North Bridge Venture Partners has announced the results of its second annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. Supported by 39 industry collaborators spanning established leaders, emerging, fast-growth companies, and startups – the 2012 survey captures current industry perceptions, sentiments and emerging trends in cloud computing. This year’s collaborators include companies such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, and Glasshouse. A total of 785 respondents spanning industry experts, users and vendors participated in the survey. Respondents were asked about a wide range of key issues impacting cloud computing, including drivers for cloud computing, inhibitors, best practices, sourcing, total cost of ownership (TCO), cloud’s impact on multiple business sectors, and emerging cloud technologies. The survey provides many insights into the adoption of cloud computing, including the cloud configurations and applications that are forming around specific business needs including Big Data, business continuity, collaboration and storage.

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In June Cloudera announced the general availability of CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4. These releases are significant milestones for the Big Data community, and are also important to any organization which has yet to being their Big Data journey. CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 make it far easier to begin projects the right way.
Both CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 are full of new features. CDH4 has more security features. Cloudera Manager makes it easy to manage and audit clusters of systems doing Big Data work.
Here is a more technical restatement of that: CDH4 includes high availability for the filesystem, an ability to support multiple namespaces, HBase table and column level security, improved performance, HBase replication, and greatly improved usability and browser support for the web interface (Hue). Cloudera Manager 4 includes new abilities to manage multiple clusters and multiple versions, automation for high availability and MapReduce2, multi-namespace support, cluster-wide heatmaps, host monitoring and automated client configurations. There are many other features which will enhance capabilities for those seeking to built applications on top of CDH, which is important for the large and growing community of applications developers leveraging Hadoop for solutions.

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The money in play for Quest Software jumped from $2.17 billion to $2.32 billion Monday morning.
The mystery bidder, believed to be Dell, that looked trumped a few days ago is back in the game after topping the $25.75-a-share offer made by Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital, two private equity outfits, with a bid of $27.50 a share cash, a sharp increase.
The sum approaches the $28 a share or $2.36 billion JPMorgan claimed the company was worth weeks ago. Insight on its own started with $23 a share in March and had to call in reinforcements last week to go to $25.75.
The unnamed strategic bidder is going to have to pay a $25 million termination fee to make the Insight-Vector alliance go away. Insight-Vector could also re-up but they’re already working on borrowed capital. There’s no financing in the mystery bid. The Insight-Vector combine has three business days to decide whether to match or improve on the “Dell” bid. Wall Street seems to think the deal could get a mite sweeter. Quest’s stock opened at $27.74 then lost a little ground.

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The money in play for Quest Software jumped from $2.17 billion to $2.32 billion Monday morning.
The mystery bidder, believed to be Dell, that looked trumped a few days ago is back in the game after topping the $25.75-a-share offer made by Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital, two private equity outfits, with a bid of $27.50 a share cash, a sharp increase.
The sum approaches the $28 a share or $2.36 billion JPMorgan claimed the company was worth weeks ago. Insight on its own started with $23 a share in March and had to call in reinforcements last week to go to $25.75.
The unnamed strategic bidder is going to have to pay a $25 million termination fee to make the Insight-Vector alliance go away. Insight-Vector could also re-up but they’re already working on borrowed capital. There’s no financing in the mystery bid. The Insight-Vector combine has three business days to decide whether to match or improve on the “Dell” bid. Wall Street seems to think the deal could get a mite sweeter. Quest’s stock opened at $27.74 then lost a little ground.

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There’s no such thing as too little cloud research from Gartner, and this is more interesting news for cloud users: Gartner forecasts that more than a third of consumers’ digital content will be stored in the cloud by 2016.

Gartner’s research is of course widely accepted as one of the most authoritative in the business, so this will come as another welcome trend, especially given that consumers only store seven percent of their content in the cloud now.

“With the emergence of the personal cloud, fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices,” said Shalini Verma, principal analyst at Gartner.

Cloud storage, in the ‘post PC’ era, is one of the most alluring aspects of consumers’ cloud adoption, and especially with user content growing at an inordinate rate, the cloud appears to be the obvious place to meet those needs.

Gartner therefore predicts that the …

The previous two articles discussed different access methods to your IBM SmartCloud Object Storage and Team Folder collaboration features. This article introduces the Folder and File Sharing feature with your IBM SmartCloud Storage.
Functionality wise, Folder and file sharing is similar to team folder collaboration. There are 3 major differences.
(1) Team folder is managed by administrator for the team; while Folder sharing is managed by each team member.
(2) Team folder can only be published to known team users; while folder sharing can be shared to external user on a read-only basis, in addition to sharing with internal team users.
(3) Team folder is always collaboration on a folder level; while folder and file sharing can share on a single file level.

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Microsoft has, as leaked a couple of weeks ago, gone ahead and cut a deal to buy the Twitter-y enterprise social network Yammer for $1.2 billion cash to extend its cloud services and protect its revenue flank.

The four-year-old start-up and its 400 people will be sent to the Office Division when the acquisition closes in Q3. Yammer CEO David Sachs, the former COO of PayPal, will report to Office president Kurt DelBene.

Yammer’s five million-odd verified corporate users reportedly include 85% of the Fortune 500.

Yammer offers a free secure private network hoping to trigger a viral “grassroots movement” that it can convert into a company-wide initiative competing with Microsoft for $5 a head every month. Customers pay to upgrade their network with administrative and security controls, integrations with enterprise applications, priority customer service and a so-called designated customer success manager.

Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption by integrating it with SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook and Skype. It says the service will develop new capabilities and scale bigger. It will also continue to be offered as a standalone product.

Yammer already integrates with SharePoint.

Yammer raised an $85 million fifth round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson in February. All Things Digital says the “implied valuation” then was around $600 million so Microsoft is paying double. Yammer has raised $140 million altogether.

The blog also said Yammer’s free users are notoriously hard to convert into paid users and suggested it’s hard to integrate.

Yammer may have a million paid subscribers.

Rival Jive Software, which IPO’d late last year, forces users to pay after a 30-day trial. It reportedly has 676 companies paying. Cisco’s got WebEx Social, Salesforce has Chatter and IBM a thing called Connections.

Yammer has iPhone and Android apps.

It was reportedly advised by Midas-like Qatalyst Partners.

Microsoft, which owns a slice of Facebook, closed down 2.7% at $29.86. Yammer has added Facebook-like features since it started on Peter Thiel’s nickel. He was Facebook’s first major investor and worked with Sacks at PayPal.

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The Microsoft Surface, whenever it arrives, is actually two machines. The lower end system running Windows RT seems destined to compete with the iPad within the general consumer market, while the higher end system running a full implementation of Windows 8 may indeed be perceived as a laptop computer rather than a tablet, and should be of interest to corporate buyers.

The Surface, if it works well, may compel may enterprise IT managers to try to rein in the current BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement that threatens chaos in the world. It seems eminently plausible for IT to embrace (if not extend) the Surface Windows 8 Pro model, and provide it as standard-issue equipment to company employees, in the old-fashioned RYOD (Receive Your Own Device) model.

The currently missing price point won’t be as much of an issue with the Pro model. I was issued a Thinkpad at an internal cost of $1,800 by a software company I worked for just a few years ago. A few people who complained enough got Macs, at much higher internal price points.

But the issue of whether the Surface will start with a pricing of $400 or $600 or $800 or more is less relevant to the higher end Pro.

Getting the Pro as a standard corporate provision will be splendidly ironic when it happens, because after all, Microsoft OS-based computers were the vanguard of the business PC revolution 30 years ago when corporate masses, tired of aloof mainframe IS managers, brought the new machines into their offices and integrated them into their everyday reality.

The IBM PC running Microsoft DOS were the original BYOD systems; now Microsoft stands as the bastion of the old guard. But no more speculation at this point – I’d like to see a real Surface machine work before I pronounce anything more about it.

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Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner, arguably the most brilliant mind on the American bench, threw out the Android infringement litigation between Apple and Motorola Mobility late Friday with prejudice, denying Apple its hoped-for injunction against the Google satellite and its smartphones.

That goes for Motorola too.

“Neither party is entitled to an injunction,” Posner said. “Neither has shown that damages would not be an adequate remedy” to an injunction – (which is usually reserved for cases of imminent irreversible harm) – but both sides “failed to make a responsible calculation” of damages.

“They had an adequate legal remedy,” he said, “but failed to make a prima facie case of how much money, by way of such remedy, they are entitled to. That was a simple failure of proof.”

Apple has the stronger case but “By failing to present a minimally adequate damages case, Apple has disabled itself from arguing that damages would not provide a complete remedy, going forward in the form of running royalties, as well as backward.”

With prejudice means the cross-litigation can’t be re-filed, giving Apple, which claims Motorola copied its technology, a powerful thumping.

There is of course always the probability of appeal or they could go venue shopping. Otherwise, Judge Posner, whose patience was tried more than a little by the case, blasted the strategy of using patents to bar a rival from the market in his 38-page decision.

After tossing nearly all of Motorola’s patent claims against Apple and leaving Apple with more, the judge cancelled a jury trial that was supposed to start on June 11 on their two-year-old cross-complaints and heard arguments last Wednesday on the possibility of injunctions determined to decide the issue himself.

He found that Apple had dicey grounds for a ban in the light of possible workarounds and said enjoining Motorola’s phones would be “catastrophic” for the company.

It didn’t have a tight enough case. “Apple wanted me to allow into evidence,” the judge said, “media reports attesting to what a terrific product the iPhone is. I said I would not permit this because the quality of the iPhone (and of related Apple products, primarily the iPad) and consumers’ regard for it have, so far as the record shows, nothing to do with the handful of patent claims that I had ruled presented triable issues of infringement. Apple’s ‘feel good’ theory does not indicate that infringement of these claims (if they were infringed) reduced Apple’s sales or market share, or impaired consumer goodwill toward Apple products.”

There’s “danger,” he said, “that Apple’s goal in obtaining an injunction is harassment of its bitter rival…The notion that these minor-seeming infringements have cost Apple market share and consumer goodwill is implausible, has virtually no support in the record, and so fails to indicate that the benefits to Apple from an injunction would exceed the costs to Motorola.”

“smallerAn injunction,” he said, “that imposes greater costs on the defendant than it confers benefits on the plaintiff reduces net social welfare.”

Meanwhile, Posner had left Motorola with one FRAND-pledged wireless patent to sue on after weeding out the others.

He said Motorola’s FRAND pledges barred it from seeking an injunction and that Motorola offered “no reasonable evidence for calculating a reasonable royalty” in light of its gargantuan licensing demands for 2.25% of Apple’s device sales.

“I don’t see how,” he wrote, “given FRAND, I would be justified in enjoining Apple from infringing the ‘898 unless Apple refuses to pay a royalty that meets the FRAND requirement. By committing to license its patents on FRAND terms, Motorola committed to license the ‘898 to anyone willing to pay a FRAND royalty and thus implicitly acknowledged that a royalty is adequate compensation for a license to use that patent. How could it do otherwise? How could it be permitted to enjoin Apple from using an invention that it contends Apple must use if it wants to make a cell phone with UMTS telecommunications capability – without which it would not be a cell phone.”

Judge Posner also quashed Apple’s proposal to limit the injunction and force Motorola to remove Apple-patented features from its phones within three months of launch. He said it would be too hard and too costly to administer for both Motorola and the court, and forcing Motorola to sell inferior technology would serve no social good and create the unhappy prospect of Apple then filing more lawsuits claiming Motorola still infringed à la Apple and HTC.

He suggested Apple license the relevant patents to Motorola.

FOSS Patents says the only thing that’s going to stop the worldwide patent disputes that Judge Posner loathes is a global settlement and the only way to achieve a settlement is either through an injunction that endangers sales or draconian damages.

According to Gartner Android owns 47% of the market and iOS has 23%.

The Apple-Google relationship is expected to deteriorate further if Google puts out its own branded phone, as widely reported

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