Why IBM desperately needed to buy SoftLayer
Can IBM use SoftLayer as a way to fend off Amazon Web Service incursions? Or is it already too late? Read more »
AppScale’s mission: Making your mobile apps really mobile
photo: AppScale
Developers love PaaSes for building code. But their IT masters don’t love running those business apps in some other guy’s cloud. AppScale can help with that. Read more »
It’s official: IBM to buy SoftLayer
SoftLayer and IBM’s legacy SmartCloud will form the basis of a new Global Cloud Services division. Read more »
What I think of Salesforce’s decision to buy Exact Target for $2.5 billion
Salesforce is trying hard and spending large to diversify from its CRM base. Today it announced plans to buy Exact Target for $2.5 billion on top of about $1.5 billion it spent on companies such as Heroku, Radian6 and Buddy Media. Read more »
ActiveState buys Appsecute for its social devops smarts
Appsecute’s service promises devops a central way to manage all their cloud-based services from AWS to Zendesk. Read more »
Here’s what Europe’s net neutrality law would look like
The proposed new rules would stop carriers from blocking services that compete with their own, but still allow subtler types of discrimination. It would be an improvement, but also allow the creation of a two-speed internet. Read more »
Verizon to buy Bloom Energy fuel cells for data center, switching centers in CA
Verizon is now the latest customer of Silicon Valley’s buzzy fuel cell company Bloom Energy. The trend of telecom and Internet companies increasingly turning to clean power options continues to grow. Read more »
4 tips for developing applications that end users will actually end up using
photo: Jordan Novet
More companies are realizing that complicated enterprise applications don’t cut it anymore, but many applications still end up getting deleted. At a conference on Monday, an enterprise executive gave tips for building useful apps. Read more »
Sponsored post: Data silos: biggest breaking point to cloud adoption and a CIO’s sanity
Data silos impact how quickly and effectively CIOs can adopt new cloud apps like Salesforce.com, ServiceNow or Workday and connect them with on-prem apps like Oracle or SAP. Find out how an elastic integration approach can overcome this barrier as a powerful on-ramp to the cloud. Read more »
Update: Twitter back up after widespread site outages
photo: Copyright Yiying Lu
Users experienced delays and a downed service from Twitter on Monday as the company experience outages as the result of a routine change. The stakes have grown higher for Twitter in what a fail whale means. Read more »
Google takes on Parse with new service for mobile-app backends
Google has announced a new service called Mobile Backend Starter that lets Android developers create and launch mobile apps on Google’s cloud with just a few clicks. Read more »
Dell called: It wants its server market share back
Dell is plotting to supercharge its server sales as other vendors keep growing. The plan is compelling, but whether it will work on everyone in the market is unclear. Read more »
Here we go again: big changes coming to Microsoft
Microsoft is noted for big reorgs when it’s behind in a key market or markets. Well, it looks like that time is near again, according to yet another report. Read more »
Inktank’s Ceph solidifies OpenStack role with Ubuntu enterprise support
Canonical isn’t the first Linux player to provide full support for the Ceph distributed storage system, but with Ubuntu’s popularity in the OpenStack world, the addition of this subscriber option is timely. Read more »
Microsoft will offer Azure by the minute to take on Amazon’s cloud
At TechEd, Microsoft will keep pitching that Azure running in Microsoft data centers and Windows Server and Systems Center running at customer sites is the best of the hybrid cloud universe. Read more »
Mellanox devises modular-switching software to sell more rack switches
photo: Mellanox
As software-defined networking threatens big network vendors, Mellanox hits hard on another front by making a virtual version of a modular switch. Read more »
The week in cloud: Can Windows Azure disrupt Amazon’s cloud? Stay tuned.
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
The public cloud computing landscape gets more interesting with Microsoft pushing its new Windows Azure infrastructure services vs. Amazon (and Google.) Read more »
The web isn’t one-size-fits-all anymore, so the as-a-service world just keeps on growing
photo: Flickr user avlxyz
Not every website needs the same set of services, and more companies are providing applications to meet small niches. The latest example is a photo-resizing service called imgix. Read more »
Here’s why CERN ditched OpenNebula for OpenStack
CERN has been testing options for a massive private cloud to serve 11,000 physicists around the world. It’s dropped OpenNebula in favor of OpenStack, but was that a valid or hype-driven decision? Read more »
Cyber theft hurts China too, says U.S. Secretary of Defense
photo: Flickr/ Todd Ehlers
Updated: U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told reporters that China has as much to lose as anyone if cyberthreats go unchecked. Read more »
More bad news for server makers
photo: Shutterstock / Oleksiy Mark
Updated: Will the server market ever come back? IDC research shows worldwide revenue on server sales off nearly 8 percent year over year. Read more »
Subscriber Content
The new building blocks for IT: OpenStack, continuous delivery, and devops
The key building blocks of a modern IT organization include a highly flexible infrastructure, an automated software delivery life cycle, and a devops-driven IT organization. This report focuses in particular on OpenStack as an underlying cloud platform to support this new type of organization. It defines the continuous delivery approach, addresses the benefits as well as disadvantages of OpenStack, and, finally, discusses the role of devops. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Surprised? Cloud providers bring in $2B in first quarter
photo: Akamai
What company remains atop the heap of IaaS/PaaS providers in Q1 2013? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. Read more »
Microsoft caves on Windows Start button. Kinda
A new version of the iconic Start Button will be part and parcel of a new Windows 8.1 desktop mode, says Microsoft corporate VP Antoine Leblond. Read more »
Ubuntu’s number 1 bug is fixed: Microsoft is no longer the enemy
Nine years ago, the Linux distribution Ubuntu came out with the mission of challenging Windows’ status as the default preinstalled PC operating system. But, since then, the whole game changed. Read more »
With 1M new downloads in 3 months, Node.js momentum just keeps on keeping on
The server-side JavaScript framework keeps winning adherents from GM to Yahoo, according to Strongloop, which offers commercially supported versions of the technology. Read more »
Killer cloud: report says Amazon Web Services threatens all IT incumbents
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
New Morgan Stanley research expects AWS to hit $24 billion in revenue by 2022 and to put the hurt on legacy IT providers in the process. Read more »
Do we really want Facebook to decide what qualifies as hate speech and what doesn’t?
photo: Flickr user Hoggarazzi
Facebook has admitted that it failed to apply its policies about offensive content to some disturbingly misogynistic pages. But is this a victory for the social network’s critics, or just another stop on the slippery slope of censorship? Read more »
Cisco to acquire energy software startup JouleX for $107M
Cisco is bolstering its energy-management portfolio by acquiring JouleX, which works with the network giant’s EnergyWise protocol. The software could help users lower infrastructure overhead. Read more »
Say hello to Netflix Conformity Monkey
photo: anneheathen
Conformity Monkey, as its name implies, finds badly behaving compute instances, in the Amazon public cloud. Read more »
Sponsored post: Rethinking the microserver in rack-level terms
Among IT people, it’s no secret that the best TCO is going to come when the application and its workloads are running on infrastructure that is optimized for the task at hand. Intel is working actively to enable these optimizations that drive higher levels of efficiency. Read more »
Formula 1 racing changes pose big data challenge
photo: EMC
Even F1 racing is trying to save energy and as it navigates changes from V-8 to V-6 cars, there are lots of big data problems to be solved. Read more »
Five9 takes on $34.5M to get more call centers aboard the cloud
photo: Five9
Five9, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor with cloud-based call-center software, is picking up funding to make the case to more call-center operators that on-premise hardware isn’t necessary. Read more »
Sponsored post: Looking for more IT efficiency? Try driving a hybrid
The public cloud may be the sexy new sports car — coveted for its horsepower and handling — but sometimes a hybrid model can be the more sensible approach, burning less gas and still getting you where you need to go. Read more »
Amazon spreads net wider by federating Facebook and Google (and Amazon) identities
photo: jaaro
If you’re a developer, chances are you use Amazon Web Services for something. Now if you want to authenticate Google and Facebook users for your app, you can do so. Read more »
Pure Storage nets new cash from In-Q-Tel to push its “flash for all” effort
photo: Pure Storage
Startup has also updated its core FlashArray product with always-on, data-at-rest encryption for the security-conscious accounts it hopes to entice. Read more »
‘Other’ server vendors keep gaining momentum, while HP, Oracle slide
HP and other server vendors lost more ground in the war against lesser known manufacturers in the first quarter of the year, new Gartner figures show. Read more »
A gigabit is not enough. New research takes us to 400Gbps.
Researchers with Bell Labs have figured out a way to cancel out the noise inside fiber data transmission — sending twin waves instead of just one. The result is 400 Gbps for more than 7,900 miles. Read more »
Are Microsoft shareholders mad as hell? One analyst thinks they’re ready to force change
photo: Flickr / ToddABishop
Have Microsoft shareholders finally hit the tipping point when it comes to share price and strategic direction? Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund seems to think so. Read more »
Easy Solutions takes on $11M to protect banks’ coffers
photo: Easy Solutions
Protecting websites and user data is one thing, and guarding money is another. Easy Solutions does both, and it’s just received $11 million in funding to expand its reach. Read more »
