I recently reported on overall and regional leaders in our latest research at the Tau Institute (which has offices in Illinois and Manila, Philippines). Now here’s a look at leaders by income tier – this is a way to compare similarly developed nations with one another, regardless of location.

We’ve been able to include 91 countries into the mix. The mission is to produce a sophisticated ranking that takes into account relative progress of the nations of the world when it comes to ICT. We integrate several publicly available factors into our own algorithm. There is thus transparency in the data we input combined with a specialized weighting system that we believe reveals new insight into the statistics.

We’ve integrated the following factors into a single, weighted formula:

* Per capita income (from the World Bank)
* Local cost of living (ditto)
* Gini coefficient (income disparity as measured by the United Nations and CIA)
* Perception of corruption (from Transparency International)
* Human development (according to the United Nations)
* Data servers per capita (adjusted for local income, as measured by the World Bank)
* Average bandwidth speed (from Ookla, Inc.)
* % of population with access to the Internet (from the International Telecommunications Union)
* % population with broadband connections (ditto)

In the end, we’ve created a “pound-for-pound” analysis that reveals the countries that are doing the most with what they have. Our method goes far beyond the normal rankings one sees that simply show wealthy countries on top, developing nations on the bottom.

We can view the datas in several ways. For today, I’ll list the countries that have been most successful on a relative basis so far.

Tomorrow, I’ll list the countries with the most raw potential. The “raw” ranking hits a middle ground of opportunity and development. Countries that have lagged regardless of income level (such as Norway and Libya) do not fare as well in this index as countries that have shown good relative ICT commitments (such as Jordan), even if they’re still impoverished (such as Ethiopia).

As a reality check and benchmark, we’ve created a “Perfect Land” which has optimal statistics in all categories. The idea is that no country should beat Perfect Land in the overall index, although many countries will beat it in the raw index, which is weighted toward potential.

Here are the Overall leaders, sorted by income tier.

Tier 1 (>$30K in per capita income)
New Zealand (#3 in the world overall)
Netherlands (#4 in the world overall)
Finland (#5 in the world overall)
Denmark
Sweden

Tier 2 ($13K-$29K)
South Korea (#1 in the world overall)
Estonia (#2 in the world overall)
Lithuania
Taiwan
Poland

Tier 3 ($6K-$13K)
Bulgaria
Romania
Latvia
Turkey
Serbia

Tier 4 ($2K-$6K)
Jordan
Jamaica
Ukraine
Mongolia
Morocco
Tunisia
Philippines
China
Armenia
Thailand

Tier 5 (<$2K) Vietnam Ghana Senegal Kenya India Each of these countries has a story to tell, as do all countries covered in our research. We are currently engaging with local resources in some of the places that emerge as leaders. We are also very interested in making new connections within any country – the Tau Index serves merely to start conversations about ICT and its role in increasing economic development and improving the lives of people. Follow me on Twitter

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IT departments are experiencing storage capacity needs doubling every 12-18 months, 50x the amount of information and 75x the number of files. IT managers are dealing with growing constraints on space, power and costs to manage their data center infrastructure. Intel is helping businesses and users realize the benefits of cloud computing technology by working to develop open standards that operate across disparate IT infrastructures and by delivering cloud-based architectures that enable federated, automated and client-aware cloud services. In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, Tony Hamilton, Enterprise Marketing Manager at Intel, discusses how the foundation for this vision will be defined by an open approach that delivers best of breed technologies + flexibility + choice from data center infrastructure to client devices. and how Intel is bringing together a broad network of leading hardware and solution providers to build and enhance cloud solutions that are interoperable, multi-vendor and embrace open standards.

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With every passing day, Big Data assumes new strength as a significant force in our industry. Someone even said that Big Data is transforming business same way IT did few decades ago.

The overall revenue (includes hardware, software, service) for Big Data is said to be around $5.1B in 2011 and includes players such as IBM, Intel, HP, Fujitsu, etc. This is hard to fathom! But pure-play revenue coming from players such as Vertica, Aster, Cloudera, Greenplum, 1010Data, etc. is valued at $468M in 2011. Then someone said the projected revenue from Big Data will reach an astounding $53B by 2017 (source- Wikibon), growing to $10B in 2013, $32 in 2015 and $48B in 2016. We can argue on these numbers, but let us agree that this will be quite big. Why is that?

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Virtustream has snared a handsome contract to move Veyance Technologies’ complex global SAP environment to its xStream cloud platform where it will run in production.
Veyance, in case you don’t know, is the exclusive manufacturer and marketer of Goodyear engineered products worldwide and its SAP environment serves over 3,000 users.
Its legacy SAP R/3, SAP XI, TREX, Netweaver, ITS and WAS systems were previously deployed on physical hardware in a traditional outsourcing arrangement. It decided to move to the cloud to enable an extensive global data center and server consolidation initiative, which will cut its IT costs, and to let it scale dynamically as future expansion needs.
Veyance will still manage the multi-tenant environment with a single panel of glass.
Its requirements reportedly included true consumption-based pricing, guaranteed compute resources, data protection and industry-leading SLAs. The xStream platform will also provide comprehensive disaster recovery and data protection.

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As cloud computing technologies and offerings mature and evolve in its services to customers, one common consumer use will be that of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
My earlier articles have touched on the various models, risks, security and forensics at several levels. There is also a plethora of resources available now that end users can educate themselves with that are freely available online.
This article will focus on aspects of security that impact the SaaS environment as developed, presented or augmented by me for several Cloud Computing projects.
Before we proceed in the subject matter, a brief clarification of what I refer to as the cloud follows. Keep in mind that this term “cloud computing” is now being used to describe a broad range of services to include product descriptors that sits outside the common definition of the cloud.

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For years, IT departments have organized their processes, employees, and business relationships around owning and operating the core IT assets in an enterprise. The current wave of cloud services can have a powerful effect on enterprise IT, with the potential for significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. To achieve these benefits, IT departments will have to integrate new ways of thinking about how IT resources are delivered.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, Scott Thomas, Vice President, Sales Engagement at Terremark, a Verizon Company, discusses the major factors driving cloud adoption for the enterprise, relating how the adoption of cloud technologies is changing the way IT departments will operate, and reviewing case studies showing how businesses have used cloud services to achieve these benefits.

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Venture capitalists are currently enamored with cloud-based startups, and are investing heavily in the cloud computing industry, according to a post on Cloudtimes.org.
According to statistics shared by PricewaterhouseCoopers, venture capitalists invested as much as $6.9 billion on “Internet-specific” startups in 2011 alone, with “Internet-specific” being a proxy term for “cloud” because that’s what most of them are doing. The $6.9 billion investment is a 68% increase from last year.
In Q4 alone, investments related to cloud amounted to $1.8 billion, which is above the $1.3 billion invested on biotech, and the $883 million invested into cleantech in the same year. It’s more than just the amount, anyway. The amount of deals is also increasing – VCs funded as many as 1,004 software startups related to the cloud last 2011.

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Microsoft said it would push Windows Server 2012 out the door in early September and it did on Tuesday, after a year of public test builds. It positioned it as the “cornerstone” of its cloud strategy, its “Cloud OS” for private and hosted clouds and a building block for Windows Azure.
It said “the Cloud OS does what operating systems have always done: manage hardware and provide a platform for applications. But it also expands to include services and technologies that have not previously been considered part of an operating system.”
In the case of Windows Server, the 2012 model works independently and connects to 200 or so online services available through Azure, stuff like bursting or analytics.
Microsoft says the widgetry is “built from the cloud up.”

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