A number of companies are looking to offer cloud-based document collaboration services, among the most prominent of course are Box and Dropbox. Both are attempting to provide some of the core collaboration features offered in Microsoft SharePoint.
The latest company to enter those sweepstakes is eXo, a French company that last year set up shop in San Francisco after inking a relationship with More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 11, 20120 comments
More than a year after promising to offer a public cloud service, Hewlett-Packard today is officially jumping into the fray.
After an eight-month beta test period, the company said its new HP Cloud Services, a portfolio of public cloud infrastructure offerings that includes compute, object storage, block storage, relational database (initially MySQL) and identity services, will be available May 10. As anticipated, HP Cloud Services will come with More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 10, 20120 comments
Citrix turned heads Tuesday when it announced it's contributing the CloudStack cloud management platform it acquired last summer from Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation with plans to release its own version of that distribution as the focal point of its cloud infrastructure offering.
The bombshell announcement didn't have to state the obvious: Citrix is dumping its previously planned support for OpenStack, the popular open source cloud management effort led by NASA and Rackspace. While Citrix didn't entirely rule out working with OpenStack in the future, there appears to be no love lost on Citrix's part. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 04, 20120 comments
There's a growing trend by providers of public cloud services to offer secure connectivity to the datacenter. The latest provider to do so is Verizon's Terremark, which this week rolled out Enterprise Cloud Private Edition.
Terremark, a major provider of public cloud services acquired last year by Verizon for $1.4 billion, said its new offering is based on its flagship platform but designed to run as a single-tenant environment for its large corporate and government clients that require security, perhaps to meet compliance requirements.
The company described Enterprise Cloud Private Edition as More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 03, 20120 comments
Looking to provide tighter integration between its public cloud services and enterprise datacenters, Amazon Web Services has inked an agreement with Eucalyptus Systems to support its platform.
While Eucalyptus already offers APIs designed to provide compatibility between private clouds running its platform and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), the deal will provide interoperability blessed and co-developed by both companies. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 28, 20121 comments
Cloud infrastructure automation vendor Opscode this week said it has received $19.5 million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners and joined by backers Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In concert with the investment, Ignition partner John Conners, the onetime Microsoft CFO, has joined Opscode's board.
The funding will help expand Opscode's development efforts as well as sales and marketing initiatives. The company is aggressively hiring developers at its Seattle headquarters as well as its new development facility in Raleigh, N.C. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 27, 20120 comments
Test results published by cloud storage provider Nasuni this week suggest it's easier to move terabytes of data to Amazon Web Services S3 service than to Microsoft's Windows Azure or Rackspace's Cloud Files.
Nasuni found that moving 12 TB blocks of data consisting of approximately 22 million files to Amazon S3 (or between S3 storage buckets) took only four hours from Windows Azure and five hours from Rackspace Cloud Files. Going the other way though took considerably longer -- 40 hours to Windows Azure and just under a week to Rackspace Cloud Files from Amazon's S3. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 22, 20120 comments
Google is adding an extra layer of security for developers building applications that access a variety of its server-side platform services.
The company's new Service Accounts, launched Tuesday, will provide certificate-based authentication to Google APIs for server-to-server interactions. Until now, Google secured its APIs in these scenarios via passwords or shared keys.
"This means, for example, that a request from a Web application to Google Cloud Storage can be authenticated via a certificate instead of a shared key," said Google product manager Justin Smith, in a blog post, noting that unlike passwords and shared keys, certs can't be guessed. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 21, 20120 comments
While software-as-a-service applications such as Cisco WebEx, Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.com, among others, are becoming a popular way of letting organizations deliver apps to their employees, they come with an added level of baggage: managing user authentication.
Every SaaS-based app has its own login and authentication mechanism, meaning users have to separately sign into those systems. Likewise, IT has no central means of managing that authentication when an employee joins or leaves a company (or has a change in role). While directories such as Microsoft's Active Directory have helped provide single sign-on to enterprise apps, third parties such as Ping Identity, Okta and Symplified offer tools that provide connectivity to apps not accessible via AD, including SaaS-based apps. But those are More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 21, 20120 comments
One year has passed since Hewlett-Packard announced its plans to launch a public cloud service and it appears that service will arrive in May.
Zorawar Biri Singh, senior vice president and general manager of HP's cloud services business last week told The New York Times that the service is on pace to go online in two months. While HP is launching a portfolio of public cloud infrastructure services similar to those of Amazon Web Services, Singh is setting modest expectations for taking on the behemoth. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 15, 20120 comments
It was bad enough that Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service was unavailable for much of the day on Feb. 29 thanks to the so-called Leap Day bug. But customers struggled to find out what was going on and when service would be restored.
That's because the Windows Azure Dashboard itself wasn't fully available, noted Bill Laing, corporate VP of Microsoft's Server and Cloud division, in a blog post Friday, where he provided an in-depth post-mortem with extensive technical details outlining what went wrong. In very simple terms, it was the result of a coding error that led the system to calculate a future date that didn't exist. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 14, 20121 comments
One of Google's largest cloud partners is now even larger. Cloud Sherpas, a major provider of Google Apps, this week said it has merged with GlobalOne, making it a major Salesforce.com partner, as well.
Since its founding in 2008, Atlanta-based Cloud Sherpas has focused its business on replacing premises e-mail and collaboration platforms with cloud services based on the Google Apps stack. New York-based GlobalOne has concentrated on offering CRM services from Salesforce.com since its formation in 2007. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 08, 20120 comments