The big cloud computing opportunity for Rackspace is in providing services for a wave of new applications, according to the company’s president and chief strategy office, Lew Moormon. Read more »
Apple, met with limited success of the Apple TV, has called its device “a hobby” but Google, with its Google TV, is forging ahead with what it believes could revolutionize the industry. So how do they compare? Read more »
It’s taken a full year and upward of $700 million in acquisitions, but CA Technologies (yes, it’s a new moniker) finally delivered on its cloud-computing strategy with several major product announcements. The Cloud-Connected Management Suite — the centerpiece of CA’s announcements — leverages pieces of technology ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Put simply, life is good for cloud-computing and big-data vendors because there’s plenty of money to be made. Whether it’s from VCs, big-IT suitors or (gasp) customers, someone wants to invest in your vision. The great part is that you don’t even have to be a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Telx Group, an NYC-based data center operator, has filed for an initial public offering that could see it raise as much as $100 million from the public markets. With the demand for data centers and Internet services on an upswing, Telx’s IPO is very timely. Read more »
More consumers are watching Internet video than ever before. How can media companies take advantage of larger audiences, longer viewing times and more monetization options without being overwhelmed by video management complexity? thePlatform’s new mpx Beta is designed to help video publishers adapt to the changing […] Read more »
An event more than a year in the making, Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing offering is finally available to the public. The software giant announced Azure in October 2008, made the service available as a limited Community Technology Preview (CTP) project shortly thereafter, and has been releasing pricing and product details at a regular clip in the meantime. Preview customers have been experimenting for free with a limited version of Azure, but as of April 1, 2010, all existing CTP customers who have not upgraded to the official version will have their accounts deleted. As the cliché goes, general availability is where the rubber meets the road for Microsoft and its vaunted cloud platform: If it can leverage its existing customer base and convince potential users to trust an oft-criticized software vendor with an entirely new delivery model, Microsoft could become a major force among cloud providers. While Windows Azure is a more-than-capable offering, trust could be an issue for a large number of developers and businesses that don’t believe Microsoft will deliver the openness so valued in the cloud world. Here’s a look at what Azure is, what it costs, and how it fits into (and will differentiate itself in) the market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
By the middle of this year I expect we’ll have a big selection of e-book readers to choose from. There were dozens of readers on display at the CES 2010 this month, and it seems that every gadget maker is working on one for the market. […] Read more »
You won’t find much argument over 2009’s moniker as “Year of the Cloud,” but you might have forgotten some of the big news that earned it that title. Here are my picks for the most important cloud news of 2009 – stories that had immediate impact ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As the year winds to close, GigaOM Pro’s crack team of contributors takes a look back at what went right, what went wrong, and for ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Rackspace today said it would offer a database in the cloud through a partnership with FathomDB, a company that provides a relational database as a service. The move brings competition to the cloud database market and could be a lifeline for FathomDB. Read more »
The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this week with yet another dramatic announcement, this time that the notorious BitTorrent site’s tracker has been officially shut down. But the move won’t impact downloading, site admins explained on a blog. Trackers are no longer needed to facilitate BitTorrent […] Read more »
With Azure, Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between giving customers the ease of a platform as a service and the customization that power users need to build tailored applications — both in-house and in the public Azure cloud. In the wake of the Redmond giant’s […] Read more »
The innovation coming out of the cloud computing market has, in many ways, made infrastructure startups interesting to venture capitalists again. Despite our excitement over the potential of cloud computing to transform IT, however, weighing on the minds of many in the VC community is what sort […] Read more »
On Aug. 26, 2009, Amazon announced a new initiative: the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Essentially, the new service enables a company to extend its internal data center to incorporate Amazon EC2 compute instances — it’s as though the perimeter of the data center has bulged out to incorporate a set of AWS compute resources. All traffic between the data center and the EC2 instances in the VPC runs over an encrypted virtual private network, ensuring that the traffic is secure and private. Tools commonly used within data centers, like traffic analyzers and intrusion detection, can be used on the Virtual Private Cloud. The net effect is that companies can incorporate scalable, cheap computing into their existing compute arrangements and treat the VPC resources as though they reside within the data center. The new services hold the potential for making enterprises that are reluctant to trust public cloud computing more comfortable and thereby increase acceptance of cloud computing. This service, by itself, does not address all aspects of “privatizing” a public cloud; the issue of securing persistent storage within Amazon still remains and must be addressed at the EC2 instance level rather than via a general AWS Service. Nevertheless, this is a significant announcement and one that hold the potential of increasing corporate adoption of AWS. This note looks at further implications of the announcement, what questions are left to be answered, and what to expect next from both Amazon and its competitors. Read more »
Amazon last night announced it Virtual Private Cloud service, essentially giving enterprise customers worried about security and control in the cloud a salve to get them to trust it. The offering provides access to Amazon’s web services through a virtual private network, which is basically a […] Read more »
Rackspace this week joined the ranks of those companies offering virtual machines that are hosted on a pool of dedicated servers. What’s curious, however, is that Rackspace refers to these setups as private clouds, yet lists them under its managed hosting offerings, not its cloud hosting ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
