Cloud Computing

It didn’t take long for the lawsuits to start after Sony notified 77 million PlayStation Network and Qriocity online service customers that their credit-card data, billing addresses, and other personal information might have been stolen. On April 27th, Johns v. Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern…

Verizon Communications Inc.’s recent acquisition of cloud-computing company Terremark Worldwide Inc. caused some analysts to speculate that there may be more consolidation in the cloud-computing industry. Consolidation in the cloud-computing industry would not be surprising since, according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, cloud computing is at the top. This means there are many market participants in the cloud-computing…

Some of the cloud confusion that I previously discussed must be subsiding because even though only 7% of small businesses were using cloud computing services as of April 2010, that number is expected to exceed 10% by mid 2011 according to technology research firm IDC.  Either that or more small businesses feel they need to jump on the…

Here is a fun fact; Facebook is or was based on cloud computing.  Cloud computing consists of three types of computing services:  (1) software as a service; (2) platform as a service; and (3) infrastructure as a service.  Facebook used Amazon.com’s EC2 platform to build its social network website.  A computer platform is the computing…

If you pay attention to the recent marketing of some big tech companies such as IBM and Microsoft, you will notice that more references are being made to the “cloud.” For example, Microsoft’s television commercials use the phrase “to the cloud.” When references to cloud computing start seeping into marketing material intended for the general public, it…

If you suffer from Cloud confusion, you are not alone. A recent study from Hubspan, an application integration and hosting company, found that about 39% of the companies in the study either planned to move some business application to the cloud or had no interest in to add a cloud or SaaS based project. The top reason…

The United States leads sales for Web-based business software for 2009 accounting for 74% of the $13.2 billion market. While Europe, Africa, and the Middle East were a distant second accounting for 13% of total sales for software-as-a-service (“SaaS”). The difference between the United States and the rest of the world is dramatic, but understandable when you…

Hewlett-Packard (“HP”) and Dell are engaged in battle over the acquisition of 3PAR. 3PAR is a small storage company that has innovative technology to handle the amounts of documents, photos, and videos being uploaded to the Internet every day. Just how important is this storage company HP and Dell’s cloud business? Thomson Reuters estimate that 3PAR’s revenue for…

Recently, I discussed the importance of thoroughly investigating a cloud computing company before handing over your data or information technology operations to a stranger. This topic begs the question of how to go about investigating these companies. Some of the larger, public companies make some of the relevant information publicly available. For example, Salesforce.com publishes some of the…