Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) service revenues surpassed $2bn in the first quarter of 2013, according to the Synergy Research Group.

This number is up 56% from last year’s figure, providing yet more evidence of the increasing numbers in cloud computing.

And it will come as no surprise as to which company is leading the way in revenues. Amazon’s overall share of the market, according to the research, stands at a whopping 27% – this was exactly the same number for the whole of last year.

Synergy calls Amazon “in a league of its own”, and it’s hard to disagree based on the research. Salesforce.com, Microsoft, IBM and Google comprise the top five, but they appear mere drops in the ocean compared to the dominance of AWS:

So 2013’s results still show a clear market share for Amazon. But that …

Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

The Australian government has finally embraced cloud services as a critical element of the digital economy by releasing a National Cloud Computing Strategy. While not quite “cloud first”, the strategy creates an explicit requirement for agencies to consider cloud services for new ICT procurements, test and development activity, and to migrate existing websites to cloud services at natural refresh points.

When combined with a range of other measures, this represents a significant step forward in the modernization of the government’s thinking and approach to ICT industry development and to its own procurement and use of ICT.

Cloud services – for the good of government, business, and the economy

We discussed the policy context that is driving demand for an Australian cloud computing strategy in our comment “Amazon heralds a warming of Australia’s digital economy”. The release of the National Cloud Computing Strategy …

As time goes on we are, without question, witnessing acceleration in the adoption of services being purchased as mainstream alternatives to on-premise, on a global scale. Whatever buyers are looking for, from CRM to business backup, a cloud option is out there.

It is the term ‘cloud’ that has won the battle to describe anything that isn’t located within a client’s physical location. However, issues have arisen because there are many variations of technology that fall within this offsite category including ‘hosted’ and ‘colocation’. The generic definition associated with ‘cloud’ causes confusion not only amongst the industry but, most importantly, for customers.

Businesses trying to decide if cloud technology will play a part in the total IT infrastructure of their organisation face an even bigger challenge by the variation in definition. This is even more critical when choosing a solution for a service as business critical as voice …

The latest cloud computing report this time comes from Microsoft in collaboration with 451 Research, and again looks towards the hybrid as the tangible future of cloud computing.

The study, ‘The New Era of Hosted Services’, took responses from more than 1500 organisations and revealed that in two years’ time 68% of organisations will adopt the hybrid cloud model, up from 49% currently.

“The next two years will be the era of the hybrid cloud”, trumpeted Marco Limena, Microsoft VP hosting service providers business.

This is simply the latest in a series of reports examining the importance of the hybrid cloud, utilising the best elements of private and public clouds.

Earlier this month CloudTech reported that hybrid cloud was the “wave of the future”, according to seven in 10 IT executives, with the primary reason for adoption being that cloud apps were deployed faster; whilst back in April Virtustream research …

We’ve all heard and understand big data issues: volume, velocity, and variety. But when breaking it down into simple terms, how much data do you think is generated every minute across common platforms?

The answers may shock you. Just remember when reading through that all of these transactions occur in one minute, every day.

(Thanks to Domo for the infographic!)

VMWare is well known for its virtualization products, so it’s not surprising that it is establishing a presence in the cloud computing world. Its hybrid cloud service, VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service, runs off of vSphere and vCloud.

It’s set up as an Infrastructure as a Service offering, with a hybrid cloud approach that seeks to expand the customer’s existing datacenter, instead of replacing it.

Here are five methods by which the vCloud Hybrid Service takes existing data centres to the cloud.

5. The hybrid approach. Instead of using a completely cloud-based solution, the hybrid server uses existing infrastructure and augments it with cloud-based resources. VMWare offers both dedicated and virtual private clouds for this service.

4. Integration with existing VMware deployment. VMware makes it simple to connect the cloud-based data centre with the physical data centre. The infrastructure used in the cloud is the same as …

iomart Group, proclaimed as the UK’s leading cloud computing company, has registered end of year profits of £10.7m before tax growth, an increase of 56% and marking a significant improvement on 2012’s £6.9m profit.

Revenue growth went up 29% to £43.1m, again an improvement on the previous year, whilst adjusted EBITDA growth (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) was 48%, up to £16.5m.

The figures are suitably impressive for the Scottish company, proving last year’s comments from senior execs were almost Nostradamus-esque in their accuracy.

iomart Group director of marketing and corporate communications Phil Worms told CloudTech this time last year that “the market expected us to deliver”, with CEO Angus MacSween adding that “at least another two or three” acquisitions were expected to be made.

And with buyouts of Melbourne Server Hosting, Skymarket and Internet Engineering for an overall figure of …

ServiceNow is a global leader in providing cloud-based services used by enterprises to streamline and automate their IT operations. 

They’re known for their expertise in IT Service Management (ITSM), speed of development cycles, and commitment to open source including MongoDB and NoSQL. 

ServiceNow also has one of the most enthusiastic, rapidly growing and loyal customer bases in enterprise software. 

Matt Schvimmer, VP Product Management at ServiceNow, credits the goal of attaining 100% customer referenceability combined with intensive focus on user experience design as contributing factors to their rapid growth, in addition to continuous feedback cycles they use for capturing and acting on customer feedback.

Update from ServiceNow’s Financial Analyst Day and Knowledge13 

On May 13th they held their Financial Analyst Day at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, the same location they hosted Knowledge13, their annual user conference held May 12th through the 16th.  You can download …

Economic uncertainty surrounding the U.S. government sequester, European debt crisis and weakening GDP in China has resulted in volatile spending patterns across most segments of the market.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), as a result of the current economic climate, business technology spending was slightly below expectations in the second half of 2012 and first quarter of 2013.

IDC now projects worldwide IT spending growth of 4.9 percent this year in constant currency, down from the previous forecast of 5.5 percent growth — and representing a slowdown from the 5.6 percent growth recorded in 2012. As a result, IT spending will reach $2.06 trillion in 2013. Including telecom services, ICT spending will increase by 4.5 percent to $3.7 trillion.

So, what are the key trends that are shaping the updated global forecasts?

Deteriorating PC shipments

The reduction in …