Economics

Square aims for growth, drops per transaction fees

A number of blogs pointed us today to news that mobile payment company Square is dropping the $.15 per transaction charge for any business using its mobile payments device and service. Square previously charged 2.75 percent of each transaction amount plus a flat $0.15 per transaction fee.

On the one hand, this is not that big of deal considering that the 2.75 percent is where the bulk of the company's revenue will eventually be made as higher-ticket purchases become more the norm. And, if you consider that 2.75 percent of $5 is $.13, the company … Read more

Database economics in cloud and virtualization

Many of the most interesting big economic landmarks in IT have happened around what might be called "re-platforming," as users take existing applications and redeploy them on new platforms, such as we see when applications move from corporate data centers to the Amazon Web Services EC2 or the Rackspace Cloud.

We see this trend every few years, for example when the IT masses switched from the mainframe to the client server world, and then again when we went from big iron Unix to Intel-driven X86 commodity platforms. Today, cloud and virtualization represent the next major re-platforming trend as … Read more

Midsize firms easing through economic downturn

A recently released report from IBM (PDF) shows that midsize businesses (100-1,000 employees) are taking advantage of technology better than both their larger and smaller peers to grow during lean economic times.

According to the report, as economies around the world continue their recovery, midsize companies have been the engines driving economic growth--reacting to a "new normal" in terms of spending and growth.

In previous periods of global economic difficulty midsize companies have struggled, often because they have had less capital available to invest in new products and also because big businesses have tended to exploit their … Read more

Venture funding hits two-year high in 2010

Private company research firm CB Insights today released a report that shows venture investment remains strong with $6.5 billion in funding taking place in the fourth quarter of 2010, a gain of roughly 12 percent over the third quarter of 2010.

Overall, 2010 saw $23.7 billion of funding into 2,792 deals representing 14 percent growth in funding and 13 percent growth in deals over 2009.

The report noted a few highlights:

New York outpaced Massachusetts for total number of deals in 2010 and is on a distinctly upward trend for the second half of the year while … Read more

Still need a job? Learned Drupal yet?

A year ago, I wrote about how those looking for work should consider learning Drupal, an open-source Web content management system. According to the project team, Drupal now powers 1 percent of all of the Web sites in the world.

This week, as the project celebrates its 10th anniversary, the team announced the release of Drupal 7, which features an easier-to-use administrative interface, more flexibility in customization, new database support, and an increased effort to make Drupal sites scale more readily. Nearly 1,000 people contributed to the release. It also announced that it is planning to host DrupalCon 2011 … Read more

VMware on the cloud and virtualization (Q&A)

VMware has come to define the virtualization market with more than 190,000 customers and dominant market share. But does that success translate to the cloud world?

To better understand how VMware thinks about virtualization and cloud, I talked with Chris Knowles, VMware's enterprise cloud architect, about how the company approaches cloud and what IT feedback the company is getting from customers.

Q: While some organizations have gone all-in on adopting cloud technologies, many organizations are still planning the best approach. How are the companies you are working with looking at implementing public, private, hybrid cloud environments? Knowles: The … Read more

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

IBM's acquisitions and strategy for 2011 (Q&A)

Few would question the impact that mergers and acquisitions have had on the IT landscape over the past year, and most people believe the acquisition trend will continue to heat up in 2011. Market consolidation is already happening with big companies getting bigger, and a host of start-ups are looking to carve out a niche.

One of the biggest consolidators via acquisition is IBM. Big Blue has acquired no less than 65 companies since 2003 and in an exclusive interview with CNET, IBM Senior VP and Group Executive Steve Mills told me the company will continue to look for acquisitions … Read more

IBM takes health care analytics to the cloud

Last week, I wrote about IBM's continued march to the cloud and the company's focus on using advanced analytical software to make better decisions faster.

This week both of these efforts are coming to light in the health care arena as Big Blue is set to announce that the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) will use advanced analytics software to cut the time required to match bone marrow donors with patients by up to 50 percent.

The NMDP estimates that as many as 10,000 patients may benefit from a transplant each year in the U.S. alone, … Read more