Statistics

Gartner: Enterprise SaaS $9.2 billion and growing

Analyst firm Gartner today released a forecast of revenue associated with software as a service (SaaS) within the enterprise application software market and it shows that cloud and hosted services are growing at a rapid pace in the enterprise.

For the sake of clarity, Gartner estimates that 75 percent of the current SaaS delivery revenue could be considered a cloud service, and that figure could exceed 90 percent by 2014 as the SaaS model matures and converges with cloud services models.

Gartner forecasts that SaaS revenue will reach $9.2 billion in 2010, up 15.7 percent from 2009 revenue … Read more

Paid developers power the Linux kernel

The Linux Foundation is releasing its "Who Writes Linux" analysis, illustrating who crafts the code, the pace of its evolution, and which companies are behind the kernel's development.

Kernel development follows a time-based release model with a new release occurring every two to three months. This is designed to help speed the development for all Linux distributions so that each one doesn't need to make kernel-specific updates or changes. More than 6,100 individual developers from more 600 different companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005, according the report.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the … Read more

Snooki, Lady Gaga top Halloween costume queries

No surprise here: Eccentric pop star Lady Gaga and "Jersey Shore" star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi are the top Halloween costume searches this year, according to Experian Hitwise. Also big this year are Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, and tween sensation Justin Bieber--though in Bieber's case, people are specifically searching for wigs.

Other Halloween costumes that have been popular searches this year are "queen of hearts," "mad hatter" (those two perhaps in reference to Tim Burton's summer hit flick "Alice in Wonderland"), "catwoman," "gypsy," and "… Read more

6.1 trillion text messages to be sent in 2010

Use of mobile phones and the Internet continues to skyrocket despite a huge difference in broadband pricing worldwide, a new study from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has found.

According to the United Nations-run organization, a whopping 6.1 trillion text messages will be sent by the end of 2010. That figure, which has tripled in the past three years, means people around the globe are sending 200,000 text messages every second.

Mobile phones are now available to 90 percent of the world's population. And so far, customers are taking advantage. The ITU estimates that there will be … Read more

Optimistic outlook for venture financing

Slated to be released this week, CB Insights Q3 2010 venture capital report shows that more venture-backed deals are happening, but at lower dollar volumes, with seed deals replacing the megadeals we saw in the first half of the year.

According to the report, seed deals (typically less than $1 million) represented just 1 percent of finance deals in the third quarter of 2009, but grew to 11 percent of deals in the third quarter of 2010. In light of the growth of seed finance deals, the median deal size for Series A deals grew to $3.4 million--a five-quarter … Read more

Survey: Virtualization and cloud need management

A new report set to be released this week from open-source systems management provider Zenoss shows that virtualization and cloud computing technologies are set to remain important growth areas in enterprise IT environments.

The overall results of the survey of 204 IT professionals weren't terribly surprising. For example, the report shows that VMware leads the pack with nearly 80 percent of respondents using the VMware hypervisor and that more than 40 percent of the users cite flexibility as the reason for using virtualization.

However, some of the more interesting results include the fact that more than 30 percent of … Read more

FBI reports auto thefts, recovery rates down

Although the FBI reports that vehicle thefts are down, you are still unlikely to recover your stolen car if you don't have some sort of electronic recovery system.

According to the 2009 Crime Statistics report, out of the 794,616 vehicles stolen that year, only 343,274 vehicles (43.2 percent) were recovered. This is the lowest recovery rates have been reported in 25 years.

Stolen vehicles are notoriously used by thieves to commit other crimes, or taken to chop shops and stripped for parts. A number of vehicles each year are shipped out illegally overseas.

In a news … Read more

Venture capitalists tire of Twitter-y start-ups

New data from research firm CB Insights shows that venture capital firms have tired of pure-play Twitter start-ups as investment financing has dropped by half over the last year.

From June 2008 to May 2009, $21.6 million was invested by venture capitalists and angel investors into pure-play Twitter start-ups. In the June 2009 to May 2010, time frame, the investment funding dropped more than 50 percent to $10.4 million. The average amount invested also dropped dramatically from a nearly $2 million average round last year to just over $1 million more recently.

According to CB Insight's Anand … Read more

Survey: Few companies virtualizing critical apps

The results of a new survey from application performance management provider AppDynamics shows that despite all the hype around virtualization, most companies haven't yet virtualized their mission-critical applications.

Despite widely acknowledging the benefits of virtualization, most companies noted that they need more evidence that mission-critical applications will succeed in virtual environments. Roughly 80 percent had already deployed or planned to deploy virtualization for nonmission critical applications so there's no need to worry for the state of the market.

This does however bring up a few questions, namely, why is virtualization not being used for mission-critical applications?

According to the survey, there are three main areas of concern:

Internal versus external facing--Comfort with internal applications running virtualized but a perceived risk in running customer-facing systems in virtual environments People, performance and design questions--A lack of skills, questions about performance, and overall application architecture insert a level of risk Lack of confidence--Despite all of the obvious benefits, many are concerned their applications won't run as well in virtual environments

In a Q&A with CNET, AppDynamics CEO Jyoti Bansal further explained the survey results: … Read more