UK-based cloud service provider iomart Group has announced pre-tax profits of £14.6m for the end of the financial year – and vows to continue towards bespoke private and hybrid cloud as opposed to mass public cloud.

Revenue stood at £55.6m compared to £43.1m in 2013, representing a 29% increase, whilst revenues from iomart’s hosting segment were up by 40% to £44.7m – higher than the company’s overall revenue last year.

This represents a solid year for iomart, and represents a further base on which to build following successive profit-making years. The company bought Backup Technology and Redstation in September 2013 to bolster its attack in terms of data protection, cloud backup and dedicated hosting, as well as upped its data centre count to eight and adding an extension to its centre in Maidenhead.

Phil Worms, marketing director at iomart, told CloudTech the results were ‘solid’ and …

Until this week the biggest anxiety when dealing with eBay has likely been fretting over a negative rating, concerns about slow shipping or a delayed refund. Then suddenly yesterday the media jumped all over the story that eBay had been hacked and users need to change their passwords. By the way, I can tell you from experience the password change process is not as easy or straightforward as you would expect.
EBay is now in damage control mode and trying to calm fears after revealing that hackers attacked its network three months ago. It is believed over 145 million user records were accessed, forcing eBay to issue a security warning. Three states are conducting a joint investigation which will focus on eBay’s measures for securing personal data, the circumstances that led to the breach, how many users were affected, and the company’s response to the breach, said a spokeswoman for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen.[i] The breach could possibly be the second-biggest in US history, based on the number of records accessed by the hackers. Massive data breaches seem to be occurring much more frequently with Heartland Payments, Target, Neiman Marcus, Living Social, Zappos, AOL and now eBay all reporting damages in the news recently.

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As a relative newcomer to the world of Application Performance Management (APM) and the larger category of Application Intelligence, I knew I had a lot to learn. I came into this market having spent the last 15 years in the Analytics space. The idea of taking large volumes of disparate data and turning it into actionable insight is something I’ve always found compelling. Though people generally think of a flashy dashboard, Analytics is so much more. At Business Objects I got to be part of the evolution from standardized reporting through ad hoc analysis, data exploration, and predictive analysis. There was still a significant barrier though to making it work in the real-world where data volume, variety and velocity were too much to handle at the application level. Data had to be extracted and transformed before being made available in a data warehouse or mart where it became available to an end user. That’s an expensive and time consuming process that only offered the insight you’re looking for hours, days or even weeks later. However, at SAP our customers were finally able to realize the promise of these new capabilities with the introduction of SAP HANA (High-performance Analytic Appliance). That in-memory platform delivered amazing computing power capable of simplifying the infrastructure of application environments while giving the business real-time insight.

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“While cost has traditionally been a foundational benefit of the cloud, we believe that other factors can play a more important part in defining the cloud of tomorrow,” said Todd Gleason, Vice President of Technology at FireHost, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “We believe that the generalist cloud provider – those low-cost commodity clouds that created price competition and insecure clouds – are going to either be gobbled up or beaten up as the industry evolves from this generalist mentality to focus on specialist clouds that have a particular focus.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
Todd Gleason: Standardization is important, but we’re concerned because security desperately needs to be part of this effort. It is not addressed enough, if at all. Much of the open standards work in cloud and other IT technologies traditionally is not security-conscious, making adoption riskier than many want to admit or truly understand. So, while standards are a good thing, we believe security should be baked in at their inception. We advocate for innovation, but it’s important that the innovative spirit is not blind to the need to protect vendors and customers.

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Water’s path from sea level to a cloud is quite a journey and often misunderstood, similar to that of an organizations path as they traverse from a traditional on premise compute model, to public and private cloud adoption. Infrastructure changes have a ripple effect, and impact functions across an organization, not just in IT, everything from executive management, to finance – and often cause unnecessary strife and significant project delays. With the cloud, large capital expenditures are converted into monthly recurring payments, lengthy sales cycles are turned into self-service models, resource intensive POCs, turned into easy to implement free trials – the list goes on and on. These require new strategies to get projects approved, fast tracked and successful – the legacy method of yearly or quarterly budgeting, and lengthy solution testing and analysis no longer applies, but changing that mindset is no easy task.

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It’s a given, this year more CIOs will shift their focus from selective IT efficiency to overall IT effectiveness. In 2014 and beyond, enterprise IT leadership will be judged on their ability to meet the demands of tech-savvy Line of Business users.

This is the type of meaningful progress that CEOs have been anticipating. But that organizational realignment won’t always translate into higher budgets. Here’s why.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide IT spending will increase by just 4.1 percent in constant currency this year — that’s down from their previous forecast of 4.6 percent and also down from 2013 growth of 4.5 percent.

IDC believes that pent-up demand should eventually drive more business technology capital spending in the second half of 2014, as some organizations replace ageing infrastructure — including servers, storage and networking equipment. So, what caused this dip in IT spending?

“As smartphone growth continues to cool from the phenomenal expansion of the past few years, tablet shipments have also performed weaker than expected over the past couple of quarters,” said Stephen Minton, vice president at IDC.

Cloud Services will Disrupt Traditional IT Budgets

Around 10 percent of software spending will have already moved to the cloud by the end of 2014, while Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will represent 15 percent of all spending on servers and storage.

While this shift is creating significant disruption, it’s also driving equally significant short-term opportunities for smart CIOs and IT managers that can successfully deploy cloud-based solutions.

Meanwhile, both cloud and traditional IT spending will be driven by the underlying demand for server and storage capacity, fueled by the data generated from the previous explosive growth of mobile devices in the workplace.

The opportunity to extract value from this accumulated Big Data repository is also driving strong demand for analytics tools. How they decide to deploy these tools will be the subject of much debate among IT leaders.

Many organizations will choose a gradual journey to adopt cloud services — with security, reliability and regulatory factors in mind, they’ll likely deploy more open hybrid cloud solutions.

Global Pockets of New Business Technology Spending

Based upon IDC’s regional assessment, Western Europe is forecast to reach IT growth of 2 percent in constant currency terms, as most countries continue to shake off the debt crisis and return to a more stable business climate.

Similarly, business confidence is gradually improving in the U.S. market, after the sequester and government shutdown of last year. Server and storage spending will rebound to positive growth after last year’s slowdown, while IT services growth will accelerate to more than 2 percent.

In Canada, IT spending growth will accelerate from 3.3 percent last year to 5 percent in 2014 — mostly due to stronger spending on PCs, servers and storage.

Japan is a different story. The prior demand was largely consumed in 2013, when the government’s deflation-busting policies boosted business confidence and when IT buyers moved to take advantage of lower prices before new taxes came into effect at the beginning of 2014.

 As a result, IT spending in Japan increased by 3.4 percent last year, but will decline by 1 percent in 2014.

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Learn why network virtualization is the final frontier to conquer for high-utilization and high-performance clouds (since server and storage virtualization are already mature).
2013 was the year of SDN’s debut, but in his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Robert Drost, Co-Founder and COO of Pluribus Networks, will discuss how SDN’s relevant server-centric comparison for network virtualization (NV) is whether it operates like a server Type-I hypervisor (Bare Metal) or Type-II (Hosted). He will explain how OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Cisco ONE, VMware NSX, and others compare and work with server hypervisors and how to incorporate network virtualization in your cloud to improve analytics, compliance, management, scalability, reliability, cloudBursting, and billing features.

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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 …

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 …

It is said that 95% of all supercomputers run Linux, so why do they still not get an invitation to the party? If you look at any cloud storage review, you will quickly notice that Linux users are often times left as an afterthought. So what do cloud storage providers have to offer Linux users?
Thankfully, a lot. There are three main ways you can regain glory with your Linux system. Firstly, connection. Linux users have the option to connect an online system to your Linux user interface. As all Linux users will know, the user interface is comprised of one of two things; either the command-line interface or the graphical user interface. There are a plethora of graphical user-interfaces that can run with many if not all versions of Linux. These include: GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, LXDE, MATE, Enlightenment, Pantheon, Trinity and Sugar. The most common of which are GNOME and KDE desktops. Additionally, these two desktops are more often than not supported by cloud storage providers. Linux also offers its power users the option of a command line interface.

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