The volume of the Layer 2-3 switch market segment of the market has increased by 46.9% compared to the same period last year. The market for Layer 4-7 devices, including application delivery controllers is also growing at rapid pace. WLAN revenues grew by 28 percent in each of the last three years.

SDN is a network approach that’s arisen to support the needs to cloud computing, virtualization and multi-tenancy. Workloads have changed – there is more virtual traffic, which has necessitated the need for a lot more flexibility in the data center.

Cloud and mobility are the two key paradigm shifts when it comes to enterprise IT networks, the report says. The network was static and reliable, and it met the needs of IT. That needs to change now. Why does it need to change? Because of the explosion of traffic.

Analysts believe the most important factor for growth in the corporate sector is the BYOD trend. In addition, significantly increasing in the use of Wi-Fi technology to offload data traffic on mobile networks, operators are driving the growth.

Mobile devices in the last year have generated a number of important trends, both in terms of technology and in terms of business. This year, the personal mobile devices employees will have an even greater impact on the organization of work in companies that will lead to an overestimation of network resources and will force organizations to support a wide range connected to the corporate network. IDC expects there will be 30 billion connected devices by 2020 and more than two-thirds of workers are accessing their enterprise network from their personal devices.

Similarly, the use of video for commercial purposes has increased in couple of years. According to IDC, applications like YouTube, combined with social and collaborative services like video conferencing, are significantly contributing to the volume of the SDN market and enterprise networking.

Furthermore, many companies in varying degrees start to involve in the cloud technologies. These include compute and storage services at the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) layer, software as a service (SaaS) layer. IDC found that in-house traditional IT is expected to drop to 62% compared to 68% of spending this year, with increased spending in public cloud, off-premises private cloud and internal private cloud.

Other factors that contributing to the support of SDN network include SDN-enabled switches, routers and network equipment. Companies like HP, Dell, IBM, Cisco and Oracle are early adopter of both hardware and software for enabling SDN, which would include servers, storage, networking and management control planes.

The APAC cloud market has also been witnessing increasing adoption of next-generation technologies. However, the requirement of high speed and data security in a cloud infrastructure could pose a challenge to the growth of this market. Moreover, SMBs are demanding for data backup and security measures to be incorporated as a part of the business solutions being delivered over the cloud infrastructure.

According to a report from RightScale, SMBs users are becoming more comfortable using the cloud. TrendMicro forecast that the global cloud security software market was valued at $241 million in 2010 and is expected to reach $963.4 million in 2014; growing at a CAGR of 41.4 percent.

In recent times, there has been an increasing demand for public cloud services in various enterprises across the APAC region, following the rapid evolution of cloud computing and cloud-based services. SMBs are the major adopters of public cloud services as they do not have the required capital infrastructure to set up their own private cloud infrastructure.

The increasing demand for public cloud services is resulting in the establishment of a number of data centers that cater to the cloud computing requirements of enterprises. The enterprises procuring these services are liable to pay the vendors for the period during which they utilize cloud services. Thus, the increasing demand for public cloud services is an emerging trend that is expected to drive the growth of the SMB Cloud market in the APAC region during the forecast period, says the report. Moreover, the less complex cloud interfaces and self-service provisions of cloud computing are also helping many organizations to manage cloud applications with limited resources.

According to the report, SMBs are increasingly adopting cloud-based services due to the drastic reduction in costs of cloud technology and their low-cost application delivery model. The key vendors dominating this market space are Verizon Communications Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., Rackspace Hosting Inc., Google, IBM and Microsoft.

As in previous years, CloudTimes is proud to announce to be a media partner for this year’s Forecast conference. ODCA’s once-a-year cloud computing and big data event taking place at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on June 17 and 18 in conjunction with GigaOM Structure.

“Forecast 2013 is about demonstrating how the enterprise ready cloud is here today and sponsors and speakers are critical to the success of the two-day event,” said Marvin Wheeler, executive director, Open Data Center Alliance. “With just about one month to go before Forecast 2013 officially begins the momentum and excitement surrounding the event continues to grow. We look forward to welcoming our sponsors, speakers, and the global IT, cloud and big data communities to San Francisco next month.”

Forecast offers a unique opportunity for participants to engage with their peers on top-of-mind issues related to cloud deployment such as compute infrastructure as a service (CIaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software defined networks (SDN), platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud security, and to hear about the latest ODCA usage models from ODCA leadership. Forecast 2013 attendees will gain a solid understanding of how ODCA is driving the enterprise ready cloud and how companies can leverage the work of ODCA to immediately begin implementing their own cloud strategies and architectures based on ODCA requirements.

With the evolution of cloud computing and virtualization, IT managers have had to change in recent years the way we interact with technology. An important part of this change has come from the hand of software defined technologies.

This development does not only affect virtualization. Now it is possible to optimize the performance of complex hardware systems. For example, instead of creating a physical NIC, an administrator can create hundreds of virtual NIC from a network. These innovations have helped data centers to improve the control, management and data loads.

In a series of three articles, we will try to explore the potential of Software Defined Networking, keys vendors and products, recent development on Software Defined Networking, key acquisitions and the market potential.

Software Defined Networking: The Future of Networking

We are about to witness a revolution in the networking towards so-called “Software Defined Networking” or “Software Defined Network” (SDN). It is not quite easy to define what is meant by SDN. SDN enables innovation in all kinds of networks — including data centers, wide area telecommunication networks, wireless networks, and enterprises and in homes — through relatively simple software changes.

Definition on Wikipedia: “Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to building data networking equipment and software that separates and abstracts elements of these systems. SDN allows system administrators to network services more easily through abstraction of lower level functionality into virtual services. This replaces having to manually configure hardware.”

SDN thus gives owners and operators of networks better control over their networks, allowing them to optimize network behavior to best serve their and their customers’ needs. For instance, in data centers SDN can be used to reduce energy usage by allowing some routers to be powered down during off-peak periods.

SDN focuses less on decoupling and more on programming interfaces that provide network equipment, whether or not a separation of control plane and footblocks. A secondary reason for this shift in focus is because Cisco recently announced that as part of its offer of SDN, it would provide API across multiple platforms.

This is not only a focus on Cisco, and other vendors, including Arista, Extreme and Juniper currently provide direct access to their products. An advantage of this approach is that it allows very detailed access and controls the network elements, but does not provide a central point and is vendor specific.

With a common definition of SDN, overall control of the network is achieved by centralizing logic of the control plane function, and network operations organization can cope with a group of network devices as a single entity. With SDN, network flows are controlled at the level of abstraction of the global network, rather than at the individual device level.

The group most associated with the development of standards based on SDN is the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). The ONF was launched in 2011 and has a vision to make the OpenFlow and Linux Foundation’s new OpenDaylight based SDN as the new standard for networks. The SDN ecosystem amplitude is reflected in the fact that today ONF has more than 70 members of various types, including suppliers providing silicon and switches, network devices, controllers, test equipment, telecommunication services, data center services, hyper-scale and smartphones.

Potential of SDN

SDN lets network operators manage, configure, optimize and secure network resources quickly via dynamic, automated SDN programs, which are independent on proprietary software.

SDN addresses the ever changing network requirements to the dynamic computing and software needs of data centers, cloud environments, etc. The driving trends for a new network paradigm include the rise of cloud services, focus on Big Data, consumerization of IT, and changing network patterns.

With the cloud is more flexible now in the IT collection, services and applications, there is virtually on demand from virtual server clusters. However, most networks – whether in the data center or in the corporate network – not built for this type of computing. They are more rigid and oriented to the physical connections. One way out of this dilemma promises SDN. The new technique can also virtualize the network so that they can respond flexibly to the needs of different applications.

SDN enables automated virtualization an open network infrastructure unlike the conventional very hierarchical network architectures. Due to the increasing virtualization of networks, we will see a high demand and a correspondingly significant market growth for SDN in the coming years.

For example, cloud providers will benefit from the new technology, since they receive a highly scalable multi-tenancy environment. Service providers can offer higher pay services by policy-based control and analysis in a more flexible way.

Using open APIs, third party could provide advanced networking features and services, such as load balancers, or intrusion prevention systems. Providers are also working on multi-tenant, virtual switches with ports spread across multiple physical systems.

There is no doubt that SDN can provide significant value to IT organizations. There is also no doubt that in the current environment, SDN is only suitable for early adopters. However, given the combination of the huge investments being made by the big players, along with the current wave of acquisitions, the SDN landscape is likely to change significantly in the next 12-18 months.

In coming days, we would see the availability of the functionality that enables organizations to effectively manage this new form of networking. The second is the availability of a wide range of applications that leverage centralized control inherent in most forms of SDN.

After more than a year of announcements, Google launched its paid YouTube channels. The service allows YouTube viewers to access premium contents from select content providers. Monthly subscription rate starts at $.99 with a 14-day free trial. Some content creators also offer discounts for those who will pay an annual rate.

As of now, there are 30 channels available for subscription. Google said it is still on a pilot mode but they plan to add more channels in the future. Some of the channels available include Sesame Street, National Geographic TV and Ultimate Fighting Championship.

But why?

Google has made their money largely through advertising and they have maintained that this is the best model for them. They have, through the years, launched several paid services and products but more than 90 percent of their earnings come from advertising.

The move is obviously part of their effort to encourage their content creators to come up with more quality content. The stiff competition, ever increasing number of content creators and continuous aversion of viewers to ads make it harder for content creators to earn enough through ads.

The move will allow these creators to continue with their free content and still open up a new revenue stream. It is not hard to believe that more quality content is the be all and end all of this whole exercise. It could also be their way of protecting their content creators and avoid having them go off to other channels that are more willing to give them more revenue stream, marketing assistance or higher revenue percentage.

However, this is Google we are talking about. There’s got to be a higher purpose.

Google’s portfolio has always branched out towards growing digital as a medium as strong as traditional media. As of now, digital is treated as an extra distribution channel but not as a content source.

Google’s effort to create more quality content could be a move towards strengthening their position as a content source good enough to be bought. Back in 2011, Google offered several content creators an advance to try and help them create more contents. They chose their premium content creators which included Ashton Kutcher, Reuters and Phil De Franco. Phil DeFranco is the most successful. They renewed their agreement with less than half of their original line up last November. This may be a continuation of that initial effort. Should they succeed, they will are going to start developing their own a market, one that’s comfortable and open to paying for digital contents.

Is there a market?

Everyone who has ever created a content and tried selling them online would know that FREE is the name of the game online. Selling digital content is harder than selling ice in Antarctica. It simply doesn’t make sense for anyone to pay for something they know they could get for free.

However, it does happen. Anime video service Crunchyroll has more than 200,000 subscribers. This happened just 6 months removed from when they reached 100,000 subscribers. Crunchyroll is a company that brings in Japanese contents just a day after it was aired on Japanese TV. Its expansion will include Korean content and other Asian contents. It includes both TV contents and films.

Bigger content sources such as the NBA also offer premium contents for premium members. The market does exist. People are willing to pay if the content is worth their penny. There is also Willo.tv. YouTube worked with Willow.tv to bring Indian cricket games online. The partnership is still on. In fact, it may be going stronger since Willo.tv is offering exclusive contents to YouTube.

They are definitely a long way from the likes of bigger film companies and magazine publishers but it is definitely possible. It goes back to the supposed original vision of YouTube, give everyone a chance to become content creators and get access to a captive audience.

The problem goes back to the original one

Given all these proof that a paying market does exist, the question might not be whether or not it is a viable business model. That may be a question that has long been answered by Google. It could be all about what it has always been about, creating quality content.

The question, of course, is more complicated than it seems. There is an obvious difference in the behaviour of online viewers and traditional media consumers. In the first slew of Google’s effort to encourage content creators to produce more quality contents, some of the biggest content creators weren’t renewed. Phil DeFranco, a YouTube born superstar, was renewed and ended up being the most successful. Franco knew his audience and knew how to design contents that people would want to watch.

Content creators need to come up with a unique selling proposition that would convince their audience to shell out some dough. For one, there are already tons of full movies that allow viewers to watch some of the rarest and hard to find movies. Thus, offering full movies might not be something people will go for.

Conclusion

Eyes should not be on questioning whether or not there is market out there for YouTube’s paid subscription because the answer is yes. The question is on whether or not content creators can create contents that people are willing to pay for.  A dollar a month doesn’t sound much until you realize that if you want to subscribe to 10 channels, that would cost you $10 a month . Can these content creators make it worth it? Can they deliver the quantity and quality of content worthy of that $10. Can they create contents that could be as legendary as Friends, The Tonight Show, The Price is Right, Mythbusters, Transformers and others.

The State of Virtualization Survey Storage survey, suggests that businesses are willing to virtualize their mission critical applications, but higher storage costs and its integration with higher cost Flash memory and solid state disks (SSDs) discouraging organizations from applying these fast technologies to virtualization workloads that are most latency-sensitive. The study conducted in March is based on the responses of 477 IT professionals from a range of questions about virtualization and its impact on storage.

The survey shows that 44 percent of respondents saying higher storage costs were a “serious obstacle” or “somewhat of an obstacle” preventing to use virtualize environments to their workloads. Nearly 42 percent said performance degradation or the inability to meet performance expectations were the factor not to opt for virtualization.

More than 52 percent of respondents said that storage accounts for more than 25 percent of their virtualization budget, while 80 percent said that they are not using any public cloud storage. SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle and SAP are the most common Tier-1 applications targeted for consolidation.

The findings make it clear; storage is the ‘big’ problem IT pros must solve today. The value and need to virtualize critical applications is now well recognized, but soaring storage costs and unpredictable performance workloads associated with virtualization and consolidation projects continue to impede their progress, says the survey. Surprisingly, nearly one in three respondents said they are still avoiding virtualization projects altogether because the related storage concerns and costs are too high.

According to a recent study from IDC, virtual machine software unit shipments still remain healthy and growing, but have seen some slowdown in mature markets that have high virtualization rates. Other factors that are impacting this market are the increased competition among companies like VMware and Red Hat and Microsoft.

It turns out that yes, the US Army has been taking advantage of cloud technology, with High Performance Technologies, Inc. helping the federal government design and implement a private cloud that will convey the latest intelligence information to US troops in Afghanistan, in real or near-real time.

The US Army’s Big Data cloud program, which started in April of 2009, has a reach that can extend all the way to forward operating bases, which can also double as local nodes that collect data from UAVs or other sources. The cloud went full live in March of 2011, after the US army has done extensive tests and proven that the cloud can really meet their needs when it comes to handling “intel” analysis, processing, and production.

Dubbed the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A), the system will take 9 different IT systems for intelligence gathering and analysis and deploy them into a single cloud-based architecture. The DCGS-A will serve as a direct replacement for the various stovepiped systems that the military has been using to collect and analyze intelligence data. The main problem with the old systems is that they tend to use proprietary data formats, which means they are not interoperable. The new replacement will speak a language that’s common across the intelligence community.

Abandoning Proprietary Data

The DCGS-A has already received the greenlight from Pentagon, and the system itself is fully compliant with the common architecture for IT systems in the overall intelligence community. The new system wasn’t embraced immediately, though. The DCGS-A got some negative national media attention a year or so ago, when a lot of service members voiced out a desire to use the old data analytics platform, Palantir, over DCGS-A under the mistaken belief that the former had some functions for intelligence analysts that the latter didn’t have.

The total number of requests for a deployment of Palantir was 13, and the army fulfilled 9 of them, citing that the reasons for the request had merit, as Palantir was easier to use for the servicemen who grew accustomed to the system. However, the army believes that the situation will change once a people are properly trained in the use of DCGS-A, as Palantir simply didn’t comply with the requirements of the military, particularly with regard to information sharing and data interoperability.

Legacy Systems to Be Phased Out This Year

A new version of the DCGS-A is currently being tested, with the aim of fixing certain kinks in the top secret corners of the system. The elements are scheduled to be tested in the second half of 2013, during the US Army’s Network Integration Evaluation. Once the new iteration passes the Army’s testing, it will get deployed as a replacement for all the legacy systems that have been filling out the gaps.

By Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo

In the past several years, as cloud computing has become one of the top IT priorities, we can agree that, for the most part, we’ve overcome the primary concerns associated with the technology – security, reliability and performance. With these concerns at least partly alleviated, it’s important to now look at how to quickly locate your data in the cloud.  While the cloud is a revolutionary delivery platform for its scalability, flexibility and freedom to place a company’s most powerful IT assets in the hands of any user, there’s one capability that your cloud may complicated: access to relevant knowledge.

The move to the cloud, plus the continuity of enterprise systems, plus social media, plus growth in unstructured content, equals fragmentation and an inability to find relevant knowledge. Beyond the challenge of a highly heterogeneous environment, the reality is that cloud environments, combined with an increased number of data channels, pose one of the biggest knowledge gaps facing companies today. Cloud-based systems house critical information, and with the amount of data doubling every 12 months, it’s another place where knowledge may be lost. Cloud-based systems contribute to an already crowded chaos of applications, databases and online resources.

IT has traditionally handled this problem through integration – that has been a very complicated, time-consuming and expensive task. In a fragmented and heterogeneous environment, enterprises should resist the temptation to migrate data to a central system. The more data moves around, the more complicated it becomes to find again. And we’ve all learned from experience that systems of record never really contain the “only” record.  Fragments of data simply proliferate outside the system of record. Different processes, point solutions, employee-activated cloud solutions, the list grows. Unfortunately, employees end up using incomplete or wrong information, or simply re-inventing the wheel.

Unified indexing technology is the way forward thinking companies will access knowledge in the 21^st century. The foundation of advanced enterprise search, unified indexing technology, easily assembles fragments of information on demand and presents them, in context, to operational users. As an example, consider how Google and Yahoo have transformed the internet by aggregating, consolidating and unifying information from the world’s websites into one index.  These technologies by nature are less concerned with security and complex systems and more focused on the homogeneous web content. Advanced unified indexing technology, however, designed for enterprise systems, performs securely in the same manner within the vast variety of systems, both on-premise and in the cloud – email, databases, CRM, ERP, social media, etc. – and mostly secure content of varied data formats, structured or unstructured. The technology securely crawls those sources, unifies the information in a central index, normalizes the information and performs mash-ups on demand, within a given context – whether that is a sales person working on a large deal, a customer service agent solving a complex case, or an engineer working on a new product. Think of a world in which every document an executive needs on any platform is instantly organized, indexed and searchable just as consumers search the Web. This type of environment is where the cloud’s hidden knowledge can be extracted, and correlated to enterprise content.

The proliferation of data found in cloud-based environments is not going to stop. In fact, it’s going to expand exponentially. If enterprises do not adapt methods of extracting and correlating data from these systems, bringing those sources in the mix, then their challenge of accessing important customer, prospect or research knowledge – to respond to customers and markets with greater relevance and immediacy – will only become greater.

Louis Têtu is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Coveo. Prior to Coveo, Louis co-founded Taleo Corporation, the leading international provider of on-demand Internet software for talent and human capital management, acquired by Oracle for $1.9B in February 2012. Louis held the position of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors from the company’s inception in 1999 through 2007. In 2004, Taleo was recognized as the 11th fastest growing technology company in the United States within the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and in 2005 it was the only software company among the Inc. 500 winners to have an Initial Public Offering.

According to research by Gartner, half of the world’s companies will seek from their workers to individually provide devices for work by 2017. It is estimated that about 15 percent of the company, due to the nature of their work, will never move to the kind of business philosophy, while about 40 percent of them offered to employees to choose the model.

Behind these numbers hide the fact economic calculation: According to Gartner’s calculations, ensuring work equipment, such as computers, mobile phones or tablets, is about $600 per worker per year. For large companies with more than 2,500 employees it can represent a significant cost on an annual basis.

BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades, says the report. The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs.

For Gartner, more generally, the phenomenon of “bring your own device” means a factor in boosting innovation and the company’s business that guarantees an increase in the number of users of mobile applications among workers, while also offering more possibilities than traditional systems communication such as email. Examples in this sense can be attendance records, the schedule of activities, the list of inputs and outputs and applications personnel management that promote collaboration between offices of human resources and employees by allowing them to directly insert and update of personal data or any other claims relating to the internal life of the company.

BYOD is currently used by most companies with a turnover of $500 million to $5 billion and is least favorite in Europe, while in India, China and Brazil it is the most popular.

While such business philosophy gives employees the opportunity to choose the devices that will work, they still expect the employer to them in some way compensated for the use of their own resources. The more employees and their different devices, this means greater safety costs, multiple licenses and more potential problems.

As regards to the concerns connected with BYOD, the report obviously fear that data leakage, especially with devices specifically designed for sharing data on the cloud. However, Gartner notes that the ‘ IT is evolving rapidly in order to respond to the security challenges posed by the BYOD. More than half of the companies define their own high security measures for corporate data transiting on mobile devices.

According to Executive Vice President of Platforms Jay Rossiter, closing the less attractive and older Yahoo products will free up resources which can be used for developing mobile applications for weather and email. Yahoo has recently introduced a new email application for tablet devices which is able to organize messages by sender. It also released a new application for weather forecast checking on smartphones.

Up until March of this year, Yahoo has made some mobile progress with more than 300 million active subscribers. There was also an increase in Flickr and Yahoo Mail active daily users. With such promising results, Mayer is optimistic that the company can be a prime mover in mobile applications in the years to come.

Microsoft has also released its latest financial results which showed a large cut in income due to decreased global personal computer sales. However, investors were said to have expected worse. The company also posted positive results from its Xbox, software tools, and Office divisions. It reported 46.1 billion as net income for the fiscal quarter ending last March. The figure was up 18% from the same period last year. According to Klein, Microsoft will also be releasing a new Windows 8 version towards the end of 2013 as a response to user feedback. 

Great infographic by Ciena – see below. Also read the recent guest article by Ciena’s Jim Morin: “3 Crucial Areas That Can Improve Your Cloud Experience“.

Although Samsung doesn’t intend to offer a phone which can be controlled by the brain, research shows that this project can help those individuals with mobility issues to finish tasks which had been impossible before. However, it should be noted that Samsung didn’t pioneer this technology as there had been companies which had already launched similar devices.

According to Roozbeh Jabari, the Dallas-based University of Texas assistant electrical engineering professor, the device being developed with Samsung doesn’t need liquid bridge and takes only 10 seconds to setup. However, users must wear the wire-covered cap. According to their research, it is possible for a person to start an application and make selections if he concentrates on an icon which is blinking at a particular frequency.

It was General Electric’s involvement that allowed Pivotal to venture off on their own last April 1, with a value of almost $1 billion, and about eight months away from having their own product.

One of the more noticeable changes in Pivotal is the fact that they are now referring to themselves as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), and they have admitted to drawing a lot from technology from their days with EMC and VMware’s stable of industry-level products and services. Pivotal is boasting integrated data fabrics, support for lecacy infrastructure, and programming frameworks, with their biggest target being the inclusion of real time telecommunications and future retail scenarios.

Pivotal’s success, if and when it happens, will be a milestone for the technology industry, which has a lousy record when it comes to making a successful company that starts out big. Pivotal is currently banking on a chance to revolutionize the way in which big businesses create software. Now that everything from cars, to turbines, to household appliances have sensor-enabled telemetry that can collect data about place and status, it has become possible to create industry-level applications in a matter of days or weeks, as opposed to months or years.

Pivotal is currently 1,250 employee-strong, with majority of the staff coming from earlier acquisitions by both EMC and VMware. They still have a strong library of software for cloud computing system building, data storage, management and analysis software, which came from its mother companies. Pivotal will be filling in gaps in the services offered by Amazon’s AWS, Google, and Microsoft – all of which offer similar cloud-based services but lack aspects of the business software creation capability.

General Electric’s goal, on the other hand, is to build businesses for the so-called “Internet of Things,” which has greater awareness of the status of its engines, power systems, and medical devices. It’s not as easy as it sounds on paper, though. Industrial data is vastly different from consumer data, and will need a highly reliable software to serve as the backbone. For instance, if the software powering Twitter encounters an error, the worst that would happen is that users will see a “fail whale” graphic. But if a software that’s controlling a jet engine goes awry, lives and property may be lost. This is where Pivotal will be proving its mettle in the months to come.

As mentioned above, the industry is keeping a close eye and hoping that Pivotal makes a lasting mark even if it didn’t go through the small startup phase. Going by past experience, tech companies that started out big eventually fizzled out, such as the high speed cable provider backed by several cable companies, @Home, or IBM and Apple’s answer to Microsoft, Tagligent.

According to Microsoft, for the last six months the number of subscribers Azure has increased by 48% .Quarterly revenue of the Microsoft Server and Tools Business (STB) business, which includes the development and promotion of the Azure project, grew by at least 10% of the last nine calendar quarters.

Azure cloud services not only include Windows Server-environment and mechanisms for remote office, but products like SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Xbox, Visual Studio, Dynamics, System Center, and others. Microsoft officials noted that this year there will be products that allow remote control of advertising. In addition, the software giant expects a turnover of one billion dollars from the Office 365 cloud application.

Microsoft launched its AWS competitor Infrastructure-as-a-Service, two weeks ago. So far, Azure was pretty much a platform-as-a-service game and therefore not directly competes with AWS. That all changes now, which is probably why Microsoft is beating the drum on the momentum of Azure.

Beyond last 12 months sales, Windows Azure is a matter taken very seriously by Microsoft, which invests heavily on the subject, hoping to convince users that Azure is quite credible to Amazon. Microsoft has announced the commercial availability of the extension to the Azure IaaS world, with new services around the hosting of virtual machines, or improvements around the VPN for certain components of Azure. Earlier last month, Microsoft had unveiled new set of cloud services designed to more directly challenge Amazon and vowed to match the lowest price of AWS. In addition, Microsoft revealed Azure cloud-based Hadoop service known as Windows Azure HDInsight Service last year in a move to support open source project.

However, the Microsoft is still struggling to be truly recognized by users of cloud. According to analysts, the American manufacturer has failed to create competition among developers and especially start-ups. According to Bloomberg, 27% ​​of companies use Azure when they are 71% to turn to Amazon for their cloud needs. But according to Forrester analyst James Staten, the market share of Microsoft could reach 35% over the next year. It also believes that the Azure income will double from one year to another.