Cloud-based DNA-sequencing specialist DNAnexus has closed a $15 million second round led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech. Elsewhere, we learned Wednesday that agribusiness giant Monsanto has deployed Cloudant’s NoSQL database as the underpinning of the company’s genomics system. Read more »
Box.net just closed additional Series D funding, netting new money from SAP Ventures–the VC arm of enterprise software giant SAP AG, as well as Salesforce.com, Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA. This brings the total from the overall Series D round of funding to $81 million. Read more »
Travel-booking service Orbitz chose Kognitio’s Data Warehouse as a Service offering. The decision to move such a critical piece of the analytics stack to Kognitio’s cloud service highlights Orbitz’s commitment big data and is further proof that the cloud is an ideal place for it. Read more »
Microsoft could use Web Matrix 2.0 tool — now in beta — to entice new-age web developers to Azure, its cloud-computing Platform-as-a-Service. While the Azure PaaS has a potentially huge built-in audience of .Net programmers, it lacks cachet among the “cool kid,” next-gen web developers. Read more »
As the OpenStack project moves into its second year and more companies evaluate the open-source cloud technology, prospective users have some requests. Documentation, for one. A longer-term roadmap, for another. A more formal process for submitting and receiving feedback, for yet another. Read more »
The OpenStack community is pleased that RackSpace will relinquish control of the open-source cloud infrastructure effort, but many OpenStack Conference attendees want to see the details before they fully endorse the effort. The foundation is expected to be operational next year. Read more »
Rackspace will be giving up control over its OpenStack cloud computing project to an indepedent foundation. OpenStack is the open-source cloud computing platform that Rackspace and co-founder NASA began pushing last year, but it has been somewhat plagued by concerns over Rackspace’s control of the community. Read more »
Oracle painted Exalytics data analytics and big data appliances as game changers. And they might be, for Oracle. But both high-end boxes are about Oracle taking existing IP assets that it acquired or open sourced, and layering them on Intel hardware and Infiniband pipes. Read more »
Amazon Web Services said Tuesday night that it’s now hosting 566 billion objects in S3. The volume has more than doubled since the fourth quarter of last year. If that doesn’t suggest that cloud use is picking up, I don’t know what does. Read more »
Battling CEOs: Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff tweeted that his counterpart at Oracle canceled Benioff’s big OpenWorld keynote. We can’t be sure because Oracle isn’t responding, but either way Salesforce.com probably just boosted attendance at its alternate event big-time. Read more »
Oracle’s rumored NoSQL database made its splashy debut along with its Big Data Appliance at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 yesterday. Less trumpeted was news that MySQL, the venerable open-source database for cloud companies, hit a milestone, offering faster queries and more powerful clustering. Read more »
Red Hat’s planned $136 million purchase of Gluster should give the enterprise Linux leader a strong play in the cloud-inflected world of scale-out storage. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions by vendors trying to stake a claim in the storage of unstructured data. Read more »
Both mobile and high performance computing are placing huge power efficiency and performance demands on chips, but the real $64,000 question is how long until such extreme computing use cases hit the server mainstream. Asked another way, how long till Amazon adopts ARM-based servers? Read more »
Along with all the big-iron appliance and big data hype at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 come a lot of questions. Is this Sparc resurgence for real? Is anyone buying Oracle’s soup-to-nuts software-hardware stack pitch? Can standalone business intelligence players survive? And just what is Oracle NoSQL anyway? Read more »
Managed-hosting veteran and now enterprise cloud-computing provider Savvis is trying to woo even more big-name customers with its new Symphony Database service that features Oracle Database 11g and Microsoft SQL Server with their usual cumbersome enterprise licenses. Read more »
With its latest appliance, Oracle officially signaled its embrace of big data. Company execs said the appliance marries big data technologies with Oracle’s core 11G database and new Exalytics analytics appliance. The Big Data Appliance bundles Oracle NoSQL and an open-source Apache Hadoop distribution. Read more »
Oracle customers have lots of questions for the database giant. If you’re one of the 50,000 people Oracle expects to converge on the Moscone Center starting Sunday–or even if you’re not–here are some key things to look out for at the big Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Conference. Read more »
Developers at the Surge conference in Baltimore have a love-hate relationship with America’s largest online retailer and cloud provider. But repeated tales of Amazon’s failures were immediately followed by assurances that the service was cheaper and better than buying your own hardware. Read more »
Autonomy’s impending acquisition by Hewlett-Packard is nearly done. The controversial $10.3 billion deal was cleared by regulators in the U.S. and Australia on Thursday, according to reports. Autonomy shareholders still have until Monday morning 10:00 a.m. U.K time to weigh in. Read more »
You might have heard of the SuperNAP data center before because of its military-grade security, more-than-400,000-square-foot footprint and roots as Enron’s attempt to build a bandwidth exchange, but the cutting-edge facility is also home to some very interesting customers. Read more »
Oracle’s cloud computing stance has evolved, to say the least, over the past few years. As the company preps for its annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-show in San Francisco next week, a huge question lingers: Does Oracle–and its CEO Larry Ellison–really “get” the cloud? Read more »
Online CRM pioneer Salesforce.com continues to back up its ecosystem with its checkbook, this time with an investment in cloud storage provider Box.net. In the past few months, Salesforce.com has made a series of outright acquisitions of Assistly, Radian6, and Heroku. Read more »
PaaS pioneer Heroku continued its march into the multi-language world today by adding support for Python and the Django framework. It’s just the latest change in an evolutionary several months for Heroku, and for PaaS overall as tries to become the face of cloud computing. Read more »
At its highly anticipated Kindle Fire launch, Amazon also took the wraps off its own browser. Amazon Silk, which relies on the Kindle Fire end point — for the cool UI — and Amazon’s powerful cloud — for the heavy lifting — promises a better user experience. Read more »
Microsoft, still a server virtualization also-ran, gets key third-party support for its Windows Server 8/ Hyper-V tandem from NEC America, Cisco and OpenNebula. With a little help from its friends, it hopes to dislodge VMware as the kingpin of server virtualization. Read more »
Virgin Media is using Savvis to launch business-oriented cloud services–minus the tech double talk–through its Virgin Media Business subsidiary. The company–which already offers broadband, fixed-line and mobile phone services to customers–promises jargon-free service to businesses that want to quickly test in-house applications or launch e-commerce services. Read more »
It may be difficult to describe what exactly the phrase “an internet of things” means, but the pieces of the puzzle that are required for that to develop are all here today, ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco. Read more »
Global Gossip, an Australian telcom that specializes in internet access, chose Verizon’s Computing-as-a-Service as the engine for its cloud offering going forward. Verizon CaaS, sold by Verizon Global Wholesale, is just one of several Verizon cloud options after the company’s buying spree. Read more »
Birst is taking the cloud out of its SaaS BI offering with a new deployment option that lets customers run the product in their own data centers. The company says its virtual appliance delivers all the benefits of traditional cloud-hosted SaaS without, well, the cloud part. Read more »
For fancy, new-fangled 4G mobile apps to really take off in a world with very few unlimited data plans, service providers need advanced yield management and the ability to bundle requisite bandwidth up with the applications themselves. Read more »
Heroku is reporting it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference. On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 a minute.” Read more »
Say what you will about Meg Whitman as the new HP CEO. She knows consumers. Now she’ll have a chance to apply her consumer touch to one of Silicon Valley’s most storied brands, which could have a chance to give Apple a run for its money. Read more »
A long-running clash of legal approaches to the handling of personal data is coming to a head, as European countries begin to act.
In Germany, Deutsche Telekom is calling for more stringent regulation of cloud providers, and in the Netherlands a government minister suggests that U.S. companies could be ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux. But now, like Microsoft itself, it obsesses more on cloud infrastructure than lowly operating systems. Questions about Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS and CloudForms IaaS dominated last night’s earnings call, but CEO Jim Whitehurst was cautious on revenue predictions. Read more »
In its new Diablo release, the OpenStack cloud OS gets perks including a dashboard to give IT a peak into what’s happening in the cloud, better authentication that ties into existing directories, and an API to ease integration into big, dynamic networks. Read more »
If Hewlett-Packard really ousts CEO Leo Apotheker barely a year into his tenure, no one can say the move—however drastic—was unexpected. Apotheker presided over a disastrous period for the venerable computing giant, but many say the HP board should follow him out the door. Read more »
OpSource Inc.’s brand spanking new Silicon Valley data center should cut latency times and boost network performance for the cloud provider’s enterprise and service provider customers on the West Coast and provide co-location options for enterprises wanting redundancy. Read more »
To build its new business cloud services, IBM melded Coremetrics’ web analytics, Sterling Commerce’ supply chain, and Unica social media marketing smarts acquired last year with its home-grown middleware. Then it optimized it all for the Power7 hardware running IBM’s cloud. Read more »
Buried in the talk about security, privacy and transnational data laws, it looks like the federal government’s cloud computing push also could bring progress on broadband accessibility. If Congress actually does push more, faster broadband, I think the promise of economic growth will drive it. 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 »
