Sketch It was a throwaway comment made by Dr Steve Garnett, Salesforce EMEA president at the Salesforce1 World Tour London press briefing on Thursday, but it was a resonant one. Last week’s event felt like Dreamforce five or six years ago, he explained.

It was meant to signify both the atmosphere of the event as well as the growth of Salesforce.com in the UK – and the keynote went flash, bang, wallop into this.

“We’re seeing record crowds, everywhere we go, around the world, because people are hungry to learn about the future,” George Hu, Salesforce COO, explained. 10,000 registered attendees can‘t be wrong, and this future was the new Salesforce1 mobile app, enabling anyone to run their business purely on their mobile device.

“Just imagine how instantly more productive you were if every one of your salespeople had that in their hands,” noted Fergus Griffin …

Updated 1819 GMT: Earlier this morning the UK government confirmed the fifth iteration of the G-Cloud cloud store was open, with 1132 suppliers making the cut and 1518 in total.

The list of suppliers for G-Cloud 5 was revealed at the end of last week, with plans to go live on Friday but for last minute bug fixes, as an official blog post confirmed.

CloudStore is open. http://t.co/MAHjtNA9dp There are now 1518 suppliers (885 SMEs) with over 17,000 services available.

— G-Cloud (@G_Cloud_UK) May 27, 2014

The latest round of procurement for G-Cloud had opened at the end of February, with Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude aiming at the time for a further £100m to be spent through the platform by May 2015 and outlining the various opportunities provided to small, innovative IT suppliers.

Yet a lot of the time the UK’s government cloud initiative has …

Do people really back up their data – or are they just saying they do?

Even in today’s world of huge capacity drives and immediately accessible online backup, you’d be amazed at the number of users who simply don’t back up their data. While this may be regrettable at home, it’s unacceptable at work. Teams can’t function properly if team members lose information. And promises to do it ‘tomorrow’ (bad) or ‘as soon as possible’ (worse) just don’t cut it.

But what’s the solution to get everybody doing their backups instead of just talking about it?

The terrible consequences

Sales people know that prospects only buy if they are feel motivated or threatened (but not by the sales people!)

In other words, there are two ways to convince people to do something. The first is through the positive consequences of taking action. The second …

RackSpace has become an important player in the cloud market. Although the company is a publically traded stock, it seems as if RackSpace just doesn’t have the brand name recognition or the capital to keep up with movers and shakers in the cloud industry. RackSpace has invested $1 billion in infrastructure since 2005. Recently, it was reported that RackSpace had been bleeding clients due to the slashing of cloud prices from vendors such as AWS, Google and Microsoft. While RackSpace’s commitment to cloud and their total investment within the industry is nothing to scoff at, it seems as if …

At his earnings call last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff noted how he could run his business from his mobile device.

Well, with a few tweaks now you can too: Salesforce has launched the new Salesforce1 mobile app at the World Tour event in London, with the product being available in the summer roll-out.

The app, which the promotional material perhaps optimistically compares with an enterprise-eseque Facebook, promises more than 30 features, including easier access for salespeople to reports and dashboards, an ecosystem of more than 65 partner apps including FInancialForce and Kenandy, as well as the ability to deploy custom business apps.

«Cloud-first is the new mantra in today’s world,» said George Hu, Salesforce COO in the keynote speech.

The Salesforce1 app is built for practically all browsers and devices, including BlackBerry, Windows 8 and Good Access Secure, and zeroes in on the ecosystem; partners, employees, admins …

Four in five (83%) of civil servants have said their experience of cloud computing in the public sector was ‘negative’ or ‘poor’, according to the latest research from not-for-profit CSP Eduserv.

The research, the latest monthly update produced by the government cloud provider, found that nearly half (40%) of those who’d suffered bad experiences were hindered by not being able to access the right data or applications, with one in 10 adding their ability to do their job was disrupted by new cloud services.

The results were collated in a paper entitled ‘Delivering Cloud First’ and polled over 800 civil servants to find out the state of the UK government’s cloud first policy – and found that efficiency trumps innovation.

Most cloud adoption (60%) has focused on entry level infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions, while the primary driver for adopting cloud remains improving operational efficiency, according to 57 …

Anyone who might have spotted a large order of champagne delivered to the Armonk area last night will now know why: IBM has just set a new record for the amount of big data stored on tape.

The Big Blue scientists have announced an eye-watering 85.9 billion bits of data per square inch on the latest tape, built from barium ferrite in conjunction with Fujitsu. This translates to 154 terabytes of uncompressed data on a standard LTO size cartridge – or, in non-tech terms, around 154 million books in one cartridge.

The tape weighs in at 4.3 micrometres thick and 1255 metres long – an improvement on the equivalent in 2010, which was a mere 5.9 micrometres and 917m.

“Even though tape technology is more than 60 years old, it’s very relevant today for one main reason: big data,” said Dr. Mark Lantz at IBM Research. “There’s …

“Anyone starting a company right now would have to be completely bonkers to build their own infrastructure,” roars Interoute chief technical officer Matthew Finnie.

Finnie is a man never short of an opinion or two, and with the number of born in the cloud companies increasing, this seems like a pretty safe bet. But here’s another view: the skills gap in the industry continues to get bigger.

“You’ve almost got two- or three-speed adoption to the cloud,” he tells CloudTech. “You’ve got a bunch of early adopters, guys at Dropbox, Netflix who’ve embraced it and done very well on the back of it. You’ve then got a middle tier, and then you’ve got a group of, more generally speaking, enterprise guys, who are circumspect about the cloud.

“And I think to some extent, what you’re looking at is some of the cynicism, or …

SAP axed their top cloud chief Shawn Price earlier this week. It seems as if SAP is looking to restructure its entire business and focus more on cloud.

Reports suggest that SAP plans on cutting 1,500 to 2,500 jobs.  SAP currently employees over 65,000 people internationally.

Not too much has been released from SAP in regards to the proposed job cuts. In a brief press release, SAP said, “Our goal is to become simpler, more agile, faster and easier to work with. This is a broad company-wide effort to make SAP more effective and strengthen our innovation leadership.”

Although the news of job cuts at SAP is certainly a shock at face value, SAP mentions that it plans on ending the year with more employees than it began 2014 with.

Those in the media who have reached out to SAP have received this response in regards to …

Research bods Horses for Sources (HfS) have put 10 companies in its winner’s circle for infrastructure as a service – but Microsoft and Google are nowhere to be seen.

The report, compiled by HfS analyst Dr Thomas Mendel, is the latest in a flurry of research articles prognosticating on the market leaders for IaaS, hot on the heels of the ‘race to the bottom’ for Amazon, Google and Microsoft in storage pricing. Yet only AWS made the winner’s circle, with Microsoft in the lesser ‘high performers’ category and Google trailing behind.

In the same week that IDC analyst David Tapper found that IBM was the most lucrative IaaS vendor for US enterprise buyers, IBM has also come up trumps here in terms of execution.

Perhaps surprisingly several companies better IBM in terms of innovation, considering the amount of investment Big Blue puts into its patents arm. Cisco was considered …