It's not every day that a company plunks down $10 billion and the news becomes a sidebar. But that's what happened last week when Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will acquire Autonomy for that amount.
The deal was overshadowed by the news that HP is weighing the sale or spinoff of its PC business, that it was shutting down its webOS hardware business and that it was lowering its revenue outlook for the year. All of that, and questions about the merits of its Autonomy acquisition, led to analyst downgrades and a 20 percent drop in HP's share price Friday (it recovered a bit Monday, gaining 3.6 percent). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 22, 20110 comments
Cloud-based business intelligence (BI) startup GoodData has landed $15 million in venture funding, bringing the total it has raised up to $28.5 million.
The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners also contributing to the latest round. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 18, 20110 comments
To say cloud providers are less than forthcoming on their approach to cloud security would be an understatement. Call it paranoia or prudence, customers are demanding more transparency about security practices before making the leap to the cloud.
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) this fall will launch a searchable registry that existing or prospective customers can access free of charge to query how cloud providers are approaching security. Customers will be able to look up cloud providers and review their security practices. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 18, 20110 comments
VMware Inc.'s Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) has signed on several new supporters of its open-cloud effort.
Cloud Foundry, which runs atop VMware's vSphere and vCloud platforms, went into beta in April. It is striving to offer a platform by which customers can develop and deploy applications to multiple clouds. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 17, 20110 comments
Are your non-technical friends and family members familiar with the term cloud computing? If they're not, don't despair. Most people aren't, either.
Only 22 percent of consumers are familiar with the term cloud computing, according to a study conducted by NPD Group. But that doesn't mean they aren't using cloud computing to conduct various tasks and activities. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 11, 20110 comments
Intuit this week said it will "double down" on its partnership with Microsoft to integrate its Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) with the Windows Azure platform for those looking to build Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.
The two companies had jointly announced in January 2010 that Intuit would name Windows Azure as a preferred platform for cloud application development on the IPP. To facilitate that, they developed and released the Windows Azure SDK for the IPP. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 11, 20110 comments
Cloud service provider Skytap has come up with a way to automate the launching of servers without requiring third-party management tools.
The company has added "cloud orchestration" to its flagship service, which it says will eliminate the need for software from the likes of CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard and IBM that manage the sequencing of servers.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 10, 20110 comments
Amazon Web Services' woes continued on Tuesday as the cloud provider worked to recover from a bolt of lighting that caused power outages in its Dublin, Ireland datacenter over the weekend.
The lighting strike brought down Amazon's EC2 and RDS services, as well as Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services. Microsoft's outage reportedly lasted several hours on Sunday and has since been restored, the company said on its Twitter feed. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 10, 20110 comments
Intel is investing $30 million to expand its research in cloud and embedded computing technologies.
The money will be used by Intel Labs to fund the creation of its Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTCs) at Carnegie Mellon University. The ISTCs are aimed at providing collaboration between university researchers and Intel. The results of that collaboration are made publicly available via technical journals and open-source software releases, Intel said. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 09, 20110 comments
CloudBees, which offers a cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Java applications, has secured $10.5 million in Series B financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The startup company, founded last year by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey, offers a Java development- and deployment-based PaaS. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 08, 20110 comments
Amazon Web Services has rolled out three new features to its portfolio of cloud services that should appeal to enterprise users by making it easier to extend their datacenters to the cloud.
Today marks the general availability of AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS Direct Connect and new identity federation capabilities. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 04, 20110 comments
Chris Kemp, who stepped down as CTO of NASA back in March, has launched a startup company called Nebula that offers a turnkey appliance based on the OpenStack platform.
OpenStack is the open source project co-developed by NASA and Rackspace Hosting. Nebula came out of stealth mode last week by announcing that it has developed an appliance that it said will allow organizations to create large private clouds using thousands of commodity computers. Nebula is named after the project Kemp oversaw at the NASA Ames Research Center. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 03, 20110 comments