“Anyone starting a company right now would have to be completely bonkers to build their own infrastructure,” roars Interoute chief technical officer Matthew Finnie.

Finnie is a man never short of an opinion or two, and with the number of born in the cloud companies increasing, this seems like a pretty safe bet. But here’s another view: the skills gap in the industry continues to get bigger.

“You’ve almost got two- or three-speed adoption to the cloud,” he tells CloudTech. “You’ve got a bunch of early adopters, guys at Dropbox, Netflix who’ve embraced it and done very well on the back of it. You’ve then got a middle tier, and then you’ve got a group of, more generally speaking, enterprise guys, who are circumspect about the cloud.

“And I think to some extent, what you’re looking at is some of the cynicism, or …

Whether they admit it or not, the emergence of public cloud providers has dramatically altered the playing field for hardware vendors of every type. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its competitors opened Pandora’s box by introducing the world to a completely programmatic, scalable, evolving, and pay-as-you-go way to procure and utilize network, compute and storage resources on a global scale. They have disrupted many layers of the technology industry from the applications being written to the way companies interact with the infrastructure being used to support those applications.
Nowhere is this disruption easier to see than in the virtualization ecosystem. For the better part of the last decade, hypervisor companies like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat worked hand-in-hand with hardware manufacturers like Cisco, NetApp, EMC, HP and Dell to define both the infrastructure foundation as well as the virtualized abstraction layer that sat underneath the entirety of the client/server era. These companies provided a direct link between the enterprise applications, the hypervisor and the hardware. They owned the traditional datacenter construct.

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The cloud wars battle rages on. Gartner predicts that one in four cloud providers will be gone by 2015, making this a very high stakes battle for all concerned. The 800lb gorillas, AWS, IBM, Google, Microsoft, et al. continue their efforts for dominance. The latest salvo has been a price war between Google, AWS and Microsoft for their services. Pricing is spiraling downward at breakneck speeds. The others are sure to follow. Into this fog of war, another player has been working on winning the hearts and minds of customers and developers. SalesForce.com, one of the first and best known Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, has set its sights on becoming the platform of choice for cloud development and deployments.
Will they succeed? They definitely can be considered a gorilla in their own right, approaching $5B in sales, and with a reported 1.5M developers, should not be taken lightly. Their approach is having an impact in the battle, forcing the other vendors and the industry to re-think how they look at cloud services, and could ultimately change the battlefield tactics in the ongoing cloud wars. To understand how a CRM vendor rose to that level of impact, becoming a contender in the cloud wars, one must trace their roots.

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As infrastructure needs grow so does the need to be able to deal with it in a quick and cost-efficient manner. With Azure, you can spin up new Windows Server and Linux virtual machines in minutes and adjust your usage as your needs change.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Drew McDaniel, Principal Program Manager Lead – Windows Azure Division at Microsoft, will explain how with Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go approach, you only pay for what you use and there are never any penalties for changing your virtual machine configurations. It includes full support for Microsoft applications including SQL, SharePoint and even third-party software such as Oracle databases and WebLogic. Whether you are using IaaS for development and test or extending your production capacity to the cloud, Azure can help.

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SAP axed their top cloud chief Shawn Price earlier this week. It seems as if SAP is looking to restructure its entire business and focus more on cloud.

Reports suggest that SAP plans on cutting 1,500 to 2,500 jobs.  SAP currently employees over 65,000 people internationally.

Not too much has been released from SAP in regards to the proposed job cuts. In a brief press release, SAP said, “Our goal is to become simpler, more agile, faster and easier to work with. This is a broad company-wide effort to make SAP more effective and strengthen our innovation leadership.”

Although the news of job cuts at SAP is certainly a shock at face value, SAP mentions that it plans on ending the year with more employees than it began 2014 with.

Those in the media who have reached out to SAP have received this response in regards to …

Mobile apps are becoming increasingly important in the enterprise. Traditional web apps cannot match the increased levels of engagement and retention achieved through a personalized and responsive experience on each user’s favorite device. To build a cross-platform mobile app capable of delivering a truly personalized and responsive experience, however, you need to effectively utilize a cloud-connected app back end that is built to enhance security, scale and speed of development.

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Data generation and storage is rapidly accelerating and is expected to grow 44x in the next few years .Strict regulations and compliance combined with the need to mine this data to gain competitive advantage make it mandatory for enterprises to store this data for longer periods of time. To deal with this data explosion, enterprises are switching to a hybrid cloud storage model – a trend that is predicted to accelerate so fast that by 2020 over a third of the world’s data is stored and passes through the cloud. Microsoft’s hybrid cloud storage solution enables enterprise customers to integrate Microsoft Azure Storage with their data center.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Marc Farley, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft, will take you through the importance of the StorSimple solution to the hybrid cloud offering and discuss the building blocks you can use to solve data growth problems and cost constraints, as you consider moving your data storage to the public cloud. The final portion provides a future vision for hybrid cloud storage (HCS) with StorSimple and Azure.

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In a world of ever-accelerating business cycles and fast-changing client expectations, the cloud increasingly serves as a growth engine and a path to new business models. Dynamic clouds enable businesses to continuously reinvent themselves, adapting their business processes, their service and software delivery and their operations to achieve speed-to-market and quick response to customer feedback. The cloud opens up new possibilities for businesses to continuously deliver software-driven innovation and enables new ways of collaboration between an extended group of stakeholders, including business leaders, developers, operations as well customers and partners.

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Normally in a document database such as CouchDB or BigCouch, data is queried using b-tree indexes built with map-reduce functions.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Brad Bonn, Systems Engineer at Cloudant, will discuss how Cloudant has extended the platform to natively take advantage of Lucene and R*-Tree indexes to make obtaining data out of NoSQL DBaaS more powerful and flexible.
Brad Bonn is a Systems Engineer at Cloudant.

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Red Hat, Inc., on Thursday announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise 2.1, the next generation of its award-winning, on-premise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Enhancements in OpenShift Enterprise 2.1 are aimed to further enable DevOps practices through the delivery of new capabilities within the PaaS platform that bring development and operations closer together. With OpenShift Enterprise 2.1, Red Hat is introducing consolidated log and metrics management, offering new versions of application programming languages, increasing application availability with a new concept of zones and regions, exposing a new plugin interface that will allow operations to better integrate existing policy orchestration into the PaaS platform, allowing new ways to integrate and work with large numbers of groups within corporate organizations, and releasing new intelligence into the platform around the automatic remedy of common application service issues OpenShift’s scalable and open source architecture enables faster developments with decreased delivery time for enterprise business applications that are fully integrated into datacenter best practices.

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