News that SAP and Amazon will All-in-One business applications to run in production on Amazon’s public cloud raises a question: what’s going on with SAP and Microsoft Windows Azure? News on this could come next week at the Sapphire 2012 show. Or not. Read more »
SAP All-in-One business applications will now run in Amazon’s cloud — another step that could make Amazon Web Services more enticing to risk-averse businesses that stress over entrusting their life-blood applications to a public cloud. Read more »
Applied DNA Sciences thinks it has created the perfect tool for identifying attempts to counterfeit or steal goods along the supply chain. It’s mobile meets cloud computing meets big data, and it begins with QR codes that mimic physical DNA signatures. Read more »
The OpenStack army marches on. On Thursday, Hewlett-Packard put its public cloud to public beta. The services had been available to a limited number of customers up till now. The news comes a week after Rackspace launched its own OpenStack cloud. Read more »
E-procurement player Coupa Software netted $22 million in a Series E funding round led by new investor Crosslink Capital. Companies use Coupa’s cloud-based services to track supplier contracts and requisitions. Read more »
New York City-based startup BetterCloud has raised $2 million for its quest to bring better business-oriented management, reporting and other capabilities to Google Apps. The funding comes from BetterCloud CEO David Politis and unnamed angel investors. Read more »
VMware CTO Steve Herrod has a message for the IT world: “[S]pecialized software will replace specialized hardware throughout the data center.” Via virtualizations and SDNs, software-defined data centers will bring the dynamic natures of Google, Facebook and Zynga data centers into the mainstream. Read more »
Cloud Engines’ Pogoplug Team software creates “on-site storage clouds” using existing PCs or servers in a way it claims is far cheaper than the various Dropboxes for the enterprise. Authorized remote workers can access folders or files as needed. Read more »
Let it never be said that the cloud computing wars are boring. Within hours of being blasted for locking developers into its ever-rising cloud stack, Amazon announced new managed database services and Elastic Beanstalk support for thousands of Microsoft-centric developers. Read more »
Positioning his company as David to Amazon’s Goliath, Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson blasted Amazon Web Services for locking developers into a closed ecosystem. As AWS adds more services, it’s harder for developers to get out, he said. Read more »
We’ve heard an awful lot about lean startups lately. Now it’s time to focus on Phat Startups — companies willing to take big risks to solve big problems — like clean energy and nuclear waste remediation, according to Jamie Goldstein, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. Read more »
Many IT professionals find migrating corporate applications to the cloud a difficult, time-consuming and altogether painful task, according to results of a new survey from Cisco. While the majority of respondents expressed relative comfort with their cloud migrations, some took rather extreme negative positions. Read more »
Rackspace is the Dr. Jekyll of hosting. For the last few years, it has been a legacy managed hosting provider by day that dabbled in cloud computing at night. As Dr. Jekyll ultimately did, though, Rackspace is becoming Mr. Hyde for good. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A cadre of DevOps experts will gather later this week at an undisclosed location in Northern California. The goal: To hash out issues they see in their own shops, to compare notes on problems and talk in a way that they cannot in vendor-driven conferences. Read more »
Market research firm IDC released the first legitimate market forecast for Hadoop on Monday, claiming the ecosystem around the de facto big data platform will sell almost $813 million worth of software by 2016. But Hadoop’s actual economic impact is likely much, much larger. Read more »
According to former Heroku CEO and current Salesforce.com VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian, Heroku is hosting more than 1.5 million applications — an increase of approximately 15x in less than 18 months. It’s success is part of an industry trend toward PaaS acceptance for new apps. Read more »
The lead developers behind open-source storage system Ceph have launched a company, called Inktank, to commercialize the software. The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” Read more »
Legacy IT vendors used to dealing with one or two ways of delivering their products and services to market, now must handle four, five, maybe more business models as cloud computing takes off. And many, according to Accenture, are not prepared for that complexity. Read more »
Brad Spiers, who runs cloud IT for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has some thoughts about the uses of cloud computing by financial services firms and what is holding back adoption of hot technologies like solid state storage and in-memory databases. Read more »
Piston Computing plans to integrate VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service with Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure as a service offering in what the two companies are billing as an integration of “the world’s most popular open source IaaS and PaaS together.” Read more »
Cloud computing and big data are in the enterprise to stay, but making the most of them presents challenges for IT decision makers. The future belongs to those companies who can work through legacy tools, ongoing security issues and the data scientist shortage. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The need for enterprise architecture was spurred by the need to gain control over an increasingly complex computing environment, and an increasingly large backlog of data and feature needs. But those needs are changing with cloud computing, and so is the job of the enterprise architect. Read more »
If you parse Amazon’s first quarter earnings, you could be forgiven for thinking that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now a $2 billion-a-year business. Revenue from Amazon’s “other” category was $500 million for the quarter, although “other” does include revenue from other things. Read more »
Internap bought Voxel early this year to boost its dedicated hosting and public cloud portfolios and to extend its reach into smaller companies. Now its new Voxel.net Agile Hosting services will let even tiny businesses configure and deploy IT infrastructure from an online configurator. Read more »
There are now more than half a dozen commercial Hadoop distributions in the market, and almost every enterprise with big data challenges is tinkering with the Apache Foundation-licensed software. A new report examines the key disruptive trends shaping the Hadoop platform market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intel paid $140 million to buy the interconnect business of Cray, the original manufacturer of supercomputers. From here it looks like there’s little left of Cray moving forward, but the interesting bit about this deal is how it could define the next generation of servers. Read more »
In a cloud computing market dominated by large, well-known companies such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, it’s difficult to find much upside investing in the competition. However, Battery Ventures has done just that, leading a $27.5 million round in SingleHop, a Chicago-based infrastructure-as-a-service provider. Read more »
VMware has acquired Cetas, a startup that provides analytics atop the Hadoop platform. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cetas is an 18-month-old company with tens of paying customers that didn’t need to rush into an acquisition. So, why did VMware buy it? Read more »
The marketplace concept does a good job of bringing the simplicity of the Apple App Store model to server applications. It has the potential to revolutionize IT consumption. And if no one else steps up, Amazon is going to own this part of the cloud, too. Read more »
If you think about it, Netflix’s metamorphosis into a company that runs its infrastructure completely atop cloud-based resources is truly remarkable. For many companies, such as site-optimization and CDN provider Yottaa, the bigger they get, the harder it is to justify the cloud’s cost and performance. Read more »
Everyone knows Amazon’s cloud is huge but many want to know exactly how huge it is. The latest to try is Deepfield Networks worked with unnamed partners to find that 1/3 of all Internet users touch on AWS at least once a day. Read more »
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to IT customers: “If we’re not delivering the right services you should walk away.” While one would disagree with that, many question exactly how easy it will be for customers to walk away if they use high-end Amazon services. Read more »
Working with Schrödinger, which specializes in computational drug design, Cycle Computing built a 50k-core AWS cluster that screened 21 million compounds in less than three hours. The cluster enabled the company to use a much more accurate screening process than other technology. Read more »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amid all the OpenStack news this week, there is a feeling in some quarters that two years after Rackspace and NASA launched this attempt to counter Amazon Web Services and VMware, it may be too late for the effort to take hold. Read more »
The new AWS Partner Network targets ISVs, SaaS companies, tool and platform providers as well as consultative partners like systems integrators and agencies. The goal is to provide them with the technology information they need, according to a post to the AWS blog. Read more »
Cloud platform provider Eucalyptus will use $30 million in new Series C funding to build its engineering and sales staffs, said CEO Marten Mickos.
The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners with contributions from Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates. Read more »
iFixit, the popular DIY repair site, will parlay its Amazon Web Services, Rightscale foundation — and its own secret sauce — to take on the problem of product support and documentation for businesses. It’s new Dozuki business division targets large retailers and manufacturers. Read more »
Newvem, the startup that aims to help companies make the most out of their Amazon Web Services instances, has some new data that might shock the Amazon faithful. A high percentage of AWS users are paying for way more compute power than they need. Read more »
