Examining Amazon Web Services usage is a cottage industry for a dozen or so startups. One of them, Newvem, has offered its service free to select customers. Now that the service is broadly available, it’s time to monetize. Read more »
Everyone’s talking about the greatness of big data, but we’re nowhere near the promised land of what’s possible when we turn data loose on our lives. Here are three things to watch that could affect how companies and everday people consume all that info. Read more »
The new ability of AWS users to move EBS storage volumes between Amazon’s regions could drastically improve disaster recovery scenarios. Amazon announced this EBS Snapshot Copy feature early on Tuesday. Read more »
Developers say Firebase makes it really easy for them to quickly write and debug web applications without having to mess with server infrastructure. But they want better security for those apps. On Tuesday, Firebase will roll out a new security API. Read more »
The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 will require following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the latest case of researchers using the cloud for good, Google is highlighting the six projects to which it awarded grants via its Exacycle for Visiting Faculty program. Ranging from genomic research to astronomy, the researchers received 100 million computing hours apiece. Read more »
The hypergrowth that the SaaS category saw last year has leveled off, but these companies are still outperforming traditional software rivals and legacy IT providers who are mired in a hardware-oriented world, according to new research from martinwolf Global M&A Advisors. Read more »
Akamai’s 8-month search for a new CEO didn’t take it too far: It tapped co-founder and chief scientist Tom Leighton to succeed Paul Sagan, who announced his intention to leave last April. Now Sagan will cede the CEO slot on January 1. Read more »
Cloudant aims for cloud ubiquity with Rackspace partnership; OpenNebula offers private testing cloud inside Amazon Web Services; and Dell vows (late) OpenStack-based public cloud, partners with Inktank on Ceph storage. Read more »
Next year, “the cloud” will finally be ready for enterprise workloads and big companies will finally start moving them there. Data centers will stop being enclosed by walls and those are just two of GigaOM’s 5 big cloud predictions. Read on for more. Read more »
New AWS billing lets customers see their cloud services charges broken out into more detail — a key issue for many customers who want a better look at what’s going on in their AWS cloud. Read more »
Cloudyn and Scalr give joint customers a better look at what’s going on in Amazon Web Services; Apptio launches a free service to help customers optimize loads on AWS, Azure and Rackspace clouds. Read more »
Mayfield Fund is backing CloudVelocity’s hybrid cloud automation vision to the tune of $5 million in Series A funding. CloudVelocity’s very bold promise is that it will move your existing enterprise apps to a public cloud and run them there securely. Read more »
Greg Sands, a veteran from Sutter Hill Ventures, has built a new fund to stake early-stage cloud and big data companies. Investments include Datalogix, DemandBase, and Risk I/0. Read more »
Opportunities for big data and data-analytics firms in health care are likely to expand dramatically in the coming years. Driving this are trends such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the use of data to address inefficient processes, and the rapid growth of mobile health. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud news you can use this week: rough times for Rackspace; a look at Amazon Web Services revenue; EMC-VMware come clean (kind of) about spinoff; and Heroku spiffs up its add-on marketplace for developers. Read more »
Through AT&T’s ForHealth initiative, researchers at AT&T Labs are working on an asthma sensor that scans the air for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that may worsen asthma symptoms and then alerts patients via smartphones and other devices. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard’s long-promised cloud builds on an OpenStack foundation as well as Akamai, and ActiveState technologies. Should it matter that this IT giant is relying on IT from other companies? Read more »
Startup CipherCloud will use fresh funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and T-Systems to beef up sales and marketing and its global presence, says CEO and founder Pravin Kothari. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard’s cloud efforts can get lost in the noise of the company’s bigger “macro” issues, but as the company adds its OpenStack compute cloud to the mix — joining the existing CDN and storage clouds — the battle for enterprise cloud users is on. Read more »
Many factors have driven the recent high demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
You love MongoDB but you’re not wild with all the configuration and tweaking? SoftLayer now offers a new managed MongoDB service that it created with help from 10gen, the company behind MongoDB. Read more »
Openstack private cloud player Piston Cloud Computing names Jim Morrisroe, who formerly headed VMware’s Zimbra group, as its new CEO. Co-founder and former CEO Joshua McKenty stays on as CTO. Read more »
Given Dropbox’s huge popularity — it claims 100 million users — it’s not surprising that many workers use it at the office. But that trend is worrisome to IT departments concerned with security breaches. Read more »
At the AWS Re: Invent conference, engineers from Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp detailed some of the strategies their companies employ in order to keep costs low as computing demand increases. The keys are keeping an eagle eye on usage and using the right types of resources. Read more »
It was a frenetic week for cloud with Google touching off a storage price war on Monday. Amazon responded Wednesday and Google hit back on Thursday. Amazon Web Services announced a data warehouse and data pipeline service at its inaugural AWS: Reinvent show. Read more »
According to Amazon Web Services Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood, big data and cloud computing are nearly a match made in heaven. Limitless, on-demand and inexpensive resources open up new worlds of possibility, and a central platform makes it easy for communities to share huge datasets. Read more »
AWS CTO Werner Vogels and I sat down at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday to talk about whether large companies are actually using the cloud to innovate through new styles of applications. Vogels says they are, and has plenty of examples to prove his point. Read more »
Writing Hadoop queries doesn’t have to be hard and neither does sharing data according to Mortar Data, which just released an open source framework for Hadoop applications. The idea is that groups of people can more easily collaborate on building apps around giant data sets. Read more »
Startup Cloud9 IDE says its new enterprise development environment will let far-flung developers collaborate in real-time on their projects. Given the demand for quality developers, companies need to hire where they can and find ways to enable collaboration. Read more »
If you don’t think Google is serious about providing public cloud infrastructure to business users, check out the latest spate of services unveiled on the company’s enterprise blog. Google clearly wants to take on cloud king Amazon on its own turf. Read more »
Netflix has forged a cottage industry building tools to fill gaps in Amazon’s cloud infrastructure or otherwise add value to it. Now the company is open sourcing its Hystrix libraries, which manage interactions between the myriad distributed services that power its applications. Read more »
Zorawar Biri Singh, who leads HP’s cloud effort, says the company’s vision aligns nicely with what enterprises want. HP will fill in check marks to its OpenStack-based game plan next month but the big question is whether HP’s brand still carries weight. Read more »
Mortar Data has raised $1.8 million for its cloud-based service that wraps Hadoop in a custom — and supposedly developer-friendly — blend of Pig and Python, meaning even novice Hadoop programmers can be writing jobs in about an hour. Read more »
Web-hosting giant GoDaddy is trying to grow into a products company to help its small business customers move into the modern computing era rather than just hosting their websites. A conversion to mobile websites is first, but cloud services are on the horizon. Read more »
Newvem has tested its analytics with customer data for 8 months and says its key finding is that customers need to hear how use of Amazon services will make them more profitable. Saving money is one thing, making money is better. Read more »
Jesse Andrews, an OpenStack veteran who’s done stints at NASA, ANSO Labs and Rackspace, will lead Nebula’s plug-and-play OpenStack development effort as it nears launch, the company said. Read more »
Hadoop is nothing without applications, and Continuuity aims to deliver those apps by making Hadoop something developers can work and innovate with. Its efforts haven’t gone unnoticed — the company just closed a $10 million Series A round from a who’s who of big data VCs. Read more »
Cloudability says its analytics can cut your overall cloud services cost. Available now for Amazon Web Services, support is coming for other major cloud service providers, A raft of companies have sprung up to help companies get a better grip on their cloud spend. Read more »
Obama for America CTO Harper Reed had helped build Threadless, a site for selling hip t-shirts, but he had never done anything like this. Here’s how he and his team built a tech platform that might forever change how presidential campaigns are built. Read more »
