Total spending on IT infrastructure products for deployment in cloud environments is projected to increase by 15.3 percent this year, for a total value of $41.7 billion. That includes spending on servers, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches, according to International Data Corp.

In its new forecast, Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, IDC says pubic cloud datacenters will account for the majority of this spending, projected to be 60.5 percent. Off-premises private cloud spending is expected to account for another 14.9 percent of spending. On-premises private clouds will account for 13.1 percent of the total.

After the slowdown seen in 2016, we expect to see spending on IT infrastructure for public cloud deployments return to double-digit growth in 2017, says Natalya Yezhkova, research director for storage systems at IDC. Growing demand for access to agile IT resources and proliferation of next generation workloads will continue driving adoption of cloud-based services. In turn, this move leads to a shift in IT infrastructure spending from traditional enterprise on-premises deployments to datacenters delivering cloud services and corporate private clouds.

Investments in cloud IT infrastructure will increase across all regions, while the majority of regions expect to see a reduction in spending on non-cloud deployments, the IDC report notes.

Long-term, IDC expects spending on off-premises cloud IT infrastructure will grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 11.7 percent and reach a value of $47.2 billion in 2021. Public cloud datacenters will account for 80.4 percent of that amount, IDC says.

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Cloud computing market predicted to reach $41.7B | Health Data ... - Health Data Management

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Microsoft Acquires Deis To Broaden Cloud Computing Scope Forbes Microsoft wants more developers to use its platform and tools. Specifically, Microsoft wants more cloud computing developers to come into its fold. With this widely accepted truth in mind, it is perhaps logical to hear news this April 2017 of the firm ... Microsoft Azure Getting More Serious About Enterprise IT, Latest Cloud Effort Aims At Conquering Enterprise Market ...University Herald all 4 news articles »

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Microsoft Acquires Deis To Broaden Cloud Computing Scope - Forbes

Price cuts are a common occurrence in the cloud computing industry. The big cloud service providers have all steadily been bringing their prices down, but the industry still has long way to go before cloud costs become so compelling that other modes of infrastructure management simply do not make any sense.

A recent report by 451 Research shows that the cloud computing price war has moved on beyond the traditional Virtual Machine (VM) price battleground to object storage.

The research firm says that object storage pricing has declined by 14% over the past 12 months compared to a 5% drop in VM prices.

The research firm adds that VMs are not the loss leaders, as some in the industry make them out to be, becausemargins for VMs easily cross30%. If this is true, then we can expect prices to start coming down sharply over the next few years as the industry scales up withmore and more companies opting for cloud computing solutions.

Heres a quick look at some of our earlier coverage on price cuts:

As the shift from compute discounting moves towards compute and object storage price cuts, its going to be increasingly difficult for potential cloud customers to figure out who the cheaper cloud computing services provider is, as 451 Research points out.

While thats not necessarily a bad thing because overall costs are going down anyway, it is important for CSPs to now start differentiating themselves in areasother than pricing. Other factors will soon come to the forefront of marketing cloud services to enterprise and business customers. No longer will pricing be the only consideration.

Cloud computing is clearly still a buyers market, where providers will go to any length to acquire a customer. As such, this is the best time to move into a cloud-based solution rather than continue to invest in in-house infrastructure.

And thats also why hybrid is being touted as the next big cloud computing deployment model: large enterprises simply dont see the sheer cost advantage of a public cloud solution yet (and the operative word is yet), but hybrid gives them elasticity, while reducing their ongoing spend on upgrading their existing one-premise infrastructure.

Thanks for reading our work! We invite you to check out ourEssentials of CloudComputingpage, which covers the basics of cloud computing, itscomponents, variousdeployment models, historical, current andforecast datafor the cloud computing industry, and evenaglossaryof cloud computing terms.

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Cloud Computing Price Cuts Move from Virtual Machines to Object ... - 1redDrop

In almost any enterprise IT shop, you are likely to see at least one laptop sticker that says, "There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer." I understand that the saying is good for a laugh, but aside from that, it could not be further from the truth.

If we stick to the definition of cloud computing outlined by the U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the cloud has five attributes: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service. Do you notice anything on that list about location?

Cloud computing, in all its various deployment models, has fundamentally changed how computing works. It is not a place, but rather a way of managing IT resources.

If we dig deeper into the NIST definition of cloud computing, we can see it has three common service models:

Software as a service is a software deployment model where an application is delivered over the internet.

Platform as a service is a platform for the deployment of an application with the underlying infrastructure completely abstracted.

Infrastructure as a service is a model that allows for the deployment of typical infrastructure components, such as servers and storage, for running arbitrary workloads.

It is easy to understand why people think and often act like the cloud is a place.

Again, we have nothing about the location of the resources on this list. That is because the cloud is not a place.

To understand the confusion around the technology, it helps to think about the average consumer. To the average non-IT person, the cloud is a place to store documents, pictures and file backups. It could be iCloud, Dropbox or other consumer-centric services. We saw the term cloud work its way into the lexicon of the masses around the time of the emergence of the smartphone. For IT professionals, cloud computing means something entirely different. It has evolved from a place to store and access documents into a new way of thinking about IT services.

Simply put, cloud computing is a flexible and agile way of designing IT services, allowing resources to be fluid and elastic. It can be anywhere -- a data center, Amazon, Azure, a local colocation facility or a mix of locations. Cloud is a method to describe how IT happens and not where IT happens. It is about building infrastructure in a way that can scale easily and be consumed by the applications in a predictable way via an API. Cloud is also about building applications that scale when needed and that can run on any infrastructure, regardless of location.

It is easy to understand why people think and often act like the cloud is a place. Marketing departments misuse the word so often that the result is rampant confusion. When I see an IT engineer with a sticker proclaiming that the cloud is "just somebody else's computer," I usually presume that either this person simply does not understand the true definition of cloud computing and why it is a good thing for everyone or that he or she understands but distrusts it because it is such a signignifcant shift in thinking.

Cloud is about rethinking and redesigning IT services. To overcome this idea that it is just a bunch of computers running somewhere else, vendors, integrators and IT departments need to stop using the term incorrectly.

Find out more about the true meaning of hybrid cloud

Follow these tips to migrate to cloud

Choose between cloud and on premises

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The true definition of cloud computing is still lost on some IT pros - TechTarget

Tech giant Oracle is aiming to build a moat between itself and its marketing cloud competitors with its latest acquisition. The company announced late yesterday that it has agreed to buy digital ad measurement cloud company Moat for an undisclosed sum.

Moat will become a subsidiary of Oracle, operating within the auspices of its Oracle Cloud Data division, although the company was careful to mention that the acquired company will continue to operate independently.

"Moat has grown its attention analytics business by over 100 [percent] in the past year, providing actionable insights around viewability, brand safety, non-human traffic, and ad creative to over 600 publisher, brand and agency clients," said Eric Roza, SVP and GM of Oracle Data Cloud, in a statement. "With the Moat acquisition, Oracle Data Cloud now offers brands and publishers a full suite of targeting and measurement solutions to improve the outcome of virtually every type of digital advertising campaign."

Attention Analytics

New York-based Moat provides ad measuring analytics to digital platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Pinterest, that depend on advertising for their business models. According to Oracle, Moat's existing enterprise client base will help complement its own, while the new technologies it brings to the table will allow Oracle to provide companies with a full suite of ad targeting and measurement solutions.

In particular, acquiring Moat will give Oracle access to something called attention analytics" that typically refers to the tools that help Web sites see which parts of their pages visitors focus on most. That information can then be used to create advertising pricing based on which parts of the screen are most viewed by visitors. Oracle specifically noted that Moats tools could be used with video and display advertising.

The addition of Moat's clients brings the number of Oracle's clients to more than 600, including 97 of the top 100 U.S. advertisers. Oracle claimed the combination of services resulting from the merger will represent the most comprehensive cloud platform for marketing data and analytics in the world, allowing it to provide tools for virtually every type of digital advertising campaign.

Digital Advertising Faces Growing Pains

Oracle has been pursuing an aggressive growth strategy for its Oracle Data Cloud division over the past several years. The company has expanded the unit through several acquisitions, including Datalogix and BlueKai, as it looks to compete with other major tech providers in the sector such as Adobe, Salesforce , IBM, and Nielsen.

The market for digital advertising has skyrocketed in recent years, with advertisers expecting to spend more than $100 billion on digital ads by 2019. But despite the rapid growth, the sector has recently run into a number of problems ranging from ads appearing alongside videos or other content that the advertiser may not wish to be associated with to users skipping past or otherwise avoiding ads that automatically appear alongside other content.

Those problems have lead to the recent development of companies like Moat and its competitors that claim to improve the effectiveness of digital campaigns through the use of their analytics tools.

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CLOUD COMPUTING Oracle Buys Moat Cloud for Marketing Data and Analytics - CIO Today