You can’t move at the moment for surveys advocating the importance of hybrid cloud strategy – and this latest one, from Rackspace Hosting and conducted by Vanson Bourne, is no different.

60% of IT top brass see the hybrid cloud as the bright, shiny future for IT operations, with a third of that number (19%) completely integrated, compared to only 41% who are partially hybrid-oriented.

The primary reason for hybrid adoption over pure public cloud systems was more control, according to 59% of those polled. This was followed by greater security (54%), reliability (48%) and cost (46%). Overall, it’s safe to say that a majority of respondents saw multiple benefits.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the US is more advanced than the UK in hybrid developments; 80% cited the hybrid cloud as a game changing strategy, compared to just 64% of UK-based respondents.

But according to Nigel Beighton, VP of technology …

IDG Enterprise recently published Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects Report, showing how enterprises continue to struggle with security, integration and governance while finding immediate value in collaboration and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

IDG’s methodology is based on interviews with 1,358 respondents, stratified across CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld, and Network World websites, in addition to respondents contacted via email, and LinkedIn forums. 

58% of respondents are from executive IT roles; 17% from Mid-level IT; 14% from IT professionals; 8% from middle-level business management and 3% non-manager roles were represented in the study.  High tech industries are the dominant industry represented with 18% of respondents, followed by financial services, government and manufacturing (each accounting for 10% of respondents).  Education (9%) and telecommunications & utilities (6%) are the other industries represented.

Key take-aways from the survey include the following:

• 49% of executive-level management see cloud computing as transformational …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Solutions

Intel recently shared its long-term strategic vision of how corporate data centers will evolve. Big Data processing plays a central role, driven by a future of escalating data volumes from mobile, cloud, and “Internet of Things” sources. Intel is starting to pull together a portfolio of offerings as a foundational infrastructure for analyzing Big Data.

Not surprisingly, this is a hardware-centric strategy, allowing Intel to sell more server engines to effectively run Big Data software applications. Intel believes it has the right chips (x86) to manage and analyze this data. But the chipmaker is taking a proactive role thinking further up the stack and fishing for Hadoop-related software opportunities.

Big Data is one of several demand-side drivers shaping the data center of the future

Intel laid out a detailed blueprint of key infrastructure for building the data centers …

When talking about Big Data, most people talk about numbers: speed of processing and how many terabytes and petabytes the platform can handle. But deriving deep insights with the potential to change business growth trajectories relies not just on quantities, processing power and speed, but also three key ilities: portability, usability and quality of the data.
Portability, usability, and quality converge to define how well the processing power of the Big Data platform can be harnessed to deliver consistent, high quality, dependable and predictable enterprise-grade insights.
Portability: Ability to transport data and insights in and out of the system
Usability: Ability to use the system to hypothesize, collaborate, analyze, and ultimately to derive insights from data
Quality: Ability to produce highly reliable and trustworthy insights from the system

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It’s that time of year again. Time for the industry’s most influential infrastructure gathering, VMworld. And, as has become an annual occurrence, I jot down some pre-show thoughts about the event (read more

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Information Management

Oracle recently unveiled a faster version of its Exalytics in-memory analytics database. The company claims the X3-4 version delivers up to 25× performance improvements over its predecessor, thanks largely to pure and simple hardware upgrades – i.e. more memory.

Ovum does not doubt the sheer speed of Exalytics, particularly for data analysis where ASAP is simply not quick enough. We see the most immediate applicability for such an ultra-responsive analytics infrastructure in driving more agile business planning and budgeting processes, but there are also a raft of other emerging use cases. Certainly benefits are to be gained from the raw power of Exalytics, but companies must consider carefully their strategies for realizing the benefits in business-critical applications.

Exalytics X3-4 reflects the accelerating pace of doing business today

Nowadays, data analysis is a deft mix of data scale and processing speed: whether it is about …