MindTouch, an open-source provider of enterprise collaboration software, announced today that its platform is now available in the cloud. You can find a video on how the platform, dubbed MindTouch Cloud, creates “a federated collaboration network” here.  MindTouch competes with Microsoft’s SharePoint, but can eliminate many of the inflexibilities of proprietary collaboration software, and MindTouch Cloud’s prices are being kept low. A 10-user group can use it for $10 per month per user, 30 users can for $8 a month per user, and 50 users can for $7 a month per user, with lower costs for larger businesses. Continue »

Intel today said it’s invested an undisclosed amount in Joyent, the 6-year-old Sausalito, Calif.-based startup that started out as a web hosting company but eventually evolved into a cloud service provider. Neither Intel nor Joyent disclosed the amount of money invested, but Intel’s investment in the company is a strategic bet for the chipmaker, as it faces a smaller end user base for its silicon thanks to enterprises turning to computing delivered as a service to help limit the number of servers they buy. First the deal specifics. Continue »

Rumors have been swirling for days about the possible delivery of a beta version of Google’s much-discussed Chrome OS this week, as we noted last Friday. I pinged a few people at Google to get some clarity, and while they didn’t provide me with a specific answer as to whether the download will arrive this week, they did send me an invitation to a press event at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday morning, billed as “an update on our progress with Google Chrome OS.” In other words, it sounds like we’ll get to try it very soon. Continue »

Microsoft today at its developer conference in Los Angeles unveiled its Pinpoint service, which looks kind of like an app store aimed at enterprise developers and customers using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offerings, albeit one that goes beyond mere apps. It also showed off  a data repository, code-named Dallas, that offers developers access to a wide variety of public and fee-based data sets with which they can build useful programs. Dallas, which can be found in the Pinpoint market, strongly resembles the service shown off this year at DEMO from Austin, Texas-based Infochimps. It was also by far the most interesting element of Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote, which highlighted what he called Redmond’s “three screens and cloud” view of the world. Continue »

Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer is the fastest machine on the planet, according to the Top 500 list of supercomputers published today by four researchers in the computing industry. It marks the first time that Jaguar beat out IBM’s Roadrunner on a performance basis, achieving 2.3 petaflops, or about 2 million billion calculations a second. However, a deeper look at the list shows that the trend in supercomputing is not only one of faster machines, but a steady erosion of how super supercomputing actually is, as exemplified by dedicated vendors such as SiCortex being shut down and venerable players like SGI filing for bankruptcy before then getting acquired. Continue »

AT&T today unveiled its Synaptic Compute as a Service product that will use hardware from Sun Microsystems and software from VMware to provide businesses with computing on demand backed by a guarantee of 99.9 percent availability. The product, which will compete with Amazon’s Ec2, Rackspace’s CloudServers, GoGrid and several planned offerings from the likes of IBM, Savvis and Terremark, is one of several web-based offerings from AT&T. Other products include storage as a service and a custom-built platform as a service. Continue »

What are cloud services uniquely good for and why? After all, CIOs aren’t going to leverage online services offered on demand just because they’re available, but for compelling business reasons. There are helpful compilations of use cases (PDF) from a technical viewpoint; here I’ve identified key cloud rationales from a strategic perspective.

Different people have different definitions of the term “cloud,” but I’m referring to common and flexible services, applications, platforms, content and resources delivered from a public provider. The lion’s share of the reasons I list below apply to most of those definitions, as well as other online/web services. Continue »