It is suddenly that time of year again: time to review past predictions, rank them, and create a new set, in the hope that, by being reasonably accurate, they will assist our members in planning out strategies in products, markets, and...

Solution Set

A utility infrastructure IaaS alone does not equal cloud. A range of emerging solutions offer to pave that last mile to full-function IaaS cloud services.

Solution Set

The Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market is still in its nascent form with a large and diverse set of vendors. This size ensures that there is an IaaS option for all sizes and types of enterprise.

Tool

Info-Tech conducted its own market evaluation of 13 Cloud IaaS solutions. Use this tool to narrow the vendors to a shortlist of solutions that best satisfy the company's requirements, before sending out RFPs and scheduling vendor demonstrations.

Note

The Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market is still in its nascent form with a large and diverse set of vendors. This size ensures that there is an IaaS option for all sizes and types of enterprise.

Tool

Info-Tech conducted its own market evaluation of seven leading Cloud Backup solutions. Use this tool to narrow the vendors to a shortlist of solutions that best satisfy company requirements, before sending out RFPs and scheduling vendor...

Note

The Cloud Backup market is very nascent, but the existing players have mature solutions that are creating a compelling case with advanced features that provide the reliability businesses expect.

(07-Apr-11) In the world of technology, there’s hardly anything as dangerous as missing the boat on the next big thing. Take Microsoft and Nokia. The two behemoths dominated the high-tech universe in the 1990s, but only two months ago they were...

Amazon began experiencing an outage on their Elastic Block Store (EBS) service in the early hours of April 21, 2011. This event triggered outages of other Amazon services, including the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Several well-known...

Two divergent tendencies are becoming almost painfully obvious among companies and countries. The fact that both are driven by the same motive force, that of the growth of e-Services, makes their differences all the more striking.

(7-Dec-10) Google's just launched eBookstore, which made available approximately 3 million digital books from more than 4,000 publishers, will be a boon for the nascent e-tablet market, according to industry experts. It could also usher in...

A friend of mine gave the gift of a new Kindle for Christmas. Being the thoughtful type, he told the recipient he would leave it on his own Amazon account, and that she could buy as many books as she wished for the next couple of weeks. Another...

Note

There is real and growing interest in cloud computing despite the overuse and overhype of the term cloud. One of the fastest growing areas of the cloud is cloud-based development. Enterprises of all sizes are evalutating the potential of...

Template/Policy

This template will help you build a business plan for the enterprise as well as document business justifications and cautions for developing in the cloud.

While cloud computing hype can be overblown, actual benefits are out there. Start by understanding the types of cloud service and what they can do for you. This note cuts through the cloud hype so you can start reaping tangible results.

Interest in cloud computing is strong among small enterprises as they explore potential for cost savings and agility. The disruptive potential of the cloud exists, but be careful to set appropriate cost saving expectations when considering cloud...

Small enterprises are often able to make higher risk investments in emerging technology for lower costs, and to take advantage of large enterprise capabilities, such as security and flexibility. Cloud computing is one such technology that can...

In technology, the ancient regime was driven by Wintel (Windows and Intel), mostly: a famously paranoid Andy Grove, paired with Bill Gates, the most competitive strategist (or strategic competitor) in the world. Everyone else got table scraps.

(9-Sep-09) Taking a page from the Salesforce.com playbook, SugarCRM has announced the availability of Sugar Community Edition on Amazon EC2 to provide CRM developers with an easy-to-deploy development environment in the cloud.

As economic conditions worsen, the tech world is abuzz with two new concepts: virtualization and the cloud. Combining these two concepts is driving vendors and analysts into climaxes of utopic speculation. The whole thing sounds very 1999, but...

At the recent 2008 Salesforce.com "Dreamforce" conference, Salesforce.com unveiled several new features and products. The most noticeable was formal integration with social networking giant Facebook.

In tough economic times, the retail industry becomes even more hyper-competitive than normal. Retailers fight for every sale, and as price-conscious consumers look to online retailers for deals, bricks-and-mortar retailers are finding it...