On Plate Tectonics, Glacier Shifts and Cloud Forecasts

Not all major changes are visible to the naked eye. Standing next to a glacier it is difficult to determine direction (does it grow or shrink across seasons) and watching continents move takes even some stamina for the casual observer. Luckily this is not the case for cloud computing.
Apart from the very noticeable cloud hype (more on the cycle of that soon) there is also very noticeable growth. At the end of a deep and wide group effort, Gartner published its “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2010-2016, 2Q12 Update” accompanied by Market Definitions and Methodology: Public Cloud Services. As I highlighted several years ago in Can the Real Cloud Market Size Please Stand Up? definitions are all important when trying to compare various cloud forecasts and especially cloud forecast categories.

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On-demand Cloud Service from ControlCircle

A scalable, on-demand infrastructure has been developed by ControlCircle, a leading UK managed service provider, utilising industry-leading technology, including VMware, NetApp, Citrix, HP and Brocade.
The Hybrix enterprise cloud service has been developed for customers who require a reliable and secure environment to develop and test new applications or to enable on-demand capabilities for business critical systems. With Hybrix, customers can use the powerful Max3000™ portal to create and deploy new cloud services whenever they are required, to whatever specification. Max3000 enables a comprehensive view into the performance of the customer’s cloud and overall IT estate by leveraging ControlCircle’s fully integrated monitoring services.

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Big Data: How Can Data Providers Position Themselves for Growth?

As applications move to SaaS Data Providers need to focus on the opportunity to deliver customizable data components in the style and in the context in which developers, architects imagine and build SaaS applications could greatly accelerate the adoption of “uber catalogs” of all things that stream, quote, change, price. These developers in turn will build new applications that use Data Provider catalog data in yet unimagined and useful ways.

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Forecasting public cloud adoption in the enterprise

The economics of public cloud computing are accelerating the pace of change occurring in enterprise software today.

Many of the scenarios that Clayton Christensen insightfully describes in The Innovator’s Dilemma are playing out right now in many sectors of this industry, shifting the balance of purchasing power to line-of-business leaders away from IT.  True to the cases shown in the book, new entrants are bringing disruptive innovations that are being successfully used to attack the most price-sensitive areas of the market. 

Winning customers at the low-end and making their way up-market, new entrants are changing the customer experience, economics and structure of the industry.  Salesforce.com is a prime example of how the insights shared in The Innovator’s Dilemma are alive and well in the CRM market for example.  This is an excellent book to add to your summer reading list.

Defining The Public Cloud

The National Institute …

Wrong strategy: 5 ways not to compete with Amazon AWS

These days, it seems that the whole world is gunning for Amazon.

Who can argue with the success of their on-line retail ventures, Kindle franchise, and of course AWS? 

The secret to Amazon’s success is their ability to tune out the noise and focus on innovating, disrupting and creating new markets.  Here’s five reasons how not to compete with Amazon AWS:

1) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

While Amazon’s competitors are busy building out their cloud infrastructure offerings, they are too closely aligned to Amazon’s vision and business model. Meanwhile, Amazon is innovating and disrupting their own market by offering new features while reducing costs.

Therefore, it seems that AWS is always one step ahead of the competition and thus customers continue to flock to their services. Rather than copy Amazon, competitors need to focus on innovation, features and benefits for the consumers of …

Dell to buy Quest Software: What does this mean?

For those not familiar with Quest, they are a software company not to be confused with the telephone communications company formerly known as Qwest (also known now as centurylink).

Both Dell and Quest have been on software related acquisition initiatives that past few years with Quest having purchased vKernel, Vizoncore (vRanger virtualization backup), BakBone (who had acquire Alavarii and Asempra) for traditional backup and data protection among others. Not to be out done, as well as purchasing Quest, Dell has also more recently bought Appassure (Disclosure: StorageIOblog site sponsor) for data protection, Sonicwall and Wyse in addition to some other recent purchases (ASAP, Boomi, Compellent, Exanet, EqualLogic, Force10, InsightOne, KACE, Ocarina, Perot, RNA and Scalent among others).

What does this mean?
Dell is expanding the scope of their business with more products (hardware, software), solution bundles, services and channel partnering opportunities Some of the software tools and focus areas that …

The cloud news categorized.