Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

Public cloud vendors are increasingly focusing on vertical markets, which will significantly accelerate public cloud adoption by latecomers. The “verticalization” of public clouds comes as a result of efforts throughout vertical ecosystems, from regulators to traditional IT service providers such as IBM, as well as newcomers such as AWS, Salesforce.com, and Veeva.

It will grow in parallel to public cloud providers increasingly moving from technology services to packages targeted at specific needs and audiences. For more information, see the 2014 Trends to Watch: Public Clouds report that looks at the overall public market trends as well as specific trends for infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) public clouds.

Vertical market regulators are catching up with public clouds

Vertical market regulators are catching up with public clouds, and will continue to do so in 2014. For example, the publication of the Health Insurance …

By Nick Razey, CEO, Next Generation Data

Time and tide wait for no one. Wise words and all the more so amid the recent flooding experienced up and down the country with even the Thames bursting its banks just a few miles short of central London.  

If it wasn’t for the Thames Barrier who knows what might have happened? It’s sobering that a fifth of all the 30 year old barrier’s closures took place in the first two months of 2014. Not surprisingly this has sparked fresh calls for the building of a new one should the current one fail through overuse.  

When it comes to data centre location, these recent events should serve as a warning to any CIO still intent on going with the flow of conventional wisdom by continuing to take data centre space at premium rates in Docklands – entirely on the floodplain – or …

While technology changes on a regular basis, IT teams have had a standard approach to administration. In recent years, however, there has been a drastic shift in data center administration. One of the biggest shifts is the adoption of private and public clouds. In part one of this series, we will examine private cloud architectures.
Today, companies keep more and more data electronically in lieu of hard copies. Whether they are large multi-layer Photoshop images or files that need to be kept in order to comply with medical or financial regulations, files are getting bigger and there are certainly more of them. Historically, companies would have a series of onsite servers, a backup and retrieval system, miscellaneous supporting hardware, and lots of documented procedures. This would ultimately lead to a never-ending need for new capital expenditures. Above all, one of the biggest issues IT admins wrestle with is managing and adding server space to accommodate all those ever-growing files. Enter the cloud.

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Interview with Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti, CEO of Sanovi: Sanovi is a niche business continuity and IT recovery software company providing application-centric solutions for tier-1 and tier-2 workloads across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure. Sanovi Cloud Continuity for Cisco UCS Director is built on our proprietary and innovative Application Defined Continuity (ADC) technology. We have over 120 customers, including service providers and multi-billion dollar enterprises across multiple vertical industries.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company and premier provider of enterprise-class hosting, managed applications, managed messaging and managed cloud services, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company, is a leading international provider of enterprise-class, cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications and services. NaviSite provides a full suite of reliable and scalable managed services, including Application Services, industry-leading Enterprise Hosting, and Managed Cloud Services, for organizations looking to outsource IT infrastructures and helps lower their capital and operational costs. Enterprise customers depend on NaviSite for customized solutions, delivered through a global footprint of state-of-the-art data centers.

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APIs are transforming businesses to extend the reach of their information systems and data. In technical terms, APIs are rather finite, allowing two software applications to exchange data and execute procedures. Yet their business impact is so great that API management requires a far from finite thought process. A “soup to nuts” approach is needed to help companies determine how to achieve the most business success with APIs.
An API enables applications to access back-end systems using lightweight, standards-based protocols such as REST and JSON. For example, if you were in food distribution, the actual business of soup and nuts, you could develop an API that lets mobile app developers tap directly into your ERP system. They could build consumer apps for recipes that showed ingredients that you had in stock. Grocery stores could build apps that gave their shoppers bulk discounts on large orders and so forth. The API extends your food distribution business into customer realms where you’ve never played before. This is fantastic. But it also presents a number of challenges to the management of the business.

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A recent Forbes article by Andrew Dailey at MGi Research reinforces the importance of “agile billing” to businesses that are serious about creating new revenue streams, meeting customers’ needs and doing it fast and well.
The term agile is a good description of what businesses need from their billing systems in order to meet these challenges. At MetraTech, we’ve been an agile billing solution from day one with our “metadata-based” approach, which is what makes MetraNet flexible and responsive as well as business model and industry agnostic. So “agile” is a good description of how the system should perform and “metadata” is how the billing system actually delivers the agility. Metadata enables you to configure your data model, transaction processing, and user interface through web services compliant APIs and, as a result, enables the billing system to conform to your business model and existing systems. No need to compromise, you can simply innovate.

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As an informed senior executive, you already know that it’s no longer a question of whether cloud service adoption is the right forward-thinking business technology strategy, but rather how you will leverage the abundance of new resources to outpace your competition.

More companies will be working within very heterogeneous cloud service environments, thereby putting more pressure on IT organizations that must deal with these additional complexities, according to a recent market study by Cloud Connect and the Everest Group.
Their latest market study reveals the increasing influence of cloud services on IT budgets, staff skills and business strategy. Moreover, the findings within the “2014 Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey” report debunks hyped-up perceptions with key facts.

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As an informed senior executive, you already know that it’s no longer a question of whether cloud service adoption is the right forward-thinking business technology strategy, but rather how you will leverage the abundance of new resources to outpace your competition.

More companies will be working within very heterogeneous cloud service environments, thereby putting more pressure on IT organizations that must deal with these additional complexities, according to a recent market study by Cloud Connect and the Everest Group.

Their latest market study reveals the increasing influence of cloud services on IT budgets, staff skills and business strategy. Moreover, the findings within the “2014 Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey” report debunks hyped-up perceptions with key facts.

“The new reality our research points to is that the modern enterprise will not be defined by public, private or hybrid but rather all of the above,” said Steve Wylie, cloud connect general manager …

Sketch “We apologise for bringing the rain down with us from Seattle,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services SVP in a slightly sheepish opening.

It was an opening delayed by half an hour because of weather and traffic fears, but those who had made it through the elements to San Francisco were treated to various client testimonials. Ranging from Adobe, to Airbnb and Twilio, they came in a variety of industries and a variety of languages – the latter seemingly to prove AWS’ customer base was truly global.

Yet this was one of the points Jassy was to emphasise in his morning keynote. AWS now has availability in 10 regions across five continents.

“Most companies these days have end users all over the world, and infact most startups launch with users all over the world,” he told delegates. “And as such, companies don’t want to settle for what was the …