Demand for cloud-skilled IT workers continues to outstrip the supply, and demand keeps growing.  You can’t pick up a technology journal without seeing quotes from hiring managers who complain about the lack of cloud skills in the job market these days.  Training and OJT are well underway, but growth is just too steep to fill all of the jobs.

The search for cloud talent is made harder due to several realities in the tech industry:

• Cloud providers do a poor job of providing generalized cloud computing skills. They typically focus only on their technology, which shouldn’t be surprising. However, the majority of enterprises use many clouds, so cloud professionals need to understand most of them.
• Certification programs are far too general. We all know the differences between IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS. The deeper skills and knowledge are more desirable these days, but they are not what the certifications …

There’s been an awful lot of research in the infrastructure as a service space over the past several weeks. Well bow down now, because Gartner has released its Magic Quadrant and there’s plenty to digest.

You thought Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be streets ahead at the top of the Quadrant? You thought correct. You thought Microsoft would be the nearest challenger to AWS? You thought correct there too.

What you might not have been expecting was that AWS and Microsoft were the only two companies Gartner analyst Lydia Leong deemed worthy of the ‘leaders’ tag. A gaggle of players comprise the visionaries section: CenturyLink, CSC, IBM – noted in the Quadrant at IBM (SoftLayer) – Google and Verizon Terremark.

Several other companies reside in the niche players category; the nearest challengers here are Rackspace and VMware, whilst GoGrid and Joyent finished flat last. HP, who recently invested a billion …

SoftLayer has announced the opening of a Hong Kong data centre, with Jonathan Wisler, EMEA managing director at SoftLayer, saying the company’s partnership with IBM continues to accelerate.

The infrastructure as a service provider opened up in Hong Kong on Monday, with further plans to expand in London later this year – as Salesforce.com did last week – as well as expansion in Europe, South America, Latin America and Asia.

Wisler notes that ‘performance, network and data privacy laws’ form the reason behind the move.

“We’re building out these data centres based on customer demand,” he tells CloudTech.  “It gets you closer to the end user, it makes it more of a high performance delivery platform, so in addition to the hosting we provide we’re also a very large network provider so with our service you get hosting plus network, and we manage that network.

“Building out data …

During the course of the last twelve months the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open-source cloud technology have been reporting their progress – with the help of their partners – towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.

We’ve also learned how these progressive technology users are pioneering changes in their own organisations – enabling them to become more competitive in the Global Networked Economy.

The OpenStack Summit 2014 opened with a keynote on the first day of the conference featuring lessons learned from industry leading organizations that have already deployed these open cloud technologies. Each case study had multiple instances of OpenStack that have been applied for a variety of commercial application scenarios.

Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the Foundation, introduced the growing community of OpenStack Superusers. Glenn Ferguson, Head of Private of Cloud Enablement at Wells Fargo Bank and Chris Launey …

Of the countless industries using ERP software today, four stand out as benefiting the most from its versatility and functionality. Retail, manufacturing, farming, and real estate management all require a customizable, streamlined management software that can collect and manage data from all business activity.

Whether tracking shipping and payment or marketing and sales, ERP software integrates everything in a real-time view of core processes while sharing this information across the various departments.

Retail

The face of retail is sales and payment. Behind the scenes, inventory management and tracking, shipping, and marketing create the backbone. Clothes, cars, and food all follow the same basic principles and require very similar functionality.

By utilizing an order management system, orders can be coordinated across multiple stores while advanced pricing allows for management of sales and numbers that can be sorted through various hierarchies. Orders can also be tracked based on stock and non-stock items …

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Chief Analyst, Global Public Sector

Three Australian state governments have recently released updated ICT strategies that include cloud-first policy positions. However, each state has taken a different approach to driving cloud services adoption. This raises interesting questions about the impact of cloud services on the logic of whole-of-government ICT strategy.

Our view is that central agencies should focus on leadership and enablement. They should be mindful of the risk that too much top-down strategy too early on will kill the golden goose of decentralized cloudy innovation that is created when agencies are simply empowered to buy services that already work.

NSW government agencies are already evaluating cloud-based services when undertaking ICT procurements

The New South Wales (NSW) state government’s ICT Strategy was published in 2012 with an implementation update released recently. The 2012 policy statement on cloud services remains unchanged:

NSW Government agencies will evaluate cloud-based …

The cloud is still fallible: Joyent’s entire US-East-1 data centre went down yesterday, with the finger of blame pointed at a particularly fat finger which resulted in a monumental operator error.

The problem has since been resolved, with all virtual machines back up and running, however according to a post-mortem blog post from the Joyent team, the minimum downtime for customers was 20 minutes and the maximum 149 minutes, with over 90% of instances recovered within an hour.

The cause of the outage? A typo, put simply. Joyent picks up the story: “The command to reboot the select set of new systems that needed to be updated was mistyped, and instead specified all servers in the data centre.

“Unfortunately the tool in question does not have enough input validation to prevent this from happening without extra steps/confirmation, and went ahead and issued a reboot command to every server …

The consumer insurance industry may be one of the more reluctant industries to jump head-first into the cloud. Think about the current process of getting a home, renters, auto or life insurance policy through a traditional vendor. You might shop for quotes online, visit an agent in person, or have companies compete over your business.

Think about all the back-end computing that goes into running an insurance operation. Agents are always in the field assessing damages, administrative personnel is fielding customer inquiries while claims can be placed 24 hours a day.

Traditional IT systems become inefficient when expanded to this scale which is why the cloud model is starting to make more sense for insurance agencies that are looking to reduce costs and increase IT efficiency.

Tony Jacob, Managing Director of Worldwide Insurance at Microsoft says, “The reality today is that many insurers are held back by their legacy IT …

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 …