A guide to Europe’s tech hubs
photo: Shutterstock/Imoloko
Tallinn, Estonia? Berlin? London? Dublin? Those aren’t the only contenders for the title of Silicon Valley of Europe. Read more »
Surprise! There may be a business in Google Apps after all!
photo: Shutterstock / Raywoo
Cloud Sherpas has seen revenue from both its Google Apps and Salesforce.com businesses double in the past year. That seams to indicate that third-party VARs and integrators can make a living off low-cost SaaS applications — and that Google gets that it needs an ecosystem. Read more »
Shares of cloud-HR company Workday soar on first day of public trading
There may be life yet in enterprise software. Workday’s much anticipated debut on the New York Stock Exchange did not disappoint. Shares of the SaaS company blew by the $28-per-share expectation, opening at $48.05 per share. Read more »
Exclusive: Comcast casts its lot with OpenStack
The nation’s biggest broadband and cable provider is joining the OpenStack effort, just in time for it’s big coming out party in San Diego next week. Comcast is also working with Cisco on applications that can build on that open-source infrastructure. Read more »
Wercker aims to “fix” the app dev universe
photo: Wercker
Wercker says its continuous delivery SaaS will fill a huge gap in today’s software landscape where developers rely on cloud services like Github to store and version their code and PaaSes to deploy it. What’s lacking is a SaaS to keep updates flowing. Read more »
Cloud storage wars rage on with OwnCloud’s new release
OwnCloud released its community edition and updated the business version of its service which lets IT store employee files in its cloud of choice. Cloud storage for business is a white hot market at least in terms of vendor activity. Read more »
OpenNebula cloud — bigger than expected in business
photo: Editor B
OpenNebula, the European-rooted open-source cloud platform is used by more businesses and in more countries than many might expect. At the ripe old age of 7, OpenNebula remains a quiet force compared to say, OpenStack. Read more »
How Oracle (yes Oracle!) helped Amazon suck the cost out of database backup
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Oracle is not often accused of helping customers cut costs, but in this case, modifications to its recovery manager product with the 10g release helped Amazon.com save $1 million a year by backing up directly to Amazon S3 storage. Read more »
If you’re a big data hacker, hack/reduce wants you
photo: Flickr / kirinqueen
If you’re a big data hacker in the greater Boston area, hack/reduce wants you to join its effort to make the area a big data hub, according to Abbey Fichtner. Read more »
Top 8 questions for the OpenStack Summit
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
If the OpenStack Summit is anywhere near as dramatic as the events leading up to it, it will be a really good show. As the open-source cloud effort transitions from a Rackspace-dominated move to a true community effort, here are 8 big questions. Read more »
Can Bitbucket prevail in a Github-obsessed world?
Github is the code repository and versioning system of choice for millions of developers, especially in the open-source world. But Atlassian is banking that its newly updated Bitbucket and Stash, can entice corporate develoeprs. Read more »
Box seeks new allies in cloud storage wars with integration framework
photo: Pinar Ozger
NetSuite, DocuSign, Jive, SugarCRM, Concur and Oracle sign on early to new Box Embed program but with erstwhile Box partners like Salesforce.com and other vendors now doing their own cloud file-share-and-sync, Box does need some reinforcements. Read more »
Zenoss taps $25M to monitor the IT universe
photo: Zenoss
Zenoss will use its new-found cash to staff up its international operations, better support global partners, and improve the real-time analytics of its IT monitoring system, said CEO Bill Karpovich. Read more »
Amazon makes it easier for IT to track apps bought from its marketplace
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
By integrating its AWS Marketplace with Identity Access Management, Amazon is making the purchase of third-party services running on its cloud infrastructure more palatable to companies worried about shadow IT. Read more »
Penn students build Firefly to make co-browsing drop-dead easy
photo: Firefly
Patrick Leahy, co-founder of startup Firefly, turned down a prestigious Wall Street investment banking internship to build software that takes the messy plug-ins and downloads out of web-based customer support services. Read more »
Cloud Print: transforming digital Data as a Service
photo: Shutterstock / imageZebra
Cloud print, which lets companies create digital “print” jobs from their desktops and tap into a web of connected print facilities, can save resources, money and time. And preserve the value of hard copy print for select applications, writes Peecho founder Sander Nagtegaal. Read more »
Citrix Startup Accelerator backs Cloud Vertical to measure cloud spending
photo: photo / Cloud Vertical
Dublin-based Cloud Vertical, which wants to help companies get the most bang for their cloud computing buck, now has cash and backing from the Citrix Startup Accelerator to build its business, says Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne. Read more »
5 ways to sniff out online fakers
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Sift Science says it can help you finger people on your website who are likely to create fraudulent accounts, post fake reviews or do other dastardly deeds. The startup’s service, now in private beta, uses machine learning to help ID the bad guys. Read more »
Cisco buys vCider to boost its distributed cloud vision
vCider’s virtual networking smarts will help Cisco build distributed cloud infrastructure that ties into its own Open Networking Environment. The move is seen as a counter to VMware’s acquisition of Nicira. Read more »
Google App Engine taps Jenkins for continuous integration
Continuous integration (CI) tools are becoming a bigger deal in the software development world. That’s why Google is helping App Engine developers use Cloudbees’ Jenkins-in-the-cloud tool. Read more »
Will there be an Amazon of Europe?
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Can a single vendor dominate the public cloud services market in Europe as Amazon has managed to do in the US? It’s not very likely. The single biggest reason is obvious: Europe is not the US. Read more »
HP’s Whitman: Wait till 2014 for turnaround
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Hewlett-Packard’s turnaround will take longer than observers had hoped. CEO Meg Whitman said the company should see traction by 2014 and that FY 2013 will be tough due to internal issues and macroeconomic “headwinds.” Read more »
Ellison says no more big acquisitions. Yeah, right
Oracle CEO and acquirer-in-chief Larry Ellison told CNBC not to expect any big acquisitions in the near future. Instead Oracle will focus on its ambitious cloud plans, engineered systems and organic growth. We’ll see…. Read more »
Is there room for another cloud storage company? CloudMe says ‘yes.’
photo: Flickr / getinet
Can a small company compete with Dropbox and Box in the wild-and-wooly world of cloud storage and file sharing? Mathias Ericsson, CEO of CloudMe, thinks so, provided the company is creative and ahead of the curve. Read more »
Spooky In-Q-Tel takes a stake in Cloudant
photo: Shutterstock / Elnur
In-Q-Tel, a somewhat mysterious company, takes an undisclosed stake in Cloudant, the developer of a NoSQL-based data layer as a service. IQT’s blessing can help companies get their technologies deployed in government agencies, including the CIA and NSA. Read more »
Gene research in the cloud could help cure diseases in the lab
photo: Flickr / CodonAUG
Morgridge Institute ran Cycle Computing software atop Amazon Web Services to build a cell knowledge base that, over time, could help doctors build the tissue types they need to resarch and cure disease in a petri dish. Read more »
Box beefs up security and search for enterprise storage
With more software vendors fielding their own cloud storage capabilities, Box continues to beef up enterprise security and perks for its offering. New features include two-step authentication, company-wide search for admins, and content scanning, the company said. Read more »
Tit for tat: Amazon offers free taste of Oracle database
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
The empire strikes back: Amazon Web Services adds the Oracle database — actually the whole RDS lineup — to its free usage tier. Anyone who doesn’t see Oracle’s new Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Amazon Web Services as potential competitors should probably look again. Read more »
SOASTA buys LogNormal to beef up mobile app testing
The two companies were already working together on mPulse when they decided a deal was in order. The new product aims to give mobile and web developers a real-time look at how their apps are perfroming in the field, said SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos. Read more »
Microsoft attacks JavaScript scaling with TypeScript
Javascript is wildly popular but needs enterprise-class capabilities if it’s going to continue to be used to build business applications. That’s why Microsoft is offering TypeScript a superset of JavaScript that adds these needed perks available as a download. Read more »
Oracle cloud takes vendor lock-in up a notch
Oracle’s new clouds are a vehicle for selling more Oracle hardware and software into big accounts. It’s unclear how many of these big accounts — banks, manufacturers, insurance companies — really want to go all-in with Oracle in the cloud, however. Read more »
Shocker! Oracle takes on Amazon with all-Oracle-all-the-time cloud
Oracle’s promised new public and private clouds will run (spoiler alert) Oracle OS, Oracle VM, Oracle database and new Oracle Exadata X3 hardware. The company’s scale-up approach flies in the face of scale-out clouds espoused by market leaders like Amazon. Read more »
Typesafe brings SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson aboard
Johnson’s presence on Typesafe’s board brings even more credibility to Typesafe’s push to make Scala a top-tier language for scalable enterprise applications. The company will be at JavaOne promoting that vision. Read more »
Hey IT — embrace, don’t stifle, developers’ flight to cloud
Shadow IT, or dark ops, can be scary to IT departments, but there are reasons developers go rogue. Instead of fighting their urge to flea to the cloud, make it easy for them to use cloud resources in a responsible way. Read more »
Change.org: 20M users but not a single server
photo: Flickr / Ryan Resella
The online social networking platform for promoting social change handles more than 20 million users, but has a tiny in-house IT footprint thanks to its use of cloud services from Amazon and Rackspace. The key thing, says infrastructure manager Kyle VanderBeek, is flexibility. Read more »
The dark side of OpenStack
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
Buyer beware when it comes to adopting OpenStack — or any open-source cloud — according to a newly released Gartner report. Long story short: evaluate OpenStack just like you’d assess a commercial offering, cautions analyst Lydia Leong. Read more »
Cloud services startup Tier 3 nets $10M in new funding
Tier 3, a startup which is attacking the enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) market, just netted $10 million in new funding in a round led by Intel Capital, according to newly filed SEC documents. Read more »
Startup Stackdriver snags StyleFeeder founder
Philip Jacob, who started online shopping site StyleFeeder, grew it to a milllion registered users, and sold it to Time Inc., is joining Boston startup Stackdriver to help it develop technology to manage applications across cloud infrastructures. Read more »
Newvem adds Amazon S3 storage analytics to its roster
Newvem, which already kept taps on Amazon EC2 instances, is now adding S3 storage to the services it monitors and analyzes for customers. The goal is to help them pick the right storage tier for their different data sets, Newvem president Zev Laderman said. Read more »
RightScale gets your cloud ready for the holidays
There’s nothing like the holiday shopping season to test an e-commerce site’s ability to ramp up and down as needed. RightScale says it can help sites proactively respond to changing loads so they don’t run out of juice and don’t pay for more resources than needed. Read more »
