Businesses understand now that big data can help them wring revenue out of once-unproductive assets. But that just fuels an exploding demand for bigger, faster, and more precise big data applications, experts speaking at Structure:Data say. Read more »
Raghu Ramakrishnan, who was the top scientist for several of Yahoo’s key technology efforts, is now a technical fellow with Microsoft’s server and tools unit. This is the latest sign that Yahoo is struggling to retain key technologists. Read more »
When it comes to moving massive files between storage clouds, performance depends — a lot — on what clouds you use, according to new research. For it’s bulk data migration report Nasuni repeatedly transferred 12 TB of data between Amazon S3, Rackspace and Microsoft Windows Azure. Read more »
More businesses are putting at least some data in the cloud and a growing pack of vendors is fighting for that business. The latest entry is Egnyte’s updated hybrid cloud offering which supports up to 10B files and 10,000 concurrent users per account. Read more »
Last April, Microsoft promised an Azure-based ERP product. Fast forward a year, it’s still not here, but the company said Dynamics NAV 2013 for Azure will go to beta in May and be broadly available by year’s end — as will Dynamics GP 2013. Read more »
It seems like every cloud storage company really, really want to be the Dropbox of the enterprise when it grows up. It’ s easy to see why. Dropbox, which now claims 50 million users, is the sweetheart of the cloud storage, file-share-and-sync world. Read more »
David Girouard, who led Google’s push into enterprise applications, is leaving the company for a startup called Upstart.com. An eight-year veteran with the search giant, Girouard led Google’s push to take on Microsoft in desktop applications and email. Girouard posted the news to Google+ Friday. Read more »
Allan Thorvaldsen, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded and sold his third startup, Softscan, to Symantec in 2009, is bringing his latest venture from Denmark to San Francisco. At least parts of it. His engineering team will remain in Europe. Read more »
It’s increasingly clear that no cloud is perfect. After public Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure outages — the latest just this week — more business customers are evaluating multiple-cloud deployments to build in redundancy and hedge their cloud computing bets. Read more »
As Salesforce.com trots out the integration of its social networking-oriented HR tools into CRM and Chatter, Microsoft is touting new research about why companies need to have workplace-oriented social tools. One problem: Some of these tools are more annoying than useful. Read more »
Appirio, which built its systems integration business in part by knitting software-as-a-service and legacy on-premises software together, netted $60 million in Series D funding led by General Atlantic, bringing total investment to $80 million. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is indisputably the largest cloud service provider by far, and by all accounts. So what rivals could be No. 2 and maybe even give AWS a run for its money? Some of these names might surprise you. Read more »
Flow Corp. says its new platform-as-a-service will help companies ingest and aggregate multiple data streams, filter them and deliver the right data to the right people or applications in real time. That all sounds great, but it’s a very tall order. Read more »
In two years’ time, your personal cloud will replace your PC as your go-to computing resource, according to Gartner research. The prevailing wisdom is that the desktop and laptop PC — or any non-smartphone, non-tablet device — is headed for the dustbin of history. Read more »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloudwords’ says its OneTM unified translation management service will streamline the onerous — and very expensive — process of translating software and documentation. The startup sports SaaS cred from co-founder Scott Yancey, who designed the system along with former Salesforce.com CTO Craig Weissman. Read more »
Welcome to the age of Github — an era when software development is as much about connecting snippets of existing code as it is about writing that code in the first place. Former Microsoft software chief Ray Ozzie gave Github a rousing endorsement recently. Read more »
With Microsoft Hyper-V 3 coming down the pike, and Red Hat revving its KVM push, VMware executives continue to tout vSphere as the best way to virtualize everything — including the mission-critical databases and ERP systems that power businesses of all sizes. Read more »
Microsoft issues credit, apologies and an explanation to Windows Azure customers affected by the recent Leap Day outage that took down several services. Snafus like this one not only affect the specific vendor but can hurt overall confidence in the cloud computing model. Read more »
Sony’s gaming arm is moving at least some of its online workloads from Amazon Web Services to the rival OpenStack cloud-computing stack implemented by Rackspace, according to a report. Such moves show a growing threat to AWS from OpenStack-based rivals. Read more »
Boston and Cambridge are battling it out to be the site of Google’s proposed expansion in the Hub. Google’s current local headquarters is in Kendall Square, but it’s unclear if it can expand there. Boston is pitching its Innovation District to the search giant. Read more »
New medium Elastic Compute Cloud instance fills the gap between — you guessed it — smaller and larger “medium” EC2 instances. That brings the total number of EC2 instances to 13 (for now) as Amazon keeps churning out options for every possible compute load. Read more »
Ray Ozzie, the former Microsoft executive charged with driving the development of Windows Azure, is evaluating Azure, along with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, for use by Cocomo, his mysterious startup company. Read more »
Whether you think cloud computing creates or kills jobs depends on what kind of jobs you’re talking about and how companies will use the IT savings they reap in moving to the cloud. Consultant David Linthicum sees validity in the cloud-as-jobs-creator argument. Read more »
Amazon isn’t the only cloud power slicing storage prices. On Tuesday Google cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. With this move and new front-end storage partners, Google appears to be making a serious play for enterprise storage. Read more »
A new Microsoft-funded IDC report purports to show that the adoption of cloud computing will create 8.8 million new jobs worldwide — 1.1 million in the U.S. — in by 2015. That factoid strained credulity among Microsoft partners and IT pros. Read more »
When Amazon Web Services isn’t adding new services, it’s cutting prices on those it already offers. Late Monday, the company said it is cutting the price of its EC2, Amazon RDS, ElastiCache and Elastic MapReduce, according to a post on the AWS blog. Read more »
If you’ve never been to a hackathon, give it a shot even if you can’t stick it out for the full ride. AngelHack Boston entrants started coding at noon on Saturday and finished 30 hours later. I was there for 10. Here’s what I learned. Read more »
On Monday Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown urged a Boston audience to pressure his Senate colleagues to bring his crowdfunding bill – or any crowdfunding bill for that matter—to a vote soon. The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on the issue on Tuesday. Read more »
Semi-stealthy startup Numecent says its virtualization technology speeds up the remote operation of server applications. It also launched Approxy, a spinoff, to bring its technology to the gaming world, which also has problems with slow connections and devices that aren’t quite smart enough. Read more »
AngelHack Boston, a 30-hour hackathon, drew a couple hundred developers, programmers (and entrepreneurs who are seeking developers and programmers) to the Cambridge Innovation Center Saturday morning. Local finalists will be named Sunday night and face AngelHack San Francisco winners on Monday. Read more »
The metro Boston area has good database DNA dating back to Digital’s Rdb. Those good genes are resurfacing in a fresh crop of database startups clustered in the area. Here are five hot database startups to watch in the Boston-Cambridge-Waltham nexus.. Read more »
Leo Apotheker, the Hewlett-Packard CEO ousted so publicly last September, pretty much disappeared from view. Until recently. Now he’s been spotted in Menlo Park and was featured on a conference call with Wall Street analyst Rick Sherlund. Could he be plotting a comeback? Read more »
Scientists have a limitless hunger for computing power and storage. That’s why three European agencies — CERN, the force behind the Large Hadron Collider; the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; and the European Space Agency and supporters — are cooking up a European science cloud. Read more »
The more features that Amazon Web Services puts on its roster, the more nervous AWS partners — and some customers — get. As the company comes up the stack, adding workflow, richer database and other services, many partners and customers fear cloud lock-in. Read more »
Azure, Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service cloud, went down Monday night and stayed down for at least 10 hours. The news comes as Microsoft is trying to pitch two-year-old Azure as a safe and reliable platform for consumer and business applications. Read more »
The big hosting provider that, along with NASA, launched the open-source cloud infrastructure project two years ago, will start beta testing the software, running tens of thousands of computing instances as opposed to the hundreds under test now, said John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO. Read more »
The new DataSift Historics can examine Twitter feeds going back two years — something that consumer product and other companies might find very useful in their product design, pricing and promotion decisions. The service will be available in April. Read more »
Is IBM joining OpenStack? It sure looks like it, according to one OpenStack contributor page, which lists IBM having joined as of February 2. There has been no announcement, but given IBM’s open source bent, an OpenStack membership makes sense for the computing giant. Read more »
Wayin, the social networking startup launched by Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, just closed $14 million in Series B financing, bringing its total backing to $20 million. U.S. Venture Partners led the round and USVP partner Rick Lewis is joining the board of the Denver-based company. Read more »
