Amazon brings its AWS management console to Android, but not iOS, devices; Hewlett-Packard SEC filing opens up an old can of worms; and Dell will wait for OpenStack to mature before bringing out its public cloud implementation Read more »
Any cloud vendor that does not try to take advantage of Amazon Web Services’ US-East woes is probably guilty of malpractice. But most tread carefully — it’s fine to talk up your uptime and service, but vendors in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Read more »
Netflix open sourced the code to Janitor Monkey, a tool it uses to automate the deletion of unused Amazon Web Services resources. It’s easy to spin up cloud compute instances, but not so easy to shut them down as they fall into disuse. Read more »
Microsoft isn’t getting much — if any — sympathy for its complaints over the Federal Trade Commission’s recent settlement with Google over its business practices. Read more »
Last year, AWS saw big success and big snafus; Superstorm Sandy prompted worry about data center location; legacy IT giants bought their way into SaaS; VMware regroups; the OpenStack crowd got their clouds off the ground; and Europe starts to buy into cloud. Read more »
Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon 16 years ago, is the second-best CEO on the planet, according to Harvard Business Review’s latest rankings. Last month Fortune named him its Business Person of the Year. Read more »
Big problems with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Load Balancing service in its US-East data center nailed Netflix and Heroku on Christmas Eve and carried over into Christmas. Netflix competitor Amazon Prime Instant Video appeared to be unaffected. Read more »
Craig Mundie, who was Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer up till recently, will retire in 2014. With Ray Ozzie and now Steve Sinofsky gone, some wonder who will drive Microsoft’s key technology vision going forward. Read more »
Most financial services companies officially forbid the use of public cloud (aka Amazon Web Services) completely. But the forward thinkers among them — like State Street — keep their options — and minds — open about such deployment in the future. Read more »
SpaceX’s Grasshopper prototype rocket was able to take off, fly 130 feet vertically and then land softly — and vertically. This is the latest in a series of test flights by which SpaceX hopes to prove the viability of a reusable space craft. Read more »
Red Hat’s $104M buyout of ManageIQ gives it a stronger cross-cloud management story; Developers love their Amazon EC2 instances and will likely use more of them next year, according to new Forrester research. Read more »
Amazon’s Data Pipeline, which promises easy, automated consolidation of data from many sources, is now available — or at least you can sign up for it. Amazon also unveiled a new instance type for data-intensive applications. Read more »
Confused by the glut of new NoSQL, NewSQL, post-SQL, structured, unstructured database options that came out over the past year? 451 Research’s Matthew Aslett maps it all out for you. Read more »
For its $871 million buyout of Eloqua, Oracle will get more marketing automation expertise and access to more than 1,000 customers. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2013 and continues Oracle’s fourth quarter buying spree. Read more »
The Atlanta-based integrator will use its new funding to keep up with what it calls accelerating demand for cloud applications and to keep serving existing Salesforce.com and Google Apps customers. Read more »
How low can PaaS pricing go? AppFog says it’s cutting the price of the paid version of its polyglot, multi-cloud PaaS in half for developers. That’s great for developers, but will it boost corporate adoption? Read more »
Examining Amazon Web Services usage is a cottage industry for a dozen or so startups. One of them, Newvem, has offered its service free to select customers. Now that the service is broadly available, it’s time to monetize. Read more »
Despite the hype around its high-end engineered “Exa” systems, Oracle hardware revenue continued to swoon in the second quarter when it was off 23 percent year over year. But, CEO Larry Ellison said that the company has just about turned the corner. Read more »
The new ability of AWS users to move EBS storage volumes between Amazon’s regions could drastically improve disaster recovery scenarios. Amazon announced this EBS Snapshot Copy feature early on Tuesday. Read more »
Developers say Firebase makes it really easy for them to quickly write and debug web applications without having to mess with server infrastructure. But they want better security for those apps. On Tuesday, Firebase will roll out a new security API. Read more »
A headhunter finds that the number of agile development jobs posted outnumbers the number of qualified candidates by a ratio of almost 5:1. Familiarity with the agile process is more important than knowledge of specific toolsets, in making a good hire, according to Yoh research. Read more »
The hypergrowth that the SaaS category saw last year has leveled off, but these companies are still outperforming traditional software rivals and legacy IT providers who are mired in a hardware-oriented world, according to new research from martinwolf Global M&A Advisors. Read more »
Akamai’s 8-month search for a new CEO didn’t take it too far: It tapped co-founder and chief scientist Tom Leighton to succeed Paul Sagan, who announced his intention to leave last April. Now Sagan will cede the CEO slot on January 1. Read more »
IBM’s latest “5 in 5″ list picks technologies the IT giant feels will hit the mainstream in the next 5 years. Its 2012 choices all center on richer data input and output that give computers the ability to taste, smell, touch, and feel. Read more »
Cloudant aims for cloud ubiquity with Rackspace partnership; OpenNebula offers private testing cloud inside Amazon Web Services; and Dell vows (late) OpenStack-based public cloud, partners with Inktank on Ceph storage. Read more »
Next year, “the cloud” will finally be ready for enterprise workloads and big companies will finally start moving them there. Data centers will stop being enclosed by walls and those are just two of GigaOM’s 5 big cloud predictions. Read on for more. Read more »
New AWS billing lets customers see their cloud services charges broken out into more detail — a key issue for many customers who want a better look at what’s going on in their AWS cloud. Read more »
VMware aggressively recruited partners to base platforms on its open-source Cloud Foundry stack. Now as it preps the Pivotal Initiative spinoff, those partners worry about more intense competition with the Cloud Foundry mothership. Read more »
With DataRaker buy Oracle says it can expand its reach into the water and energy verticals and offer deeper analytical “Big Data” services. It also buys new customers and a better maintenance and support revenue stream. Read more »
SendGrid is inching towards ubiquity with new integrations to Parse, Stackmob and Windows Azure mobile backend services. SendGrid is popular with developers who want easy email integration for their mobile apps and who don’t want to rely too much on Amazon services. Read more »
Unconfirmed reports have it that the Carl Icahn, the infamous corporate raider, is buying up Hewlett-Packard shares. Investors think Icahn and HP’s board are meant for each other. Read more »
Cloudyn and Scalr give joint customers a better look at what’s going on in Amazon Web Services; Apptio launches a free service to help customers optimize loads on AWS, Azure and Rackspace clouds. Read more »
Mayfield Fund is backing CloudVelocity’s hybrid cloud automation vision to the tune of $5 million in Series A funding. CloudVelocity’s very bold promise is that it will move your existing enterprise apps to a public cloud and run them there securely. Read more »
Greg Sands, a veteran from Sutter Hill Ventures, has built a new fund to stake early-stage cloud and big data companies. Investments include Datalogix, DemandBase, and Risk I/0. Read more »
With the storage leader now formally aboard the OpenStack Foundation, it’s almost easier to count the IT vendors who have not climbed aboard this open-source cloud bandwagon. Read more »
Company says payroll for small and medium companies is an area ripe for innovation. Current leaders ADP and Paychex are too pricey and many companies have yet to automate the process at all, says ZenPayroll CEO Joshua Reeves. Read more »
You want to star on your Xbox 360? A new app makes it easy to view your personal photos and videos on the big screen and to manipulate them with Kinect or voice controls. Read more »
Microsoft to customers; Buy some storage and get a $138K StorSimple appliance for free! This is just the latest proof point showing that big cloud purveyors see storage as the gateway to broader cloud service sales. Read more »
Which OpenStack component is best for your needs? Mirantis says its Do-it-Yourself OpenStack service can sort this out for you and provide the best, most stable OpenStack infrastructure to meet given needs. Read more »
Employees are driving business apps selection in many small and medium businesses, according to new research. A good percentage of productivity, social and collaborative apps now sanctioned by IT in SMBs were brought in by workers without IT knowledge. Read more »
