By Tony Baer, Prinicpal Analyst, Ovum Enterprise Solutions

Summary

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud 2.0 (“Exalogic”) adds features that will make the system better suited for its role as a cloud deployment target. It adds server virtualisation capabilities that accelerate provisioning and deliver the expected elasticity.

A new lightweight virtualisation engine optimised for Oracle workloads improves application performance. This comes atop incremental enhancements to existing features such as Oracle Exabus.

The importance of the 2.0 release is not necessarily in the individual improvements, but rather in how they help the system live up to its original “elastic cloud” branding.

So far, Oracle has successfully sold Exalogic to its installed base, primarily as the middleware complement to the Exadata database platform and as the infrastructure for its business applications.

Oracle has promoted the “soft” business benefits, such as improved responsiveness and efficiency that comes from its engineered systems, but it …

Rackspace has announced that they are incorporating their commitment to open source cloud into their official company branding.

The hosting provider is using the tagline “the open cloud company” as part of its logo, reaffirming their belief in the cloud.

This comes after their strong second quarter results for 2012, which included a yearly increase of 29% on net revenue, up to $319 million (£204.1m), up 5.9% from the previous quarter.

Rackspace’s net income grew 43% year on year to $25m (£15.9m), with their adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBIDTA) calculated at $112m (£71.7m), a 37% yearly increase.

The company’s shares also shot up to $54.62 (£35) per share, a jump of over 10%.

Rackspace, of course, is trying to promote open source cloud computing through their OpenStack programming code, unveiled in 2010, which they are trying to make a …

Medical experts and researchers have been talking about the cloud in the healthcare industry for some time. When it comes to its application in this field, the information technology seems to be on a very poor level.

The majority of medical services still practice a complicated paper-based administration. Considering how many medical records, application forms and walking-orders a hospital has to issue in a single day, another solution for the whole process is highly necessary.

Enhancement of productivity and collaboration

Even the largest hospitals all over the world still sacrifice their time, space and efficacy using the outdated technology.

While the number of patients remains the same the hospital archives are filling up. In order to keep up with at least the basic advancements in IT industry, hospitals must regularly invest in equipment for servers, applications, and maintenance.

Cloud computing might be a solution for restructuring medical papyrology in a …

A new report from Ponemon Institute has shown that 82% of companies have already transferred, or plan to transfer confidential data into the cloud.

The report, entitled ‘Encryption in the Cloud’ and sponsored by security experts Thales, aims to examine current trends and perceptions with storing sensitive information in the cloud.

Broken down, the survey of over 4000 IT professionals across five continents revealed that 49% of respondents had already overseen a transfer of data to the cloud; 33% were “likely over the next 24 months” to migrate; and 19% replied that they didn’t have any plans to move.

Similarly, there is an intriguing balance with regard to liability for secure confidential data in the cloud.

According to the survey, more IT professionals believed that it was the job of the cloud provider (44%) than the consumer (30%) for liability, but could it be argued that these numbers are …

This year, the London Olympics Committee used cloud computing muscle to simulate the predicted traffic that would hit its servers during the games.

Engineers spent six months running scenarios of swarms and spikes against the official Olympic websites and mobile apps. SOASTA, an American company, employed the cloud power of Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure to simulate both patterns of individual users and business applications. 

Cloud services have been able to instantly access a vast amount of virtual servers from anywhere on the globe.  SOASTA provided results to assured organisers that their servers would survive hits from up to 1 billion people over the 17 days that the games are scheduled.

What they didn’t count on was the opposite effect – that the Olympic Games might take down the cloud.

On July 26 the Dublin-based Microsoft Azure cloud went down for about the length of the new Batman movie. No …

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is hardly sitting on the fence with his opinions on the cloud

Speaking after a performance of Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, Steve Wozniak was in uncompromising mood concerning his thoughts on cloud computing.

Wozniak reportedly told the packed theatre audience: “I think [cloud’s] going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years”.

Five years is a long time. According to Gartner, four years is all it will take for a third of consumers’ digital content to end up in the cloud.

Wozniak added: “With the cloud, you don’t own anything. The more we transfer everything onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it”.

As a result, it’s easy to sympathise with the unfortunate story of US journalist Mat …

Sales VPs for years have been test-driving SaaS-based CRM systems, piloting them with sales teams to see if using them leads to higher sales and greater customer retention.  Marketing VPs and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) also continue to pilot SaaS-based web analytics and marketing automation applications.

What’s been missing from these pilots is the ability to bring CRM, marketing automation, sales management and web analytics systems into existing enterprise IT architectures just as fast.  This is changing quickly.  CRM vendors have been quick to respond to the challenge, offering Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), integration adapters, connectors and from larger vendors, integrated bus architectures.

What the Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012 Means

CRM’s real value is in unifying an entire enterprise based on its ability to sell, serve and retain customers better than before. Gartner shows this is a high priority for its CRM clients by underscoring which …

Cloud, social, mobile and information are the new ‘Nexus of Forces’ with cloud at the apparent epicentre

The convergence of four IT forces – cloud, social, mobile and information – has formed what analyst house Gartner has described as a new “Nexus of Forces” which will become the paradigm for the future of IT.

The research firm predicts that while the four ‘forces’ are currently disruptive as they are, combined they will tear up old enterprise IT models.

Cloud computing, according to Gartner, provides the “glue” for all the forces, thus being the pivot for everything around it.

“Without cloud computing, social interactions would have no place to happen at scale, mobile access would fail to be able to connect to a wide variety of data and functions, and information still would be stuck inside internal systems,” Gartner notes.

An important point to note is how the cloud has changed the paradigm …

The popularity of storage products such as Dropbox is infiltrating into enterprise as users go against company policy to utilise cloud-based storage.

According to a recent report from social business network Spiceworks, 33% of organisations said that their staff was using personal storage products.

The report, entitled ‘The Cloud Barometer’, aims to give insight into SMEs and their usage of cloud-based file sharing software. Spiceworks interviewed over 300 users across North America and the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region.

The IT industry appears to have a mixed view on this acceleration, with 31% of companies surveyed agreeing that employees could use any provider they wished, yet 32% discouraged the behaviour.

Spiceworks noted that despite the accessibility, collaboration and convenience associated with cloud-based storage software, employers were still wary of the risks associated with file-sharing; evidently the type of data being shared and the usual bedbug, security.

Regarding specifics …