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 »
Cloud news you can use this week: rough times for Rackspace; a look at Amazon Web Services revenue; EMC-VMware come clean (kind of) about spinoff; and Heroku spiffs up its add-on marketplace for developers. Read more »
Updated: Google reportedly earned $1 billion from Google Apps for Business last year. While that pales in comparison to Microsoft Office numbers, it’s still not chump change. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard’s long-promised cloud builds on an OpenStack foundation as well as Akamai, and ActiveState technologies. Should it matter that this IT giant is relying on IT from other companies? Read more »
Cloudera netted big bucks to accelerate its Hadoop push into enterprises and around the world. The Palo Alto, Calif. company says its framework is the most widely deployed of several available Hadoop distributions. Read more »
Storage price slashing continues as Microsoft meets cuts Google and Amazon traded last week. There’s method in this madness — lots of businesses have yet to test the cloud, and cheap storage is a way to attract those newbies. And once they’re hooked, watch out! Read more »
Credit the BYOD boom with this one: Citrix is buying Zenprise for its mobile device management expertise. Citrix launched a new push on enterprise mobility at its Synergy conference last spring. Read more »
Startup CipherCloud will use fresh funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and T-Systems to beef up sales and marketing and its global presence, says CEO and founder Pravin Kothari. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard’s cloud efforts can get lost in the noise of the company’s bigger “macro” issues, but as the company adds its OpenStack compute cloud to the mix — joining the existing CDN and storage clouds — the battle for enterprise cloud users is on. Read more »
With its newly minted Pivotal Initiative, EMC and VMware are cordoning off key technologies to attack the big data and cloud application spaces. Paul Maritz, EMC’s chief strategy officer and former VMware CEO, will spearhead this effort. Read more »
You love MongoDB but you’re not wild with all the configuration and tweaking? SoftLayer now offers a new managed MongoDB service that it created with help from 10gen, the company behind MongoDB. Read more »
Former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie is still working on his super-stealthy mobile startup Talko, only now he has $4 million more to fund whatever it is he’s doing. Read more »
The decision by VMware and parent EMC to spin out VMware’s “tier 2″ technologies into a separate subsidiary shows that they’re under pressure to compete with massive cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in the enterprise. Read more »
Openstack private cloud player Piston Cloud Computing names Jim Morrisroe, who formerly headed VMware’s Zimbra group, as its new CEO. Co-founder and former CEO Joshua McKenty stays on as CTO. Read more »
Given Dropbox’s huge popularity — it claims 100 million users — it’s not surprising that many workers use it at the office. But that trend is worrisome to IT departments concerned with security breaches. Read more »
It was a frenetic week for cloud with Google touching off a storage price war on Monday. Amazon responded Wednesday and Google hit back on Thursday. Amazon Web Services announced a data warehouse and data pipeline service at its inaugural AWS: Reinvent show. Read more »
The Library of Congress this week started streaming interviews with music superstars including Ray Charles, James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. The tapes, donated by former record exec Joe Smith, are truly a must-listen for music lovers. Read more »
Just weeks after the election, members of the tech team behind the Obama For America effort took their show on the road to Vegas. Here, at AWS: Reinvent, they gave off the cuff and very candid reviews of the technologies they loved — and hated. Read more »
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to Las Vegas Thursday to chat about Amazon Web Services and other topics with CTO Werner Vogels at the first AWS: Reinvent conference. Read more »
Just when you thought the cloud storage wars couldn’t get any hotter, they do. Google on Thursday launched its second price cut in a week, a day after Amazon Web Services lopped S3 prices by 25 percent. Microsoft are you out there? Read more »
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels unveiled the company’s new Data Pipeline Service at AWS: Reinvent conference in Las Vegas. The service aims to make it easier for AWS customers to automate data workflows between various AWS and third party repositories. Read more »
Coopetition lives on as Amazon Web Services partners build atop Amazon infrastructure but then watch as Amazon brings out rival products. It’s the cost of doing business, they say. Read more »
Oracle, IBM, Teradata take note: Amazon has you in its crosshairs with new Redshift data warehousing services that are in preview now and slated to be broadly available next year. Read more »
Vagrant, open-source software that eases set up of test-and-dev machines, will get a boost this week with the launch of HashiCorp, a company that will expand the tool to VMware and offer paid services, support and add-ons to the popular tool, says Mitchell Hashimoto. Read more »
VMware plans to turn over SpringSource, Cloud Foundry, GemStone and other non-core technologies over to a new EMC-owned subsidiary, GigaOM has learned. The move helps separate the money-making, enterprise-focused VMware business from the future CloudFoundry unit that will compete against Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Read more »
Apprenda, a true believer in private Platform as a Service, is embracing the hybrid cloud with its latest release. CEO Sinclair Schuller said many companies are ready to test out at least some workloads in a public cloud. Read more »
The Scala programming language is one big reason why applications like Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare have taken off among mobile phone users. Meet Martin Odersky, the man behind the language. Read more »
Startup Cloud9 IDE says its new enterprise development environment will let far-flung developers collaborate in real-time on their projects. Given the demand for quality developers, companies need to hire where they can and find ways to enable collaboration. Read more »
If you don’t think Google is serious about providing public cloud infrastructure to business users, check out the latest spate of services unveiled on the company’s enterprise blog. Google clearly wants to take on cloud king Amazon on its own turf. Read more »
General Electric, the mega-conglomerate behind machines from household appliances to jet engines, says there are huge productivity gains to be had by connecting manufacturing and test devices up to the “industrial internet.” Read more »
With this update to its open-source cloud, Eucalyptus focuses on better usability, a web-based user console, better reporting tools and key bug fixes to harden the cloud foundation for production use, says CEO Marten Mickos. Read more »
