Meeting the needs of employees to access systems is an important consideration for any modern business. Now, cloud-based call enter systems provider TCN is making its technology accessible for the visually impaired.

Its Platform 3 Vocal Vision product is optimized to work with Job Access with Speech (JAWS) technology and allows visually impaired call center agents to effectively navigate TCN's cloud-based contact center suite, helping to improve agent productivity while also creating new employment opportunities for the visually impaired.

Enterprise software specialist SAP has announced the availability of a new manufacturing application to help deliver data integration across businesses using the SAP HANA platform.

SAP Manufacturing Execution includes the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) application and SAP Plant Connectivity software. This allows it to provide machine-to-machine integration and orchestrate intelligent manufacturing.

There has been a lot of discussion in the treasury management software market over the years about which deployment method is the best for clients. The general consensus, both among industry experts and, as evidenced by growth figures put out by analysts such as IDC and Apps Run The World, is that the installed model is on its last legs and SaaS (software as a service) is how the majority of treasury systems will be deployed in the future.

Given this backdrop, it’s not hugely surprising that the treasury vendors themselves are clamoring to talk about how their solutions are SaaS, in order to capitalize on market interest.

While I keep the list short this year, it wouldn't be U.S. Thanksgiving without my writing about gratitude, and why some tech company's executives, employees, and partners should prostrate and pray "Thanks".

Let's start off with Google, which continues a great run that started with Larry Page's return as CEO in April 2011. If he's not all smiles this Turkey Day, someone should slap that man aside the head. I could tick off a hundred things for which he should give thanks. For brevity's sake, so you can get back to the big game and bigger bird, I select some things that might not come to mind.

Communication service providers (CSPs) have spent the last few years investing heavily in cloud software provision to expand their business.

A new report by Israel-based Allot Communications shows that this is paying off as software as a service is now a major revenue source for CSPs.

Microsoft Azure was hit by an 11-hour outage on November 19, in United States, Europe and certain parts of Asia. The outage impacted multiple services offered through the cloud platform, including Azure Storage, Virtual Machines, Service Bus, and Visual Studio, just to name a few. The culprit? Microsoft links a performance update to the mishap.

The performance update, which is meant for Azure Storage, "had been [successfully] tested over several weeks", says Microsoft, on a small subset of targets, prior to being applied. However, during the general roll-out, Microsoft noticed an issue which resulted in an "inability for the [storage blob] front ends to take on further traffic, which in turn caused other services built on top to experience issues".

A global survey carried out by Equinix has found that, over the next 12 months, the majority of business applications will be deployed to not just one, but multiple clouds across several geographies.

Of the 659 respondents, 77 percent said they planned to deploy to multiple clouds in the next 12 months and 74 percent expected cloud services to command a larger budget in 2015.

Cloud computing is growing at such a pace that it is becoming the "new normal" with businesses and enterprises turning to it without giving a second thought to on-premise offerings.

Amazon Web Services [AWS], one of the world’s largest cloud providers, used its re:invent conference in Las Vegas to push the cloud’s popularity that has meant upwards of a million customers are using its cloud services -- a number that continues to increase by the day.

With more businesses adopting cloud and hybrid environments, protecting data is more important than ever but it’s also more complex.

Microsoft is looking to improve protection for its enterprise customers with today's announcement that it has acquired Aorato, an innovator in enterprise security.

Enterprises can be reluctant to move some functions into the cloud because of security and other concerns. So services that can allay these fears have big potential in the market.

Data flow specialist Axway already hosts secure private cloud portfolio solutions with AWS and has now announced that it’s making a Cloud B2B service available.

Moving business applications to the cloud doesn't remove the need for securing them, in fact it potentially makes them more vulnerable.

Cloud application delivery service Instart Logic has announced a new Security Suite offering customers multi-layered protection against DDoS attacks and other cybersecurity threats.

New research commissioned by technology services firm Reconnix has found that 82 percent of UK IT leaders do not believe they are fully ready to make the move to Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, due to a shortage of in-house skills.

Only 10 percent of the 100 IT decision makers involved believed they were ready, whilst a further 8 percent had already migrated or were in the process of migration.

Google Cloud’s long-awaited price cuts have finally been announced with various new features coming as part of the decreases that follow earlier cuts by its two main competitors in the space in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The search giant cut some products by almost 80 percent and added direct peering, container scheduling and a new container engine built on Google’s Kubernetes technology.

I so requested to buy Amazon Echo, which promises to bring Star Trek-like responsive computing to the home. The cylindrical device, announced today, is a Bluetooth- and WiFi-enabled speaker that responds to users' questions. Just say "Alexa" and ask something. "What's the weather?" "What is the largest dinosaur?" This is how search information should be, assuming Echo resounds as strongly as Amazon's product information and demo video claim.

Touchless interaction is by no means new. Apple got the jump with personal assistant Siri, which responds to requests and commands on iOS devices. Google Now, available on multiple platforms, is far superior, and Windows Phone now has Cortana. All three cloud-based touchless-response systems make your voice the primary user interface. But Echo, like the Moto X smartphone, is always listening, such that the interaction is almost completely hands-free. That's the difference.

Public and private clouds have been rapidly adopted by businesses around the world over the past few years. However, the debate over the pros and cons of each model has led to the emergence of a new type of cloud that allows businesses to avoid making compromises. The hybrid model enables organizations to enjoy a combination of the scalability and flexibility of public offerings with the manageability and security of their private counterparts, so it's unsurprising to see them becoming so popular. Indeed, Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of large enterprises will use hybrid cloud.

So what makes this model so attractive for businesses, and what does the future hold for the hybrid cloud?