Lang, CEO of Quorum. “In addition, it offers the ability for enterprises to pay only for what they need, adding to its cache.”

However …

Nishant Shah, Analyst, Government Technology

Using connection technologies to facilitate response to humanitarian emergencies has become a well-established and rapidly evolving practice by governments, international organizations, non-profit organizations, community groups, and individuals. Using such technologies in the preventionof violence and catastrophe has been more difficult, owing to lack of political will, operational gaps between receiving warnings and mounting responses, and the difficulty of measuring the results of prevention efforts in the face of more austere budgets.

The first generation of network technologies used in crisis response were primarily designed and deployed top-down by governments. The generation that followed added technical, bottom-up hackers and volunteer groups, such as Ushahidi.

The next wave is being influenced by a broader humanitarian technology community of practice and the growing popularity of open source approaches. These embrace open source tools, put a premium on effective visualizations and maps, and use crowdsourcing techniques to improve …

Cloud computing stocks continue to show wide variation in performance throughout the first half of this year.

Ten of the twenty companies in the Cloud Computing Stock Index delivered returns to shareholders with NetSuite leading with a 37.30% share gain, delivering $13,730 on $10,000 invested on January 2, 2013.

To more fully define the stock performance of these companies, I’ve added Earnings Per Share (EPS), Price/Earnings Ratio, Year-To-Date (YTD) Total Gains or Loss, Annualized Gain or Loss, and Total Dollar Value of $10,000 invested on January 2, 2013.  You can download the latest version of the Cloud Computing Stock Index here.  The filter applied to these companies is that 50% or more of their revenues are generated from cloud-based applications, infrastructure and services.  Additional details of the index are provided at the end of this post.

Best Performing

Application delivery controllers (ADCs) are now essential for business-critical applications, managing fast-changing transaction loads, and enhancing performance, resilience and security. However, many online applications change frequently to reflect customer requirements, and the increasing speed of change in application deployment means that traditional ADC architectures can hold back the pace of change.

So, enterprises rolling out private clouds still face several technology and operations limitations today as a result of their static legacy application delivery infrastructures. These are a bottleneck in virtualised data centres and cloud environments, hampering IT’s ability to orchestrate and manage their application delivery services.

Moving to an on-demand platform for application delivery “ADC-as-a-service” can transform an Enterprise or Cloud Operator by providing the tools and technology to deploy and manage a dynamic and elastic application delivery infrastructure.

From a management standpoint, ADC-as-a-service delivers better ROI by aligning the application delivery costs with the a more usage-based …

Gartner published the report What’s Hot in CRM Applications in 2013, by Ed Thompson on June 20, 2013.  The report covers areas of interest by clients in the four areas of marketing, sales, customer service and e-commerce.

The report states that “the 2013 What’s Hot list was compiled after examining Gartner inquiry volumes by topic. It was then supplemented by asking all Gartner CRM analysts to offer their opinions on what has been generating the most interest during all the client inquiries they have taken since the end of 2012 and in the beginning of 2013.”

Big data, cloud, social, mobile and the Internet of Things are the five catalysts that are driving inquiries in the hottest areas of interest. 

Gartner’s Ed Thompson, author of the report, states that “this is where our clients’ interests lie, although not their current CRM spending.”  Technologies highlighted in red are …

Microsoft has had a lot to say in terms of cloud computing developments in recent months, and this latest report in association with IDC may come as no surprise: channel partners who have more than 50% of revenue in cloud are experiencing major payoffs in business growth.

The report surfaced at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC13) in Houston, and found that cloud partners perform better in various KPIs; revenue per employee, higher gross profit, higher customer acquisition, and of course faster growth.

But how many partners are there? The stats from the opening day’s play at WPC13, as The VAR Guy reports, were impressive.

3.2m businesses currently use Office 365; 150,000 partners worldwide are able to sell Office 365 and Microsoft cloud services. Over the past 12 months, 22,000 partners did sell Microsoft public cloud services – certainly impressive figures. But what other trends did …

It’s a fairly well known truth that EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) isn’t as up to speed as North America in utilising cloud technologies. It is being addressed, if the EU’s cloud strategy launched last September is anything to go by – yet the gap is still there. So what can be done?

Duncan Greenwood, sales director at CA Technologies, believes that EMEA CIOs, in these belt-tightening times, have pressures built on them borne out of survival rather than growth; and as a result, cloud is the only way to go.

“They’ve got this innovation agenda that the business is demanding – faster, cheaper, we want it more, we want it now,” Greenwood explains in a call to CloudTech. “That’s the difference in mentality between the US and Europe.

“The lack of investment innovation in technology is absolutely driving them to the cloud, and that’s why …

Boxee, the Israel-based media streaming provider, has been bought out by Samsung Electronics – and has immediately announced the removal of its cloud-based digital video recorder (DVR) software.

The bad news for Boxee customers is that the switch off for the cloud DVR comes on July 10, with all recordings being wiped after that date. Expect many Boxee viewers to be bleary-eyed for work in the coming days having ploughed through the recordings they still have.

“We believe that over the next few years the video market will change even more than it has in the past few decades,” a statement on the Boxee site reads.

“Joining Samsung means we will be able to work on products that marry the best hardware and software in the TV space, products that will be used by tens of millions of people and will help to shape the future of TV,” it adds.

According …

Carter Lusher, Research Fellow & Chief Analyst: Enterprise Applications Ecosystem

On June 25, 2013, Oracle and Salesforce.com sent out press releases about how they had agreed to a strategic partnership to integrate their Salesforce.com and Oracle clouds. The press release was followed up on June 27 with a press conference held by both CEOs. The announcement generated a considerable amount of press and blogosphere buzz, with the general tone being that it is game-changing.

However, nothing in the announcement amounted to a significant change in either company’s strategy. Instead, what was offered was only just above “press release-ware” level, because no proof points were provided. In addition, the cross-vendor application integrations, Salesforce’s commitment to Oracle technology such as Database 12c, and internal usage of each other’s applications, are not unique or surprising.

It is Ovum’s opinion that this announcement neither shifts the dynamics of the …