News that SAP and Amazon will All-in-One business applications to run in production on Amazon’s public cloud raises a question: what’s going on with SAP and Microsoft Windows Azure? News on this could come next week at the Sapphire 2012 show. Or not. Read more »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing is at the top of virtually every CIO’s interest list and is expected to grow 126.5 percent over the next two years. A new report on GigaOM Pro details each sector of cloud computing and forecasts a shift toward hybrid models in the enterprise community. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Key to understanding big data is to move beyond simply examining the technology for data storage and analytics engines. Organizations preparing for a data-centric economy should also examine the roles of data quality, data obesity and data markets in the future of modern enterprises. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon’s Eucalyptus deal, which gives it a better hybrid cloud story and solidifies the dominance of the AWS API, plus the ever-growing AWS feature set, aren’t necessarily all good news to PaaS and other partners that run their services on Amazon infrastructure. Read more »
Two star hires and a well-reviewed phone-and-tablet operating system do not necessarily remake a company, but they do ease the perception — prevalent in recent years — that Microsoft is on its last legs. Could the once-dominant software giant be on the comeback trail? Read more »
Amazon Web Services is indisputably the largest cloud service provider by far, and by all accounts. So what rivals could be No. 2 and maybe even give AWS a run for its money? Some of these names might surprise you. Read more »
Microsoft issues credit, apologies and an explanation to Windows Azure customers affected by the recent Leap Day outage that took down several services. Snafus like this one not only affect the specific vendor but can hurt overall confidence in the cloud computing model. Read more »
New medium Elastic Compute Cloud instance fills the gap between — you guessed it — smaller and larger “medium” EC2 instances. That brings the total number of EC2 instances to 13 (for now) as Amazon keeps churning out options for every possible compute load. Read more »
Ray Ozzie, the former Microsoft executive charged with driving the development of Windows Azure, is evaluating Azure, along with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, for use by Cocomo, his mysterious startup company. Read more »
Amazon isn’t the only cloud power slicing storage prices. On Tuesday Google cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. With this move and new front-end storage partners, Google appears to be making a serious play for enterprise storage. Read more »
Microsoft, which looked as if it might be the odd man out on Hadoop, might actually play a big role in taking the platform into the mainstream. On Tuesday, it exposed its plans to make Hadoop data analyzable via both a JavaScript framework and Microsoft Excel. Read more »
Engine Yard, the popular platform as a service, said its revenue doubled to $28 million and the number of paying customers rose 50 percent to 2,000 in 2011. The company, which started in the Ruby universe, now supports PHP, Node.js and other languages. Read more »
Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft, the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — including Node.js and Hadoop — squarely at Gates’ feet. Read more »
Joe Coyle, CTO of global integrator Capgemini, sees a lot of cloud pitches from all the major technology vendors — and God knows they all have a cloud strategy. Here’s what he thinks of the current state of the market. Read more »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon will let customers run micro-instances of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 for free on its EC2 service starting now, according to a new post to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog. Such try-before-you-buy tactics have helped Amazon win converts to its cloud platform. Read more »
Amazon is hiring techies for a new digital media services push. The company seeks senior development managers and developers for a “brand new team,” although their work will grow out of an existing AWS digital media offering, according to a job post. 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 »
Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry. Read more »
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as a service (PaaS) now supports Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript development framework. That could give Azure more traction beyond the Microsoft .NET faithful. Also new: a limited trial of Hadoop-based distribution for Azure. Read more »
Windows Azure is an ambitious PaaS that doesn’t get a lot of love from web developers. Here are four things Microsoft must do to make it a more compelling option for the new-age, non-.NET developers who now flock to Amazon Web Services or another PaaS. Read more »
Fujitsu’s new hybrid implementation of Microsoft Windows Azure could address corporate concerns about deploying global workloads on Microsoft’s public cloud. With Hybrid Cloud Services for Microsoft Windows Azure, Fujitsu can use its global presence to make sure that data stays within prescribed areas Read more »
Microsoft poured money and resources into Microsoft Windows Azure, its grand attempt to transport the company’s software dominance into the cloud computing era. For die-hard .Net heads, Azure is probably the PaaS of choice. But for the army of new-age web developers, it’s an also-ran. Read more »
Microsoft could use Web Matrix 2.0 tool — now in beta — to entice new-age web developers to Azure, its cloud-computing Platform-as-a-Service. While the Azure PaaS has a potentially huge built-in audience of .Net programmers, it lacks cachet among the “cool kid,” next-gen web developers. Read more »
To find out how these two services measure up in the real world, Craig Knighton of LiquidSpace and Zach Richardson of Ravel Data lay out the cases for their clouds of choice to see how the services compared in real-world use at living, breathing companies. Read more »
Despite OpenStack’s continued growth, a combination of product updates and acquisitions from Citrix, Eucalyptus, Red Hat and VMware over the past week demonstrate that the race to become the dominant private cloud provider, as well as win over the enterprise, is far from over. Is one of ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Dell has officially become a cloud provider with the launch of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud built atop VMware technology. The move is just the first in Dell’s three-pronged IaaS attack, which will soon include clouds based on the Microsoft Windows Azure and OpenStack platforms. Read more »
Verizon is buying cloud computing startup CloudSwitch in a move that will give Verizon, as well as its subsidiary Terremark, a software-development edge to complement its service-provider expertise. CloudSwitch will lead software development beyond its core product, which will give Verizon additional cloud intellectual property. Read more »
OpenLogic, a software vendor that helps companies better utilize open-source software, is turning its attention toward cloud computing. On Tuesday, it announced $2 million in funding for a new Platform-as-a-Service offering featuring open-source components. Read more »
If there’s one thing certain about Amazon Web Services, it’s that the company isn’t Oracle. On Thursday, the company slashed the bandwidth charges for its various services, the latest in a series of price cuts dating back to 2008. Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The dream of open cloud computing took a couple of small steps forward in the past 24 hours with Apache promoting the Libcloud project to top-level status and with Microsoft releasing a new software development kit for PHP applications on its Windows Azure platform. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
According to a post on Bloomberg this morning, Microsoft plans to spend 90 percent, or $8.64 billion, of its $9.6 billion annual R&D budget on cloud computing, which begs the question of where that money will land within Microsoft’s very broad definition of cloud. Read more »
Microsoft and Toyota are jointly investing $12 million in a bid to build a cloud-based platform that will connect cars, homes and the electrical smart grids. The joint venture will be run out of Toyota Media Services and will leverage Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud services. Read more »
At long last, Microsoft has taken a big step forward in its cloud computing fight against VMware by letting customers manage hybrid on-premise and Windows Azure environments from within Microsoft’s System Center systems management software. Read more »
Add Microsoft to the list of cloud providers offering free usage levels for their cloud offerings, as the company is now offering 750 free hours of Windows Azure usage. Like most things free, though, there is a catch. Read more »
Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft. More accurately, he’s “retiring” this summer because CEO Steve Ballmer decided that the Server and Tools Business, which Muglia leads, needs new leadership. One has to ask what’s going on at Microsoft and what Steve Ballmer has in mind. Read more »
This year was rightfully advertised as the “Year of the Cloud.” The cloud computing landscape began to take shape in 2010, with providers honing their offerings, important issues surfacing to light and industry consolidation finally beginning to happen. In most areas, however, the action is likely ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
