Oracle’s still fighting to recover, recoup and profit from its $7.4 billion buyout of Sun Microsystems three years ago. In its first quarter, Oracle’s overall hardware business was off 24 percent year over year despite “triple-digit growth” in engineered systems like Exadata. Read more »
Bad economy aside, European government agencies and private businesses will be strongly encouraged to beef up their cloud infrastructure in a forthcoming report by the EC-sanctioned European Cloud Partnership. A leaked report said companies/agencies should invest €45 billion in cloud computing by 2020. Read more »
The OpenStack Foundation is official as of Wednesday with a new 24-person board, $10 million in funding, 5,600 members, and a mandate to promote flexible open-source cloud infrastructure. Question: Will the foundation echo the success of Eclipse or the failure of OpenOffice? Read more »
With its new marketplace for reserved instances, Amazon Web Services has taken another step towards turning cloud computing into a commodity. But Dr. James Mitchell, CEO and founder of the cloud broker-dealer Strategic Blue, thinks AWS needs to implement more commodities market best practices. Read more »
1010data has launched a new service called the Analytical Dataspace, which is essentially a marketplace for buying and selling data and accessing analytics applications. 1010data has been providing a cloud-based analytics service for years, but this is a chance to add value by adding data. Read more »
Yes, cloud adoption in Europe hasn’t happened as fast as in the US. But despite the difficult economy, there’s considerable interest in cloud on the continent. The market bears watching and here are 5 things you should know about it. Read more »
Apprenda, hopes to make private PaaSes more attractive to companies by giving developers access to a public instance of its Paas to experiment with, then pull in house, according to company CEO Sinclair Schuller. Read more »
The changes in enterprise IT and infrastructure has been very good for VC firms which have put billions in startups and seen lucrative exits. Now, as IT continues its shift Battery Ventures is promoting Itzik Parnafes to general partner for the next stage of enterprise IT. Read more »
In-Q-Tel which finds and vets strategic technology for use by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, has given a boost (and some money) to Huddle, the UK provider of cloud collaboration services. Together they”re working on a version for use by US government entities. Read more »
Amazon — which knows a thing or two about online marketplaces — is launching one for Amazon Web Services customers who may have over-provisioned their EC2 reserved instances. Now they can buy or sell those instances with other AWS customers Read more »
Autodesk now offers a cloud-based version of its simulation software for a fraction of the cost of most similar on-premise options. While large enterprises might not being willing to make the jump yet, some innovative startups are already on board and testing the future. Read more »
ComodIT, a tiny startup out of Liege, Belgium, has big plans to help you manage your IT infrastructure in the cloud. The company’s new Synapse Agent, a step towards that goal, lets you manage multiple hosts or instances from a single command-line interface. Read more »
As the volume of connected devices increases, so too will the probability of hackers targeting these systems to exploit networks, steal data, hijack systems, and compromise workflows. Security specialists recognize the potential risks and are already developing technologies and methodologies for hardening M2M systems from attack. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Mark Shuttleworth, a superstar in the open-source world and the force behind Ubuntu Linux, is funding Inktank to the tune of $1 million. DreamHost spun out Inktank last year to help get customers up and running on Ceph open-source storage technology. Read more »
GoDaddy, the hosting and domain registrar has been down for more than four hours, possibly as a result of the group Anonymous. But the founder of ThingsWeStart, a Kickstarter data collection project just wishes it hadn’t happened in the middle of his site’s launch. hacktavist Read more »
Cloud analytics provider GoodData has a new suite of offerings that let users connect their various data sources into a single platform that handles the analysis and visualization for them. It’s made possible by a confluence of technology trends that enable analytics as a service. Read more »
As ProfitBricks rolls out its scale-up infrastructure as a platform in the U.S. this week, it says it can offer more powerful instances to customers cheaper than market leader Amazon Web Services. That’s a tall order, but an intriguing one. Read more »
OpenStack is hot, but determining which companies are best poised to capitalize on its promise is hard to do. Prabhakar Gopalan assesses what hardware vendors, software vendors and service will have to do if they want to be among the big OpenStack winners. Read more »
After weeks of back and forth and considerable anxiety, VMware, Intel and NEC are now Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation. The news comes out of Friday afternoon’s OpenStack board meeting. Read more »
Cisco wants to rethink the big data business model by putting infomediaries at the center of vast data-sharing networks. It’s a vision of easy access to data and resources, where analyses can be conducted and acted upon in real time, but it’s a long way off. Read more »
Heroku CEO and Salesforce.com EVP of Platforms Byron Sebastian has left the company. Sebastian was key to Heroku’s fast growth as a platform-as-a-service provider, which included a $212 million acquisition by Salesforce.com in December 2010. Read more »
On Tuesday, Netflix put source code for its Eureka mid-tier load balancing technology onto Github so that other Amazon Web Services users can tweak it for their own use. This isn’t the first time Netflix has filled voids in the AWS stack. Read more »
Prabhakar Gopalan looks at how the skill sets and mindsets of corporate strategists need to change in the cloud computing era. This means everything from learning to accept new revenue models to being technologically savvy enough to actually build new products. Read more »
When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private cloud and legacy IT are here to stay. Read more »
Well into the cloud computing era, the definitions of what constitutes an “open cloud,” and how to select the right technology are still a mystery to potential users. And, consumers are still in the dark when it comes to the concept of cloud. Read more »
The goal of the cloud is to reduce disparate systems and to let IT departments manage their infrastructure and services within a single, integrated solution, from the design stage all the way through production. Here’s how to measure your company’s current cloud plan against this goal. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It’s hurry up and wait when it comes to VMware’s bid to become part of OpenStack’s inner circle. Its application for Gold membership status — along with applications from Intel and NEC — will have to wait for the next Open Stack Foundation meeting. Read more »
With Nodester, the polyglot PaaS provider gets deeper and broader Node.js support and access to even more Node.js developers. Next up? J2EE, Go and Perl support, says Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson. Read more »
Splunk is taking its machine data show to the cloud with a new SaaS offering called Storm. It’s essentially Splunk’s flagship software tuned for cloud-generated data, but it plays into a big opportunity for fusing cloud computing with big data. Read more »
More granular cloud management features will make it easier for companies and service providers to set up group policies and lessen server sprawl in their environments, says Tier 3 CTO Jared Wray. Read more »
VMware’s decision to join the OpenStack Foundation could be a huge or not-so-huge deal. Some see the move as a way to outflank Citrix, others say VMware’s Nicira, DynamicOps buys signaled a desire to at least appear more open in the era of cloud computing. Read more »
Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members. Read more »
As executives contemplate the emergence of cloud computing, it’s important that they understand the questions they need to ask about why they’d adopt the new IT paradigm. Those deciding should consider the history and decisions made by Borders, the bookstore chain. Its execs chose poorly. Read more »
Since launching five months ago, Mover, a startup based in Edmonton, Alberta, has picked up thousands of users with data migration service, but the company’s ultimate goal is broader. This week, the startup graduated from Vancouvers’ GrowLab accelerator. Read more »
Rackspace CTO John Engates said the company’s new monitoring service, based on its Cloudkick acquisition two years ago, will give customers a better way to monitor the performance of their cloud resources. As more companies consider cloud deployment, tools like these are becoming essential. Read more »
Investors continue throwing money at infrastructure companies, especially if they have a product that helps accomodate and mitigate the complexities of virtualization and scaled out computing infrastructures. Nutanix aims to solve problems in both areas, and investors are rewarding it with $33 million. Read more »
NetApp is working with Fusion-io to make server-side flash a resource for storing “hot” data. The company said its Flash Accel software can boost application performance up to 90 percent in some cases. Read more »
Why should mid-market companies deploy multiple data center appliances if one can do the job? That’s the rationale behind SimpliVity’s new OmniCube appliance that merges storage, server, deduplication, and other tasks into one 2U box and can be federated across sites. Read more »
Data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s expected to increase significantly. To cut power and costs tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are cutting electricity use by greening their data centers. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Comparing the cost of on-demand computing to buying your own infrastructure is one way to look at IT costs in a cloud era, but it’s a shortsighted way to measure how cloud computing can affect your business. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels outlines another way. Read more »
