Global PaaS revenue to touch $1.2 billion
The global sales of platform as a service (PaaS) is set to reach $1.2 billion in 2012, 33 per cent higher than sales in 2011, according to IT research and advisory services company Gartner, Inc. Gartner expects further growth in 2013, projecting sales of $1.5 billion. The market is expected to touch $2.9 billion in 2016, it said in a recent statement.
PaaS includes suites of application infrastructure services, such as application platforms as a service (aPaaS) and integration platforms as a service (iPaaS). It also includes “specialist” application infrastructure services, such as database platform as a service, business process management platform as a service, messaging as a service and other functional types of middleware, which are offered as a cloud service.
Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, said infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) are the “most mature and established” among the range of offerings. “PaaS is where the battle between vendors and products is set to intensify the most,” he noted. He described the PaaS “competitive landscape” as being in a state of flux. Traditional application infrastructure vendors are facing competition from new and large players. “Pure PaaS players”, he said, “are cutting into their slice of profits.”
Talk on art and Open Source
Gene Kogan, a programmer and digital artist, will speak in Bangalore on ‘Art in the Open Source age’. The talk, slated to be held at the Centre for Internet and Society on November 30, will focus on how the Open Source movement is challenging longstanding assumptions about art practice.
Mr. Kogan’s interest areas include performance art, generative systems and machine learning. He will talk about how communities of programmers have collaborated online to create mature software development kits such as Processing and OpenFrameworks, as well as websites such as Instructables.com, where users can document and share their process. This talk will critically examine this new outlook and attempt to resolve some practical issues, a release from CIS stated. The talk will be held between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. For details, log on to http://cis-india.org/
Technology summit on graphical design
NIDays 2012, a graphical design systems summit organised by global technology firm National Instruments (NI), was attended by more than 700 engineers, researchers and scientists in Bangalore this week. The focus of the summit was to highlight the impact of NI technology on solving engineering challenges in India, a release from the firm stated,
A community forum, www.labviewenabled.in was launched during the event. This forum intends to bring together developers from all over India to share best practices, discuss technical challenges, share sample codes and explore career opportunities.
Winners of the annual Graphical System Design Achievement Awards 2012 were announced at the summit. The ‘Application of the Year’ was awarded to the Indian Institute of Technology – Jodhpur, Rajasthan, for developing IP for next-generation, digital radio standard-based transmitter to enable digital quality AM reception for rural India, the release stated.
Victor Mieres, vice-president, Emerging Markets, said, “As India’s influence on the global marketplace grows, the NI India team collaborates with hundreds of customers in universities, SMEs and multinational corporations to nurture local innovation and accelerate productivity.”
Parents unaware of teens’ activities online
Many parents are unaware of what their wards are doing online. Surveys, over the years, have pointed to this as well as to a need for parents to monitor their children’s activities online.
Internet security firm McAfee’s recent survey of over 1,500 Indian parents and teens reiterates that there is an evident discrepancy between parental perception and the reality regarding the online activities of Indian teenagers. Titled ‘Secret Lives of Teens’, the survey finds that 40 per cent of the teenagers would not hesitate to share their home addresses online, and that only 21 per cent of the polled parents believe that teens would have actually done so. Not surprisingly, while 83 per cent parents are confident that their children would not meet their online acquaintances outside the Web, 31 per cent children have done so. More disturbingly, the survey records that 38 per cent of the surveyed teens have witnessed cruel/mean behaviour online whereas only 16 per cent parents are aware of this.
