Cloud COVERAGE FROM AROUND THE WEB
![[Christofer] Hoff](http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/2942489392/711bfd0fdc7a2b40594377499395c07e_normal.jpeg){kind=small}
Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon's cloud business and the Harvard MBA who wrote its business plan, told the Sunday Telegraph in London over the weekend that AWS could some day displace Apple as the world's most valuable tech company."We don't say to ourselves, ‘What we're really doing is trying to build the largest technology company in the world,'" he told the paper. "We just happen to think, with how much computing is going to move to the cloud, and with the breadth and global footprint that we have, and our continuing [commitment] to iterate at a very fast pace, it just has the chance to be the largest technology company."Amazon doesn't break out Amazon Web Services' results, but watchers reckon it could currently be at $1 billion-$1.5 billion in revenues, supposedly profitable despite very thin margins."At the highest levels of this company," Jassy said, "we believe that it's quite possible that AWS ends up being the largest business in Amazon. We believe [that] passionately. Now that is saying a lot because our retail business, which is a $40 billion business, is still growing 25% to 30% year-on-year. We're not there yet and I don't know how long that will take but we see that as a real possibility."
What do small and medium-sized businesses want? Today MrMail.com announced an SMB opinion poll to answer this question in order to further enhance service provision. Cloud hosting and mobile communications are two of the driving factors behind the rapid pace of today's business operations. However, providing the rapid response to the demands of a local or global market with multiple paths of access to a company has proven to be a major stumbling block for many SMBs. Very often these businesses are structured with individuals in different geographical locations, making instantaneous communication and synchronization vital. MrMail.com began offering the ZeXtras service in conjunction with their VMWare Zimbra product line to small and medium sized businesses in early 2012 with outstanding results and has launched the opinion survey to ensure the success of the New Vision Initiative launch in 2013. The clients who are utilizing this service enjoy the rock-solid stability of a server-hosted premium quality application that works with their mobile device flawlessly. Gone are the days of sole reliance on email alone, now with the power of mobile synchronization every member of a business network is in touch and in tune with the status of the business. Companies can now integrate their Intranet and Internet web space through collaboration and social media applications as well. The goal of the opinion poll to determine the support services small and medium sized businesses need most to fully leverage the power of their cloud hosting package.
Examining Amazon Web Services usage is a cottage industry for a dozen or so startups. One of them, Newvem, has offered its service free to select customers. Now that the service is broadly available, it’s time to monetize. Updated: Newvem, which promises to watch your Amazon Web Services usage for you and recommend ways to get the most mileage out of rented compute and storage, is now ready to charge for its services.Large enterprises will negotiate their own deals, but for smaller accounts the company will offer free services until the customer goes over 50,000 AWS resource hours per month. Then it charges a cent or two per additional resource hour depending on usage. According to Newvem’s price list, there are additional fixed-rate charges for more advanced analytics of S3 storage or EC2 reserved instance use.One service the company is particularly proud of is tracking AWS usage by department or business function within a large organization. “Amazon itself is very horizontal — it’s just infrastructure — they’ll tell you how many instances and how much storage you use all in one bill. What we do is let you slice and dice Amazon resources against your divisions — no one else can do that,” said Newvem president Zev Laderman. (Update: For the record, Cloudability disputes this, saying it offers similar services.)”If you have R&D and engineering and manufacturing folks and want to tie all AWS usage to each unit to make sure they’re consuming it properly, if there are security issues or vulnerabilities with how ports are setup, if you want to charge-back from a central unit, you can do all that.” (
A study commissioned by Cbeyond, a telecommunications and IT company based in Atlanta, Georgia, revealed that cloud adoption among SMBs is growing. In addition, SMBs are increasing their IT budgets in order to migrate to the cloud. According to the study, 64 percent of the small businesses that were surveyed have plans to increase their IT budgets to accommodate cloud services adoption. Companies would also be hard-pressed to include infrastructure without the cloud, a move that represents a growing opportunity for business partners to reach out to their smallest customers with an updated managed cloud services portfolio. Finding customers may not be difficult, but maintaining a profitable and competitive edge along these newfound markets can be challenging. And as for service prospects in 2013, accounting, banking, company emailing, data archiving, and file sharing are the most popular choices.The factors that drive cloud services adoption among SMBs are the following: 83 percent claimed that cloud services offered them more flexibility, 78 percent said that cloud-based services allowed them to be more productive, and 71 percent maintained that migrating to the cloud was a money-saving move.Forty-nine percent of surveyed SMBs expected their general business conditions to improve six months from now, while 45 percent said that they predict their 2013 hiring goals to fall short of their hiring levels in 2012. Plus, while majority of SMBs planned to ramp up their IT spending, 31 percent admitted to keeping theirs unchanged and five percent would lower their IT budget.
REDWOOD CITY -- Even as Oracle (ORCL) begins to reap the benefits of its move into cloud-based software, it continues to add to its portfolio through acquisitions, announcing the purchase of Eloqua for more than $800 million Thursday.Eloqua's cloud-based suite of marketing applications will "will become the centerpiece" of a new Oracle offering designed for marketing companies and departments, Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of development at Oracle, said in Thursday's announcement. The software giant agreed to pay $23.50 a share for the Virginia-based company, which Oracle said would mean a commitment of $871 million; the company sold shares for $11.50 in its August initial public offering in August and closed Wednesday at $17.92, giving the price a premium of 31.1 percent.Oracle has been forcefully pushing into software as a service, or SaaS, through acquisitions for more than a year, beginning with the $1.5 billion purchase of RightNow Technologies in October 2011, which preceded the purchase of Dublin-based Taleo for $1.9 billion. The Redwood City software giant used those companies to roll out a suite of cloud services for different industries earlier this year, and its efforts began to show fruit earlier this week, when Oracle announced its most recent quarter produced a 17 percent
According to a study by the London School of Economics and Political Science, the development of cloud computing will result in economic growth, increased productivity, and promote change in the types of jobs and skills required by businesses.The study focuses on two industries – smartphone and aerospace service – and dives into the impact of cloud computing on said industries using the UK, Germany, Italy, and USA and the years 2010 and 2014 as subjects. Microsoft helped underwrite the study.The study claims that investments in cloud computing are contributing to job creation and growth in both the old and slow-growing aerospace sector and the relatively new, yet fast growing smartphone industry. Added to this, the cloud computing industry is also responsible for job creation via construction, staffing, and supply of the data centers that will host the cloud. Cloud computing also has the benefit of optimizing businesses as it frees up managerial staff and skilled employees, allowing them to focus on the areas of work that are more profitable.The shift to cloud and virtualization will also open up a wide range of new employment opportunities, as the new set of skills they demand will be in demand among employers. They could also lead to higher than average salaries due to said demand and the rarity of people who have tenure in said fields.
A journalist for more than 25 years, Antone Gonsalves has covered general, business and technology news for a wire service, magazines and websites. He started his career with United Press International, working as a reporter in Kansas and later as an editor in charge of news coverage in Florida and California. At the height of the Internet boom in the late '90s, Gonsalves moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a business technology reporter and editor for PC Week, InformationWeek and TechWeb. Gonsalves is also a contributing writer for Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.com.While cloud computing giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft scramble to cut prices to lure customers to their cloud-computing infrastructures, their smaller rival Rackspace Hosting is heading in the opposite direction."We're not going the route of a race to the bottom," says John Engates, Rackspace's chief technology officer. Instead, Rackspace is betting that corporate customers will pay more to make the San Antonio-based company their IT department in the cloud - a strategy that's sure to face challenges as the number of competitors rises.Over the last several years, Rackspace has competed mostly with Amazon in the business of renting data center servers for pennies an hour to run websites and business applications. Since its initial public offering in 2008, Rackspace has grown its cloud infrastructure business to nearly 24% of revenue. The company has more than 180,000 business customers and topped $1 billion in revenue last year for the first time.
The potential benefits to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) of cloud networking, whereby applications/data is accessible on the Internet instead of on a single computer or private network, are well recorded. SMB spending on cloud services is expected to increase by almost 20 percent annually over the next five years.Common examples of cloud-based solutions that SMBs are using include hosted email and storage, online payment processing and accounts software. Many traditional services are also ‘moving to the cloud’ to become more cost-effective and efficient. For example, while fax may seem outdated as a method of business communication, very often there is a legal requirement for businesses to be able to send and receive faxes even though fax machines may be costly both in terms of outlay and ongoing maintenance.Hosted fax solutions offer a cost-effective alternative, allowing businesses to send and receive faxes securely over the Internet and are just one example of how cloud services have the power to revolutionise legacy business practices for SMBs.However, with more and more companies moving to the cloud for everything from the basics, network connectivity has never been more important. Services delivered through the Cloud are only as reliable as the network that they are delivered on – if the connection to the Internet breaks so does the ability to access important applications and data which may be fundamental for day to day operations.
As the end of 2012 approaches there is one clear takeaway about the cloud computing market – enterprise use has arrived. Cloud use is no longer solely hiding in the shadows, IT departments are no longer denying it’s happening in their company and legitimate budgeting around cloud is now taking place. According to the latest Forrsights Surveys nearly half of all enterprises in North America and Europe will set aside budget for private cloud investments in 2013 and nearly as many software development managers are planning to deploy applications to the cloud.So what does that mean for the coming year? In short, cloud use in 2013 will get real. We can stop speculating, hopefully stop cloudwashing, and get down to the real business of incorporating cloud services and platforms into our formal IT portfolios. As we get real about cloud we will institute some substantial changes in our cultures and approaches to cloud investments. We asked all the contributors to the Forrester Cloud Playbook to weigh in with their cloud predictions for the coming year then voted for the top ten. Herewith is what we expect to happen when enterprise gets real about cloud in 2013:My thanks to the many contributors to this report including Dave Bartoletti, Michael Gualtieri, Lauren Nelson, Rachel Dines, Michael Facemire, Andre Kindness, Glenn O'Donnell, Liz Herbert.and Chris Voce.
Let’s settle two things from the outset – firstly, PaaS is (I believe) the future of cloud services and will be the area for growth in the coming years. Secondly, I’m an investor and board member in Appsecute so I’m naturally bullish about what they’re doing. That said, today’s announcement is a real leap in providing enterprises with what they need.Let’s take a step backwards and remember that there exists a massive tension in the enterprise – on the one side are developers who just want to be able to get sh1t done and use the tools that best allow them to deliver outcomes. On the other side you have enterprise IT who is tasked with ensuring that an organization’s data and services remain secure. This two step generally shows up by developers resorting to shadow IT to get things done, and enterprise IT playing whack-a-mole with solutions they haven’t approved of.So what’s the answer? Well the answer is finding systems that allow developers to use a variety of different tools and platforms, while doing so in a way that enables enterprise IT to maintain visibility over the portfolio of applications and platforms being used throughout their organization. Which is why I’m really excited by the new release that Appsecute is unveiling at CloudBeat today.
Featured Webcasts
This Week's Issue
Free Print Subscription
SubscribeCurrent Government Issue
In this issue:
Subscribe Now
- Data Center Optimization: Federal agencies must increase server utilization and energy efficiency as they squeeze more computer processing into fewer data centers. We explore how the Army, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and others are doing that.
- Future Cities: The world's urban centers are growing, creating a civic management challenge of unprecedented scope and complexity. Our exclusive survey reveals the opportunities and challenges for city planners and municipal IT pros.
- Read the Current Issue
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports
