After reporting stronger than expected second quarter earnings yesterday, Amazon has passed $100 billion in market cap this morning. The company’s shares are currently trading at around $225 per share, giving the e-commerce giant a $101.81 billion market cap.

Amazon’s sales for the quarter neared $10 billion, an increase of 51 percent from the same quarter in 2010. Net income decreased 8% to $191 million in the second quarter, or $0.41 per diluted share, compared with net income of $207 million, or $0.45 per diluted share, in second quarter 2010. But despite this decline in net income, Amazon was able to beat analyst expectations.

And the company’s stock is rallying this morning, thanks to bullish investors.

From InfoCloud

Sending your IT business to the cloud comes with risk, as those affected by these 10 colossal cloud outages can attest

As a concept, there's a lot to like about the cloud. Drop those bulky servers and get yourself a big, white hard drive in the sky. Someone else handles the upkeep and lets you put your data where you want it. Even the word "cloud" itself brings to mind a heavenly (if slightly fluffy) fantasy.

Joint development efforts will integrate both companies’ innovative solutions, extending the telepresence experience and web conferencing beyond the conference room

 Google today unveiled its long-rumored entry into the e-book sales world, not called Google Editions, as was previously speculated, but a more anonymous-sounding Google eBooks. The basic idea is to provide an entirely web-based e-book platform accessible from any device with a browser. The business model they’ve opted for is slightly less centralized than the competition, but not quite the distributed seller network I envisioned last week.

My wool-gathering regarding the decentralization of the e-book store model are all in that post, so we’ll just focus on the particulars of eBooks service for now.

As perception of cloud-based IT services by top-level IT management pros becomes increasingly positive, an increase in investment in at least one area of the cloud is expected in 2011 over the current year.
A new survey conducted on behalf of the US-based data center services company Savvis found that more than 60 percent of companies expect to increase spending on hosted software and Software-as-a-Service solutions. About half of survey respondents expect an increase in spending on hardware; 45 percent expect to invest in installed software, 43 percent in IT services and 35 percent in IT outsourcing.

Source: Enterprise-Grade Cloud Computing Adoption: Trends and Purchase Requirements. Study commissioned by Savvis

While changes in spending over the past 12 months in the latter four categories are in the 1-5 percent range, the increase in hosted software and SaaS spending is 24 percent. The percentage of respondents that expected non-installed software spending to stay the same went from more than 50 percent this year to 30 percent in 2011.
More than 20 percent of respondents said they were already using enterprise-grade cloud-based solutions for apps they own or manage and 45 percent said they were expecting to be using such solutions within the next two years.
While identifying the right projects and areas of the business that can benefit from cloud-based solutions is in most cases done by the IT side of the house, more than 20 percent of respondents to the survey said business leaders sometimes bypass IT and buy the solutions on their own.
The survey also found that security has remained the most important factor during evaluation of cloud-based solutions, with more than 60 percent of respondents saying this factor was “critical”.
The report, titled Enterprise-Grade Cloud Computing Adoption: Trends and Purchase Requirements, was based on more than 170 responses to the survey. Most of the respondents had IT-management titles; nearly half were CIO’s or CTO’s. Respondents came from companies with average staff sizes of about 13,000.

 For the original article: click here

I was asked recently to write a guest blog post for a web collaboration solution (FuzeMeeting) that I've been consulting with the past few months - if any of you are looking for a healthy alternative to the hassle that is WebEx/GoToMeeting then make sure you give this app a try! 

Here’s a riddle for you – Let’s say you’re going to schedule a one hour meeting for ten people.  How many hours is that in total? If you said 10 hours then you are CORRECT!  When you think about it – the true cost of meetings are staggering.

Remember when Steve Ballmer made this statement? "About 70 percent of our folks are doing things that are entirely cloud-based, or cloud inspired," he told an audience at the University of Washington last March. "And by a year from now that will be 90 percent."

At the time I thought: Yeah, right.

The cloud is so difficult to define, and Microsoft's cloud offerings had been so slow to emerge, I couldn't bring myself to believe that claim, especially with Ballmer's "cloud inspired" location leaving several football fields of wiggle room. For those reasons and more, two weeks ago I pretty much dismissed the announcement of the forthcoming Microsoft Office 365 as a repackaging of Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services), a cloud offering that has failed to get much traction.

Dell has just announced it has agreed to acquire Software-as-a-Service integration company Boomi. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and, as usual, the purchase is subject to customary closing conditions. Dell did not say when it expects to complete the purchase of the startup.

Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell had yesterday teased the press about an impending acquisition in the cloud computing space (see Reuters).

The comment, made at an event in Hong-Kong, sparked a guessing game among tech reporters, but it turns out Dell is picking up a rather small company – Boomi has raised only $4 million in venture capital according to CrunchBase. Nevertheless, it’s a startup that does offer a compelling SaaS platform for many a company.