Survey Sez 10/26/12
Keep it simple, scalable and secure is the approach of small and medium businesses in adopting business clouds, says a Strategy Analytics Business Cloud Strategies (BCS) report. Unlike larger organizations that have invested in both public and private clouds for applications and infrastructure, SMBs prefer public Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings that are easy to use, manage and integrate with other infrastructure and applications, it adds. Security remains a concern shared with larger firms. “Many SMBs have moved nearly all of the applications that they can to public SaaS clouds,” notes Mark Levitt, director/Business Cloud Strategies research. “In the next 12 to 24 months, SMBs will explore how to move their remaining applications to run on public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds”…A new white paper from Infonetics Research examines how edge routing technology are helping carriers meet the demands of growing video traffic, surging mobile backhaul traffic and cloud services at the IP edge. Comments Michael Howard, Infonetics Research’s co-founder/principal analyst for carrier networks/author of the white paper, "The great migration from TDM to IP has been in motion for over a decade and, just as carriers are nearing completion of their IP packet networks, they’re faced with new challenges from video, mobility and the cloud that have the ability to overwhelm these networks." Other findings: The current IP edge comprises separate overlay networks for multiple services and is not up to the task of providing the capacity and service granularity today’s video and data services require; and the “new IP edge: is a consolidated multiservice delivery point for IP video, mobile, and cloud services…According to Juniper Research, smartphone shipments topped 157 million in 3Q12, with Samsung continuing in the lead, shipping more than 56 million units (almost double that of Apple, which sold 26.9 million). While other smartphone vendors, including Nokia and RIM, posted disappointing shipments for the third quarter, LG posted a 24-percent quarter-over-quarter growth with 7 million smartphone shipments. To beat its rivals Samsung and Apple, “LG needs to better its smartphone line-up and rebuild its position within the second-tier smartphone segment – in order to improve profit margins and effectively to compete against players including Huawei, Motorola and HTC,” the group says.