Cloud computing heavyweights Salesforce.com and Workday both reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue increases last week, maintaining their impressive growth track records. It’s fresh evidence that enterprise applications are going in the cloud, with new InformationWeek research showing that the fashion isn’t limited to small- and midsize-businesses or to lightweight “edge” applications like travel and expense management. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> Salesforce.com’s latest quarter ended July 31 was highlighted by a 31% year-over-year increase in revenue to $957 million — well sooner than the $941 million revenue mark expected by analysts at Wells Fargo Securities. The rise was fueled partly by the company’s $2.5 billion acquisition of cloud-based marketing firm ExactTarget. However the bigger story is Salesforce.com’s effort to focus on “the biggest and essential companies on the earth,” as Benioff put it during last week’s conference call with analysts. [ Want our latest insight on enterprise apps? Download Research: Cloud Software: Where Next?. ] Salesforce.com’s customer list already included the... Read More »

9 Tips on how to Avoid IT Midcareer Slump (click image for larger view) The latest rage in IT hiring is the DevOps engineer. Quick searches on LinkedIn and Dice.com show openings for roughly 250 such jobs, often for positions on a “DevOps team.” The flaw during this thinking is that the DevOps competency is something that may be hired or crafted by individuals or teams. If you’ve followed the DevOps movement, by now that it’s about building collaboration and cooperation between software developers and other IT pros. Thus, in hiring a DevOps engineer, you’re trying to usher in an interloper to make sweeping cultural changes throughout your company. Read that last sentence again, and view how well most organizations will reply to an interloper trying to institute sweeping changes. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> In the event you must hire for this critical position, so be it, but I highly recommend which you instead identify someone from within your... Read More »

9 Android Apps To enhance Security, Privacy (click image for larger view) In Gartner’s latest quarterly PC sales analysis, it’s hard to overlook the giant shift clear of desktop and laptop PCs toward tablets and smartphones. Worldwide PC shipments within the second quarter were down 10.9% from the year before, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of falling sales. U.S. government agencies are following this trend and, occasionally, even leading it. Per a Mobile Work Exchange report released in May 2013, many federal IT executives say they’ve launched new internal and customer-facing mobile applications, including apps for timecards, document sharing, inventory tracking, and weather watch and warning systems. an exceptional 59% of agencies have developed an enterprise-wide inventory for mobile devices and wireless contracts. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> The excellent news is that these federal users say their agencies are realizing the advantages of access to mobile devices, including improved communication with colleagues in several locations, employee productivity and availability... Read More »

Tax laws are always a number of beats behind technology. Interstate telephone calls were taxed according to the billing address of the telephone customer and the positioning on the end of a few copper wire of sending and receiving equipment. Now one end of a choice can be on a subway line, the opposite in an airplane traveling from Boston to Paris. Who gets to tax it? The most recent conundrum: Both business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions are moving to the cloud, and a few startups are putting all in their IT infrastructure in provider sites. How, in an integrated 50-state economy, are tax concepts speculated to take care of this in a method that’s practical and doesn’t become an unfair burden for any entity? Without a doubt , all computing occurs on servers which can be physically located somewhere. Maybe you hire a cloud provider to store company records. You could not know where those records are at any given moment. The storage vendor won’t... Read More »

Just a number of short decades ago, the most costly IT resources were computers, and human operators were interchangeable. Now the jobs are reversed — technology assets are becoming a commodity while organizations place a premium on people. Accordingly, the adoption of cloud computing brings with it a sequence of changes that directly impact the IT workforce. Failing to account for those changes can reduce the cost of the cloud and increase IT costs and dysfunction. There are at the very least four major areas of human cost to evaluate when planning a cloud strategy and choosing a cloud provider. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> No. 1: Cost Of Changed Expectations Employees aren’t rubes in terms of the cloud. Sure, a lot of people can’t differentiate software-as-a-service from platform-as-a-service, however the recent consumerization-of-IT phenomenon has reset expectations. Most folks regularly use cloud-based email clients, collaboration tools or even business apps. They’ve come to expect a brand new class of services... Read More »