For this week Cloud Business Review’s Cloud business news roundup, we highlight the slump of stock prices in cloud sector, allegedly caused by strong expectations toward cloud computing stocks – a run started 6 months ago and end rather badly in around January 20, 2011.
The strong rises in share prices of cloud computing stocks came to an end as investors’ high expectation wanes. The mass sell-off results in a drop of cloud stocks share prices. For example, Rackspace’s stocks were down by 10 percent, Blue Coat dropped 7 percent, Riverbed went down by 5 percent, EMC Corp dropped 2.5 percent, NetApp Inc. shed 3.4 percent, and Salesforce.com Inc. stocks were down by 6.6 percent.
Cloud computing is still pretty much fragile, as a result of continuous evolution. Investors interested in the cloud stocks should be aware of the risks.
Other developments in the cloud still show strong interests toward cloud computing for business. Some worth noted news:
Businesses will be in the cloud in two years time
According to KPMG’s recent survey, 90 percent of the executives and 68 percent of the middle managers said they are using or plan to use cloud-based services within two years. The main driver of the trends is due to the benefits offered by cloud computing – a more agile and cost competitive business – that in effect will enhance the business’ competitiveness.
Box.net is now an online business collaboration service provider
Box.net, a cloud storage service provider enabling members to share files, is now expanding into online collaboration, adding collaboration features into members’ back-end system. Not only sharing documents, Box.net users now can collaborate with others, integrating comments, messaging capabilities, and such into the system.
New IT career path is on the rise: Jobs in the cloud
The cloud jobs are hot today, especially in storage, virtualization and other cloud-related jobs. Not only in engineering and project leadership positions, the cloud propels growth in other jobs in the cloud, such as senior level sales, marketing, engineering, consulting and management.
