Better a disruptor than a disruptee, says NetSuite

Stuart Lauchlan — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:31:03 +0000

A week of good news, bad news for NetSuite.

The good news: the company posted yearly revenue of $236.3 million, a 22 per cent year-over-year growth and a new record. In the fourth quarter of 2011 alone, NetSuite pulled in a record-setting $64.1 million in revenue, a 23 per cent increase from 2010 – all of which beat Wall Street’s expectations.

The bad news: NetSuite posted an overall loss of $32 million for the full year.

But overall NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson is in upbeat mood:

From tapes on trucks to storage in the sky

Claudiu Craciun — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:47:07 +0000

Cloud backup, online backup or disk-to-disk backup (whichever name you want to call it) works in a very different way to traditional backup to tape. When you backup to tapes, it’s easy to visualise where your backups are for each day - you can point to your tape or tapes and say “that backup is from Tuesday night”. Even if you run incremental or differential backups to tape, it’s still very easy to envisage where the data is.

Is Europe ready to take down its data protection Cloudy trade barriers?

Stuart Lauchlan — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:39:39 +0000

Cloud buyers, including the public sector, will buy more with less and become more efficient - that was the not entirely original, but still bold ambition laid out by Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week:

Gartner: BI head to the Cloud

Rachel Fielding — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:27:56 +0000

One in three organisations will move to the Cloud to enhance their business intelligence capabilities in the next 12 months, analyst Gartner has said.

A survey of 1,364 IT managers and business users of BI platforms conducted by the analyst found that only 17% of organisations have replaced or plan to replace parts of their core BI functions with Cloud/SaaS offerings. However, almost a third already use or plan to use Cloud/SaaS options to augment their BI capabilities for specific lines of business or subject areas in the next 12 months.

Salesforce.com in analytics pricing u-turn

Rachel Fielding — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:13:26 +0000

Salesforce.com is to include analytics functionality in some versions of its CRM software after bowing to customer pressure and performing a u-turn on its pricing strategy.

Oracle opens up RightNow roadmap

Stuart Lauchlan — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:06:30 +0000

When Oracle swooped on Cloud CRM firm RightNow last October, the stakes were upped in the Cloud applications market. That much we all knew.

What was less clear was what exactly Oracle planned to do with its new toy once the short term thrill of seeing some crestfallen faces over at Salesforce.com had faded.

BT joins CloudSleuth

Martin Banks — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:59:02 +0000

BT Global Services has become the first of the `big gorilla’ telecoms carriers to sign up for Compuware’s CloudSleuth partner community and have its Cloud hosting services independently, and publicly, monitored globally for the service quality provided across datacentre facilities in Europe.

Web security for developers

Martin Banks — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:47:45 +0000

Defending web applications, particularly when they are running as SaaS service or in multi-tenant hosted environments, is one of the hot topics for developers at the best of times, and certainly so this year as Cloud services start to penetrate deeper in to the IT infrastructures of businesses.

Salesforce puts service desk in a phone

Martin Banks — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:44:43 +0000

Software as a Service has already established itself as viable service delivery model that many businesses can exploit. Now this year we can expect to see a far wider and more granular range of services come available, which in turn will shift the emphasis for developers from `re-inventing the wheel’. There will be less need to code up businesses and a shift to orchestrating existing services together.

A Parliamentary Tale

Gary Flood — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:35:10 +0000

What can we say about an entity that still publishes its most important documents on the skins of calves… but which is also putting wi-fi into as many nooks of its Victorian HQ as physically possible - and which has committed to being mostly Cloud-based within two years?