The thought that everyone should write software is gaining steam. The reasoning is that if all the people who use software actually understand how to build software, everyone’s better off. But if everyone codes, what’s that mean for the professionals? Read more »
The OpenStack cloud computing project turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process. The opportunity is huge, but the challenges are too. Read more »
Apple took Microsoft to school with its iPod, iPhone, iPad trilogy and Microsoft responded with vows to one-up Apple with Surface and Windows phones. But can the Microsoft of the 21st century do what the older Microsoft did in overcoming foes? Skepticism abounds. Read more »
Two big Amazon outages over the past month certainly got everyone’s attention. Here are three tactical measures cloud users should take to minimize damage from future cloud computing snafus. Broadly, the outages also ratchet up pressure for companies to move to multiple clouds. Read more »
Cloudabilty, the Portland, Ore.-startup that seeks to help companies manage their spending across clouds, just landed $8.7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by The Foundry Group and included contributions from 500 Startups, Trinity Ventures and ad firm Wieden + Kennedy. Read more »
Here’s a sour reminder of a bleak chapter of Hewlett-Packard’s past. Two private investigators — a father-and-son team — face sentencing Thursday for their role in the HP pretexting scandal in which they assumed other identities to get phone records of reporters and board members. Read more »
It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. Also, cloud is big, duh. Read more »
Startup Cumulogic releases its Java platform-as-a-service foundations on Wednesday. The company, with strong Sun Microsystems and Java DNA, hopes that major hosting companies, telcos, and other service providers will build their PaaSes atop its technology. Read more »
With the OpenStack project turning two years old soon amid what will no doubt be a ton of vendor-generated hoopla, Ignacio Llorente wants the world to know that the more mature OpenNebula open-source cloud continues to evolve, just with a lot less noise. Read more »
Cloud storage specialist Nasuni is embracing unified storage, meaning its service now supports block storage (typically addressed by iSCSI and Fibre Channel devices) as well as the file storage it already supported and which is commonly used in branch and remote offices. Read more »
Steve Ballmer, unbowed by a negative Vanity Fair story that paints Microsoft as a company that no longer competes effectively remains … well, Ballmer. In a recent interview, Ballmer said Microsoft will take the battle to Apple again in tablets, in smartphones, in cloud. Read more »
NuoDB has $10 million in Series B funding led by Morgenthaler Ventures and adds database pioneer Gary Morgenthaler to its board. The company will use the funding to widen the beta of its webscale database and get it out broadly this fall. Read more »
Software as a service is a great for deploying applications across a company. The flip side is that it ends up creating data silos across vendors. Roger Sippl’s Cloud Connection aims to bridge those silos so users can use their data as they see fit. Read more »
Massive thunderstorms notwithstanding, the fact that Amazon’s U.S. East data center went down again Friday night while other cloud services hosted in the same area kept running raises anew questions about whether Amazon is suffering architectural glitches that go beyond acts of God. Read more »
Boston picked the brains of a gaggle of IBM engineers who came in to figure out how to consolidate and analyze existing traffic data feeds as well as new data sources including Twitter, to ease the city’s notorious traffic jams. Read more »
In a recent interview, NASA CIO Linda Cureton said the space agency still uses OpenStack for some projects but that it must be pragmatic in all cloud technology choices going forward. Various NASA entities are using Amazon and Windows Azure as needed. Read more »
Two tech conferences took place this week on opposite coasts. One featured storage product updates and cocktails at Fenway Park. The other highlighted augmented-reality glasses and skydivers. One was the Red Hat Summit, the other Google I/O. Guess which was which. Read more »
Google shared some factoids about the Google App Engine PaaS at Google I/O this week. Most interesting to me is that the company now claims 250,000 active GAE users. That’s up from the 150,000 active users it claimed to date. Read more »
Atlantis Computing thinks that storage is still too expensive and it wants to suck as much of that cost out of your IT infrastructure as possible. It started out attacking desktop virtualization and now sets its sights on storage-intensive server applications like Hadoop. Read more »
The new Google App Engine release gets more global with better European data center coverage, plus better search APIs, SSL support for custom domains, and more integrated PageSpeed optimization. On the flip side, the Cloud SQL database still isn’t fully baked. Read more »
Paris is for lovers and programming language startups. MLstate is trying to get backers for its Opa language, which hopes to automate a lot of busy work for programmers and was a finalist at the Launchpad competition during GigaOM Structure last week. Read more »
Asana, the startup that wants to help workgroups collaborate easily, is adding a new feature to its SaaS to attack what it calls a huge productivity suck: email. And it’s doing so with a new feature ironically called Inbox. Read more »
Cloudability’s new Reserved Instances Explorer helps companies keep track of and best utilize their discounted Amazon reserved instances even across accounts. The tool can search Amazon EC2 instances by size, region, operating system and expiration date. Read more »
Most of the noise coming out of Google I/O this week will be around the company’s infrastructure as a service plan. But developers who have banked on the Google App Engine platform as a service have some very specific requests of Google. Read more »
Most platforms as a service focus on helping developers write shiny new cloud-based applications. Startup CliQr Technologies is more interested in putting the applications that already run businesses into the best cloud to run them and then to make them transportable from cloud to cloud. Read more »
Very few companies know how to scale and deploy cloud applications like Netflix, the ginormous movie streaming site. And now it’s making its Asgard management console available to the open source community. Read more »
Flotype, the semi-stealthy Berkeley, Calif.-based startup has renamed itself Bridge and is making its messaging technology broadly available. Bridge promises real-time communications between any servers and other devices in a language- and hardware-independent way. Read more »
Cloud storage player Box is launching its mobile app framework OneCloud for Android on Monday, just in time for the Google I/O Conference. Included in the apps selection is Docusign Ink, Breezy, iAnnotate and Fetchnotes, said Chris Yeh, VP of platforms for Box. Read more »
Typesafe continues to push the Scala programming language and associated Akka middleware as top-tier software development tools for the webscale age, and now claims Juniper Networks as a convert. The networking hardware giant will use Scala and Akka in upcoming — and undisclosed — products. Read more »
Satya Nadella, who leads Microsoft’s Azure effort, said he would welcome the chance to sit down with Rackspace president Lew Moorman to hash out how to make it easier to move workloads between the companies’ respective clouds and ease cloud lock-in fears. Read more »
Microsoft plans to bring big data to the little guy, said Satya Nadella, the executive directing the company’s gigantic Windows Azure cloud effort. It’s backend work with Hadoop is a big piece, but the linkage to Excel will bring big data to the masses. Read more »
Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace, said cloud providers that clone Amazon APIs miss the point of true cloud interoperability. Eucalyptus and other cloud providers clearly disagree. The debate will doubtless rage on this week at the GigaOM Structure conference. Read more »
The number of die hards who resist the notion of running business apps in the cloud is dwindling. More than a third of end users polled recently feel that the cloud is safe for mission-critical applications, according to the 2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey Read more »
Server giant HP promised new low energy servers — under the Project Gemini code name — based on Intel’s 64-bit Atom Centerton chips, actually systems on a chip or SoC. The servers, due late this year, can be modified to handle new workloads. Read more »
Eucalyptus, the company that wants to link private clouds to the Amazon cloud, is updating its platform software bringing it more in line with the open source model. All Eucalyptus 3.1 code will be available on Github. Subscribers will get plug-ins and other perks. Read more »
Enterprise cloud storage player Panzura will use $15 million in new Series C funding to expand its global sales force and build both marketing and sales worldwide, says CEO Randy Chou. This round, led by Opus Capital, brings total funding to $33 million. Read more »
We’re number 1! An IBM supercomputer topped the semi-annual list of the 500 top supercomputers for the first time in three years. Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q System using 1,572,864 processor cores scored 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack Benchmark used to rate such things. Read more »
The high-tech industry, heck industry in general, would be better off if academic researchers could bring the fruits of their labor to market faster. That’s an old argument, brought up anew in a blog by Matt Welsh, a software engineer at Google. Read more »
Microsoft’s reported deal to buy Yammer for its enterprise social networking savvy isn’t done yet, but the move — despite what many see as a too-hefty price tag — could make sense. Pairing Yammer with the Microsoft Office juggernaut could be a winner. Read more »
The Muppet Theory making the rounds of late holds that everyone is either either a Chaos Muppet — volatile, energetic, perhaps brilliant — or an Order Muppet, surprise-averse, and hyper-organized. The late Steve Jobs? Order Muppet extraordinaire. Steve Ballmer? Hmmmm. Larry Page? Read more »
