Facebook and others want to see use cases to better understand how software-defined networking can improve the cloud, so Facebook is testing it out in a sandbox environment. Read more »
Tod Nielsen, who helped lead VMware’s applications platform group, has moved over to the Pivotal Initiative spin-off where he’ll report to old pal Paul Maritz. Read more »
VMware shares took it on the chin Tuesday, a day after the company talked down its projected earnings for the next quarter. Read more »
Dr. Nic Williams has left Engine Yard to promote the use of the rival Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service. Read more »
Hybrid cloud, software-defined data center, and end-user computing are all in. Other VMware efforts will be out in the upcoming year as the company seeks to regain focus. Read more »
Partly to differentiate itself from the likes of OpenStack and Eucalyptus, and partly to boost enterprise adoption, OpenNebula is moving beyond its traditional business of infrastructure management. Read more »
Lots of personnel moves at and between VMware and parent company EMC (and spinoff Pivotal Initiative as it gets ready to launch.) Also: Cisco and NetApp launch more FlexPods. Read more »
Star engineer Mark Lucovsky appears to be back at VMware, after handing the Cloud Foundry PaaS over to VMware/EMC’s Pivotal Initiative spin-off. Read more »
Puppet and VMware will work on joint solutions to ease the configuration and management of IT environments, says Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies. Read more »
The last quarter of 2012 saw the rise of cloud-based databases, the cloud awakening of software giants such as HP, and many cloud outages that have left question marks. Enterprises found more IT dollars, and they will focus on the cloud for much of that spending. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
VMware CTO Steve Herrod is leaving his post to join venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he’ll be managing director. I think this is a big loss for VMware, which has already been hemorrhaging technical talent to younger, nimbler companies. Read more »
The threat of software-defined networking has prompted Juniper to revamp its business model — switching from a hardware-based model to one more familiar in enterprise software. It has also unveiled an SDN strategy that preserves the importance of specialty hardware at the lowest level of the network. Read more »
Last year, AWS saw big success and big snafus; Superstorm Sandy prompted worry about data center location; legacy IT giants bought their way into SaaS; VMware regroups; the OpenStack crowd got their clouds off the ground; and Europe starts to buy into cloud. Read more »
Red Hat’s $104M buyout of ManageIQ gives it a stronger cross-cloud management story; Developers love their Amazon EC2 instances and will likely use more of them next year, according to new Forrester research. Read more »
How low can PaaS pricing go? AppFog says it’s cutting the price of the paid version of its polyglot, multi-cloud PaaS in half for developers. That’s great for developers, but will it boost corporate adoption? Read more »
A headhunter finds that the number of agile development jobs posted outnumbers the number of qualified candidates by a ratio of almost 5:1. Familiarity with the agile process is more important than knowledge of specific toolsets, in making a good hire, according to Yoh research. Read more »
VMware aggressively recruited partners to base platforms on its open-source Cloud Foundry stack. Now as it preps the Pivotal Initiative spinoff, those partners worry about more intense competition with the Cloud Foundry mothership. Read more »
Juniper will spend up to $176 million on stealthy software-defined networking startup Contrail. The move coming just weeks after Cisco’s own SDN buy and months after VMware’s $1.3 billion grab for Nicira show how aggressively the established vendors are about staking a claim. Read more »
With the storage leader now formally aboard the OpenStack Foundation, it’s almost easier to count the IT vendors who have not climbed aboard this open-source cloud bandwagon. Read more »
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 »
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 »
With its newly minted Pivotal Initiative, EMC and VMware are cordoning off key technologies to attack the big data and cloud application spaces. Paul Maritz, EMC’s chief strategy officer and former VMware CEO, will spearhead this effort. Read more »
The decision by VMware and parent EMC to spin out VMware’s “tier 2″ technologies into a separate subsidiary shows that they’re under pressure to compete with massive cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in the enterprise. 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 »
Vagrant, open-source software that eases set up of test-and-dev machines, will get a boost this week with the launch of HashiCorp, a company that will expand the tool to VMware and offer paid services, support and add-ons to the popular tool, says Mitchell Hashimoto. Read more »
VMware plans to turn over SpringSource, Cloud Foundry, GemStone and other non-core technologies over to a new EMC-owned subsidiary, GigaOM has learned. The move helps separate the money-making, enterprise-focused VMware business from the future CloudFoundry unit that will compete against Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Read more »
Big Switch Networks has come a long way since it launched in June of 2011, and two big announcements today showcasing its ecosystem and its newly launched products are signs that its going on the offensive in the software-defined networking space. Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Brocade, the switch company, is buying Vyatta, a company that pioneered the idea of open-source routing software, in a bid to compete in the networking world as software-defined networking severs the link between networking software and the box that it sits on. Read more »
The SDN startup’s Series B round comes courtesy of new investors Redpoint Ventures and Goldman Sachs. The money will be used to staff up an already tech-heavy engineering staff as the company readies its SDN controllers and applications for the market. Read more »
Everyone is jumping on the ARM server bandwagon with Red Hat and Applied Micro the latest vendors to hitch a ride. Cell phone chips in the the data center is a hotly anticipated trend and we’re going to see a lot of ecosystem announcements next week. Read more »
Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Software-defined networks and data centers are the future if enterprises want to manage their infrastructure with the agility of cloud computing providers, but they’re nowhere near ubiquity yet. However, according to two senior VMware executives, the pieces are in place and maturing every day. Read more »
The usual suspects Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remained the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The PaaS market is predicted to reach $20.1 billion in 2014. Huge brands occupy this space, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com, as well as newer startups. As the market grows, watch for more consolidation, tighter integration with IaaS services, and more features. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
vCider’s virtual networking smarts will help Cisco build distributed cloud infrastructure that ties into its own Open Networking Environment. The move is seen as a counter to VMware’s acquisition of Nicira. Read more »
Agility is increasingly recognized as one of the main advantages of cloud computing, but an important aspect of agility is choice: the choice to run computing jobs in house, in a private cloud, or on public cloud services from the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, and a growing number of other providers. To exercise choice, customers require information and the ability to compare the costs and benefits of competing solutions. This report explores opportunities for accurately measuring computing resources and their use, simplifying the comparison of competing cloud offerings and opening the door to charging models based more closely on actual consumption. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Johnson’s presence on Typesafe’s board brings even more credibility to Typesafe’s push to make Scala a top-tier language for scalable enterprise applications. The company will be at JavaOne promoting that vision. Read more »
Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a class of social tools oriented toward the needs of enterprises. Their emergence is due to the shifting expectations of an increasingly social workforce and the sense that older approaches to work like email are arguably approaching obsolescence. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
