$1B annual run rate, 1,000+ vBlocks sold (cumulative?), with $1.3B investment, founded 2011. More: How's VCE been doin'?

three years ago 65-70 percent of Spiceworks users were from companies that had fewer than 100 employees. In the last 24 months, however, that has completely turned on its head, and now 75 percent of usage comes from companies with 100 employees or more. Specifically the two fastest growing segments are companies with 500-1,000 employees and companies with 1,000 employees and above. As of last month there were 13,000 installations with more than 1,000 devices, implying that 60-65 percent of enterprises in the world use Spiceworks for something.

The engineer says for $7,500 a month, Amazon will guarantee they will be on dedicated hardware, and not just have the IP addresses segmented through the VPC. Noisy neighbors are usually only a problem for larger customers though, he says. … He considers Google to be a serious threat to AWS, but not Azure. "Anyone who thinks there is a ‘cloud war’ currently and AWS is seeing any type of real challenge is just fooling themselves.

Watch over the next 2 years as the Big 4 of BI (IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microstragy) battle distuption from well funded upstarts. Folks like SAS snd Terradata will have to pick sides. More: QLIK Rising: As DATA Soars, BMO Cheers New Analytics Approach

Look at the genealogy here, starting with our first move, the acquisition of MCI back in 2006. That provided us this very expansive global IP backbone network. [Then we moved] on to Cybertrust Managed Security capabilities in 2007, and then further on with Terremark in 2011, then a company called CloudSwitch, then Hughes Telematics, as well as the organic investment in our 4G LTE wireless network. –Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the nearly $30 billion unit

“We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.” --SAP Takes It All to the Cloud

With the Enstratius acquisition, Dell is getting a group of people with deep influence in the community. Founder George Reese is an O'Reilly author and a cloud pioneer. He is supported by James Urquhart, Bernard Golden and John Willis, all recognized as influencers in the cloud community. --Alex Williams, TechCruch cloud strength.Welcome @botchagalupe @davidajbagley @georgereese @jamesurquhart @bernardgolden and the entire @enstratius team — Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) May 6, 2013 This is the part I'm most excited about.

[flickr video=8678862379 secret=ee744f017f w=400 h=225] Last week I was at on a Dell event panel representing Dell cloud think. Our moderator asked if developers are really in the driver seat - here's the answer! What else would you expect from a RedMonk? ;> Also, Andy Rhode's car fleet analogy is a good one for explaining bespoke IT vs. cloud IT.

As IBM now cleverly says Mobile isn’t a Device, Its Data... We’re heading into a beautiful, bright, future where Data is Eating The World and solving tough problems... --Mobile, Informed Consent, and the Permission First Web

I was in and out of DevOpsDays Austin over the past few days. It's always a fun, event, packed with plenty of old friends and folks to catch up. We gave away a Sputnik to a lucky winner, a fine fellow from Boston as I recall. Also, check out Barton’s video interview with Patrick Debois.