Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company was winning the battle for productivity applications in the cloud, and when it’s winning, it’s taking customers away from Google. And in doing so, he invoked a little bit of Charlie Sheen in showing his enthusiasm about network-based applications. Read more »
Amazon has become the cloud king, with its AWS offerings providing cloud-based storage and processing that takes a lot of the cost out of deploying new products and applications. Netflix, DropBox and Yelp are all AWS clients, but the most important user might be Amazon itself. Read more »
NSN today laid out a new architecture for mobile networks that brings concepts such automation and elasticity from webscale and cloud computing to mobile broadband as network engineers at carriers face the challenge of scaling their infrastructure to serve billions of endpoints. Read more »
On Wednesday HP released its first two public cloud computing services for private beta, based in part on the open-source OpenStack code. The services, some details of which were leaked in the spring, are HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage. Read more »
During VMworld this week, VMware introduced a new Dropbox-like application called Project Octopus that will let users safely store, access and share corporate documents. It all so sounded so promising, and then someone asked me whether it will actually get used. Read more »
After the Department of Justice surprised pretty much everyone by suing to stop AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile, the nation’s No. 2 carrier isn’t taking defeat lying down. It has vowed to fight the suit in a statement released this morning. Read more »
Verizon is buying cloud computing startup CloudSwitch in a move that will give Verizon, as well as its subsidiary Terremark, a software-development edge to complement its service-provider expertise. CloudSwitch will lead software development beyond its core product, which will give Verizon additional cloud intellectual property. Read more »
Amazon has been adding all kinds of features to attract enterprise users to its cloud computing platform, but with it’s new caching product, it’s returning to web developers. Perhaps with an influx of platforms and OpenStack, Amazon realizes it needs to concentrate on its core. Read more »
Encoding.com’s Vid.ly universal URL service is now ready for professional users, with features and pricing designed to provide a turnkey solution for video delivery on any device. Vid.ly Pro is rolling out to users today, in an effort to capture more of the cloud-encoding market. Read more »
On Thursday Amazon announced three enhancements to its cloud computing offering. These include improvements to existing virtual private cloud and identity management solutions as well as a new option to directly connect enterprise networks to machines in Amazon’s Virginia data center, as Derrick Harris recounts and Amazon’s Jeff Barr ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The economic impact of AWS is much bigger and wider than most think, as it is crucial to the startup revolution. In order to push that philosophy, Amazon holds an annual contest, the AWS Startup Challenge, which is now back for its fifth year. Read more »
Amazon Web Services announced on Tuesday afternoon that its Simple Storage Service (S3) now houses more than 449 billion objects. The rapid pace of S3′s growth is a microcosm of both AWS’ overall business as well as cloud computing in general. Read more »
It would be understandable for people to view Microsoft Azure, the company’s enterprise cloud hosting service, as a direct competitive play. After all, the product was launched in February 2010, well after Microsoft’s fellow software giants Amazon and Google had positioned themselves in the cloud computing […] Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Fyels just launched a new service for file sharing through Twitter, and it comes with almost no strings attached: The service offers unlimited, free and ad-free storage, and files can be as large as 9 GB each. Almost sounds to good to be true, doesn’t it? Read more »
While Google has been at the forefront of cutting-edge green data center technology, with experimental projects like its seawater-cooled data center, Google’s big message at its second data center efficiency summit: There’s no magic involved with greener data centers. Read more »
With all the bad news about recent outages of Amazon Web Services and Sony’s Playstation Network, cloud-based services and the cloud industry needs to more proactively educate users to protect the “cloud” brand. Read more »
We’ve already covered the trends that began to shape up in the infrastructure market in 2010 and will really materialize in 2011. Several companies played — and will continue to play — a big role in making those trends happen. From Facebook to Cloudera to Microsoft, here ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon is looking to add a new cloud encoding service to its web services portfolio. While creating the new encoding service would fit neatly into its AWS plans, it could also potentially displace some customers who rely on its infrastructure for their own cloud encoding services. Read more »
The PaaS segment of the cloud computing market is hot. Just look at the ado VMware and Salesforce.com created with their VMforce announcement, or the attention Heroku is attracting with its Ruby-centric service. Could Amazon be the next cloud player to enter this market? Read more »
An event more than a year in the making, Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing offering is finally available to the public. The software giant announced Azure in October 2008, made the service available as a limited Community Technology Preview (CTP) project shortly thereafter, and has been releasing pricing and product details at a regular clip in the meantime. Preview customers have been experimenting for free with a limited version of Azure, but as of April 1, 2010, all existing CTP customers who have not upgraded to the official version will have their accounts deleted. As the cliché goes, general availability is where the rubber meets the road for Microsoft and its vaunted cloud platform: If it can leverage its existing customer base and convince potential users to trust an oft-criticized software vendor with an entirely new delivery model, Microsoft could become a major force among cloud providers. While Windows Azure is a more-than-capable offering, trust could be an issue for a large number of developers and businesses that don’t believe Microsoft will deliver the openness so valued in the cloud world. Here’s a look at what Azure is, what it costs, and how it fits into (and will differentiate itself in) the market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing solutions of various flavors continue to grow in popularity, as individuals, small startups and global corporations turn to the cloud in order to store data, distribute computing tasks, or deliver applications from email and calendaring to customer relationship management and gene sequencing. While cloud ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Microsoft and Rackspace both made much cloud computing news this week; the former by announcing pricing and details for its Azure platform, and the latter by opening up its Cloud Servers APIs. Both companies have large customer bases and strong reputations, so the real question as ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In an effort to cut costs, Viacom announced today that it will be restructuring its organization, resulting in layoffs of 7 percent, or 850 positions that will be implemented across all divisions of the company, as well as suspending pay increases for senior management in 2009. Read more »
With a flurry of announcements in recent weeks, Amazon has extended its cloud computing lead. The beta label’s gone. It can run Windows applications. By investing in firms like Elastra, it’s tackling enterprise deployment. And there’s a 99.95 percent uptime guarantee. Much of this is a […] Read more »
