IBM is kicking off a new program intended to make it easier for partners to sell the company's cloud-based products.
Big Blue unveiled the new Cloud Computing Specialty at its PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Orlando last week. Up until now, the company lacked a cohesive go-to-market strategy for its various cloud initiatives.
"We did have a couple of programs that were in certain areas but as we looked at what cloud has become, there are so many more opportunities now," said Dave Mitchell, director of strategy and emerging business for IBM's ISV and developer relations organization. "Our portfolio has become so much wider, and our capabilities have become so much broader, that we felt it was a good time to really see how we could bring this together into a single story."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/24/20110 comments
Axcient is the latest provider of data protection technology that lets small and medium-sized enterprises use the cloud for disaster recovery and business continuity.
Though not a well-known company, Axcient supplies appliances that offer multiple levels of backup and recovery. Here's how it works: The customer pays a monthly fee for the appliances that consist of servers loaded with Axcient's software, storage and network infrastructure and are controlled by a Web-based interface. Files and data from both clients and servers can be backed up to the appliance, which also provides backup to the vendor's cloud-based facilities.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/24/20110 comments
The information technology portion of the 2012 federal budget proposal submitted by President Barak Obama this week calls for a "Cloud-First" policy, meaning agencies are being encouraged to use cloud-based solution when such an option exists.
The shift is outlined in a report released last week by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. "This policy is intended to accelerate the pace at which the government will realize the value of cloud computing by requiring agencies to evaluate safe, secure cloud computing options before making any new investments," according to the report.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/17/20110 comments
With Verizon Communications agreeing to acquire Terremark for $1.4 billion last month and Time Warner Cable following up with a deal to buy NaviSite for $230 million, it begs the question: are we going to see a wave of consolidation in the cloud computing industry? The obvious answer is: of course.
One company that claims it's not in play is Rackspace Hosting. Rackspace would appear to be a natural acquirer or acquire. The company is one of the leading players in the cloud computing industry. Revenues in 2010 were up 24 percent topping $780 million, the company announced last week. At that run rate, Rackspace's revenues this year will fall just shy of $1 billion.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/17/20110 comments
Need to use 10,000 servers just for an hour or two? Or perhaps you have excess capacity that you'll never use or sell? If you are in either camp, now there's a marketplace aimed at matching buyers and sellers of cloud computing capacity.
Enter SpotCloud. Enomaly, a longtime provider of cloud computing infrastructure software, launched the public beta of SpotCloud on Monday. Cloud service providers can make unused capacity available on the exchange.
Enomaly describes SpotCloud as the first structured marketplace where service providers can sell their excess computing capacity to an open field of buyers and resellers. The company vets all providers, who can have as little one 8-core server and 500 gigabytes of storage.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/17/20110 comments
Amazon Web Services plans to make the Oracle Database 11g R2 available on its Relational Database Service (RDS) next quarter.
RDS is a service designed to let customers install, run and scale relational databases in the cloud. Until now, only the MySQL database was an option on RDS, a service Amazon said is used by thousands of customers.
"As with today's MySQL offering, Amazon RDS running Oracle database will reduce administrative overhead and expense by maintaining database software, taking continuous backups for point-in-time recovering, and exposing key operational metrics via Amazon CloudWatch," said Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, in a blog post. CloudWatch is a service that lets customers monitor their AWS cloud resources.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/10/20110 comments
In my Redmond magazine cover story this month, Clouds Collide in Strategic Microsoft vs. Google Battle,I reported how fiercely the two companies are going after each other in the hosted e-mail and Web productivity space.
Google is trying to eat into Microsoft's cash cows: Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and Office -- and the article explains how. While Microsoft likes to tout missing features in Google Apps, it's a moving target. Google frequently updates Google Apps.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/10/20110 comments
Expenditures for public cloud services will grow to nearly $30 billion over the next three years, according to a report released this week by market researcher IDC.
The latest forecast projects a compounded annual growth rate of 21.6 percent since 2009 when revenues were $11 billion. With a number of reports showing robust growth for cloud computing services, this one is noteworthy because it looks at public cloud service revenues from 18 vertical industries.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/10/20110 comments
NASA and Rackspace Hosting last week commemorated the six-month anniversary of their open-source cloud effort by announcing it has more than 40 partners on board. One of those partners, Internap Network Services, said it is building a cloud storage platform based on OpenStack.
Rackspace chairman Graham Weston believes OpenStack will become a key factor in open-source cloud computing. The goal is to provide portability among cloud providers who build their infrastructures on OpenStack. "At Rackspace we think OpenStack is the next Linux," Weston said in a company-produced video posted on the OpenStack Web site.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/25/20110 comments
Google's decision to name Larry Page to replace Eric Schmidt as CEO caught me and everyone else who follows the company off guard. After all, Google was showing quarter-over-quarter revenue and profit growth that most companies would kill for. But in retrospect, the handwriting was on the wall.
While there are rumors they weren't on the same page, Google insists there was no friction between Schmidt and the two co-founders, Page and Sergey Brin. Putting aside Schmidt's controversial comments on privacy and the decision last year to pull out of China, Schmidt had his own ideas for how the company should develop technology and bring products to the market.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/25/20111 comments
Microsoft is getting ready to launch the newest datacenter for its cloud services. The new facility, in Quincy, Wash., will go live early this year, Microsoft announced this week.
It incorporates much of the principals of its Chicago and Dublin datacenters, notes Kevin Timmons, Microsoft's general manager of datacenter services.
Timmons points out that there are some nuances. The Dublin facility uses server PODs, which rely on outside air to reduce cooling costs. The Chicago datacenter, by comparison uses Microsoft's IT Pre-Assembled Components (ITPACs.). Quincy will use the ITPACs.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/06/20110 comments
Skytap, a cloud provider that offers virtual data centers for application testing and deployment, this week said it has received a $10 million infusion.
The Series C round of funding came from Open View Venture Partners, putting the total venture investment in Skytap at $23.5 million. Skytap's existing investors include Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos Expeditions and Washington Research Foundation.
I spoke with Skytap CEO Scott Roza this week who was naturally quite excited about the latest round of funding. "They don’t do B seed rounds or A rounds, they really are looking for companies that have built a product and they're beyond the technology risk stage of growth," Roza said.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/06/20110 comments