Once again, Amazon Web Services said it is cutting the price of its cloud offerings, including its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic MapReduce (EMR) offerings.
This latest reduction marks the 19th time Amazon has cut prices of its cloud services in the six years since launching them. Just last month, Amazon reduced pricing for its Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) offerings. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 08, 20121 comments
I have yet to talk to a cloud provider that doesn't emphasize the security of its services. So it should come as no surprise that when I talked to executives overseeing IBM's cloud efforts last week at the company's Partnership Leadership Conference in New Orleans, security was a critical part of the conversation.
IBM's cloud security framework brings together assets from its Tivoli security software business and Rational development tools unit, as well as its identity management and data security approaches embedded into its servers, storage and various software offerings ranging from development tools to middleware and its business analytics software. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 05, 20121 comments
Rackspace's acquisition of SharePoint911, announced last week, is intended to further the company's reach as a provider of cloud-based SharePoint implementations. But in a departure for the hosting and cloud services provider, the move also aims to give Rackspace a stake in supporting premises-based deployments of SharePoint.
Unusual as that might sound, the acquisition of SharePoint911, a leading boutique firm of Microsoft MVPs specializing in Microsoft's collaboration platform, is the latest step in Rackspace's effort to expand from a provider of pure hosted services to one that offers hybrid cloud offerings by adding support for installations running in customers' datacenters. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 27, 20121 comments
Dimension Data on Thursday is launching a public cloud offering that it says will compete with Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Hosting, among others.
The $5.8 billion global systems integrator and technology services provider is also launching private cloud implementation services, hybrid cloud offerings and a managed hosting service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 23, 20120 comments
When it comes to policies that promote growth of cloud computing among the world's leading users of information technology, Japan comes out on top and the United States fourth, according to a report published this week by the Business Software Alliance.
But a lack of consistency in laws and economic polices among the 24 countries that account for 80 percent of the world's information and communications technology is putting the promise of a robust global cloud marketplace at risk, based on a BSA study that is the basis of its first Global Cloud Computing Scorecard (report .PDF here). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 23, 20120 comments
Looking to simplify the development and management of business critical applications distributed across its public cloud and customers' private data centers, Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched a workflow service that coordinates all of the processing procedures within an app.
Amazon said its new Simple Workflow Service (SWF) is aimed at reducing the time-consuming process of building applications such as those that automate business processes for, say, running financial systems, conducting data analytics or managing cloud infrastructure services. SWF coordinates the tasks and manages their execution dependencies, scheduling and concurrency in conjunction with the application logic associated with that task, according to Amazon. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 22, 20120 comments
Rackspace Hosting is getting deeper into the SharePoint consulting business. The hosting and cloud provider on Thursday said it has acquired SharePoint911, a well-regarded boutique firm that provides enterprises with SharePoint consulting, custom development, design, implementation and training services.
Six of its consultants are Microsoft MVPs who have authored numerous books and are frequent speakers at industry events. Rackspace first started offering managed SharePoint services in 2008. The acquisition of SharePoint911 gives Rackspace a staff of experienced SharePoint consultants who have architected numerous SharePoint projects for customers. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 16, 20120 comments
When Rackspace launched Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition last year, the goal was to allow enterprises to build clouds based on OpenStack in their own datacenters or in collocation facilities of their choices. But Rackspace has determined that some customers, while they like the idea, don't want to do it themselves.
Its remedy is a partnership announced Wednesday with Redapt, a solution provider with expertise in OpenStack that deploys private clouds. Rackspace has established Redapt as its partner of choice for such work, due to its work with such companies as Zynga, Citigroup and Red Hat. Redapt is also an established Dell partner. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 15, 20120 comments
Salesforce.com might be leading the charge when it comes to bringing social networking to customer relationship management but it's not the only CRM vendor banging the social drum.
Nimble on Tuesday released a new version of its eponymous cloud-based CRM offering. The new Nimble 2.0 adds tighter integration from third-party social networks, including Facebook and Google+. In addition, Nimble 2.0 consolidates notifications from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. The aim is to allow sales reps to better serve customers based on their social network interactions. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 14, 20120 comments
Oracle on Thursday said it has agreed to acquire Taleo, a leading cloud-based provider of human capital management (HCM) apps, for $1.9 billion.
The move is hardly surprising. In December, two of Oracle's key rivals made similar moves; SAP announced its $3.5 billion deal to acquire SuccessFactors and Salesforce.com agreed to acquire Rypple. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 09, 20120 comments
Alfresco on Thursday released a major new version of its enterprise content management software platform that will help enterprises transition the use of ECM to the cloud.
The new release, Alfresco Enterprise 4, introduces an HTML 5-based user interface targeted at supporting mobile devices, notably iPads. The new UI embeds key social network features such as the ability to favorite, like and comment on content. It also integrates with social networks and has links to GoogleDocs, Microsoft Office and Quickoffice HD for iPad users. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 02, 20120 comments
Joyent is getting ready to bring online new datacenters that it says will equip it to compete with cloud behemoth Amazon Web Services.
San Francisco-based Joyent is building new datacenters in Europe and in the Asia Pacific. The datacenter in Europe should be up and running next month and the Asia Pacific facilities are slated to go online by May. Also, through a partnership with telecom provider Telefónica, Joyent is establishing a series of alliances to add further capacity around the world. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 01, 20120 comments