Amazon Cloud Storage Traffic Soars

Amazon Web Services said this week that its "Simple Storage Service" housed 262 billion objects at year-end of 2010, more than doubling in size from 102 billion objects at the close of 2009. The peak request rate for S3 is now in excess of 200,000 requests per second, according to Amazon’s Jeff Barr.

Amazon S3 Cloud Stores 262 Billion Objects Data Center Knowledge

Global Cloud Computing Revenue Forecast

Here's a forecast for global cloud computing revenue.

The Yankee Group global forecast for cloud computing revenue includes some key definitions.

Yankee Group defines midsize to large enterprises as 249 or more employees. The forecast also includes SMBs, which the firm defines as organizations with 2 to 250 employees. The forecast excludes consumer cloud services but does allow that small businesses will often adopt consumer cloud services for business use. Yankee Group excludes sole proprietors from infrastructure as a service and platform as a service because analysts do not believe the typical small business has a need for those services.

The forecast likely understates demand in the small business segment to the extent that many small software firms will have high incentives to buy platform and infrastructure services "as a service."

To forecast revenue, the analysts start with the concept of average revenue per employee per month. Yankee Group calculates ARPE for SaaS, IaaS and PaaS as $4, $2 and $1, respectively.

For example, a typical enterprise will spend $4 per employee per month on SaaS. This is equivalent to $48 per year per employee, or what a small business or sole proprietor might pay for an online backup service such as Mozy or Carbonite and simple collaboration software like Evernote or Dropbox.

Yankee Group Research Report

Rackspace Bullish on Cloud Computing, Of Course

Cloud computing implies data centers and good connectivity. That's good for Rackspace, and for capacity suppliers alike.

Cloud Computing: Less Adoption Near Term; More Than You Think Long Term

It would be entirely within historical precedents for cloud-based enterprise software to achieve less near-term revenue success than analysts expect, but more success than anticipated long term. That, in fact, is a common experience for truly-important and successful innovations.

Why Enterprises Move Apps into the Cloud

"Business agility" is the reason 65 percent of 140 surveyed enterprise information technology professionals give for desiring virtualization and cloud projects.

But cost savings are the second most important reason for moving at least some applications into the cloud. Competitive advantage also is seen as a top driver for such moves.

read the study here

Telco Opportunities in Cloud Computing

Ray Ozzie on Cloud Computing's Implications

"Whether in the realm of communications, productivity, entertainment or business, tomorrow’s experiences and solutions are likely to differ significantly even from today’s most successful apps," says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

"Tomorrow’s experiences will be inherently trans-media and trans-device," he says. "They’ll be centered on your own social and organizational networks."

"For both individuals and businesses, new consumption and interaction models will change the game," Ozzie says. "It’s inevitable."

To deliver what is required, specifically new levels of coherence across apps, services and devices, lots of innovation will happen to occur in the user experience, the interaction model, authentication model, user data and privacy model, policy and management model, programming and application model.

If you wonder why tier-one service providers think cloud computing is important, all this is why.

Dawn of a New Day Ray Ozzie:

Think Seriously About a Post-PC World, Ray Ozzie Says

"It’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and customers will ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur," says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has just announced his resignation.

"How would customers accomplish the kinds of things they do today? In what ways would it be better? In what ways would it be worse, or just different?," Ozzie says everyone must ask.

Whatever happens, the future is likely to include approaches that attack the complexity that now characterizes the PC-based computing model.

And make no mistake, Ozzi believes "we’re moving toward a world of cloud-based continuous services and appliance-like connected devices."

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that are constantly assimilating and analyzing data from both a user's real and online worlds.

Tomorrow’s devices will be relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-like by design. They will be instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss. A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

"Many years ago when the PC first emerged as an alternative to the mini and mainframe, the key facets of simplicity and broad approachability were key to its amazing success," Ozzie says. "If there’s to be a next wave of industry reconfiguration – toward a world of internet-connected continuous services and appliance-like connected devices – it would likely arise again from those very same facets."

Dawn of a New Day Ray Ozzie:

Tablets, Cloud Computing are at Hype Cycle Peak

Media tablets, private cloud computing, and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays are some of the technologies that have moved into the Peak of Inflated Expectations, according to the 2010 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle by Gartner.

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That virtually guarantees there will be a period of relative disillusionment coming for tablet devices and cloud computing. That is not to say they will not be important, only that the wave of hype now is cresting.

Gartner's 2010 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates Maturity of 1,800 Technologies

Cloud Computing: the Revenue Model, Not the Technology

Cloud computing has immediate revenue implications for hosted service providers now. Down the road, it is going to create new revenue models for all sorts of companies that used to sell in a "location-limited" manner. Whether you want to consider this "over the top everything" or just the extension of browser-based and Internet-based application delivery is sort of a matter of taste and your own preferences. But is will be a big deal. Here's one practical look at the matter.

Reduced cost (65 percent), scalability (62 percent), and rapid implementation (50 percent) are seen as primary benefits to cloud computing, according to a survey of more than 300 information technology professionals surveyed by PhoneFactor.

Some 87 percent of respondents indicated that they were planning to at least evaluate the use of cloud services.

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You can download the full survey results here: http://www.phonefactor.com/two-factor-resources/whitepapers/download-cloud-security-survey.

Smoothstone on Cloud Computing Business

Verizon Introduces "Computing as Service" for Smaller Businesses

Boosting bandwidth, adding more servers and turning up additional storage capacity to meet changing business needs quickly are among the many things small and medium-sized businesses now can do affordably with Verizon's new cloud computing offering, "Computing as a Service, SMB," that can be billed on a credit card.

Verizon's new offering is tailored to companies that have limited IT resources and do not want to own or manage their IT infrastructure. "CaaS SMB" is suited to smaller businesses such as retailers, manufacturers and professional services firms as well as independent departments within larger organizations, Verizon says. It also appeals to online businesses and application developers who want to code, test and stage in a reliable and scalable cloud environment.  All that's needed to get started is a credit card.

With Verizon CaaS SMB, customers can customize the server, storage and network resources required to manage a Web presence or enable company applications.  Unlike many other available cloud offerings, Verizon CaaS SMB offers built-in security including virtual private networks while allowing companies to add more security features.  CaaS SMB also lets companies retain previous computing configurations of their data and servers so data can be easily accessed in the future.

Cloud Computing Market is Bifurcated

Newer enterprises founded within the last 10 years are twice as likely to use cloud computing as are older firms, says the Yankee Group.

On the other hand, though cloud usage is significantly rarer among older enterprises, which hold a conservative view of the technology, those firms are most likely to choose more established names for their cloud needs, especially service providers and vendors such as AT&T, IBM and Microsoft, than newer cloud upstarts.

As often is the case in the communications and technology businesses, there is a natural bifurcation of supply and demand. Enterprises may prefer to work with other substantial companies, while small businesses will be more comfortable using smaller suppliers.

The smaller and newer firms seem to be optimistic that the cloud will evolve into a primary IT platform over the next several years and are willing to buy services from newer cloud companies coming from outside the traditional IT market, such as Amazon, Google or Terremark.

Yankee Group :: Research Report:

What Every Exec Needs To Know About The Future of eCommerce Technology | Forrester Blogs

Mobile e-commerce is going to happen in the cloud, or not at all, one might conclude from some Forrester Research findings.

On average, 8.85 different hosts were involved in delivering an e-ommerce transaction this year in the United States, and it was even slightly higher for German eCommerce transactions.

This year, nearly 20 percent of e-commerce transactions across more than 200 sites included at least one piece of content served by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) solution. In other words, 20 percent of e-commerce transactions already rely on cloud services provided by Amazon alone.

And appetite for such solutions seems to be growing. About 54 percent of executives are interested in moving to e-commerce solutions based on software-as-a-service.

What Every Exec Needs To Know About The Future of eCommerce Technology | Forrester Blogs:

Cloud Computing: When to Use it; When Not To

There's an old set of tradeoffs between buying services or "doing it yourself," where it comes to computing or communications infrastructure. Hosted VoIP virtually always makes more sense than buying systems for a smaller business. But premises-based solutions typically are more economical for large enterprises.

Something of the same argument can be when companies or people choose between cloud computing services and building their own data centers. Obviously, large enterprises often justify building their own data centers. Others might be able to justify renting space in somebody else's data center. Smaller organizations might well find that renting computing cycles is the better choice.

Google Sr. Manager, Production Network Engineering and Architecture at Google argues that the decision is highly dependent on duty cycle. Steady, predictable loads, especially at a high rate of utilization, will tip economics in favor of self-operated or co-located facilities. Highly-variable demand, and low volume, will tend to tip the economics in favor of a cloud computing solution.

"Think of it as taking a taxi vs. buying a car to make a trip between San Francisco and Palo Alto," says Gill. "If you only make the trip once a quarter, it is cheaper to take a taxi." But "if you make the trip every day, then you are better off buying a car."

"The difference is the duty cycle. If you are running infrastructure with a duty cycle of 100 percent, it may make sense to run in-house," says Gill. The detailed assumptions and analysis are here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgWfa8v6EGzjdElXQVFzU1plSXdEQmVHZ3M5YjlsNVE&hl=en&authkey=CM_RzL0E#gid=0

link to post

Amazon Web Services a $2.5 Billion Business by 2014?

UBS Investment Research analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald estimate that in 2010, Amazon Web Services will generate about $500 million in revenues and will grow to $750 million by 2011. By 2014, it would bring in close to $2.54 billion in revenues.

Researchers at IDC estimate the 2014 global market for cloud computing services of as much as $55 billion.

UBS thinks revenue and profit from Amazon Web Services could have a material impact on Amazon as soon as the latter quarters of 2010.

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How Big is Amazon’s Cloud Computing Business?

Martin Geddes on Socio-Economic Impact of Cloud Communications

"Telcos in particular are selling very outdated products, particular with voice, that needs substantial rethinking if it's going to have a viable business model going forwards, consultant Martin Geddes says.

If you want to know what might happen next month, or even next year, or if you want a technology tutorial, Martin Geddes is not necessarily what you will be looking for.

If you want to know the deeper, broader trends that shape communications, and what service providers might have to do to re-architect their business models, you might not be able to do better than to listen to Martin.

Here's an audio and written version of his latest musing on the future service provider business model.

Martin Geddes Interview: Cloud Communications and Future of Telecom

Can Google Apps Save a Business Money?

Many enterprises would have a really hard time quantifying the benefits from cloud applications, hosted applications or software as a service.

Google claims it can help businesses quantify how much they can save by switching to Google Apps. Smaller organizations might buy the logic.

Android Seems Built for the "Cloud"

One thing is clear with the release of Android version 2.2: Google seems to be much better positioned for a "cloud-based" approach to features.

The new Android version has a “cloud-to-device” feature that Apple doesn't seem able to match, at least for the moment.

If a user buys an app from the Android Marketplace using a PC web browser, he or she can select an Android device, and the item you just purchased will be pushed directly to that device over the air.

If a user is working in browser, then wants to leave and resume on the Android, that can be done. It is possible, using version 2.2, to push the the current URL from the PC web browser to the Android, over the air. If it’s a web page, it’ll open in the Android web browser; if it’s a Google Maps URL, it’ll open in the Android Maps app.

To the extent that mobiles do have a shot at "replacing PCs" in many cases, such cloud-based features likely will be important.

Daring Fireball: Post-I/O Thoughts