A recent study of technology job want ads shows a 61 percent increase in demand nationwide for IT professionals with cloud computing experience.
The study, which is based on ads posted by about 2,400 businesses, was performed by Wanted Analytics, a firm that provides business intelligence for the talent marketplace.
Professionals who are looking to get on the cloud hiring bandwagon may need to acquire new cloud technology skills and certifications.
To help fill the demand for qualified IT professionals, some leading IT vendors are now offering education and certification programs. Case in point is Hewlett-Packard, which launched a suite of new cloud computing certifications this past November. The certifications offered by HP are designed to give IT professionals the skills required to design and deploy a cloud environment.
The CB Insights 2011 Venture Capital Report, released Thursday, showed that Internet or web companies took in a healthy $10.5 billion in 1185 deals total last year, although the number of deals tailed off in the fourth quarter.
The report itself doesn’t even mention cloud computing per se, but CB Insights Co-Founder Jonathan Sherry was a good sport and took a shot at parsing out the true cloud computing numbers.
Via email, Sherry said:
Over the course of 2011, we’ve seen a steady uptick of venture investment into cloud-based software and services. In Q4, cloud-based companies comprised 26.5% of internet deal volume and 34.5% of internet investment dollars. Dollar share skewed higher than deal share due to mega deals including Dropbox and Box.net.
For its purposes, CB Insights put Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud storage companies like the aforementioned Dropbox and Box.net – or any true cloud infrastructure players in this category. It did not include game companies or those that run part of their business on Amazon Web Services, for example, in that number.
Some VCs agreed that the categorization remains tricky, especially as any new company now claims cloud credentials whether it has any or not.
There will be new VC numbers out of the National Venture Capital Association and PriceWaterhouseCoopers coming out Jan. 19, so expect still more confusion over what deals are true cloud vs. the product of cloud washing.
Other interesting tidbits from the report:
- Healthcare hit a five quarter high on funding and showed solid deal activity. Sector reverses downward trend and shows pulse to close out 2011.
- Massachusetts took back its #2 spot for both deals and dollars with deals across multiple sectors. Healthcare was particularly strong. Internet investment in the state was the one weak spot in an otherwise strong showing.
- Cali and NY account for 59% of internet VC deals and 66% of funding. Internet investments took over 1/3 of venture dollars in 2011. Massachusetts fell to a five quarter low on internet deal share. Mega-deals in the data storage (Dropbox and Box.net) buoy funding.
- Cali still the top spot for VC deals and dollars. ‘Nuff said.
- We’ll bring back our “Sleeping in Seattle” metaphor as Washington continued its multi-quarter dealflow slide and also came down on funding.
Cloud-related startups we’ve spoken about recently on the show. This list is of companies that haven’t been acquired, as there’s an equally long list of those that have been snatched up by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Rackspace, Google, and SAP:
- AppFog
- Bromium
- Calxeda
- Cloudability
- CloudSigma
- CloudSwitch
- Explorys
- Kaggle
- Nebula
- Parse
- ScaleXtreme
- Solidfire
- Zillabyte
Jeff:
Big Data Analytics is the “Golden Nugget in Big Data”
Traditional data warehouse as served its purpose and continues to serve the goals it is designed for. But with more and more data explosion from multiple data sources and as well as multiple formats, it is becoming prevalent that the traditional data warehouse is been stretched belong its capabilities. At the same time, organizations increasingly need information from their vast amounts of data to make decision in near real time. This is the result of Big Data Analytics.
Big Data is a Big Deal (Source: TechTarget.com: )
Traditional data warehousing is a large but relatively slow producer of information to business analytics users. It draws from limited data resources and depends on reiterative extract, transform and load (ETL) processes. Customers are now looking for quick access to information that is based on culling nuggets from multiple data sources concurrently. Big Data analytics can be defined, to some extent, in relationship to the need to parse large data sets from multiple sources, and to produce information in real-time or near-real-time.
· Big Data Flavors:
o MapReduce
o Scalable Databases (NOSQL)
o Real-time Streaming
o Big Data Appliance
o Big Data Storage
· Big Data Analytics: The ability to understand and gain new insight and information from both structured and unstructured data sources in near real time, is the key to encouraging organizations to jumping on this new approach of information management. It is not necessarily the storage part of Big Data that management wants hear about even though they are inter-dependent.
Oracle’s release of their big data appliance which comes bundled with Cloudera’s Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL and an open-source distribution of R software. R software is used for predictive analytics and statistical modeling the provides organizations with the Big Data Analytics needed to make sense of the huge volumes of data from multiple sources, hence gaining insight into their organization’s performance and market.
