Monthly Archives: May 2012

Nuclear Decommissioning Authority awards £140m IT outsourcing contract to Atos

The body responsible for nuclear decommissioning in the UK has awarded a £140 million IT outsourcing contract to Atos.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s (NDA) procurement arm, Shared Services Alliance (SSA), awarded the five-year contract to Atos, which covers all IT services for Sellafield, Magnox, National Nuclear Laboratories and Low Level Waste Repository.

It expects to save more than 30 percent over five years by consolidating and modernising the IT infrastructure across the entire estate.

Keith Gibson, project manager at the SSA, said: "[This contract] signals a period of significant change with the new contract having a strong focus on investment and future benefits realisation.

"It will reduce costs by simplifying IT support arrangements and provides a solid platform for future developments."

Atos will provide services including networking, desktop, applications, hosting, service integration and management to more than 18,000 end users located at over 30 locations.

Source:http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=64533103-E55E-DB55-573A89E10BCF7F73

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Worldwide IT outsourcing market grew 7.8 per cent in 2011

Worldwide IT outsourcing (ITO) revenue totalled $246.6 billion in 2011, a 7.8-per cent increase from 2010 revenue of $228.7 billion as India-based IT services providers and cloud-based services delivered the highest growth rates, according to a report by technology market research firm Gartner Inc.

"Revenue cannibalisation resulting from client adoption of industrialised, and often cloud-based, services risks muting the growth opportunities for the ITO providers that are heavily weighted in infrastructure outsourcing," said Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner.

"Strategies will vary as clients are likely to pursue hybrid cloud strategies requiring providers to deliver some asset-light and some asset-heavy offerings – which will result in varying growth trajectories among competitors over the next several years,” Britz added.

IBM maintained the No 1 position, as its revenue grew 7.8 per cent, and its revenue accounted for 10.9 per cent of ITO revenue. IBM was the No 1 ranked provider in all regions.

HP grew below the market growth rate, but retained the No 2 worldwide market share position with 6.1 per cent market share. Fujitsu, helped by currency gains, overtook CSC for the No. 3 worldwide market share position in 2011.

Forty-three providers booked 2011 revenues of $1 billion or more. This group of providers collectively grew by 9.5 per cent during 2011. After excluding India-based IT services providers, cloud-centric providers, and providers that made sizable acquisitions during the year, the remaining group of large ITO providers grew by only 6.5 percent during 2011.

"For many leading providers in the ITO market, 2011 revenue results demonstrate how challenging simply maintaining a market share position has become, much less gaining share – and this challenge is likely to worsen over the next few years for providers that do not address these forces," Britz said.

He concluded, "The challenges are likely to spur consolidation to augment growth, posing risk to the consolidators, because acquisitions have been a challenge in the IT services market."

 

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Source:http://www.domain-b.com/infotech/itnews/20120521_worldwide.html

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IT Outsourcing: Will CIOs Reclaim Their Power?

IT outsourcing has always been a double-edged sword for CIOs. What starts out as a cure for IT’s ills always seems to cause more headaches down the road.

The first IT outsourcing models—single-sourced, vertical deals—promised to bring to bear industry expertise in service delivery and processes. But these all-inclusive relationships often ended up stifling competition, limiting flexibility and even increasing costs.

As the corporate IT environment grew more complex, IT leaders sought help from multiple vendors to meet their needs for technical skills, geographical coverage, and competitive rates. But this "maze of outside vendors" has proven difficult to manage, says Arjun Sethi, vice president and partner in charge of A.T. Kearney’s strategic IT practice. CIOs in multi-sourced IT organizations continue to struggle; there’s no single view of processes, no automated exchange of information between vendors, no consistent SLA management—all of which lead to escalating management costs.

But that’s all about to change, according to Sethi, who says the tipping point will be the adoption of independent cloud-based IT service management tools. These systems will not only streamline vendor relationships and service management, he says, but also enable CIOs to reassert control over IT by taking the process piece back in-house.
CIO.com talked to Sethi about his predictions for the future or corporate IT power and the IT outsourcing model he envisions for the future.

CIO.com: IT outsourcing has always been fraught with management challenges for corporate IT. What are the biggest changes you’ve observed in this area in recent years?

Arjun Sethi: We have observed several key changes in the last five years that have fundamentally changed the structure of the IT outsourcing market:

It service quality is now judged more based on achieving the desired business outcomes than the underlying technical performance and availability. The distinction between business outcomes and IT performance has largely disappeared.

IT services are delivered in a more integrated manner from different locations around the globe—or virtually.

New vendors are challenging traditional outsourcers with solutions that deliver capabilities at a lower price point.

The need to manage IT operations seamlessly across a multi-vendor environment has increased.

CIO.com: You look at the new tools and changes taking place in end user service management (EUSM)—one of the first areas of IT to go out the door—as a bellwether for the rest of IT services. What are you seeing?

Sethi: Cloud-based EUSM tools provide a unified view into the root causes of incidents for tracking, measuring and improving performance—cradle to grave—from both end user and vendor management perspectives. They have put the CIO and their IT department in the driver’s seat by enabling them to view the delivery process from issue initiation to problem resolution, regardless of which or how many vendors perform a given task. Empowered by cloud delivery and process commoditization, enterprises have real potential to take back control of their EUSM choices. We believe other towers of service will follow.

CIO.com: You say that now is the time for CIOs to take back control of IT processes and vendor management. But having outsourced a significant portion of IT to date, have they retained the skills necessary to do this?

Sethi: That’s perhaps the most important question. It is both a risk and an opportunity. Indeed, with all of the outsourcing over the last many years, organizations have lost some of the key content and contextual knowledge required to run their IT operations. We find that many IT organizations who are heavily outsourced sometimes do not readily have basic—and oftentimes critical—information like asset inventory or a good understanding of root causes driving IT issues. Only when a high-severity issue occurs do organizations deploy detailed root cause analysis. It takes substantial time to then figure out the problem across the entire IT stack—from the application source code to the middleware to the underlying infrastructure. More often than not, that process leads to debate and no one takes accountability because different vendors (or the company itself) own different parts of IT.

On the flip side, this is an opportunity is to take back control, rebuild the necessary skill set, and get in front of this issue, leveraging new service management-enabled opportunities.

Source:http://www.cio.com/article/706759/IT_Outsourcing_Will_

CIOs_Reclaim_Their_Power_?taxonomyId=3154

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Blank Check or Set a Budget? How to Fund Agile Software Projects

Are you interested in exploring the agile methodology for developing software at your company, but you’re worried that it feels like writing a blank check to the developer? It’s a commonly held belief among companies looking for outsourced software development that agile could potentially cost more than traditional methodologies. However, the nature of how agile development works, combined with a well-defined structure for funding it, ensures that you can produce a great piece of software without breaking the bank.

Two approaches to funding Agile – Fixed Budgeting Approach

The first step to ensuring that your company’s agile development meets your budget requirements is deciding upon whether to go with a fixed budget or continuous funding. A fixed budget is exactly what it sounds like–your company sets the maximum amount that they’re willing to spend for the software, and the development team works on the project until they hit the budget ceiling. Fixed budgeting is a good funding approach for companies that are not entirely familiar with the agile development process, and they want to make sure that there is a distinct budget cap.

Because the agile development process insures that you have a finished piece of software at the end of every sprint, you’re saving time and money with either continuous funding or fixed budgeting.

A fixed budget doesn’t mean you end up with an unfinished project. Instead, agile development works hand-in-hand with fixed budgeting because stages of the project (or sprints) are each completed within a set amount of time; at the end of every sprint you have a complete piece of software as well as an update on how much of the budget is left.

The development team covers the most important and critical features in the first sprint, shows you the result, and you give the  green light for the second sprint to add more features, work out bugs, or even take the software in a different direction if that’s what market conditions require. Though it may not be as comprehensive and feature-rich as you might want in the future, it’s still a solid version 1.0 that you can beta-test since the most critical features are already developed.

Funding Agile – Continuous Funding Approach

Continuous funding is typically used by more experienced companies that know how agile works and are confident in the development team. The company outlines what they need, the team figures out how long it will take, and they create a detailed prioritization of the product backlog of features, separating those features into a smaller backlog for each sprint. If they reach the end of the sprint without fully completing all the features, they take it out and move on with what works instead of dragging out the deadline for who knows how long trying to figure out just one bug. The difference between continuous funding and a fixed budget is that continuous funding allows the development team to work on critical and non-critical features at the same time because the budget allows for more time to continue working on various features rather than focusing only on the mission-critical ones.

The Best Part About Agile? You Save Money Either Way

Because the agile development process insures that you have a finished piece of software at the end of every sprint, you’re saving time and money with either continuous funding or fixed budgeting. Instead of waiting for months or years to see the end result, you get a real, workable update within a specific period of time, giving your company the opportunity to evaluate and decide whether the project is moving in the right direction. Having these mini releases also allows you to gather more funding because you can release the software, get feedback from your users (or the market), then see if it’s worth getting additional funding for an improved version, or determine whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Either way, the agile development process helps you make sure that your company doesn’t sink too much money into software development. The agile methodology does quite the opposite, in fact.

Source:
http://nearshoreamericas.com/fund-agile-software-development/

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Essential Metrics to Use to Evaluate Application Development and Testing Vendors

Linda Chapman Essential Metrics to Use to Evaluate Application Development and Testing VendorsDeveloping and implementing consistent, actionable performance metrics for your Application Development and Maintenance and Testing program is one of the best ways to ensure you get value for money. One of the most important aspects of developing effective metrics is to resist measuring everything that can be measured. Focus only on measuring what matters.

According to CORE (Centre for Outsourcing Research and Education) research conducted in 2011,  one of the largest weaknesses found was that almost half of the organizations struggled to identify a compact set of metrics that aligned with business priorities. Over-abundance of metrics often obscured the core set and made it challenging for clients to aggregate relevant information and derive intelligent insights. Others recognized the issue not as a problem of quantity but of quality; stating that metrics were being tracked, but did not link to the organization’s ultimate goals.

This is an area where there is a tendency to try to measure too many things, often resulting in lots of data, plenty of noise but not much actionable information

No matter how complex or far reaching your metrics are, most managers pay attention to only a few metrics. In addition to simplifying the metrics measurement process, this guide to “best practices” will help you develop metrics that marry the relationship and performance information you really need with the information vendors can readily provide.

There are three types of Metrics that you should consider creating to measure the success of your program and vendor relationships:

1) Relationship level – these Metrics focus on how the relationship between the two companies is working, and how satisfied you are with their responsiveness and your access to their thought leadership and innovation.

2) Customer level – these Metrics focus on how well the vendor is performing tactical, “table stakes” tasks, like invoice accuracy and incident management.

3) Statement of Work (SOW) level – these Metrics focus on how well the vendor is delivering quality outcomes, on time and on budget, against each Statement of Work.

Measuring Performance

Relationship and Customer level Metrics are performance management tools and controls that are not unique to ADM and Testing vendor relationships. A good way to simplify governance processes and reduce workload associated with managing multiple vendors is to develop and deploy a generic set of Relationship and Customer levels across the population.

The primary focus of this article is on the SOW level Metrics. This is an area where there is a tendency to try to measure too many things, often resulting in lots of data, plenty of noise but not much actionable information. The best way to simplify your thinking about what to measure is to establish an overarching framework that addresses expected and important outcomes. By this I mean deciding how to group everything you want to measure into a few overarching categories. Three or four categories are simple to remember, easy to manage and simplify the communication process.

Grouping Metrics

I’d recommend grouping SOW level Metrics into “Quality,” “Efficiency” and “Effectiveness” categories, then creating sub-level metrics that align with each category. When you’re deciding on the sub-level Metrics, which are labeled “Type” in this example, give careful consideration to which metrics are referenced in best practices research coupled with what the vendor already measures internally. If you’re not sure what your vendors measure, just ask. They’ll appreciate your efforts to align your performance reporting requirements with their existing processes.

This is an example of “Quality” Metrics for Application Development and Maintenance. The Type column identifies the type of quality metric being measured; the Description specifies what is being measured; Waterfall or Agile refers to the software development methodology; Reporting periods can be set according to the timing of SOW deliverables, against major milestones or for long term relationships by quarter.

The same approach is taken to develop “Efficiency” and “Effectiveness” Metrics and any other categories you wish to measure. (Click on the chart for an expanded view.)

Metrics 14 1024x668 Essential Metrics to Use to Evaluate Application Development and Testing Vendors

And here is an example of “Quality” Metrics for Testing: (Click on the chart for an expanded view.)

Metrics 22 1024x394 Essential Metrics to Use to Evaluate Application Development and Testing Vendors

Conclusion

This approach is extremely useful for managing outcomes for each SOW and every vendor. Over time, you will have a sufficient volume of actual results for each vendor and every SOW. The data can be analyzed for opportunities and issues. You can identify fact-based opportunities for Project Teams and vendors to achieve better quality, higher productivity levels and lower costs. Ultimately, this is the most predictable way to increase the value for money.

Source:

http://nearshoreamericas.com/application-development-testing-vendors/

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The Pros and Cons of IT Outsourcing: Globally, Nationally and Locally

Outsourcing is pretty much de rigueur for modern startups looking to conserve capital. But making outsourcing work for your startup isn’t always easy. One of the first steps is figuring out where to outsource.

There are a lot of choices. The first major decision is geographical. Should you outsource locally, nationally or internationally?

My company, GrowBiz Media, has outsourced Web design and development, both internationally and locally. Believe me when I tell you each comes with its own set of pros and cons.

Here’s a quick overview:

Outsourcing Internationally

When most people think of outsourcing, they envision coders in Southeast Asia working into the wee hours of (our) night. Turns out that many factors can make global outsourcing more difficult and expensive than it appears to be at first glance.

Pros: Low cost is the primary reason most companies outsource overseas. The time difference can also be a plus: You can send your changes to your team at the end of your business day, and have the code ready when you wake up the next morning.

Cons: The old adage “you get what you pay for” often holds true. Managing people thousands of miles away is difficult at best, so when calculating costs, consider that you may need to pay someone to oversee your overseas contractors. Language or cultural barriers can add to the complexity, and different time zones can cause as many problems as they solve.

Outsourcing Nationally

Outsourcing IT within the U.S. is gaining steam. Often called rural sourcing or near-sourcing, the movement is driven partly by companies’ dissatisfaction with the quality of overseas workers and partly by a desire to bring jobs back to the U.S.

The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals named near-sourcing one of its top trends for 2012. In places like Georgia, North Carolina and Arkansas, skilled tech workers can be found for a fraction of what you’d pay in Silicon Valley or New York, according to Rural Sourcing Inc., which matches companies with workers in “second- and third-tier” cities nationwide.

Pros: Lack of cultural and language barriers make communicating with U.S. workers easier and more convenient. The time zone differential may be a slight benefit, depending on where your business and your contractors are located.

Cons: You’ll pay more for outsourcing within America than you would overseas, and if your outsourced team is across the country, meeting in person will still take time, effort and money. Be aware that some American contractors will subcontract some or all of your projects to overseas workers. This can be fine, particularly if they’re familiar with them and their work. But when this happened with one contractor we dealt with, the results were not positive.

Outsourcing Locally

Pros: Face time is the major advantage of working with a local company. While most of our communication still takes place by email and conference calls, when we undertake big projects or major changes, we can meet in person to brainstorm ideas and sketch out plans. Another advantage: If you do end up hiring full-time in the future, good contractors often turn into good employees.

Cons: By outsourcing to workers in your area, you’ll have to pay the going rate – which can wipe out most of the cost benefits. As with national contractors, some local firms may outsource all or part of your work overseas.

Source:http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2012/05/the-pros-and-cons-of-it-outsourcing-globally-nationally-and-locally.php

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Cloud Computing and IT Outsourcing Improve Profitability

All startup companies start small with limited capital and resources that are stretched to cover expenses. Personnel often multitask and perform more than one role in small companies. As the company grows, reaching strengths of say 50-100 personnel, enterprise heads have to look at new ways to optimize IT management and resource consumption. At the very least, they have to start planning to prepare for the future.

Instead of ramping up in an unorganized manner, SMBs look at smart innovative options that are available to them today. One approach to improving profitability and optimizing resources is to take advantage of cloud computing solutions and outsourcing. By offloading non-business centric tasks to external caretakers, SMBs can reduce infrastructure, management and operational costs. At the same time, they can allocate more resources and funds towards the core competencies of the organization and its services.

According to a whitepaper released by IDC, demand-side research shows that small businesses consistently cite revenue growth as their number one business priority, but efficiency has become more important, especially as firms grow in size beyond 50 and 100 employees into the midsize space.

Tapping cloud computing options

The Solution-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has been around some time. Cloud computing solutions have evolved and matured to offer viable Platform-as-a-Service, IT-as-a-Service, Video-as-a-Service and other specific services. Moving to the cloud offers huge savings – in terms of cost, time, resources, scaling, agility, access to advanced technology, software and hardware management, etc. – but it also requires some ground level changes in your existing setup.

SMBs should look at cloud computing as an enhancement rather than a replacement. Comprehensive transition to the cloud does not work well for small enterprises and it’s best that some parts of the business remain on premise, in direct control of internal IT. The decision to move to the cloud should be based on the predicted ROI and cost increment following expansion. The company may open a new branch, possibly in another part of the world. The cloud computing solution should be capable of delivering results efficiently and effectively around the clock.

IT Outsourcing

Small companies cannot afford big changes fast. But when it comes to IT, it could mean short-changing yourself by not taking advantage of the performance gains of moving to latest technology. This is where outsourcing helps. Look at IT outsourcing solutions and SLAs that:

  1. Offer some guarantees of performance
  2. Support flexibility in case of unprecedented changes or requirements
  3. Provide a clear breakdown of costs
  4. Do not require lock-in periods of commitment
  5. Support smooth transition of proprietary data to your premises when and if required

Cloud computing and IT outsourcing can make a big difference in business profitability. At the same time, the approach prepares the company for the future, allowing company heads more time to focus on market opportunities and growth.

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The real limits of cloud computing

When Google Drive was initially announced to be integrated with ChromeOS-running machines, the general consensus in the media seemed to be that this functionality was going to harbor a new age of personal cloud computing.

I, for one, am not so sure.

It is increasingly apparent that the level of hype around cloud computing has reached new and dizzying levels, and personal and business storage seems to be the latest "hot" implementation through which the Glories of Cloud are proclaimed.

But there are some serious limitations with the notion of cloud computing that seem to be blithely ignored amidst all of the hype.

First, there’s the very real issue of bandwidth limitation. If I, a business owner, find the prospect of storing my data cheaply in the cloud and not having to worry about building a local infrastructure (forgetting, for a moment, some of the obvious problems that such an approach implies), then let’s go with that a moment, shall we? If you have any sizable data load, you’re going to have big problems with upload speed.

Figuring an upstream speed of 10 Mbps (if you’re lucky), it would take about 12.5 days to push up a full terabyte of data… and a mere 10 GB would take just under two hours at those speeds. That’s not exactly optimal.

Yet services like Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Drive are expecting us to live with just upload bottlenecks. Unless you have the resources to afford a really big pipe to the Internet, cloud storage (at least on the initial upload) is going to take a long time.

And then there’s the problem that home internet users are increasingly confronting: data caps. Designed to prevent illicit downloads, as well as slow down the growing trend to "cut the cable" many people are doing to drop traditional cable services in favor of Internet-delivered content on Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV, many ISPs are putting data caps into place.

You can agree or disagree with their motives all you want (and I, for the record, disagree most strongly), but the real presence of data caps put a serious damper on using the cloud for storage. Granted, business Internet accounts have no such caps, but the premium that must be paid to get fast business-grade access is quite high with most providers.

With storage so relatively cheap, I can set up terabytes of data locally and not have to worry about losing data or filling up for a long time. And what about the benefits of disaster recovery and multi-device access?

There, I will admit, is the real lure of cloud storage. And I do, in fact, use a free Dropbox account to share files across PCs, laptops, and portable devices. My DR strategy is still local, though, because there’s too much "important" data to store online.

It may be pedantic to bring up such mundane issues as bandwidth and data capping to knock on cloud storage, but they must not be lost in all of the hype.

Source:http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/277228/real-limits-cloud-computing

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Enough room in outsourcing for both China, India

Loh Tiak Koon, CEO of Beijing-based IT outsourcing giant HiSoft, said within the booming global outsourcing market, the Chinese market will continue to grow a lot faster than its counterparts. Citing research from IDC, China saw 25 percent year-on-year growth in 2011, whereas India grew in the mid-tens, he told ZDNet Asia in an interview Thursday.

Loh, a Singaporean based in Beijing, was at a media event here where HiSoft’s Singapore officereceived the international headquarters (IHQ) status from the Economic Development Board (EDB), making it the headquarters for HiSoft’s Asia South–excluding mainland China and Japan–business.

According to Loh, the Chinese IT outsourcing industry has grown well vis-à-vis the Indian players and will continue to be "extremely strong" in the next three to five years. He attributed his outlook to four main reasons.

First of all, there is the huge and rapidly growing domestic market in China, coupled with still low IT penetration, that local outsourcing companies can tap.

Second, there has been a tremendous push by multinational corporations (MNCs) to enter the Chinese market, which they increasingly realize that their systems must be localized in order to succeed.

Third, the size of the IT labor force including IT graduates in China is equal to that of India. But while the Indian labor force has been fully exhausted because Indian outsourcers have been fully deployed over the last 10 years, the Chinese labor force has not been tapped as much, meaning means room for tremendous growth in the "infant years", Loh explained.

The last reason is that Chinese outsourcing companies also have business opportunities in Japan which has an aging population, he noted. "In terms of proximity like geographical distance and cultural affinity, the best country to serve Japan’s outsourcing [needs] is really China," he said.

Read More:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/enough-room-in-outsourcing-for-both-china-india-62304696.htm

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Apple may ‘think different’ on iCloud’s video sync feature

Apple is rumored to be adding video sync to its iCloud service. The question is whether it will feed into Photo Stream, or count against user storage.

Apple's photo sync through iCloud using Photo Stream.

Apple’s photo sync through iCloud using Photo Stream

iCloud and video are two words that have not gone together since the service launched last year. But a video synchronization feature rumored to arrive on iCloud next month could change all that.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal earlier today (subscription required), Apple is at work on a feature that lets users sync up videos they’ve taken with their iOS devices through iCloud. What’s unclear is whether that’s simply an addition to the existing Photo Stream feature, or something separate.

As it stands, Apple’s Photo Stream feature, which was introduced alongside iOS 5 last June, only syncs photos. If you want to see a video you’ve taken from your iPhone on your iPad, or vice versa, you’ve got to either sync it to that device with a computer using iTunes, or upload it to a Web sharing service like YouTube or Vimeo. The Journal’s report suggests videos would now be ferried over too.

This brings up a question about storage though. Videos are big, especially if you’ve captured them on either of Apple’s most recent iOS devices, the third-generation iPad and iPhone 4S. Both of these shoot in 1080p, and the files that are saved are bigger than ever. If Apple treats videos the same as photos, will that mean you get to keep videos as part of your Photo Stream, with no size limits? That would be generous given how Apple treats other types of files on the service.

Apple’s iCloud gives users 5GB for free, though only some files eat into that amount. Things like digital content (be it apps, books, videos, or music) purchased from one of Apple’s stores and the Photo Stream don’t count against the limit. However, e-mail, stored documents, settings, app data, and iOS device backups (which can include the camera roll’s photos and videos) are all counted. When this gets short, users can add on 10GB, 20GB, or 50GB of iCloud storage, for $20, $40, or $100 per year respectively.

By comparison Photo Stream is considered more like a temporary bin for your files. Apple counts photos by volume, not megabyte or gigabyte. You get up to 1,000 photos in your Photo Stream at any given time, and as new ones come in, old ones are flushed out.

But the way users store their media with the service could be changing, according to the Journal. In the same report the outlet says Apple execs have been considering "expanding the number of photos and albums users can store via iCloud to make the service resemble its iPhoto downloadable software," but that cost (presumably in its server infrastructure) has been a consideration. In other words, a move like that would likely increase how much Apple needs to spend on its server infrastructure and upkeep.

One thing that’s unclear is how many people are paying for add-on storage through Apple already. During its fiscal second-quarter conference call last month, Apple was asked by Goldman Sachs whether there had been "a big uptick in iTunes Match and paid storage additions," since those features were introduced (iTunes Match is Apple’s other paid add-on service that scans and matches a user’s music library with tracks in the iTunes catalog to make them available on other iOS devices). Apple’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, responded by saying that question was missing the point (emphasis mine):

We’ve now got over 125 million users that have come on to the service since then and they’re building up documents and music and other things that they want to store. And so I think storage growth will come more over time. Our real desire here was not about selling more storage. We think Match is a great product, and we recommend that everybody use it. But it’s a ‘pay for a service.’ We just really want to increase the customer delight from the entire ecosystem and platform of our iOS devices and the Mac, and that’s why we’ve done iCloud.

That’s a pretty strong indication that Apple won’t charge extra if it were to add videos to the Photo Stream feature. The real question is what happens if iOS users actually get to store more of their media on iCloud as opposed to relying on computers and hard drives, or on iCloud’s backup feature, which only stores snapshots of a device.

Apple very clearly wants to distance itself from using iCloud as a virtual hard drive, as we can see with the closure of MobileMe’s iDisk next month. User-made video hasn’t been too far removed from that product.

Looking back, Apple has kept close tabs on how much space user videos take up in its cloud. With MobileMe, and .Mac before it, Apple kept track of not just how much storage a video took up, but also how much bandwidth got slurped up when you shared it with someone else. MobileMe closes up its doors next month, and perhaps that megabyte-counting behavior will go with it.

source:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57433888-37/apple-may-think-different-on-iclouds-video-sync-feature/

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