Brad Spiers, who runs cloud IT for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has some thoughts about the uses of cloud computing by financial services firms and what is holding back adoption of hot technologies like solid state storage and in-memory databases. Read more »
Newvem, the Israeli startup that’s making a name for itself analyzing Amazon Web Services usage for potential customers, netted $4 million in Series A funding led by Greylock Partners. Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors are also participating. Read more »
Just because a company is not a huge enterprise, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have big IT management headaches. That’s the problem SaaS startup Panorama9 seeks to solve with its eponymous Web dashboard launching in the U.S. now. Read more »
Microsoft”s $300 million investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook business gives it a piece of an ebook reader also-ran. But this is far from the first time Microsoft enlisted a B list ally to attack a recalcitrant market. Read more »
Piston Computing plans to integrate VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service with Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure as a service offering in what the two companies are billing as an integration of “the world’s most popular open source IaaS and PaaS together.” Read more »
Greylock Partners, seeking more operational experience in the enterprise and cloud computing sector, named Dev Ittyhceria, an operations guy who made his name in enterprise software, as its newest partner. Ittycheria founded Bladelogic and sold it to BMC seven years later for $900 million. Read more »
A new Portable Consent Form could make it easier — and more palatable — for individuals to donate their anonymized genetic data to science at large. The goal of the Consent to Research project is nothing less than the open-sourcing of the genetic data pool. Read more »
If you parse Amazon’s first quarter earnings, you could be forgiven for thinking that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now a $2 billion-a-year business. Revenue from Amazon’s “other” category was $500 million for the quarter, although “other” does include revenue from other things. Read more »
Internap bought Voxel early this year to boost its dedicated hosting and public cloud portfolios and to extend its reach into smaller companies. Now its new Voxel.net Agile Hosting services will let even tiny businesses configure and deploy IT infrastructure from an online configurator. Read more »
With Square Inc.’s new open-source Cubism.js library, developers can devise complex timeline visualizations that tap into multiple data backends. Think Yahoo Finance stock charts only more dynamic and interactive. Cubism.js is available under the Apache license from Github. Read more »
IBM’s big data platform will support the Cloudera Hadoop distribution, a surprising decision given the reservations the two companies had expressed about each other before. That gives IBM and rival Oracle at least one thing in common: Oracle’s Big Data Appliance runs Cloudera too. Read more »
It’s beginning to look like there will be no free-standing analytics companies left. IBM is buying Vivisimo for the “discovery and navigation” expertise that companies use to access and analyze (what else?) big data. The news come a week after IBM bought Varicent, another analytics company. Read more »
Symform, a company that brings peer-to-peer technology to bear on the cloud storage problem, netted $11 million in a new Series B investment round led by WestRiver Capital and including OVP and Longworth Venture Partners. Erik Anderson of WestRiver Capital joins the Symform Board of Directors. Read more »
As Google Drive hits the cloud storage market like a gale force wind, Box continues to push itself as the cloud storage supplier for business. Box has refined its API to ease integration with third-party software and allied itself with New York-based incubators. Read more »
As tech companies–both vendors that build product — and integrators that customize and integrate that product into larger solutions — strive for scale there’s growing opportunity for cross-border mergers. That’s why martinwolf M&A Advisors of San Ramon, Calif. is opening an office in Bangalore. Read more »
The folks at Meteor apparently listened to developer hue-and-cry and put the promising real-time JavaScript framework under a more open MIT license. That means it will be easier to build commercial software with Meteor than it would have been under the GPL license. Read more »
Everyone knows Amazon’s cloud is huge but many want to know exactly how huge it is. The latest to try is Deepfield Networks worked with unnamed partners to find that 1/3 of all Internet users touch on AWS at least once a day. Read more »
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to IT customers: “If we’re not delivering the right services you should walk away.” While one would disagree with that, many question exactly how easy it will be for customers to walk away if they use high-end Amazon services. Read more »
The highly anticipated Splunk IPO has not disappointed, with shares up 90 percent from their opening price at one point. Intense trading tripped NYSE circuit breakers. Surging interest in Splunk reflects a belief that the era of big data is just beginning. Read more »
Working with Schrödinger, which specializes in computational drug design, Cycle Computing built a 50k-core AWS cluster that screened 21 million compounds in less than three hours. The cluster enabled the company to use a much more accurate screening process than other technology. Read more »
Less than a month after being acquired Zynga, OMGPOP is on its way to being integrated into the giant game maker’s technology roadmap, says Jason Pearlman, CTO of OMGPOP. Some of the new Draw Something features released today were made using Z Cloud resources. Read more »
Amid all the OpenStack news this week, there is a feeling in some quarters that two years after Rackspace and NASA launched this attempt to counter Amazon Web Services and VMware, it may be too late for the effort to take hold. Read more »
The new AWS Partner Network targets ISVs, SaaS companies, tool and platform providers as well as consultative partners like systems integrators and agencies. The goal is to provide them with the technology information they need, according to a post to the AWS blog. Read more »
Cloud platform provider Eucalyptus will use $30 million in new Series C funding to build its engineering and sales staffs, said CEO Marten Mickos.
The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners with contributions from Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates. Read more »
iFixit, the popular DIY repair site, will parlay its Amazon Web Services, Rightscale foundation — and its own secret sauce — to take on the problem of product support and documentation for businesses. It’s new Dozuki business division targets large retailers and manufacturers. Read more »
Newvem, the startup that aims to help companies make the most out of their Amazon Web Services instances, has some new data that might shock the Amazon faithful. A high percentage of AWS users are paying for way more compute power than they need. Read more »
A new visual dashboard by Cedexis provides a glimpse into what clouds and content delivery networks are performing best at a given point in time. Cedexis’ aims to help content owners pick the best infrastructure for their cloud workload on an ongoing basis. Read more »
Few industries are better suited to the cloud computing model than film and TV production. Show business is heavily project-oriented with myriad production shops and contractors collaborating on relatively short-term, compute-intensive projects. That’s why the cloud-computing giants are converging at NAB this week. Read more »
Customers can now get early access to Rackspace’s OpenStack-based public cloud, slated to come online May 1. The news comes as the OpenStack Spring Conference kicks off in San Francisco. The company also unveiled OpenStack-based Cloud Block Storage and MySQL-based database services. Read more »
Clarence Wooten had some words of wisdom for MIT Sloan School of Management grad students who might go the startup route. Wooten-backed startups include Image Cafe which debuted in 1998 and was bought for $23 million seven months later by Network Solutions/Verisign. Read more »
The desire for more and increasingly specific analytics continues with IBM’s acquisition of Varicent Software. Banks, insurance companies, and retailers use Varicent software to look at data across finance, sales, human resources and IT departments to determine how to boost sales, according to IBM. Read more »
With its new BOSH management process, VMware keeps pushing CloudFoundry as a good multi-cloud PaaS option by making it easier to deploy and manage across clouds and on the biggest clouds. That’s important as more companies hedge their bets when it comes to cloud deployment. Read more »
OpenStack filled in some important checkmarks this week by adding IBM and Red Hat to its roster of corporate backers. Eighteen companies are slated to become members of the evolving OpenStack Foundation which is expected to come online in the third quarter. Read more »
And the latest entry into the cloud storage sweepstakes is … LogMeIn, the company that built its business with its easy-to-use remote access service. The company hopes to woo both consumers and businesses with a beta of its Cubby service, said LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon. Read more »
Google take notice: Amazon Web Services is now pushing a “fully managed search service” for web or mobile app developers. CloudSearch promises to ease the provisioning headaches of web developers who need to build search into their commerce or other sites. Read more »
Meteor, a new real-time JavaScript framework targeting web app developers, is causing quite a stir on Twitter and Hacker News. One of the company’s biggest claims is that its open-source technology will enable hot code updates that won’t disturb app users. Read more »
Whatever you do, don’t compare IBM’s new PureSystems to Oracle Exadata or Cisco’s Unified Compute System. The company said it’s spent three years and $2 billion to get these systems just right for cloud computing and other workloads. Read more »
After years of beating around the bush, SAP declares that it is a database company and will take on the biggest kid on the block. It’s about time. It’s funding startups to build applications for Hana and Sybase. But beating Oracle won’t be easy. Read more »
For years, Oracle has wowed Wall Street with fat software margins: Large companies depending on Oracle relational databases pay what it takes to keep them up and running. It’s unclear whether Oracle can carry that dominance over into the Big Data era, however. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard is putting more of its chips on OpenStack as a key foundation for its upcoming public, private and hybrid cloud implementations. HP says its Converged Cloud will amalgamate existing HP technologies and OpenStack so applications can be managed uniformly across cloud types. Read more »
