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 »
When Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) launched its iCloud service earlier this year, it automatically gave users of its own devices 5GB of free cloud-base… Read more at paidContent »
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 ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
We all know about the trials and tribulations of holding on to domain names around particular brands, but here’s an example of a curious bli… Read more at paidContent »
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 jobs. 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 are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Security concerns are always cited as the primary inhibitor to wider cloud adoption by businesses, but Capgemini CTO Joe Coyle says the security model for the cloud is already here and working just fine, thank you very much. Read more »
Analyst powerhouses IDC and Gartner both rolled out their latest cloud computing and big data predictions and statistics Thursday morning, and while some are bold, others should have you saying “Duh.” Here’s what they have to say, and how that squares with what I’m seeing. Read more »
Advocates of the public cloud tend to dismiss private cloud deployments within individual companies, arguing that they are too small to deliver the cost or flexibility advantages of the public cloud. But recent developments in the UK refute that argument. The University Modernization Fund’s Cloud Pilot, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Bessemer Venture Partners’ Byron Deeter shares his firm’s Cloudscape, a visualization of the leading companies in the cloud computing revolution, which Bessemer presented at its annual CEO Conference on cloud computing. Read more »
Node.js is following in Ruby on Rails’ and NoSQL’s footsteps to become the next hacker technology to be embraced by the enterprise. Just ask Flotype, the Berkeley, CA. startup which built its NowJS architecture atop Node.js, the server-side JavaScript-based toolset. Read more »
If you’re a Software-as-a-Service provider and want to wring the richest rewards out of what is already a lucrative gig, you should “verticalize” your services. That’s according to a newly published report from Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert. Read more »
Silk, the browser for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, utilizes Amazon’s cloud. But don’t think AWS is the Kindle Fire’s only cloud connection. In a post on Tuesday, Pulse’s Greg Bayer explained how his company’s news-reading app actually runs atop Google’s App Engine Platform-as-a-Service offering. Read more »
HPCC Systems, the division of LexisNexis that’s pushing a big-data processing-and-delivery platform to compete with Hadoop, has tuned its software to run on Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Interested developers can now experiment with the open source software without having to wrangle physical servers. Read more »
So the big data backlash begins. The Hadoop framework does a lot, but some experts — including those who push non-Hadoop options — say it’s not enough for many specialized apps where a build-your-own Hadoop implementation costs too much to be a real contender. Read more »
In the past few years we have seen accommodation-sharing company Airbnb grab a valuation of over $1 billion and car-sharing leader Zipcar squeak into profitability sooner than expected. Those developments, among others, suggest the share economy is alive and well, but how can this space continue ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Windows Azure is an ambitious PaaS that doesn’t get a lot of love from web developers. Here are four things Microsoft must do to make it a more compelling option for the new-age, non-.NET developers who now flock to Amazon Web Services or another PaaS. Read more »
