Cloud Tech News

CIOs engaged in cloud initiatives have identified one of their top goals - a need for a cloud strategy. The reason; cloud initiatives not only directly impact technology, but the effect extends significantly to business processes and organisational resources. A strategy that aligns process, technology and business service delivery is critical to the future returns on the initiative.

The future of customer relationships depends more on context than transactions. And this trend is accelerating, driven by the integration of social media into customer relationship management (CRM), rapid gains in usability of CRM and integration applications, and the global growth of the API economy.

Online collaboration has evolved during the last decade, delivering even greater value - thanks to a new generation of business technology applications. Forbes Insights released "Collaborating in the Cloud", a Cisco-sponsored study examining the ways business leaders increasingly look at cloud collaboration as a way to increase productivity, accelerate business results and enhance innovation across borders and functions.

Even today's most successful organisations will not survive the converged business future by merely doing the same things they currently do, only differently. What is needed is a shift to do different things. Ovum believes that rapid, assured and sustained business innovation is imperative to an organisation's success. IT leaders therefore need to effectively harness technological advances, cut time to market, and improve quality and performance.

In some ways, everything about IT is about creating uniformity. Standard configurations. Synchronised patches. 1000 identical laptops shipped to all employees. We place a high premium on "everything being exactly the same", and for good reason.

Oracle is now taking the next step in optimizing portions of its application portfolio to take full advantage of the new X3-2 line. Oracle’s Fast Data approach to enterprise applications follows SAP’s release of SAP Business Suite and CRM on the in-memory HANA platform. Ovum believes that Oracle’s approach is a logical first step, and would like to see this eventually yield a new generation of application-specific, single-appliance engineered systems.

The platform as a service (PaaS) market is expected to reach $6.45bn by 2016 and grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 50%, with application infrastructure and middleware PaaS expected to grow the fastest. That’s the big takeaway from analysts TechNavio, having published a report entitled Global Platform as a Service Market 2012-2016.

Few topics have lately drawn more hype and scrutiny than Big Data. Having originated with Internet firms, Big Data has captured enterprise attention with examples that show how organisations, from public sector to financial services firms, telcos, and media derived insights that improved customer retention, operational efficiency, and risk mitigation.