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This Week in Cloud, December 7, 2011: CA Technologies Cloud Marketplace, Cisco CloudVerse, Cloud’s impact on IT jobs, SAP acquires SuccessFactors. And more…
Cloud News
- CA Technologies recently launched its Cloud Commons Marketplace, an open marketplace and community for cloud developers, software vendors, enterprise businesses and service providers. The marketplace is built on an app store business model, which allows users to compare, rate, buy, and sell cloud solutions. To learn more about the Cloud Commons Marketplace and how a cloud marketplace based on an aggregation model can benefit enterprises as well as service providers, read this Search Cloud Provider article.
- Cisco recently announced CloudVerse, which combines Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network, and Cloud Applications and Services to help organizations build, manage, and connect their internal and external cloud. This Data Center Knowledge article describes the offering in detail.
- On December 3, 2011, SAP America announced its $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, which provides cloud-based human capital management tools. With this move, SAP aims to make a more aggressive foray into cloud computing. To learn more about the acquisition and SAP’s cloud vision, read this article in PCWorld.
- According to research findings by Gartner, low-cost cloud services will take over a significant portion of the revenue of outsourcing firms by 2015. Industrialized low-cost IT services (ILCS) could restructure the pricing and value of IT services, by directly or indirectly substituting traditionally outsourced services. To know more about what Gartner analysts say about the future of ILCS, and the consumerization of the cloud, read this Business Standard article.
- Mobile device connectivity may be the number one factor in driving business cloud adoption. In a recent CSC survey of 2,645 IT executives, 1/3 of respondents said that having access to information through multiple devices was the reason they adopted the technology. In comparison, only 10% attributed cost savings as the main reason for going to the cloud. Read more in this Forbes article.
Feature article
The impact of cloud computing on IT jobs - a few thoughts
By George Hulme, Independent Writer
Talk around the (mostly negative) impact cloud computing will have on IT jobs doesn’t seem to ever let up. In his piece, Cloud computing’s real creative destruction may be the IT workforce, Larry Dignan at ZDNet writes that “humans will be virtualized just like servers are, as he recaps a presentation from two analysts at the market research firm Gartner. Taking a different view, Bernard Golden at CIO.com provides a strong argument in his The IT Jobs Cloud Computing Will Create.
Goldman contends, essentially, that rather than jobs being automated away - on net - that the increased use of IT that cloud computing will usher in will actually create IT jobs.
I tend to agree with Goldman, and think the hysteria on how many IT jobs cloud computing will displace is significantly overhyped - if not flat out wrong. Read the full article.
Cloud Views
- According to a new study by The International Data Corporation, the future of IT lies in the coming together of mobile devices, social networking, cloud computing, and data storage. This convergence is likely to cause major upheaval among large companies. As major firms adopt and invest in new technology, significant changes in IT are expected. To find out what IDC analysts predict about the spending on advanced technologies, and their effects on the industry, read this blog in The New York Times.
- The Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) recently ran into a problem with their cloud services. The company decided to go to the cloud to support its mobile workforce, but soon learned that different areas of the enterprise were actually using different cloud hosts. This Information Week article details how VNSNY remedied the problem and how access control can be a major concern for industries with sensitive data.
- In this blog on Cloud Commons, Kurt Milne discusses the results from a survey he conducted at the OpenStack hacker event in Silicon Valley on whether or not it makes sense to move existing workloads into the cloud.
MSP Corner
- MSPs are now partnering with IaaS providers, such as Rackspace and AWS, to bring more visibility and transparency to their customers. By partnering with IaaS providers, MSPs gain the advantage of transparency into key SLAs which includes metrics on end-user performance indicators such as latency and bandwidth. To learn more about how the traditional role of MSPs is shifting with advent of cloud computing, read this AppNeta article.
- According to a poll by Kroll Ontrack, 81 percent of attorneys in medium-to-large companies that participated in a recent survey on e-discovery said they plan to leverage the cloud for storage and e-discovery purposes within the next two years. Noticing the trend, MSPs, including Kroll Ontrack, are beginning to offer SaaS versions of e-discovery. Read more in this Talkin’ Cloud article.
Upcoming Cloud Events
- Gartner Data Center Conference: December 5 – 8, Las Vegas, NV
- Cloud Expo Europe: January 25 – 26, London, UK
- MSPWorld: February 1 – 3, Miami, FL
- Cloud Connect: February 13 – 16, Silicon Valley, CA
