A survey from Capita IT Services has revealed that CIOs see cloud computing as a key enabler to business innovation, yet boardrooms are “nervous” places where execs have to convince them cloud adoption is the way forward.

The research, a combination of roundtable sessions and surveys featuring nearly 150 CIOs, found some interesting points regarding cloud adoption. More than three in five (61%) believe that improving the company’s innovation is now one of their highest priorities, with a further one in five (20%) believing it to be a low priority.

Not surprisingly, the report discusses the shift of CIO from chief information to chief innovation officer.

“The ‘C’ in CIO now represents communication, collaboration, change; ‘I’ represents integration, interfaces, investment; and ‘O’ means optimisation, organisation and operations,” the report trumpets.

“In order to assert themselves at board level and become strategic business influencers, CIOs need to align themselves with …

How can your business benefit from using the cloud? We hear the term all the time in the tech world, but it’s never really clearly defined. Those of us who are using social media or saving data with online sources are already using it. Perhaps you just didn’t know it. Amazon is one of the largest cloud service centers. It houses information on behalf of Netflix, Dropbox and Autodesk. Other remote servers are Google, Microsoft and Rackspace.

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“Meanwhile, in Windows XP land, the countdown continues with the April deadline looming” said Jessica Davis in a recent article in MSPmentor. “Reports say that the XP installed base has dipped below 30 percent for the first time, while comments on this same story speculate that the numbers are much higher still. Meanwhile, if you have customers with XP machines still in place, you need to be worrying how you will secure those after the deadline. Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows XP is sharing the same dead date with the OS it supports, according to this report.”

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Over the holidays I actually spent some time reviewing the newly released “Managing IaaS and DBaaS Clouds with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c”. This book is a step-by-step tutorial filled with practical examples which will show readers how to configure and manage IaaS and DBaaS with Oracle Enterprise Manager. If you are a cloud administrator or a user of self-service provisioning systems offered by this Oracle product, this book is ideal for you. It will also help administrators who want to understand the available chargeback mechanisms.

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Over the holidays I actually spent some time reviewing the newly released “Managing IaaS and DBaaS Clouds with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c”. This book is a step-by-step tutorial filled with practical examples which will show readers how to configure and manage IaaS and DBaaS with Oracle Enterprise Manager. If you are a cloud administrator or a user of self-service provisioning systems offered by this Oracle product, this book is ideal for you. It will also help administrators who want to understand the available chargeback mechanisms.

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The cloud’s main story so far has been one of horizontal providers, such as salesforce.com, Microsoft and Amazon, offering one-size-fits-all solutions. While these providers had some success in the financial services sector, their products weren’t specialized enough to address the needs of asset managers or bankers.
The advent of vertical SaaS providers was the topic of my latest article, Will 2014 be the Year of Vertical Clouds, written for Wired. Even though they’re a young market today, expect to see a larger number of these vertical cloud providers getting scale and attention, in 2014.
“In the days before the cloud, on-premise software providers that focused on selling into a vertical market were considered second-class citizens to the ‘big guns’ selling into the broader horizontal marketplace. However, with the advent of the SaaS model, the tables have turned,” according to Gordon Ritter of Emergence Capital.

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Want VM agility with near bare metal performance? How about [milli]second provision/stop/start/restart times? Looking to achieve greater VM density on your hardware assets, or provision applications without worry of dependency hell? Look no further than next-gen virtualization with Linux Containers.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Boden Russell, an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM Global Technology Services, will provide a Linux Container technology overview including underpinnings, throttling, monitoring, tooling/commoditization, images, security, use cases, pros/cons and why containers are poised as “the next VM” in our modern cloud era. By the end of this session you will have a firm understanding of the Linux Container landscape in today’s industry and an appreciation for their realization.

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DevOps is an exciting and far-reaching shift in IT delivery. The promises are tempting: radically higher productivity, lower cost and more reliable systems. So I guess it’s finally time for your IT organization to get on the development-operations (DevOps) bandwagon, right? Everybody’s doing it, so don’t delay. The big question isn’t whether, but how and where do you start? First, go out and hire some DevOps people. Wait, wait – DevOps isn’t a job.

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Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Software – Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

Microsoft is betting heavily on the cloud for delivering self-service BI capabilities. Power BI builds on existing Microsoft Excel building blocks, including Power Query and Power View, to provide a single self-service client based on the familiar Excel spreadsheet as the user interface. It is a welcome simplification of Microsoft’s often confusing BI product stack that includes overlapping capabilities. The Power BI for Office 365 is priced competitively versus Tableau Online, the closest comparable product.

Making BI native to Excel

With many millions of users, Microsoft Excel is arguably the world’s most popular BI tool. With Power BI Microsoft sharpens its focus on the BI end user by leveraging the ubiquity of Excel, allowing users to load data, manage queries, visualize the answers, and manage connections to a variety of back-end data sources inside the …