Gartner: "The public cloud market is to grow 18.5% in 2013"

Gartner has released some research that suggests the global public cloud computing market is set to grow by 18.5% in 2013 which will see it rise from a $111bn market last year to $131 this year.  Yet the big news is that the public cloud market is set to total $677bn over the next three years.

The largest contributors are North America and Western Europe, but areas such as APAC and Eastern Europe are quickly growing with opportunities around cloud computing services.  To quantify that to percentages, Gartner suggests that North America will be responsible for 59% of new cloud computing spend through to 2016 with Western Europe accounting for 24%.

Gartner's research breaks down the cloud computing segments as follows:

• Business Process as a Service: 28%
• Software as a Service: 14.7%
• Infrastructure as a Service: 5.5%
• Management, Security and Automation: 2.8%
• Platform as a Service: 1%
• Cloud Advertising: 48%.

Clearly there are cloud services that have not been created yet that will be relevant in 2016,but this should give you a good idea of where things are heading.  If you need help on your cloud strategy and transitions contact us.

VMware Horizon Mirage adds app layering for a more flexible desktop

For years we have heard that this will be the year of VDI and those years have come and gone, and in that year there has been some sizable VDI deployments, but it is fair to say that the hype has not lived to the reality.  VDI is a great technology, but it isn't the only way to deploy desktops and VMware with their recent GTM of Horizon Mirage 4.0 allows IT departments to be more modular when architecting and deploying centrally managed desktop images using application packages.

VMware have View at the heart of their EUC proposition, but as IT departments have continued to deploy desktops in a traditional way VMware have had to take this in their stride and hence acquired Wanova allowing them to centralise the management of desktop images but allow them to be executed on the physical device.

Contained within the latest release (Horizon Mirage 4.0) is application layering which is a key technology in this release.

The process for building the image is straight forward, you create the base layer including commonly used applications across the business.  Once this layer is complete you configure additional layers containing applications only, these layers are then delivered independent of the base layer to managed desktops.   Prior to this applications were all part of the base layer, but the addition of the application layers allow IT departments to be more granular, and deliver a flexible work environment.  Each layer can be migrated, updated, or restored independently of the others.

Mirage is part of VMware's Horizon Suite end-user computing proposition which also includes Workspace and View.

Version 5.2 of View -- which is used to remotely access desktops running on a server, including bandwidth improvements, hardware accelerated 3D graphics and the platform can now understand native iOS and Android gestures.