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 »
Now that Amazon has its own devices in the Kindle Fire lineup, downloads from the Appstore are on the rise: up 500% in the past year. It doesn’t hurt that Amazon has added a number of developer-friendly features over the past 20 months, either. 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 »
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 »
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 »
A website that claims to be from Amazon about launching a clean-powered pilot project for its AWS services, alas, isn’t true. It’s a stunt by the environmentalist at Greenpeace to get Amazon to add more clean power to its cloud. 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 »
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 »
The web has thoroughly infiltrated the political process, much like TV did in the 1960s. A series of posts on how the Obama team managed to analyze data, format its emails and now, build a fundraising API are showing how much web savvy and infrastructure matters. 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 »
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 »
New Deepfield analysis out just after Black Friday and in time for Cyber Monday shows (spoiler alert!) Amazon is by far the most popular online retail site. But there are some surprises as well. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy woes just keep on rolling; Cisco drops $1.2 billion on Meraki’s Wi-Fi smarts; and Amazon’s retail operations face sales tax bite on in more states — sparking questions on the impact on cloud services. Read more »
Do you want to buy a gift card for the Apple Store or for iTunes? Or maybe an Amazon card would be better. It all depends on what the gift recipient is likely to buy. We break down your options. Read more »
All the talk about big companies not wanting to put workloads on Amazon Web Services is hot air. The biggest companies already deploy workloads beyond test-and-dev on AWS. The question is: can AWS sustain that momentum as new options come online? Read more »
As the holiday gift-giving season is upon us, a good reminder to read reviews of products before buying online: Dozens of complaints on Amazon show that many of the “Apple Smart Covers” and ” Apple Smart Cases” for sale on the site are not the real thing. Read more »
After his abrupt departure from Microsoft last week, inquiring minds want to know just where Steven Sinofsky will land next. Here are a couple intriguing possibilities. What do you think? Read more »
Newvem has tested its analytics with customer data for 8 months and says its key finding is that customers need to hear how use of Amazon services will make them more profitable. Saving money is one thing, making money is better. Read more »
TV broadcasters and programmers must embrace a new set of video-delivery techniques to reach consumers today. Online delivery to so many types of consumer devices means that video programmers must produce multiple internet-streaming formats that use different types of security and different ways of inserting ads. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloudability says its analytics can cut your overall cloud services cost. Available now for Amazon Web Services, support is coming for other major cloud service providers, A raft of companies have sprung up to help companies get a better grip on their cloud spend. Read more »
India’s major tech firms have become competitive enterprise outsourcers and systems integrators on a global scale. Firms such as Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services are looking for technology to provide the next competitive advantages in the market. The cloud provides that opportunity on several levels. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon is adding a new region based in Sydney to offer lower-latency services to customers in Australia and New Zealand. The addition brings total regions worldwide to nine at a time when cloud competitors with global reach are coming online. Read more »
In the wake of several glitches at the Amazon Web Services’ US-East data centers in recent months, RedisToGo opens shop in US-West, will others follow? Also in cloud news: Rackspace and Savvis seek critical mass for their new cloud service offerings. Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The search giant keeps pushing its public cloud infrastructure, this time by updating its Cloud SQL database service with more storage, bigger caches for faster reads, and a choice of data center locales, according to a Google Enterprise blog post. Read more »
Netflix is putting Edda, aka Entrypoints, its tool for rapidly querying and reporting on Amazon Web Services resources, onto Github so other AWS customers can apply it to their own workloads, according to a company blog post. Read more »
With its OpenStack-based cloud coming online, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier says the company can take on Amazon Web Services for the biggest of big accounts, provided those accounts want the sort of value-add service Rackspace provides. Read more »
Joyent has named a new CEO and announced the altest generation of its infrastructure as a service software. The moves are in preparation for a big play in the coming months as the company looks to build the right computing platform for data and cloud applications. Read more »
The Spanish telecoms giant has made its big infrastructure-as-a-service play with Instant Servers, which it claims will beat entrenched rivals through better reliability and scalability. Read more »
Tablet sales are rising says IDC, as 27.7 million slates were sold in the last quarter. Apple still holds a majority market share as Samsung, Amazon and others are catching up to the iPad. But there’s a bigger story here when it comes to PCs. Read more »
Newvem is bringing its Amazon Web Services analytics to CIOs and IT managers via a shiny new iOS app that will let CIOs use their beloved iPads and iPhones to keep tabs on Amazon cloud services in use. Read more »
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
By 2016, there will be fewer data centers but those that are built will be much bigger, according to IDC research. Cedexis launches tool to help AWS customers route computing loads around Amazon EC2 regions to mitigate service problems. Read more »
With an ailing economy where manufacturing jobs are gone forever, what hope does America have? Mark Sigal of Unicorn Labs says companies—and our country—can prosper again only by embracing a unified approach to business, or an ethos of Indivisibility. Read more »
Another busy week for Amazon Web Services which added new compute instance types, cut prices on others, and upped the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line. Read more »
Devops is an industry buzzword that arose to describe the collaboration of development and operations teams. Continuous delivery is the automated implementation of the build, deploy, test, and release processes. As more teams embrace these ideas, more platforms and services will move toward a self-service model. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Chasing a potentially huge market, Microsoft has inked a pact with the municipality of Shanghai and with ISP 21Vianet to offer Windows Azure services in China. The deal could be huge but also problematic, given problems Google and other U.S. companies have had in China. Read more »
Brand advertising’s focus on cross-platform media measurement has grown dramatically in the past five years. Within the next 36 months cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars to online viewing and the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
