Tablet Use in Business to Gain Momentum in 2012

The early-adopter trials have begun, the commercial apps are being developed -- it's now a given, purpose-built tablets will be used in more mainstream business settings during 2012. Besides, executives and IT managers at multinational companies will likely witness this phenomenon first, particularly in the more advanced markets.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), media tablet shipments in EMEA reached more than 12 million units in the first three quarters of 2011 -- growing to 20 million units by the end of the year.

Although business purchases currently represent less than 10 percent of the entire tablet market, the near-term opportunity for growth from business use is believed to be significant -- including online collaboration applications.

Functionality such as a touch screen user-interface, portability, secure LAN connectivity and more business apps for vertical industry needs, are all factors that demonstrate the potential value in commercial settings.

Introducing Media Tablets into the Enterprise

IDC recently conducted a study across businesses in Western Europe to understand the perceptions of tablet adoption, intention to purchase, applications for specific business needs, preference for features, and acquisition strategies.

The key takeaways from the IDC study include:

Adoption Trend: More than 48 percent of businesses have either already evaluated and are keen to introduce tablets or purchased a few, and many verticals pointed to interest in purchasing tablets by the first and second half of 2012. With evident uptake among the IT services, professional services industry, other sectors such as transport and storage, utilities and distribution are showing strong interest.

Perception of Adoption: More than 22 percent of businesses think that the present generation of tablets defined by Apple iPad, are more suitable to their needs -- for example, meter reading, inventory management -- rather than their present equipment, such as traditional tablet devices or vertical application devices.

App Usage in Business: Applications and usage of tablets in businesses vary depending on the industry. Mainstream business use for tablets are as presentation tools during customer meetings and to remotely check emails and calendars. But tablets are suited for several key vertical applications such as:

• Equipment maintenance, meter-reading (water, gas, electricity), proof-of-service in the field service category.
• Asset and inventory management, telematics and direct store delivery in the storage and logistics, travel, and distribution verticals.

Tablet User Preference: While iOS and Android receive a strong response rate, more than 30 percent of respondents would consider a Windows OS-based tablet. While some businesses are price-sensitive, others would pay up to 50 percent above the standard price to have the most suitable tablet. Features vary depending on the business use-case; whether for the choice of screen size, or ruggedized features:

• Transport and storage and distribution sectors prefer to have barcode scanners, SD card readers, and cameras.
• Finance sectors prefer features such as credit card readers, signature capture, and HDD with encryption.

Deployment and Acquisition Strategy: Most businesses favor partnering directly with OEMs and traditional resellers with few verticals interested in partnering with ISVs. Virtualization and cloud-based solutions are the top preferred technologies considered to support tablet devices.

IDC believes that tablets now are a credible client device option, and in some cases they better fulfill the needs which are only partially met by traditional devices. They say that while some companies are in a wait-and-see mode, the forward-thinking leaders and early-adopters are already keen to deploy solutions.

Five Predictions for Managed Cloud Services in 2012

The proof-positive business impact from managed cloud services deployment, including the numerous associated productivity benefits and anticipated cost-savings, have pushed cloud computing well into the mainstream during 2011.

As we move into 2012, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that this evolution will continue as more users test the growing capabilities of the public cloud services that are already available.

However, by 2015, IDC envisions a very different scenario -- one where cloud services will become commonplace, thereby forcing significant changes in the ongoing adoption of progressive business technology practices throughout legacy IT organizations.

"In the next 24 months, the 'cloud' as a marketing label will cease to exist, as the success of cloud services will mean that it will permeate the sourcing strategies of the CIO and business unit manager alike," says Chris Morris, Lead Analyst for Cloud Services at IDC Asia/Pacific.

He adds, "The use of externally sourced business and IT services from the cloud will form the basis of what we see as the Outsourcing 3.0 period, and will provide an extensive portfolio of services from which innovative solutions can be constructed."

How Cloud Drives the Next Wave of Outsourcing

With Outsourcing 3.0, the cloud will metamorphose into a universal service catalog of individual cloud services. This will begin to replace both traditional information technology outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) engagements as well as on-premises infrastructure.

IDC believes that in an Outsourcing 3.0 scenario, the sourcing of business and IT services from multiple external suppliers will result in a major challenge for the enterprise CIO. They will become a service broker and aggregator, involved in sourcing, integrating and managing the services -- on behalf of their business units.

Drawing from the latest research and internal brainstorming sessions amongst IDC's regional and country analysts, the following are five cloud predictions for 2012.

These key points represent major trends with either the most significant financial impact or long-term market impact across the Asia-Pacific region, according to the IDC assessment.

1. Less than Half of End-Users across APEJ will complete their Private Cloud Projects by 2014
2. Making 2 + 2 = 1: Cloud Service Orchestration Services Lead the Drive to Outsourcing 3.0
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will become Verticalized by 2013
4. By the end of 2012, 90% of Telecom Service Providers (SPs) in the APEJ region will have brought a broad portfolio of Cloud Services to market; but, by end of 2013, their Portfolios will become Specialized as they redefine their preferred role in the Cloud Ecosystem and target specific markets
5. Cloud SP (CSPs) strategies based on Aggregation and Resale of IT and business services will Fail to meet Profitability Goals by 2013 unless they can efficiently and effectively Manage, Support and Bill Services from Multiple Service Providers

Global Cloud Index: the Evolution of Data Center Traffic

As 2011 comes to a close, many busy executives and IT managers will be pondering the continued adoption of cloud applications within their organizations. How can a business be adequately prepared for the anticipated increase in demand for managed cloud services? Moreover, what are the key related market indicators that are shaping the future of emerging business technology deployments?

The Cisco Global Cloud Index is an ongoing effort to forecast the growth of global data center and cloud-based IP traffic. The forecast includes trends associated with data center virtualization and cloud computing.

From 2000 to 2008, peer-to-peer file sharing dominated Internet traffic. As a result, the majority of Internet traffic did not touch a data center, but was communicated directly between Internet users. Since 2008, most Internet traffic has originated or terminated in a data center.

Data center traffic will continue to dominate Internet traffic for the foreseeable future, but the nature of data center traffic will undergo a fundamental transformation brought about by cloud applications, services, and infrastructure.

By 2015, one-third of data center traffic will be cloud traffic.

Global Data Center IP Traffic: Already in the Zettabyte Era

The Internet may not reach the zettabyte era until 2015, but the data center has already entered the zettabyte era. While the amount of traffic crossing the Internet and IP WAN networks is projected to reach nearly 1 zettabyte per year in 2015, the amount of data center traffic is already over 1 zettabyte per year -- and by 2015 will quadruple to reach 4.8 zettabytes per year.

This represents a 33 percent CAGR. The higher volume of data center traffic is due to the inclusion of traffic inside the data center (Typically, definitions of Internet and WAN stop at the boundary of the data center).

The global data center traffic forecast, a major component of the Global Cloud Index, covers network data centers worldwide operated by service providers as well as private enterprises.

Traffic Destinations: Most Traffic Stays Within the Data Center

In 2010, 77 percent of traffic remains within the data center, and this will decline only slightly to 76 percent by 2015. The fact that the majority of traffic remains within the data center can be attributed to several factors:

• Functional separation of application servers and storage, which requires all replication and backup traffic to traverse the data center.
• Functional separation of database and application servers, such that traffic is generated whenever an application reads from or writes to a central database.
• Parallel processing, which divides tasks into multiple smaller tasks and sends them to multiple servers, contributing to internal data center traffic.

The ratio of traffic exiting the data center to traffic remaining within the data center might be expected to increase over time, because video files are bandwidth-heavy and do not require database or processing traffic commensurate with their file size.

However, the ongoing virtualization of data centers offsets this trend. Virtualization of storage, for example, increases traffic within the data center because virtualized storage is no longer local to a rack or server.

How does the transition of workloads from traditional data centers to cloud data centers effect the typical IT environment? Find the answer to this question, and learn more about the implications, by browsing the Cisco Global Cloud Index forecast data.

Cloud Storage Spending to Reach $22.6 Billion by 2015

Cloud computing demand will drive new IT spending over the next five years, as public cloud service providers and the adopters of private cloud solutions invest in the supporting infrastructure, according to a recent market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Therefore, the leading managed cloud service providers have been busy expanding their service delivery platforms.

Overall spending by public cloud service providers on storage hardware, software, and professional services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.6 percent from 2010 to 2015, while enterprise spending on storage for the private cloud will experience a CAGR of 28.9 percent. By 2015, combined spending for public and private cloud storage will be $22.6 billion worldwide.

"Despite current economic uncertainties, IDC expects cloud service providers -- both public and private -- to be among the most expansive spenders on IT products and services as they continue to build out their facilities worldwide and expand their service options," said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems & Executive Strategies at IDC.

According to the IDC assessment, the most significant driver of storage consumption over the past three years has been the emergence of public cloud-based application and infrastructure providers. Many of these service providers act as content depots -- gathering, organizing, and providing access to large quantities of digital content.

Meanwhile, other cloud-based service providers have emerged with a focus on delivering IT infrastructure and applications in an "as a service" model. Collectively these companies have undertaken massive storage buildouts as they have expanded their service offerings, entered new markets, and extended their geographic reach.

In parallel to the expansion of the public cloud, many organizations have started to deploy their own private clouds for application, compute, and archival storage. Some of these private cloud deployments -- government and research sites -- are comparable in scope and complexity to public cloud environments, while others are limited in scope.

 Five information requirements are driving storage demands:

• Enabling more efficient delivery of information/applications to Internet-based customers.
• Reducing upfront infrastructure investment levels (i.e., cutting the cost and time associated with deploying new IT and compute infrastructure).
• Minimizing internal IT infrastructure investment associated with "bursty" or unpredictable workloads.
• Lowering and/or distributing the ongoing costs associated with long-term archiving of information.
• Enabling near-continuous, real-time analysis of large volumes and wide varieties of customer-, partner-, and machine-generated data (Big Data).

To meet these diverse requirements, IDC believes that organizations will continue to demand access to low-cost storage capacity -- plus a growing range of complementary advanced data transformation, security, and analytics solutions.

"The challenge facing the storage industry will be to balance public cloud service providers' demand for low-cost hardware while boosting demand for advanced software solutions in areas such as object-based storage, automated data tiering, Big Data processing, and advanced archiving services," noted Villars.

"Big Data developments will be perhaps the most critical new marketplace for storage solutions providers in the coming decade. Providing a strong portfolio of complete Big Data solutions -- hardware, software, and implementation services -- will be a high priority to succeed. Similarly, a strong portfolio of active archival storage solutions will be a critical differentiator for private content or archive cloud deployments."

Increased Adoption of Telepresence and New Video Apps

Telepresence and other forms of advanced visual collaboration technologies are moving further into the mainstream of forward-looking business practices. This increase in adoption has been a global phenomenon, as more business leaders follow the numerous application examples of the early-adopters.

Infonetics Research released excerpts from its second quarter 2011 (2Q11) "Enterprise Telepresence and Video Conferencing" report. Their findings demonstrate the progress that's been made so far this year.

Their latest market study provides insights on market size, vendor market share, and analysis for PBX-based video phones and software, as well as dedicated video conference infrastructure and endpoints -- including immersive telepresence and software.

Forecast for Continued Double-Digit Growth

For the first 6 months of 2011, enterprise telepresence and video conferencing equipment revenue is up 24 percent year-over-year -- and according to the current Infonetics market assessment, they expect strong double-digit growth in 2011 over 2010.

"Growth will stay in double-digit territory through at least 2015, thanks to demographic and communication trends favoring video, increasing acceptance of video among users, and specific use cases like tele-learning and tele-medicine," notes Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research.

 Enterprise Telepresence and Video Conferencing study insights include:

• The global enterprise video conferencing and telepresence equipment market jumped 21% to $683 million between the first and second quarters of 2011, setting a record high for quarterly revenue.
• Year-over-year (2Q10 to 2Q11), the market is up 34 percent.
• Cisco, the leading vendor, sequentially increased its videoconferencing and telepresence system revenue 33 percent, and now holds over half the global market share.
• Infonetics forecasts the enterprise telepresence and video conferencing equipment market to grow to $5.4 billion by 2015.
• Dedicated multi-purpose room video systems make up over half the enterprise video equipment market now and will continue to be the biggest revenue-generator among enterprise video solutions.
• Meanwhile, videophones are the fastest-growing segment of the market; they are the smallest in size.
• Regionally, the strongest demand for enterprise video equipment is coming out of North America, China, India, and Brazil.

Growing Demand for Mobile Enterprise Application Services

More capable smartphones and media tablets are now joining a variety of highly portable netbook computers that have already invaded the workplace. Many are being combined with mobile apps that tap into cloud-based productivity solutions.

According to the latest market study by ABI Research, healthcare is one of the most dynamic sectors for mobile technologies, and manufacturing is now the largest sector for mobile enterprise applications worldwide.

By 2016, manufacturing will generate approximately 23 percent of the nearly $5 billion in mobile enterprise application service revenues.

Mobile enterprise applications, also called mobile B2E applications, include dashboard apps, work flow approval apps, and line-of-business applications for both the smartphone and tablet.

ABI's mobile services practice director, Dan Shey, says, "Manufacturing beats healthcare for B2E app adoption and revenues because of its large employment worldwide and the breadth of occupations that can benefit from mobile apps."

China is also one of the biggest drivers for manufacturing B2E mobile app adoption.

Manufacturing is the second largest employer worldwide. Manufacturing also employs a wide range of occupations using B2E apps, including shipping or receiving workers, delivery drivers, management and supervisory personnel, sales, and installation and repair workers.

Moreover, China is the world’s manufacturing hub, which drives B2E app needs -- not only for Chinese manufacturers but also for companies visiting their Chinese subcontractors.

Healthcare is the top sector in B2E mobile app adoption when viewing the data at the regional level. Healthcare leads in Western Europe, the Middle East, and especially North America, where healthcare B2E adoption outpaces manufacturing by nearly five to one.

Enterprise Cloud Applications Ongoing Impact on IT

The transition to managed cloud services is having a trickle-down effect on various stakeholders in the business technology landscape. As an example, in the evolving enterprise communications market, customer premise equipment (CPE) vendors must confront imminent erosion in their installed base -- as cloud services gain traction across the public, private, and hybrid cloud domains.

According to the latest market study by ABI Research, 41 percent of all enterprise communications users -- or 386 million lines or seats -- will be on virtual infrastructure by 2016, which is posing a serious danger to the traditional CPE market.

"For CPE vendors, the cloud threat is real," says ABI senior analyst Subha Rama. "By 2016, the communications CPE market will only grow 4.3 percent, while cloud communications will grow by over 21 percent, reaching $8 billion in revenues."

Smaller vendors with point solutions will see cloud services rapidly displace their installed bases. Moreover, some large systems vendors are becoming cloud providers or key enablers of this migration.

However, according to the ABI assessment, many of the CPE solutions are simply not "cloud ready" and will see performance downgrades when virtualized.

The Top Three Forces Influencing Cloud Migration are:

1. The growing adoption of data center architectures and virtualization technologies.
2. The need to integrate multiple applications to deliver the connected experience to users across different devices, including smartphones and media tablets.
3. The promise of lower costs and increased efficiencies from standardized platforms and processes in the cloud.

Enterprises are adopting a non-linear approach to cloud migration; while certain applications undergo experimentation, others are retained on premises.

Mixed environments and hybridization are becoming the norm, especially with larger enterprises. However, the technology to manage hybrid clouds and to enable seamless movement of applications instances across different vendor clouds is in its infancy.

"Enterprise mobilization is also driving migration to the cloud," says ABI practice director Dan Shey. "Cloud applications ease application delivery for businesses that are increasingly relying on access across fixed and mobile endpoints."

Mobile Enterprise App Development Life-Cycle Services

Media tablet and smartphone software applications (apps) have entered the mainstream of business technology. In fact, results from recent market research by International Data Corporation (IDC) demonstrates that service providers are already reporting increasing enterprise and independent software vendor (ISV) activity -- centered upon the new commercial mobile apps ecosystem that has emerged.

These latest developments are establishing mobile initiatives for a variety of horizontal and industry-specific business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) application scenarios.

Enabling Mobile Enterprise Agile App Development

Furthermore, third parties are increasing their mobile application life-cycle investments to meet the growing demand for mobile applications -- such as native, Web-based or cross-platform -- with an emphasis on accelerating client mobile applications to market at lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with higher productivity and quality.

An insightful IDC study has analyzed the emerging new mobility services market and reviewed vendor investments in infrastructure and mobile intellectual property (IP) -- across fourteen different providers.

The following are key factors influencing growth in this segment:

• Accelerating mobile IP creation or investment and partnership activity through component reusability, application factories, and use of internal IP for rapid cross-platform portability are central to service provider investments.
• Partnerships with mobile enterprise application platform vendors are on the rise as are initiatives that integrate smart device technology with cloud-based back-end applications to improve efficiency, reduce cost, and generate new revenue streams.
• The importance of usability and user experience (UX) is becoming a critical best practice to accelerate development timeframes and ensure alignment to business expectations.
• Mobile development is frequently being packaged as part of broader mobile application life-cycle services -- with heightened attention to mobile platform selection, business case development, architectural planning (e.g. back end integration), and agile mobile development and testing.

"As third-party service providers move forward, they will need to address the broader spectrum of enterprise customer needs, from new entrants to the mobile space to more mature customers that have been engaged in a mobile road map strategy for a few years," said Rona Shuchat, director, Application Outsourcing Services at IDC.

The focus will be on building relevant and innovative business-centric solutions -- using mobile device apps as a key enabler.

As such, it's important to conceptualize new use-cases that will increase operational efficiencies and facilitate higher worker productivity, lower the cost of end-to-end order and supply chains, or introduce effective new ways of marketing products to end-customers via mobility.

Helloo

Helloo

Business Objectives Drive the Shift to Cloud Services

Adoption of cloud computing services continues to accelerate as organizations move from limited deployments to comprehensive solutions, according to the latest market study by CompTIA, the non-profit trade association for the information technology (IT) industry.

More than half (56 percent) of the organizations surveyed for the CompTIA study said their investment in cloud computing will increase by 10 percent or more over the next 12 months.

“This additional investment will likely be accompanied by greater complexity in the overall cloud strategy, such as moving to a hybrid cloud model or adopting more advanced services beyond Software as a Service (SaaS),” said Seth Robinson, director, technology analysis, CompTIA. ”Organizations may begin exploring options such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), which will allow them to experiment with custom application development.”

IT departments are often a key driver behind the transition to managed cloud services, but the CompTIA study suggests individual business unit leaders within an organization are equally or perhaps more likely to now seek out the benefits of a cloud service deployment.

About one in five (21 percent) companies surveyed said that line of business leaders championed the transition to a cloud solution -- independently of their IT department.

“Most SaaS applications are easily accessible through the Internet, making it relatively easy for business employees to use them without involving the IT staff,” Robinson said. “But there are risks in this approach, as lines of business often do not have the same awareness of security and reliability as the IT department.”

Demand for Procurement and Implementation Guidance

That being said, apparently the results from the study provided no specific evidence of where CIOs or other IT managers demonstrated security breaches -- as a result of business leaders leading the shift to managed cloud services.

However, the CompTIA study findings did indicate that there's growing interest throughout these organizations to invest more in cloud computing education and thereby learn about the technology deployment considerations.

Although the mainstream business manager's understanding of cloud computing has improved over the past year, many users continue to have questions regarding details of cloud service implementation.

The 2010 CompTIA cloud computing study found that 60 percent of end users desired a clearer definition of cloud computing. In 2011, that number increased to 66 percent.

Areas where users want more clarity include the types of cloud computing offerings (Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service) and the types of deployment models (public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud services).

Attainment of Business Objectives Drives the Shift to Cloud

Organizations that have invested the time to learn about -- or are experimenting with -- cloud solutions indicate they have a higher level of comfort with cloud computing offerings. Approximately 72 percent of these organizations feel more positive about cloud computing now than they did one year ago. Another 25 percent of survey respondents report no change in their perception.

“For those who feel more positively about the cloud than they did a year ago, the primary reasons are the technical benefits and the ability to achieve other business objectives,” Robinson noted. “This finding is in line with data from other CompTIA surveys, where the primary advantage of cloud computing appears to be increased capability, not cost savings."

Note: the survey included 500 IT business professionals and other key decision makers within the U.S. market.

How Mobile Applications will Transform all Businesses

Mobile communication related activity is now considered the number one business technology issue on the minds of IT professionals in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the latest market study by IDC. Their analysts have been exploring, in depth, what mobility really means for organizations and how utilizing a variety of commercial mobile applications will become the norm in the near future.

Clearly, enterprise mobility has been a familiar topic for savvy business and technology leaders within most multinational organizations. For many companies it means mobile email, perhaps some form of unified communications (UC) or fixed mobile convergence (FMC).

Moreover, for the more adventurous IT leaders, they have already embarked on extending workplace applications into the mobile environment.

How Mobility Supports Operational Business Goals

Tim Dillon, IDC's Associate Vice President for Asia-Pacific says, "That's yesterday's view. It's changed. Organizations that continue to take enterprise mobility for granted will be swept aside in the new environment. Today, we’re seeing what we could call a perfect storm, created by the evolution of different areas of technology combining to fundamentally, and drastically change how organizations can use enterprise mobility to support business goals and strategies."

IDC research clients are seeing new access networks, new devices, new mobile operating systems, business related applications (apps), platforms and delivery models come together to create an all-embracing enterprise mobility.

Previous IT turning points were the move from mainframes to desktops, and the growth of Internet access. Now, new mobile devices and numerous productivity-oriented applications will constitute the next wave of business technology adoption.

Amongst the many issues that IDC will continue to explore, perhaps the changing landscape for devices is most prevalent -- where media tablets, such as the Apple iPad, and large-screen smartphones can now run almost fully functional versions of all enterprise software and services.

Smarter and more capable mobile operating systems, along with the applied talent of independent software developers, are providing the market with the ingredients for an agile ecosystem that can quickly mobilize these new applications -- extending the functionality of virtually all IT systems to mainstream mobile devices.

Mobility Combined with Cloud Computing Services

Dillon adds, "ICT is evolving on multiple fronts to create a true revolution in mobility. As enterprise applications become mobile, the boundaries of the enterprise become extended and blurred. With the constant evolution in devices and applications that tap into the core enterprise systems, all systems become increasingly vulnerable to the acts of negligent users and malicious attacks -- companies will need to pair pervasive mobility with ubiquitous security."

Furthermore, as more and more communication and collaboration applications transition to the cloud -- via either managed public or private cloud computing services -- demand for mobile access is likely to increase, in line with the continued user adoption of multifaceted smartphones and purpose-built business-centric tablets.

Healthcare IT Spending on Cloud to Surpass $1 Billion

The healthcare and social services vertical marketplace is extensive. It includes companies that provide medical care and social assistance for individuals -- which includes ambulatory healthcare services, hospitals, nursing and residential care facilities, and social assistance services.

Healthcare has been a growth vertical in U.S. business markets.

According to the latest market study by In-Stat, research supports a forecast of continued growth, with healthcare spending $518 million on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in 2015.

Overall telecom spending by the healthcare and social services vertical was just under $16 billion in 2010.

Wireless communications is the largest of the product categories, comprising about 40 percent of telecom spending in the healthcare and social services vertical. Cloud computing and managed services is the fasting growing component.

Wireline data and wireline voice comprise the remainder of the telecom spend.

Increased Demand for Managed Cloud Offerings

"The healthcare vertical segment, across all sizes of business, and across nearly all product groups, is fast becoming the most robust business vertical segment in U.S. business markets," says Greg Potter, Analyst at In-Stat.

Demand for cloud computing services in particular has exploded and In-Stat believes there's nothing that would indicate the trend won’t continue -- at least through 2015.

Additional insights from the In-Stat study include:

• Small businesses with 20 to 99 employees will be the fastest growing size segment in healthcare, growing over 35 percent from 2010 to 2015.
• Enterprise wireless spending in healthcare will increase roughly 12 percent from 2010 to 2011.
• Healthcare public cloud computing spending will surpass $1 billion in 2013.

How TelePresence Improves Public Health Care in Chile

The hospitals in Talcahuano (Las Higueras), San Carlos and Linares have inaugurated Cisco TelePresence units -- the high-definition video technology that allows them to interact with their patients via tele-consultations, examinations and interviews. The TelePresence technology also helps them find solutions for cardiovascular pathologies, the main public health problem facing Chilean society that has resulted in great human and economic impact.

This HD video communication solution enables the hospitals in Linares and San Carlos to connect with specialists in Las Higueras Hospital in Talcahuano and carry out remote specialized consultations -- as a result accelerating the process of attending to patients.

As an example, now the time taken for a specialist's first response has been significantly reduced (from 12 months to 54 hours), as well as the time taken to resolve the problem that gave rise to the initial consultation (from as long as two years down to one month).

Enabling Just-in-Time Healthcare to Citizens

The Cisco TelePresence solution is a pilot project that forms part of and complements the Galileo Telemedical Program, developed in the Hemodynamic and Electrophysiology Unit of Las Higueras Hospital in Talcahuano as a solution for pathologies in the cardiovascular area, illnesses that produce long waiting lists and high mortality rates in Chile.

This managed solution is a contribution made by Telefónica Empresas -- based on Cisco´s technology -- in collaboration with the Talcahuano Health Services and Las Higueras Hospital, showing the positive impact of public-private partnerships in the implementation of technologies that can transform peoples' lives. This solution works through the Chilean Ministry of Health's communication network (administered by Movistar), and it includes three Cisco TelePresence System 1300 Series units.

This new system deployment facilitates effective and timely access to specialized health care for all citizens -- no matter where they live. It improves the quality of patient care and the efficiency of medical attention, helping to reduce or eliminate waiting lists for health care services.

Pilot Project Delivers Cost-Effective Treatment Options

It makes prioritization of referrals easier, improving the access of the most seriously ill patients to critical operations. It reduces the number of referrals to the specialty center, which saves money for the health care system overall, as well as for patients and their families. There are also benefits for the individual such as in terms of reduction in the number of trips needed to be made, hours or days missed from work or school, and avoiding disruption in family life.

It provides a solution within the system, optimizing current resources in an efficient way by empowering initiatives that are already present within the existing health care system.

Movistar is providing this Cisco technology as a pilot project at no cost to local health services in order to evaluate its impact and effectiveness. They do this as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives in an effort to provide innovative solutions to the health care system's most critical needs and to alleviate the extra difficulties these hospitals have had to face after the 2010 earthquake due to the reduction of their operative capacity.

The Galileo Project is an initiative of Las Higueras Hospital's Hemodynamic and Electrophysiology Unit, unique in the country's health care services. It was promoted by Dr. Francisco Albornoz, and it defines a new modality of services to improve the quality of cardiovascular treatments by means of teleprocesses in medical administration. The project consists of Web-based solutions and integrates electronic joint consultations, electrocardiography in its different modes, and echocardiography, connecting remote sites of referrals to one specialty center, maintaining the concept of efficiency in clinical decision making and therapeutic resolution.

"The telemedicine project in Talcahuano is in line with the corporate e-health program whose objective is to make high-end technologies available for the benefit of every Chilean. Health is one of the great concerns, and this service will shorten waiting times, facilitate opportune diagnosis, and keep illnesses from getting worse. At Movistar we are very happy since, as strategic partners with the country and the government, we believe we are fulfilling the promise we made to our clients, that of making high-end technologies available wherever they are needed," said Pedro Pablo Laso, general manager of Telefónica Empresas.

Increased Spending on Public Cloud Computing Services

This week, the world's financial markets have been negatively impacted by continued concerns about the global economic outlook. There has been little good news about the economy lately, particularly regarding the U.S. jobs forecast.

That said, enterprise related IT spending has apparently been one positive forward-looking market indicator -- particularly the current and planned use of managed cloud services.

According to the latest market study by In-Stat, enterprise business spending on IT and telecom services -- which include cloud computing, wireless, wireline voice, wireline data, and business IP/VoIP -- will move in a positive direction in 2011, increasing by healthy 6 percent.

"There will be positive growth across all 20 verticals with education and healthcare & social services leading the surge with growth of 10 percent and 9 percent respectively,” says Greg Potter, analyst at in-Stat.

These forecast increases in spending are across all product groups except wireline voice, which will decline by about half a percent.

In-Stat's latest market study findings include:

• Enterprise spending on public cloud computing services is set to expand 139% from 2010 to 2011.
• Enterprise spending on wireless data is set to approach $17 billion in 2015.
• Enterprise spending in the healthcare sector on wireline data will approach 2 billion in 2014.
• Enterprise spending on wireline voice will remain flat, with traditional TDM services continuing their decline, only reaching $3.4 billion in 2011.

The Top Five Vertical Markets for IaaS Offerings

The cloud computing phenomenon now includes a set of services and technologies that enable the delivery of on-demand computing services over the Internet in real-time, allowing end-users instant access to data and applications from any device with online access.

Although still in its infancy, gaining traction has not been a problem. According to the latest market study by In-Stat, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is set to grow to roughly $4 billion by 2015.

"Growth is expected in all public cloud service segments," says Greg Potter, Analyst at In-Stat.

Many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have been around for a long time, but now with the advent of entire platforms for these applications they're gaining the necessary visibility among businesses to reach renewed momentum in the marketplace.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS) is also gaining increased traction, especially in the small business market.

In-Stat's latest market study includes the following insights:

• SaaS (software as a service) is poised to grow 142 percent between 2010 and 2015.
• Overall public cloud computing (IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS) is set to grow 153 percent from 2010 to 2015.
• Small business (5 to 99 employees) is the fastest growing size segment growing from $2.5 billion by 2010 to $6.6 billion by 2015.
• Small business account for over half of the market in SaaS and IaaS.

According to the In-Stat assessment, the top five vertical markets for IaaS offerings, in terms of 2011 market revenue, will be hospitality and food, healthcare and social services, and retail trade. The bottom 5 verticals will be mining, forestry, fishing, and agricultural services and utilities.

How Healthcare IT will Migrate to Cloud Services

According to the findings from a global market study, the healthcare sector has a highly complex IT environment that's supporting a very diversified professional user population (i.e., clinicians) -- along with their patients in life-critical situations. The industry is currently facing growing economic and regulatory pressures that make its IT infrastructure primed for change.

Therefore, all organizations will likely consider the potential benefits of migrating to cloud computing. Improvement in the quality of healthcare services is a key driver for managed cloud service adoption.

Billions of dollars of federal incentives are provided for the delivery of quality healthcare services, and expanding the use of electronic health record (EHRs) systems -- as well as providing the basis for the exchange of information and data across and between the providers. These EHR systems are expected to be used extensively by 2014.

Another significant opportunity is the consumer-oriented cloud application -- offering the potential of improving healthcare communications and enabling patients to manage their own medical records. The cloud platform fits well with new business models, which often require uninterrupted access from multiple providers to a single patient, such as a Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model or Accountable Care Organization (ACO).

Cost Reduction Potential Across the Ecosystem

Reducing costs in the healthcare industry ecosystem is a key motivation for cloud service adoption. This is true for all healthcare organizations, irrespective of their size and area of specialization. In making future IT investment decisions, health organizations will likely measure the return on investment closely. For many new Health Information Exchange (HIE) models, the infrastructure is already in place.

In today’s healthcare system, access to good facilities often depends on the physical location. As more health data moves into the cloud and telehealth technologies become popular, everyone will be able to access health information in real-time from anywhere. The result will be better access to healthcare and relevant data, especially in the remote areas. However, risks around data privacy, security and safety, and state specific policy rules are among the top concerns raised for the adoption of cloud computing.

As a result, these issues currently are the greatest barriers for embracing cloud computing. However, according to the MarketsandMarkets assessment, the data security issue has the potential to increase cloud service adoption. By centralizing and standardizing handling of patient data across the healthcare ecosystem, the cloud could enable stronger security and authentication measures to be imposed by SaaS (software as a service) providers, thereby actually improving protection and integrity of data.

According to MarketsandMarkets latest research, globally 32 percent of healthcare facilities are already using some form of cloud application. Moreover, close to 75 percent of the organizations not using any cloud applications are already considering adopting them in the next three to five years.

In summary, the top priorities for the healthcare industry are:

• Improvement in the quality of healthcare services.
• Reduction of costs.
• Increasing access to the healthcare systems.
• Data privacy and security.