The Cloud
Rapid price spikes are effecting buyers on the Amazon Spot Market, where users are bidding extremely high prices for scarce compute capacity. These price spikes are new, and they call into question assumptions that many users have made about how the auctioning of computing resources works. Read More »
While the rest of the IT world is reeling from the hard drive shortage, users of cloud computing services should have a relatively painless experience — even if their providers don’t. Joyent’s Steve Tuck talks about his experience and how the HDD shortage might affect the … Read More »
Cloud computing 2012: a pessimist’s guide
How does the cloud market for the next year look? There will be no silver linings or lemonade. This research note, part of GigaOM Pro’s outlook for 2012, examines startups’ chances to challenge traditional enterprise IT practices, cloud pricing models, the true state of federated clouds, …
Which stories dominated the green GigaOM clicks in 2011? This year was filled with smart thermostats, a dream of Apple getting into solar, the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the efficiency of cloud computing, Google’s green data centers and Tesla’s Model S. Read More »
Google announced that it’s ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects. The company says access to such resources is now common. Read More »
“Cloud first” markets — those where companies’ first serious engagements with information technology are in the form of cloud computing — are beginning to emerge. For the BRIC economies in particular, this might mean a chance to adopt low-cost solutions that will give companies a clear …
Cloudability, a startup that bills itself as “Mint.com for the cloud,” has raised $1.1 million in seed funding for its service that helps companies keep an eye on their cloud-computing spending. It recently let one user spot an exploit that could have cost the company dearly. Read More »
The cloud makes it possible for tiny organizations in the poor countries to access bite-size slices of tech and talent. Perhaps the developing world’s affinity for the cloud is also a threat to established firms (and an opportunity for new ones), argues one A-list blogger. Read More »
This year may have been the beginning of the big data onslaught, but big data will only get bigger in 2012. Watch for companies to check out specialized databases for different data types and to segment their data centers for old and new workloads. Read More »
Ask Box.net CEO Aaron Levie about his company’s cloud storage business, and you’ll hear a long, excited answer that probably won’t include the word “storage” at all. He’ll talk about sharing, collaboration and universal access — anything but the core storage infrastructure that makes Box’s service … Read More »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for …
Money has turned the Hadoop community, once united under the Apache banner and the cuddly stuffed-toy-elephant logo, into something resembling a frat house: Everyone’s under the same roof, but there’s plenty of machismo to go around. If it’s not good business; it is good theater. Read More »
The discovery of a new type of chemical bond by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows exactly how supercomputers and big data are combining to become the microscope of the future. Read More »
At last week’s MongoSV conference in Santa Clara, Calif., a number of users shared their experiences with the MongoDB NoSQL database. One common theme: NoSQL is necessary for a lot of use cases, but it’s not for companies afraid of hard work. Read More »
In this era of cheap-and-reliable renta-data centers run by Amazon, Rackspace, and others, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on it’s own? Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s own James Hamilton doesn’t think so. More surprisingly, other IT pros agree. Read More »
For those in a perpetual snit about personal data privacy, here’s bold proposal from Michael Driscoll: Donate your own medical data. And do it now — don’t wait till you’re dead. What better way to make big data truly relevant — and helpful — to … Read More »
Salesforce.com’s plan to purchase Rypple shows the importance of human capital management to the new cloud-savvy enterprise. The game plan calls for a new Salesforce.com HCM business unit and the relabeling of Rypple’s offerings as “Successforce.” The effort will be directed by industry vet John Wookey. Read More »
A recent survey suggests that “mobile computing appears to be a driving force behind cloud adoption in enterprises.” While the cloud clearly plays a role in making mobile devices as valuable to the enterprise as they are, it may be too much to suggest that mobiles …
After a long-running controversy, the Los Angeles Police Department will definitely not move to Google Apps. And that’s final. The City Council voted to kill the proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD although the city’s other 17,000 employees are still aboard. Read More »
IBM is buying Emptoris, a specialist in supply chain and contract management analytics, in what is the latest example of an entrenched IT provider’s buying analytics and cloud capabilities. The move comes a week after IBM’s $440 million buyout of DemandTec. Read More »
Did you know that the proceeds from cyber weekend sales surpassed the entire budget of Bulgaria? Or that people will create 1.2 trillion GB of data this year — that’s equivalent to 75 billion 16 GB iPods. These nuggets courtesy of Emerson Network Power. Read More »
Virtustream, a fast-growing enteprise cloud provider, is buying cloud-computing pioneer Enomaly for an undisclosed amount. Enomaly, which launched in 2003, sells one of the first private-cloud management products, Elastic Computing Platform, and in the last year launched an infrastructure resource exchange called SpotCloud. Read More »
It may not be man-bites-dog but it is still surprising to hear about a software as a service vendor moving towards on-premises deployment. And yet that is just what Birst is doing, first with its business intelligence service and now with its home-grown in-memory database. Read More »
Microsoft’s SkyDrive is coming to an iPhone near you, the company said this week. A new app means that iPhone users can store and access their personal photos, files and documents in SkyDrive as opposed to, say, Apple’s own iCloud. Read More »
Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry. Read More »
In the latest salvo in the ever-hotter cloud storage battle, YouSendIt added iPad and Android client apps to its cloud-based document sync, transfer and storage service, as well as updated iPhone and Windows desktop apps. A new Mac desktop version is in beta. Read More »
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as a service (PaaS) now supports Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript development framework. That could give Azure more traction beyond the Microsoft .NET faithful. Also new: a limited trial of Hadoop-based distribution for Azure. Read More »
SOASTA has raised a $12 million Series D round as a throng of competitors jockeys for position behind it. SOASTA’s vision of using cloud resources for load testing is very relevant today as new applications web, mobile and even Facebook applications pop up by the minute. Read More »
After a long look at the performance of cloud storage providers, only six of the 16 largest CSPs made the grade and the two top dogs were Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, said Nasuni, a data continuity specialist that works with all the major CSPs. Read More »
The cloud-based SAP Social Media Analytics service aims to bring more consumer-centric smarts to SAP’s enterprise customers. SAP will sell and provision NetBase semantic search and analytics capabilities and provide a user-friendly dashboard to display the results on an iPad or other device. Read More »
The world of words gets in the way of conversations between IT and the business all the time. Cloud computing is no exception. Words such as “application” and “service” mean different things to different people, but perhaps there’s room for consensus on some core principles. Read More »
Northwestern University is doing its bit to feed the need for analytics skills in this era of big data. NU’s McCormick School of Engineering launched a new Master of Science degree in analytics and is accepting applications for the inaugural class. Read More »
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a …
InterContinental Hotels Group, the luxury hotel chain, has spent the last five and half years creating a technology platform for its business that helps it span multiple brands, cultures and continents, according to Tom Conophy, EVP and CIO of the hotel company. Read More »
LexisNexis is pressing MarkLogic’s technology into service for its just-launched Lexis Advance legal service. MarkLogic’s document storage, search and analytics technology replaces legacy home-built code as part of a platform modernization and big data push. Read More »
Amazon is scheduling what looks to be a significant number of reboots to customer EC2 instances in the coming weeks. Customers started getting letters informing them of the instance restarts on Tuesday, according to Cloudscaling. It is unclear what issue the patches address. Read More »
As companies move to the cloud, DevOps — the practice where developers work with the operations side of the house — becomes more important. That collaboration could lead to more satisfying IT implementations and the best — and sanctioned — use of cloud resources. Read More »
The public Internet and the cloud shouldn’t mix, according to a paper out today. Cisco seems to agree if its CloudVerse suite of products is any indication. A growing number of endpoints and multiple services in web apps required dedicated and intelligent networks. Read More »
Digital Reasoning, a somewhat shadowy specialist in big data analytics for the U.S. intelligence community, announced B Series funding and named industry vet John Brennan to its board. Funding came from CIA-backed In-Q-Tel, as well as some Silver Lake Sumeru partners and other unnamed investors. Read More »
The Great Firewall of China is preventing local programmers from downloading the latest Node.js programming framework. The problem is that the version number corresponds to the June 4, 1989 government crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrators. Read More »
According to a new survey by CSC, cloud computing is not the money saver it’s sometimes made out to be. But don’t fret — it’s still a very valuable delivery model for IT resources. The cloud brings with a wealth of benefits around mobility, efficiency and … Read More »
The race for market share among cloud storage providers continues with some HP PCs now offering an easy on-ramp to Box.net’s cloud storage. But how much traction can a PC bundle get when most business users rely more and more on their mobile devices? Read More »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who …
SAP America’s decision to buy SuccessFactors and its human capital management expertise for $3.4 billion in cash, is just the latest acquisition of a vertically-focused SaaS player by a legacy software giant. Look for that trend to continue. Read More »
Online games powerhouse Zynga is shooting to reap $1billion in its IPO, according to an amended prospectus filed on Friday. The company behind Farmville, Mafia Wars and other games expects to offer 100 million shares of common stock at $8.50 to $10.00 per share. Read More »
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云应用: haha,we also do many innovations in our cloud app.
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Mr. Ketter: I like your comment Shaleen. Innovation is actually by definition "pushing somet...
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Farid El Baraka: The Cloud is bringing a major change in how startups innovate. We are moving fro...
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guest: What year is it? Was it 2009 and I just feel asleep? oy. I thik when i do a star...
