Enterprise cloud adoption ticks up
A RightScale survey released last week said bigger companies — those with more than 1,000 employees — are “slightly more likely” to claim cloud adoption than their 
smaller brethren: 77 percent of large companies surveyed said they’re adopting cloud in some form compared to 73 percent for smaller companies. The survey reinforced what RightScale CEO Michael Crandell says all the time: most companies want to use multiple clouds to avoid over-reliance on one provider.
Of course companies like RightScale and competitors like Enstratius and Server Density, which promise a single dashboard for multiple clouds, have a vested interest in multi-cloud being the adoption mode of choice. So do most of the cloud providers who fear a world were Amazon Web Services will become the cloud standard.
Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services keeps chugging along. For Amazon’s first fiscal quarter, the business category including AWS, logged $ 750 million in net sales, down from $ 769 million from the historically strong fourth quarter, but still a pretty impressive number.
Mobile cloud access is hot hot hot
Not that it’s a surprise, but mobile is big. More people tap their cloud services with their tablets and smartphones instead of (or in addition to ) their PCs. that’s why Facebook bought Parse, the mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) provider. And why AWS is bulking up its mobile development efforts. And also why Rackspace and Salesforce.com are building up their own mobile development portfolios.
All of that activity comes after Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish. It’ s clear that expertise in mobile development platforms is a huge draw right now.
The takeaway from this activity? Expect more “acqui-hires” by big companies of mobile back end services players.
What’s up with Dell cloud?
In January, Dell said it would hold off on its public OpenStack cloud until the fourth quarter and two week sago it announced a partnership with SUSE to build out its private OpenStack implementations. Under that pact, Dell will package up SUSE’s OpenStack implementation on Dell hardware in a sort of easy-to-plug-in cloud appliance. In the background, the battle raging around Dell’s future ownership model has had to be a distraction. That may start easing up since Blackstone, which had been mulling its own bid, reportedly dropped those plans last week.
And, in a surprise appearance at the annual Silverlake Management conference in New York, company founder and CEO Michael Dell said IT security and cloud computing are key customer pushes for the company going forward — and defended the much-maligned PC business in a world obsessed with smartphones, according to Bloomberg News.
Mr. Dell is partnering with Silverlake to take his company private in a deal valued at about $ 24.4 billion when it was announced in January. Some shareholders, including Southeastern Asset Management, which owns about 8.4 percent of Dell shares, and Carl Icahn characterized that as a sweetheart deal that undervalues the company.
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