Cloud Tech News

We are beginning to see the emergence of a new member of the board: the chief disruption officer (CDO), who can act as a channel and a focus for bold approaches to strategic decision-making. Technologies like big data and software-defined networking are paving a way for positive disruption in the sense that they force organisations to evaluate new business models and new routes to market. Andrew Carr, CEO for UK & Ireland at Bull discusses how these individuals are driving adoption of a new wave of technologies to improve business performance.

Email management provider Mimecast has experienced a UK-based outage due to a hardware network failure today, with customers being temporarily unable to send or receive emails. Yet the outage itself does not explain the full story. Mimecast, for better or worse, promises a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) – which now is torn to shreds after today’s unfortunate difficulties.

One of the most frequent questions we get on cloud computing is: "When should a company move to the cloud?" While there are numerous reasons to make the move, there are also certain events that minimise obstacles and objections. These are "triggers", which greatly reduce the sales cycle for prospects considering cloud offerings. In no particular order...

During 2012 the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market experienced sluggish growth of just 2.2%, yet software as a service (SaaS), financial management and human capital management (HCM) applications showed potential for breakout growth. Through the challenging times of the previous year, however, SAP still retained worldwide market share leadership.

Adobe, at the annual “MAX” event, has completely re-branded the companies most well-known Creative products which consists of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Premiere Pro. Each will now gain a CC moniker (e.g. Photoshop CC) which represents “Creative Cloud”.

Last year, four out of every 10 CRM systems sold were SaaS-based, and the trend is accelerating. In the recent Gartner report Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Software, Worldwide, 2012 published April 18 2013 the authors provide insights into why the worldwide CRM market experienced 12% growth in 2012, three times the average of all enterprise software categories.

In my role as a globetrotting cloud consultant, I continue to be amazed at how many executives still favour private clouds over public. These managers are perfectly happy to pour money into newfangled data centres (sorry, "private clouds"), even though Amazon Web Services and its brethren are reinventing the entire world of IT. Their reason? Sometimes they believe private clouds will save them money over the public cloud option...

There is a lot of hype surrounding the cloud and its delivery of software, storage and infrastructure over the Internet, but many businesses still view the technology as being too disruptive to implement. And yet, by taking the time to understand this advanced technology, we can begin to learn that the benefits usually outweigh the negatives, and that the myths are most often grounded in fiction. For that reason, we are going to debunk 10 of those myths.