Economic woes push more enterprises to the cloud
Whoa, think enterprises are rushing to the cloud? Think again. It's still early days and slow going. Seventy percent have used software-as-a-service projects for less than three years, says Gartner. That's less time than consumer cloud services like Facebook and Twitter have been around or even Apple's iPhone. One-third of organizations have migration plans in place -- from on-premise to SaaS solutions. Among those enterprises already in the cloud in some way, 95 percent plan to maintain SaaS investments or increase them.
Gartner surveyed 525 organizations from nine countries -- in June and July. That may seem like old data but at the pace enterprises make IT changes, it's current; the survey might as well have been taken yesterday. :) Organizations adopting SaaS cite two major reasons: ease/speed of deployments and lower costs. Global economic crisis is a major factor driving SaaS adoption. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the US stock market collapsed three years ago last week, and the majority of enterprises started deploying SaaS solutions since.
Enterprise cloud email and collaboration has reached the 'tipping point', or will in 2012, maybe 2014 -- well, someday
The new math that analysts use to make predictions is sometimes amazing to comprehend. Gartner predicts that so-called cloud email and collaboration services (CECS) have reached a "tipping point" based on projected 10 percent enterprise adoption by 2014. So it's not even 10 percent yet, but, hey, that's okay, enterprises are rushing to the cloud. Or are they?
I'm a big proponent of cloud computing, and have predicted the big push to cloud-connected devices for years. But even I have to gape in wonder at the concept of 10 percent in three years being a "tipping point".
Minus: No frills online storage plus 10GB free
There are plenty of free online storage providers around, but most provide only one or two gigabytes of space in their basic accounts: not much, by modern standards.
Minus stands out, though, by offering a whole 10GB, free of charge. The service supports files up to 2GB in size; these can be private, shared individually through links, or entirely open to public view; and there are no transfer limits, very useful if you’ve large files you’d like to distribute and you’re worried about potential bandwidth costs. And these are just some of the plus points of the Minus service.
Microsoft takes Visual Studio and Windows 8 Server to the cloud
Today, Microsoft dropped the other ball during the second big BUILD developer conference keynote. The company is releasing Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and Windows Server 8 Developer Preview. The software will be available for MSDN subscribers.
Yesterday, Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows & Windows Live division, formally unveiled Windows 8, which is available in a developer preview you can download now. Today, Jason Zander, vice president for the Visual Studio team, connected the dots to developing apps supporting Azure services also connected to Windows Phone 7.5. He created the Windows 8 Metro-style game pictured above.
Social CRM is a sure way to lose money, for now
That's the takeaway from Gartner, which has released a forecast for Social CRM. While the market is expected to generate $1 billion in revenue next year, there are more than 100 vendors competing, the majority of which are unprofitable or take in less than $1 million. The market is growing, but it's too small for the number of participants. Social CRM accounts for just 5 percent of the total client-relationship management market.
The problem is customer adoption. "Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as a series of experiments and tactical purchases", Adam Sarner, Gartner research director, says in a statement. "Few have a social CRM strategy or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results. Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of applications for different purposes.
Even with drastic price reduction, TouchPads still get 50GB free cloud storage
One of the nice bonuses of the HP TouchPad is that it comes with a lifetime 50GB cloud storage account from Box for free. This is exactly ten times more storage than they offer standard users on their free tier.
With the sudden discontinuation of the TouchPad and the subsequent liquidation of all stock, this little bonus looks a lot sweeter, but we wondered if Box could pull out of the deal due to behind-the-scenes agreements and arrangements.
BlackBerry users, would you pay $5 a month for 50 songs?
It's a strange question given the alternatives, but it must be asked. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka reports $5/month for 50 songs will be the going rate for Research in Motion's rumored BlackBerry Music Service.
You can stop laughing now. Please. Someone will hear.
Office 365 becomes Office 364 with Wednesday outage
Microsoft joins Amazon and other online services providers who have suffered cloud outages. I'm surprised. Sincerely.
I figured if any company could do the cloud right, it would be Microsoft -- right as in 365 days up time. Damn, if this was a leap year, that could be an excuse. :)
Think eBay is the top retail or auction site? You'd be wrong
I would have picked eBay. But according to ComScore, Amazon is leader, with 20.4 percent global Internet population reach in June -- 16.2 percent for eBay. The analyst group lumps together auctions and retail, so looked at that way it's not surprising. What perhaps is unexpected -- Apple ranks fourth -- 9.7 percent share, with 135 million unique visitors.
Auction sites had 1.39 billion unique visitors, 282 million of them to Amazon and 223.5 million from eBay.
Box hits tablets from all sides with Honeycomb, PlayBook, HTML5 apps
Web-based file storage and content sharing service Box.net on Thursday unveiled three new apps for the tablet world: one for Android Honeycomb, one for BlackBerry PlayBook, and one for HTML5-compatible browsers. These new products bring Box to essentially all mobile platforms in some way and round out its app offerings which already included iOS, Android, and WebOS.
Like Amazon has done with its Kindle e-book platform, Box is attempting to attain what it calls "mobile ubiquity," or a meaningful presence on any mobile device that comes along, irrespective of platform.
Developers say Google+ can catch up to Facebook in social
Well, so much for Facebook's 750 million active users as a competitive advantage.
IDC's quarterly survey of mobile developers couldn't have come at a better time for Google, soon after its Plus service opened on an invite-only beta basis. Developers -- 2,012 surveyed from July 20-22 -- are enthusiastic about Google+. "Two-thirds of respondents believe that Google can catch up to Facebook in social with Google+", according to the report.
Is iCloud sync done right?
Sync is the killer application for the connected world, an assertion I've been making for about six years now. With iCloud, Apple has the chance to catch up sync ground lost after becoming an early leader and falling away.
Late yesterday, iCloud launched in beta to developers. The service is slated to release this autumn, presumably concurrent with iPhone 5 and iOS 5.
Attention SMB's! Dell can help! [Sponsored]
Are you a Small Business Owner? Are you looking to Improve Responsiveness while Reducing Costs? Dell can help!
By incorporating server management, disaster recovery and storage provisioning, Dell drives complexity out of virtualization with business-ready configurations with Intel Technology. Learn more here: http://content.dell.com/us/en/business/smb-by-technology-virtualization.aspx?dgc=BA&cid=69785&lid=1768606
SMBs get more efficient servers with virtualization
Editor's note: This article was commissioned by Dell. To learn more about Dell's solutions for improving responsiveness while reducing costs with virtualization, please visit Dell's site by clicking here.
As hardware power increased over the years IT pros used to wonder about what we'd do with all that capacity, but no longer. Virtualization has enabled everyone, from SMBs to enterprise IT, to get better utilization out of their hardware and make management easier too.
Rev up your websites for free with Google Page Speed Service
Would you like to take advantage of Google's worldwide network of fast proxy servers, not to mention their coding expertise? Now you can, and for free, just by signing up for a service of theirs.
Two years ago Google released the Page Speed Browser Extensions for Chrome and Firefox. These gave web developers performance analysis on their pages to help them optimize their sites based on a set of best practices developed by Google.
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