Jeremy Cox, Principal Analyst Enterprise Solutions

On February 15, Sage announced that it was selling off Sage ACT, Sage SalesLogix, and the Sage Nonprofit Solutions product suite (managed from the US), as well as four other non-CRM products in Europe. Ovum sees this as further evidence of Sage’s customer-focused transformation and desire to accelerate development of its core hybrid cloud and mobile applications portfolio.

At last year’s Sage Summit, the company’s definition of what constitutes core did not include Sage CRM. With these product divestments, we can expect Sage CRM to move into the limelight along with Sage ERP X3. Both are being developed on the same Microsoft Azure platform and will both benefit from further investments in mobility and social in 2013.

Sage divestments will accelerate its renaissance

How things have changed. In 2001 Sage continued to build through acquisition, buying ACT and SalesLogix in one …

More than a third of all enterprises now have some form of cloud computing technology in their organizations. That percentage is growing rapidly, with most experts suggesting that more than half of enterprises implementing cloud solutions by the end of 2013.
Cloud computing has had an impact in the marketplace, and the entertainment marketplace is no exception. Why is this important to IT professionals? Well, when C-level employees start using cloud solutions in their personal lives, they begin to wonder about exactly if and how cloud solutions could improve the enterprise.

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More than a third of all enterprises now have some form of cloud computing technology in their organizations. That percentage is growing rapidly, with most experts suggesting that more than half of enterprises implementing cloud solutions by the end of 2013.
Cloud computing has had an impact in the marketplace, and the entertainment marketplace is no exception. Why is this important to IT professionals? Well, when C-level employees start using cloud solutions in their personal lives, they begin to wonder about exactly if and how cloud solutions could improve the enterprise.

read more

Improving application program performance will require parallelizing the program execution at ever finer granularity now that the processor clock rates are no longer increasing. However, even in a per-application dedicated computing environment, the parallelization overhead is known to place a limit on how much application on-time throughput performance increase can be achieved via higher levels of parallel processing. The throughput-limiting impact of parallelization overhead will be significantly amplified when executing multiple internally parallelized applications on dynamically shared cloud computing environment, since the allocation of processing resources to instances and tasks of any given application cannot be done in isolation, but instead it needs to be done collectively across all the applications dynamically sharing the given pool of computing resources. There thus is an urgent need to solve this complex challenge of developing internally parallelized programs for dynamic execution on shared cloud computing infrastructure, if we expect to be able scale the performance and capacity of cloud hosted applications going forward.

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Today there is a war being fought between Amazon AWS and the enterprise over the future direction of the IT industry.  Amazon promotes the public cloud as a destination, a primary and permanent facility for a company’s IT infrastructure; while enterprises today are mostly interested in cloud as a secondary facility used as needed, for […]

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Today there is a war being fought between Amazon AWS and the enterprise over the future direction of the IT industry.  Amazon promotes the public cloud as a destination, a primary and permanent facility for a company’s IT infrastructure; while enterprises today are mostly interested in cloud as a secondary facility used as needed, for […]

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Who are the world’s ICT leaders? What separates them from the pack? Where are the emerging ICT stars? Why are they important? How can you go “beyond the BRICs” in your analysis?

These are questions we’ve been working to answer over the past two years, with original research that looks at national ICT expenditures on a relative, “pound-for-pound” basis. We’ve engaged directly with government and business leaders in several countries – from each region of the world – to see how our findings can be used to improve national technology environments and, by extension, economic and societal growth.

In addition to our primary study, which is known as the Tau Index, we’re now embarking on targeted research for specific aspects of national ICT commitments—bandwidth, government policy, and the growth of various aspects of cloud computing.

As I’ve written extensively (search “Tau Strukhoff” – bing does a much better job than google), there are numerous results that may appear to be surprising. But if you’re looking for something that goes beyond traditional rankings that, in essence, show developed countries on top and developing countries on the bottom, visit us at www.tauinstitute.org or contact me via Twitter.

We have 102 countries in our index, and can provide views by region, income level, and other parameters.

read more

Who are the world’s ICT leaders? What separates them from the pack? Where are the emerging ICT stars? Why are they important? How can you go “beyond the BRICs” in your analysis?

These are questions we’ve been working to answer over the past two years, with original research that looks at national ICT expenditures on a relative, “pound-for-pound” basis. We’ve engaged directly with government and business leaders in several countries – from each region of the world – to see how our findings can be used to improve national technology environments and, by extension, economic and societal growth.

In addition to our primary study, which is known as the Tau Index, we’re now embarking on targeted research for specific aspects of national ICT commitments—bandwidth, government policy, and the growth of various aspects of cloud computing.

As I’ve written extensively (search “Tau Strukhoff” – bing does a much better job than google), there are numerous results that may appear to be surprising. But if you’re looking for something that goes beyond traditional rankings that, in essence, show developed countries on top and developing countries on the bottom, visit us at www.tauinstitute.org or contact me via Twitter.

We have 102 countries in our index, and can provide views by region, income level, and other parameters.

read more

CDW report looks at the health of cloud computing in terms of drivers, barriers and cost and says that ‘work imitates life’ with cloud adoption

It’s that time of the year again; companies have stopped predicting what the cloud is going to look like for 2013, with organisations instead concentrating on what the ecosystem is currently looking like.

CDW is a case in point. The IT product supplier has issued its ‘2013 State of the Cloud’ report, surveying 1,242 tech professionals, and concluded that ‘work imitates life’; a big driver of corporate cloud adoption is users’ experience of consumer services.

Nearly three quarters of respondents (73%) claimed that, in their company, employees’ use of personal cloud apps has “significantly influenced” the decision to move wholesale to the cloud. Similarly, just over three in five (61%) cloudy organisations agreed that employee personal devices have culminated in a faster move …

by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

Hypervisors were the right solution for the enterprise. Triple gains in efficiency over standard servers with added bonus of simplified manageability made it a king of the IT hill.  When ROI calculation can be done on the back of a napkin and IT can show the CEO millions in cost savings, problems are overlooked, careers are made, software vendors grow to multi-billion valuations and technology adoption jets to supersonic speeds. But a perfect solution for a cost center is not enough for a profit driven business.

The hosting business model depends on the ability to satisfy needs of customers not bound to annual budgets or locked to a single IT provider. Customers who have a choice. A choice of provider, cost, and performance for the solution they need. To profitably satisfy these needs, hosters use an alternative virtualization solution, container virtualization. The reason for that is that containers have a 3x efficiency advantage over hypervisors. Unlike the IT cost center, hosting providers need a high-density virtualization solution to compete in the market.  Container virtualization had no equal in hosting scenarios where efficiency matters.

In the pre-cloud enterprise, container usage was limited to specialized high density and performance scenarios like technical computing. Now cloud puts a new demand on virtualization in both enterprise IT and hosting worlds and for the first time brings these two separate worlds closer together. No matter where applied the cloud requires high density, instant provisioning, elasticity, and portability.

These requirements are now met by a new breed of container technology. Already, containers are powering Google search, Facebook sites, and internet banking in addition to hosting businesses. These new containers come equipped with optimized memory, rebootless updates and not only maintain the 3x performance advantage over hypervisors but further extend it.

The latest and most impactful cloud containers innovation comes in the form of a container in a file enabling simple backup, migrations, geo replication, and as demonstrated with Parallels Cloud Storage, High Availability solutions.  The new generation of containers show advantage over hypervisors in most cloud scenarios and for most user types, solidifying the container position in the hosting space and opening a new opportunity for container powered clouds and the enterprise.