NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra or CouchDB are a key foundation for web startups. But those companies might be better served using an old-fashioned relational database when it comes to their bread-and-butter transactions, according to Thrillist CTO Mark O’Neill. Read More »
Bio:Barb has covered technology and high-tech companies for longer than she’d care to admit. She started out as a reporter for InfoWorld, covering Boston-area software companies; then moved over to CRN where she managed the news staff and covered the business both in terms of technology and how technology is sold. She was also news editor for TechWeb and senior news director at TechTarget before joining GigaOM. Barb enjoys seeing how old-school IT companies are (mis)managing their transition into the cloud computing era. She has won several ASBPE awards for her news coverage. Outside of work, she loves gardening, movies and baseball.
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My Focus
Cloud computing
Infrastructure
Recent Posts
Dell may buy Quest Software in a bid to bolster its overall software management play, according to a Bloomberg report. Quest makes management software and tools that could help Dell to become an enterprise services provider — a long-time goal for the PC maker. Read More »
NASA, one of the two original backers of the OpenStack project, plans to stop actively developing software for that open-source cloud computing platform. NASA executive Karen Petraskas signaled the move at the Uptime Symposium this week, according to a published report. Read More »
Consumers are feeling pretty perky about things going into Memorial Day, according to new IBM sentiment analysis. That means stores and hotels might have reason to smile over the holiday weekend, as people seem to want to travel — and shop — over the long weekend. … Read More »
Cloud storage provider Box adds a more advanced administrative console, enterprise-wide search, enterprise license agreements and support for multiple email domains to its service. Enterprise features like these are a battle ground for cloud service providers trying to convince IT to make the cloud move. Read More »
The big news out of Hewlett-Packard’s second quarter earnings call is that the company will lose 9,000 employees in FY 2012, with former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch among the departed. Enterprise software chief Bill Veghte will take over stewardship of Autonomy. Read More »
Dr. Gautam Shroff, VP of Tata Consultancy Services and the head of the TCS Innovation Lab in Delhi, recently shared his thoughts on the hottest trends in IT. From his vantagepoint he sees the cloud computing discussion as yesterday’s news. I Read More »
More Must Reads
Just when you thought Oracle might be done buying stuff, it buys something else. Today the database giant said it is purchasing Vitrue, a company that offers a SaaS service that lets companies better utilize social networking for their branding and marketing efforts. Read More »
Enterprise software giant SAP is buying Ariba in a $4.3 billion move that will give it control of what may be world’s largest online marketplace. Businesses worldwide use Ariba’s e-commerce and procurement services to buy and sell all sorts of goods and services. Read More »
In its push to get traction for Windows Azure as a platform for cloud services, Microsoft is opening an Azure accelerator in Bangalore. The goal is to find and help startups across India and Southeast Asia — and get them aboard the Microsoft PaaS. Read More »
Cloud storage provider Box experienced a snafu early today, as some users reported via Twitter that they could not access their stored documents. The company acknowledged that some customers experienced difficulty getting to their Box-stored files for about two hours early Tuesday. Read More »
Yottaa, the startup which aims to accelerate website performance, netted $9 million in Series B funding from existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures as well as some new-but-unnamed backers. That company will use the new funding to bankroll customer recruitment.. Read More »
Github, the social network for software developers, now has a brand-new, first-ever Windows client. That means developers can build their Windows XP, Windows 7 and pre-release Windows 8 — even Vista applications — but now also share their work on the popular Github repository. Read More »
The bring-your-own-device trend may cause as many problems as it solves, according to IBM CIO Jeanette Horan. BYOD, in which companies let (even encourage) employees to use personal smartphones or tablets to access company applications, boosts productivity. It also causes big IT headaches. Read More »
Speaking to Boston University’s graduating class of 2012 on Sunday afternoon, Google’s Eric Schmidt took some veiled potshots at archrival and newly public Facebook. Schmidt didn’t drop any F-bombs, but everyone got the message. Read More »
With news that Google and Microsoft plan to take on Amazon Web Services with infrastructure services of their own, you have to ask: How many clouds do we need? Legacy vendors IBM, Microsoft and HP are hoping at least a couple more. Read More »
The anticipated SpaceX launch was aborted at the last possible second after a computer detected a glitch in one of the rocket’s nine engines. The snafu raised anew questions of whether private industry can handle a space program. Read More »
Striving to make Chef more enterprise-friendly, Opscode added Microsoft Active Directory and Solaris support to the automated configuration management tool. It also says that its Private Chef version can now wring three times as much work out of the same old hardware. Read More »
Brad Garlinghouse, who once headed up AOL’s Silicon Valley operations, is now CEO of YouSendIt, a provider of file sharing, sync, storage and collaboration software for businesses. Garlinghouse replaces Ivan Koon who is leaving the company after six years. Read More »
VMware’s set its sights on becoming a bona fide application development powerhouse. With the latest version of its Springsource-based vFabric Suite, VMware adds application deployment automation, vSphere-optimized Posgres and a SQLFire in-memory database layer — all are geared to woo web scale developers. Read More »
Amazon says its updated Cloudfront content delivery network will better handle dynamic, interactive web content. To date, Cloudfront handled static web pages while Amazon left a lot of the heavy lifting of dynamic content to partners like CDN market leader Akamai. Read More »
Amazon cloud services may be cheap, but even those small charges can add up. Following a raft of third-party companies that offer AWS monitoring services, Amazon has stepped up to offer its own proactive billing alerts for Cloudwatch customers that enable it. Read More »
Box, the cloud storage company that would like to be the “Dropbox of the Enterprise” appears headed for an IPO next year. The company just added Dana Evans, former CFO of Verisign, to its board and named her head of its audit committee. Read More »
News that SAP and Amazon will All-in-One business applications to run in production on Amazon’s public cloud raises a question: what’s going on with SAP and Microsoft Windows Azure? News on this could come next week at the Sapphire 2012 show. Or not. Read More »
SAP All-in-One business applications will now run in Amazon’s cloud — another step that could make Amazon Web Services more enticing to risk-averse businesses that stress over entrusting their life-blood applications to a public cloud. Read More »
Microsoft’s top search guy took to the Web Thursday to show off a refreshed interface for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, that he said better incorporates the user’s social media contacts in a new sidebar which brings in their Facebook and Twitter contacts input. Read More »
Trying to convince naysayers that it’s serious about Google App Engine as a business, Google put a price plan — actually two price plans — around its MySQL-based SQL Cloud services. Google, Amazon, HP and others are racing to add more database services to their own … Read More »
The OpenStack army marches on. On Thursday, Hewlett-Packard put its public cloud to public beta. The services had been available to a limited number of customers up till now. The news comes a week after Rackspace launched its own OpenStack cloud. Read More »
E-procurement player Coupa Software netted $22 million in a Series E funding round led by new investor Crosslink Capital. Companies use Coupa’s cloud-based services to track supplier contracts and requisitions. Read More »
New York City-based startup BetterCloud has raised $2 million for its quest to bring better business-oriented management, reporting and other capabilities to Google Apps. The funding comes from BetterCloud CEO David Politis and unnamed angel investors. Read More »
Save the date: Amazon will host its first-ever partner and customer conference at the Las Vegas Venetian in late November. With this move, Amazon looks more like an old-school IT vendor than ever. It recently announced an official partner program, another sign of IT maturity. Read More »
For the last two, three maybe more years, various pundits have said that the year of desktop virtualization is just around the corner. And each year, they were wrong. Still, we gotta ask, will 2012 be the year of desktop virtualization? Read More »
Paul Doscher, CEO of Lucid Imagination wants you to know that when it come to enterprise-class search, open-source Lucene is a contender. And a strong contender that can face off against Google, Amazon and Microsoft in the big data search arena. Read More »
Cloud Engines’ Pogoplug Team software creates “on-site storage clouds” using existing PCs or servers in a way it claims is far cheaper than the various Dropboxes for the enterprise. Authorized remote workers can access folders or files as needed. Read More »
Let it never be said that the cloud computing wars are boring. Within hours of being blasted for locking developers into its ever-rising cloud stack, Amazon announced new managed database services and Elastic Beanstalk support for thousands of Microsoft-centric developers. Read More »
Positioning his company as David to Amazon’s Goliath, Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson blasted Amazon Web Services for locking developers into a closed ecosystem. As AWS adds more services, it’s harder for developers to get out, he said. Read More »
Up-and-coming IaaS player Tier 3′s new Web Fabric Platform aims to give enterprise customers access to infrastructure services and higher-level application services from a single console. It builds on Iron Foundry, an open source fork of Cloud Foundry that adds .NET support. Read More »
We’ve heard an awful lot about lean startups lately. Now it’s time to focus on Phat Startups — companies willing to take big risks to solve big problems — like clean energy and nuclear waste remediation, according to Jamie Goldstein, general partner at North Bridge Venture … Read More »
With its Project Sputnik laptop, Dell hopes to lure Linux-loving developers back into its camp and perhaps even get some who defected to Mac OSX to return to the open source fold. The laptop bundles Ubuntu, tools and an on-ramp to github repositories. Read More »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business.
A cadre of DevOps experts will gather later this week at an undisclosed location in Northern California. The goal: To hash out issues they see in their own shops, to compare notes on problems and talk in a way that they cannot in vendor-driven conferences. Read More »
One reason the year of desktop virtualization is always on the horizon but never gets here, is its expense. Atlantis Computing says its software cuts RAM requirements to 500MB per user, down from 1.2GB so VDI can be deployed without storage hardware. Read More »
It’s easy to write off Internet memes — Double Rainbow Guy, LOLcats — as trivial entertainment. But then a funny thing happened at ROFLCon where I learned that seemingly silly memes say a lot about us as a culture and they definitely bear examination. Read More »
The big news out of ROFLCon is that this is the last ROFLCon. So if you want to catch your favorite “Famous on the Internet” stars — Tron Guy, Double Rainbow Guy, the Nyancats — you better get to MIT Building 26 in the next few … Read More »
DocTrackr’s new “remote document management as a service” will let users control access to their Word, Excel, or PDF files, monitor their use, and even destroy them after they’ve been emailed to others, says Clement Cazalot, company CEO. Read More »
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