The big hosting provider that, along with NASA, launched the open-source cloud infrastructure project two years ago, will start beta testing the software, running tens of thousands of computing instances as opposed to the hundreds under test now, said John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO. Read more »
Is IBM joining OpenStack? It sure looks like it, according to one OpenStack contributor page, which lists IBM having joined as of February 2. There has been no announcement, but given IBM’s open source bent, an OpenStack membership makes sense for the computing giant. Read more »
Searching for a new lease of life, Mozilla is joining forces with Spanish operator Telefónica to build handsets that have web technologies at their heart. But can Mozilla succeed where Palm failed? And is there room in a difficult market for more players? Read more »
Big data’s fine; the right data’s a game changer. Serial database entrepreneur Andy Palmer — who co-founded Vertica Systems and VoltDB — sees this massive amount of diverse big data as table stakes. The real, compelling value lies in “big analytics,” he says. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard continues to be rocked by a flood-induced hard drive shortage; its go-to printing business is sputtering; the company as a whole continues to spend too much on too many products; and it needs to get its design-and-execution mojo back. Read more »
Mobile privacy will still be a murky issue despite a new agreement between the state of California and six leading mobile companies over how best to help app developers comply with a California law requiring them to post a privacy policy. Read more »
When HP CEO Meg Whitman addresses thousands of partners Wednesday, there will be a lot on the line. She has to convince them that the management snafus of the last two years are firmly in the past. The partners would love to believe that. Read more »
Microsoft’s ambitious Windows Azure cloud is many things — it’s a full-fledged PaaS for developers. But beneath that, it is also a huge pool of foundational storage infrastructure for rent. And in that arena, it could be the only real competitor to Amazon. Read more »
Does your kid want to play with unicorns? You might want to check out the goods at next week’s Toy Fair in New York, where toy makers will show off the latest-and-greatest augmented reality technology that animates once-static games, books, and toys. Read more »
Oracle and HP used to coexist quite well — People forget that the first Oracle Exadata ran on HP hardware. Then Oracle bought Sun and things went downhill fast. Public spats played out in CEO letters to The New York Times, and now court documents. Read more »
HP won a tactical battle last night when a judge tossed out an Oracle fraud claim. But it also lost one — when he unsealed previously redacted documents that show just how desperate HP was to keep Oracle working on software for HP’s Itanium servers. Read more »
Apple is the king of the PC heap, so long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at PC sales, focusing on the fourth quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing with the iPad included. Read more »
Jon Rubinstein, the man who helped oversee Palm’s move to a new webOS operating system and later sold the company to Hewlett Packard, has quietly exited the company. It’s an unsurprising move, but one that further signals the end of the Palm era at HP. Read more »
Apple spent the most on semiconductors in 2011, beating out Samsung and HP to take the crown. HP dropped from the top spot, thanks to overall weakness in the PC market, while Apple soared upward on the rising tide of smartphones, tablets and the MacBook Air. Read more »
IBM is working the reins of its Smarter Commerce initiative by rolling out a new Netezza analytics appliance designed to help retailers churn through potentially petabytes of consumer sales data in real time. It’s trying to capitalize on the increased importance of e-commerce to revenues. Read more »
The greater Boston area may not be the hub of the big data universe that some recent research suggests, but it got a leg up this week with news that tech giant Hewlett-Packard is moving some of its big data operations to Cambridge. Read more »
After 132 years in business, photo film maker Kodak filed for bankruptcy and in the process becoming yet another fallen corporate giant. The company’s failure has lessons for others such as Yahoo and Nokia who might meet a fate similar to the photo company. 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 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 »
On New Year’s Day, Ginny Rometty took the reins at IBM. Big Blue is on a roll: its stock outperformed Google and Apple this year, and Warren Buffett is a fan. But the IT giant faces perils as well as opportunities going into 2012. Read more »
As 2011 comes to a close, I’m thinking ahead to what mobile technology trends I expect to see in 2012. While I formulate those thoughts for a post later this week, now is a good time to see how I did with my 2011 predictions. Read more »
2011 is surely a year that Hewlett-Packard would like to forget. It fired its second CEO in two years. It said it might sell its PC business and push WebOS phones and tablets only to back off on both moves. Here’s what HP needs to do in 2012. 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 »
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 »
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 »
