It’s that time of year again, with every analyst firm falling over themselves to predict what will happen in IT during the next 12 months.

IDC is no different, issuing the first of its 2014 predictions earlier this week with a straightforward claim: all the big players will make increased investment in cloud, mobile and big data because of the huge emergence of the “third platform” for IT management.

The term ‘third platform’ relates to the technology built on the pillars of...

Kevin Noonan, Research Director, Public Sector

Although there is general acceptance that cloud services are here to stay, a number of enterprises are still skeptical about whether cloud computing is really up to the job when it comes to delivering big and complicated government services. Against this backdrop, the New Zealand government’s successful national census provides valuable lessons about how to drive a large-scale cloud implementation, as we explain in our recent report Driving Government Innovation...

Cloud giant Salesforce has unveiled its new shiny cloud platform Salesforce1 at Dreamforce in San Francisco, with CEO Marc Benioff stressing the ‘internet of customers’ – the importance of the consumer in a cloud, social and mobile world.

“I’ve never been more excited to be part of Salesforce.com,” Benioff bellowed to the audience of customers, partners and non-profits.

“In the world of the Internet of Things, it’s really a world of Internet of...

IBM has patented a solution which the tech giant claims is a “green button” that distributes a cloud service to lower power systems to help save environmental costs.

According to the Armonk firm, patent 8,549,125 took its inspiration from energy firms offering consumers alternate, environmentally-friendly energy streams.

“We have invented a way for cloud service providers to more efficiently manage their data centres and, as a result, significantly reduce their environmental impact,”...

By David LinthicumWe all know that cloud computing provides business agility.  For many enterprises, that means they have the ability to keep up with new and emerging markets.  In the world of healthcare, cloud computing also provides the ability to keep up with ever-changing regulations.

This double value that healthcare cloud computing brings is rather interesting, given that many in healthcare are suspicious of the value of...

One issue relative to cloud computing that keeps critics well fed is the degree to which expectations and realities of the technology all too often don’t sync. Add to the mix a large degree of expected hype around buzzy marketing concepts, and what companies expect going into switching to cloud and what they get can feel problematically let-down-ish.

So what does the internet think?

By David LinthicumContinuing our discussion from my last blog in July, perhaps it’s helpful to drive deeper into security approaches and technology for use within clouds that serve the healthcare vertical.  We’ll start by focusing on the fundamentals of cloud security for healthcare.  However, some of this is transferable to other verticals as well.

First fundamental: Understand the data that will reside in the...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the way in terms of developers using cloud compute and storage services, with AWS on an equal footing with Microsoft as the product of choice for devs’ relational database management system (RDBMS) services.

That’s the big takeaway from the latest developer survey by Forrester Research, which certainly sheds light on preferences between the big three providers in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.

Regarding compute services, AWS has a clear advantage on...

69% of enterprises who have separate budgets for cloud computing are predicting spending increases this year and into 2014.

This is one of several key take-aways from a research study published today by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research.  TheInfoPro Wave 5 Cloud Computing Study is based on research completed in the first six months of 2013, and relies on live interviews with IT management and primary...

We have all heard of cloud computing and we all know what it does. It’s undeniable, the cloud has revolutionised IT and will ultimately replace a significant portion of today’s IT services. Yes, it’s here to stay.

With such a saturated and competitive market, vendors are offering an array of cloud models and services, which are relatively easy to acquire. Whether it is public, private or hybrid, enterprises’ choices in the cloud are endless.

Nowadays, they can even choose to adopt a...

It's been well over a year that Forrester's James Staten (@staten7) has been gently orating from the rooftops that "you are already hybrid."  In his foresight, he was referring to the broad existence of so-called shadow-IT, the tendency of competent non-IT folk to pull out their credit cards and purchase public cloud services and SaaS services, thereby solving their own problems.

This week, a spate of articles from

Are you one of those independent executives that uses strategic foresight to gain a decisive lead over competitors that tend to follow the crowd? Granted, it takes courage to make bold moves -- and follow the path that's less traveled. Big rewards tend to go to the confident, not the cautious. What's your business technology investment strategy for 2013, and beyond?  Does your corporate foresight anticipate success, based upon your ability to deploy quantum-leap technological advances -- like

David Molony, Principal Analyst, EnterpriseTelcos have launched a series of credible cloud services offers, and there is a perception in the market that they can now compete with global systems integrators in the converged ICT space. But telco noise levels are set low. There’s a tentativeness in their marketing (which may be deliberate) but, more importantly, they are not getting the direct advocacy they deserve from their global MNC customers.

Tier-2 telcos ramp up cloud services

Telco cloud service providers were...

iomart Group, proclaimed as the UK’s leading cloud computing company, has registered end of year profits of £10.7m before tax growth, an increase of 56% and marking a significant improvement on 2012’s £6.9m profit.

Revenue growth went up 29% to £43.1m, again an improvement on the previous year, whilst adjusted EBITDA growth (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) was 48%, up to £16.5m.

The figures are suitably impressive for the Scottish company,...

Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst, IT SolutionsOvum’s Integration Middleware Global Market Forecast Model estimates that the spend on cloud-based integration platforms will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31% between 2012 and 2018, reaching $3.7bn by the end of 2018. Over the same period, spending on cloud-based integration platforms in the Americas and Asia-Pacific regions will grow at CAGRs of 27% and 44% respectively. The Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) cloud-based integration platforms market...

The Cabinet Office’s third iteration of the G-Cloud framework not only added an extra 368 suppliers to its CloudStore, but it raised a few eyebrows over the exclusion of one notable bidder – Amazon!

The company made no secret of its desire for inclusion during the G-Cloud’s second iteration, touting that it was looking to get involved with the G-Cloud in the future.  And, the reasoning for its previous...

By Andrew Carr, CEO Bull UK & Ireland @acarr_bull

Businesses today increasingly look at technologies like big data and software-defined networking as being disruptive in the sense that they force organisations to evaluate new business models and new routes to market.

Rather than having negative associations, disruptive in this context means having an impact through a different way of thinking about business issues and challenges, as opposed to the traditional dictionary definition of ‘throwing into...

You’ve adopted the cloud, got a high level of storage and moved a lot of apps in – but you’re still not getting as much work done as you thought.

That’s the alarming case with more than half of respondents to an Oracle-conducted survey entitled ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.

54% of the 1355 executives polled said that they had suffered staff downtime as a result of difficulties with cloud integration. In terms of specific numbers, this...

By Paula ReinmanCloud, SaaS, Big Data, Fast Data, NoSQL, PaaS…while this economy cannot produce jobs, it can definitely produce jargon at the speed of light.

As a tech-savvy business person who is not an engineer,...

During 2012 the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market experienced sluggish growth of just 2.2%, yet Software-as-a-Service...