Cloud Tech News

Regardless of the sector in question, home-based working has always aroused emotions among executives. The recent comments made by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg against home working have further inflamed this debate, but Ovum feels that contact center services players would be wise to heed the remarks of Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, which were well thought out and very much in favour of working from home.

Through 2012, many CRM outsourcers struggled to adjust to ongoing economic uncertainty, as well as shifting requirements from clients in terms of supporting mobility and social media solutions. However, there were encouraging signs from the standpoint of financial performance, with a number of the sector's major players managing to moderately increase revenues and maintain profitability.

Hiring great people and creating a culture of achievement that is fun, focused and able to get challenging tasks done is not an easy task. Keeping that culture strong and focused on the customers takes a unique leader. Those are the qualities I think of whenever I'm asked to recommend the best cloud computing companies to work for.

Cutting through the hype of cloud vendors starts by evaluating how ready their cloud services, enabling technologies and professional services are to serve customers today. Nine different companies have been analysed: Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP and VMware.

We first went from reserving cloud capacity to securing capacity on-demand, and then we even started to bid for unused capacity in spot market - all in an effort to decrease cost in the cloud. Can we take this one step further? Instead of us bidding for capacity, wouldn't it be interesting if we can get providers to bid for our demand?

To capitalise on Parallels' success story Cisco, the global networking giant, of recent has made an equity investment of $11 million to the desktop virtualisation firm. According to Hilton Romanski, VP corporate business development Cisco: "Cisco is continuing its commitment to technology development and innovation through strategic investments".

The cloud has fundamentally changed business models; it has shifted time-to-market, entry points and who can do what. These byproducts of massive elasticity are wrapped up in an even greater evolutionary change that is occurring right now: The cloud is having a pronounced impact on the supply chain, which will amount to a tidal wave of changes in the near-term that will cause huge pain for some and spawn incredible innovation and wealth for others.

New platforms and services, announced this week by Amazon at its first ever “re: Invent” user conference this week, will help fill out and add connective tissue to the various AWS platforms and services. Now that Amazon is automating data flows, it should take the next step and add integrated SQL views to NoSQL data stores, something that other providers are already pursuing.