A group of tech companies led by IBM and including CA, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, NetApp, Red Hat, SAP — is throwing its weight behind a proposed standard to assure that applications can move between clouds. Amazon, RackSpace, Microsoft? They’re not on board, at least not yet. Read more »
Although we live in an AC-dominated world, DC seems poised for a comeback, particularly in data centers. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a datacenter at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. Read more »
Metamarkets is readying its cloud-based big data platform for significant business growth by making key personnel changes and spreading its wings into new industries. Co-founder Mike Driscoll is stepping up to CEO, and the company is moving into the gaming and social media spaces. Read more »
The free version of Jaspersoft’s analytics software will be offered as part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. As Red Hat, Microsoft, Heroku, and Cloud Foundry PaaSes compete, watch for them to add more services and capabilities just as they’ve raced to add language support. Read more »
The cloud is looking pretty good to software developers this year, according to new Zend Technologies’ research. More than half of the 3,335 developers surveyed said they expect to use a public cloud for their work in 2012, with AWS being the top draw. Read more »
People think of data centers as a big, clunky category, but in the cloud computing era it shouldn’t be a surprise that the sector has been hot, with more hotness to come. As more cloud services come online, demand for webscale data centers will keep growing. Read more »
I spent some time playing with Google Insights to find out what parts of the country are most interested in technology and when that interest hit its peak. It wasn’t surprising to see Silicon Valley rank highly, but did you know Utah was into next-generation programming? Read more »
AT&T has decided to build another cloud, this one focusing on developers and, ultimately, incorporating elements of the open-source OpenStack project. It’s an ambitious undertaking as AT&T tries to prove it can hang with the big boys in delivering cloud infrastructure to the masses. Read more »
As usual, a big chunk of the news out of the Consumer Electronics Show this year revolves around bright-and-shiny devices. But this time out, those devices are acting as the Trojan horses for the hardware makers’ cloud vision. The battle’s all about cloud services now. Read more »
The new OnLive Desktop app making its debut at CES this week will let users stream their full-featured — and resource-intensive — Microsoft Office applications to their Apple iPads. The company runs virtualized versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint on its data centers in the cloud. Read more »
If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I’m afraid I have bad news for you. For every problem eliminated by choosing cloud, it just creates more problems you remain accountable for— and perhaps some that you never had to face before. Read more »
Keeping a data center online is a highly complex and often underestimated task, but one that provides the bedrock of any public cloud availability. Patrick Baillie of CloudSigma explains why he thinks public IaaS cloud service providers shouldn’t run their own data centers. Read more »
Two recent wins for GE signal not just where GE is headed, but also two important trends for 2012. First, the move to “cloud-based” hosted services is under way in earnest. Second, many of the sector’s biggest players are targeting coops and municipals. Read more »
The wave of M&A activity swelling the cloud services sector won’t stop with in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) arena. Internap’s $30 million purchase of Voxel, announced early this week, signals a land rush for cloud services, with many smaller, capable cloud providers now in play. Read more »
GrabCAD, a specialist in open-source CAD software, has netted $4.2 million in new funding from its existing VC backers. It has also added Matrix Partners’ David Skok to its board, according to a new blog post by GrabCAD President Hardi Meybaum. Read more »
Much has been written about the U.S. government’s plan to shutter 1,200 data centers. There’s been considerably less chatter about the fact that some of the remaining, revamped federal data centers are now leasing out excess capacity to other government agencies. Read more »
It’s four days into the new year and IBM just made its first acquisition of 2012 — it is buying Green Hat, a company that simulates application testing in the cloud. The deal is all about IBM building its automated software testing portfolio. Read more »
1010data says it now hosts more than 5 trillion records for its customers. If 1010data’s growth is a microcosm of the greater market, it’s no wonder there’s so much excitement around scalable data stores such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases and massively parallel analytic databases. Read more »
In the world of science, cloud computing provides an ideal platform for crowdsourcing scientific problems across the whole world of researchers, giving them access to data sets and the computing resources to analyze them. If big data is any indicator, scientific crowdsourcing should catch on. Read more »
Last year was a great year for GigaOM Pro, and 2012 promises to be even better. Jo Maitland recently joined our team as a Research Director for Enterprise, and she will help us produce more research in the enterprise IT and cloud computing spaces. Read more »
All startup activity around cloud computing in the past few years has been great, but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Here are 10 cloud startups launched in 2011 that have a chance to make it big in 2012. Read more »
I made a lot of predictions about cloud computing and the general IT infrastructure space heading into 2011, and I impressed myself with my skills of prognostication. Of course, it’s possible I’m just grading myself too generously, so I’ll let readers be the judges. Read more »
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 industry. Read more »
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, and how IT jobs will change in the coming months. Expect plenty of defensive M&A, cloud lock-in, phantom data discovery, outages, availability headaches, pricing confusion and job displacement over the next 12 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 possible. 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 »
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 delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 real live people? Read more »
We’ve been talking about cloud computing for what seems like forever, but the talk definitely heated up in 2011 with the launch of Apple’s i… Read more at paidContent »
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 ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
