Cloud Tech News

Tech giant IBM has announced the acquisition of cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer, evidently hoping to strengthen IBM’s position in the cloud infrastructure as a service space.

The latest cloud computing report this time comes from Microsoft in collaboration with 451 Research, and again looks towards the hybrid as the tangible future of cloud computing. The study, ‘The New Era of Hosted Services’, took responses from more than 1500 organisations and revealed that in two years’ time 68% of organisations will adopt the hybrid cloud model, up from 49% currently.

Jonathan Birch, EMEA Practice Head for Infrastructure and Architecture at NTT DATA disucsses whether there really is a future for the public cloud, or not.

The combination of public and private cloud is really starting to gain traction in 2013. But why? The most important reason for adopting hybrid clouds, according to 38% of respondents, was that cloud apps were deployed faster. Delivering better value (21%), and being able to meet requirements more easily (10%) were the next most popular suggestions.

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.

What’s the best way to put the kibosh on your competitor’s latest key cloud release? Make a statement loaded with braggadocio yourself, as Amazon has done by announcing that two trillion (2 x 10¹²) objects are now stored on its S3 cloud – a turnaround of 1.1m requests per second.

A survey of over 800 US-based IT decision makers from Virtustream in conjunction with independent cloud research firm Neovise has revealed that over half of US enterprise are using cloud computing in one form or another. 54% of those surveyed said they were in the cloud, which certainly indicates an uptake in US adoption. But it's the statistics on hybrid cloud usage and strategy which garnered the most interest...

For enterprises, customer relationship management (CRM) is moving ahead of enterprise resource planning (ERP) as the main priority for application software investment. That was just one of the takeaways from Gartner’s latest report, “User Survey Analysis: Cloud and CRM Nexus Will Drive Enterprise Software Spending in 2013 and 2014”, published last month.