Amazon Web Services in August launched AWS Direct Connect, an option that lets customers build a dedicated network link from a datacenter or collocation facility to an Amazon facility, which it calls an AWS Region.
Amazon added this option to customers who were concerned about privacy, network costs and those who were seeking better connectivity than the Internet provides, the company said at the time. But the connectivity was limited to one location: an Equinix collocation facility in Virginia. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/12/2012 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Looking to expand its global footprint and addressable market, cloud hosting provider Internap this week said it has acquired Voxel Holdings for $30 million in cash.
By adding Voxel, Internap can target smaller customers that require more automation and self-service implementation of cloud and hosting services. Internap addresses large enterprises that typically spend a minimum of $10,000 per month and as much as $1 million monthly, said President and CEO Eric Cooney, speaking Tuesday during an investor conference call announcing the acquisition. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/05/2012 at 1:14 PM0 comments
IBM kicked off its first acquisition of the new year on Wednesday saying it has agreed to buy Green Hat, a provider of tools that lets application developers use cloud resources to test their software.
Big Blue did not disclose financial terms of the deal. Green Hat will be folded into IBM's Rational Software business where it will be offered in conjunction with the company's application lifecycle management (ALM) portfolio. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/04/2012 at 1:14 PM0 comments
With the rush to the cloud, it's no surprise that some of the largest IT vendors shelled out big bucks to gain ground in 2011.
Many players were slow to acknowledge that the cloud is for real, or they have legacy platforms that are not easy to transform. Consequently, some pioneers in cloud computing are now becoming parts of established vendors such as Verizon, Oracle and SAP. Meanwhile, leading cloud pioneer Salesforce.com continues to fill in gaps that exist in its offerings. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/20/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments
While it is not known how many customers have signed on to Microsoft's Office 365 service since it launched nearly six months ago, Office division president Kurt DelBene last month said 90 percent are small businesses. Gunning for the largest of corporations and government agencies, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard said they will jointly offer Office 365 with the HP Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio.
The two companies announced a four-year partnership in which HP will host at its datacenters Microsoft's Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, as well as resell the subscription-based Office 365. The pact is aimed at organizations with more than 5,000 seats, Patricia Wilkey, HP's global director of marketing for workplace services, told me this week. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/14/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Amazon Web Services edged out 16 cloud storage providers in a 26-month stress test that measured scalability, availability, stability and performance.
The company's Simple Storage Service (S3) was one of only six that made the cut, with Microsoft's Windows Azure coming in second. The tests were conducted by Nasuni, a provider of premises-based network attached storage (NAS) gear that uses cloud storage providers for primary storage backups and/or disaster recovery. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/13/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
VMware's open source Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) is getting an unlikely addition: support for Microsoft's .NET Framework.
It's not coming from VMware but from cloud provider Tier 3, which announced it is contributing its own fork of the .NET Framework for Cloud Foundry to the open source community. The framework will allow developers to port their .NET applications to Cloud Foundry.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/13/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Access to data from multiple mobile devices outweighs cost savings when it comes to justifying the reason for deploying cloud-based solutions.
That's the rather curious finding from a study released this week by CSC, the global integrator based in Falls Church, Va. According to CSC's Cloud Usage Index, in a report based on a survey of 3,645 IT decision makers in eight countries, 33 percent cited access to data from mobile devices as the primary reason for adopting cloud computing. Only 17 percent said reducing costs was the most important reason for moving to the cloud. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/07/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Like every IT vendor these days, Cisco Systems has talked up the cloud for some time. But now, it has a new umbrella cloud strategy.
The networking giant on Tuesday outlined its framework aimed at tying together private, hybrid and public clouds using its network gear, datacenter infrastructure and apps and services. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/06/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Over the weekend, SAP announced it has agreed to acquire SuccessFactors, a provider of cloud-based human capital management solutions, for $3.4 billion.
The deal represents a 52 percent premium over SuccessFactors' share price at the close of the equity markets on Friday. By acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP, primarily known for its premises-based line of business and ERP software, is hoping it will propel its push into the cloud. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/05/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
According to Cisco's first Global Cloud Index Report released this week, cloud computing traffic will reach 1.6 zettabytes by 2015, a twelvefold increase over last year's traffic, which topped 166 exabytes.
That translates to a 66 percent compounded annual growth rate (CAGR). The cloud today represents 11 percent of datacenter traffic, which Cisco says is growing at a CAGR of 33 percent and is expected to equate to 4.8 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes). By 2015, the cloud will represent 33 percent of datacenter traffic, according to Cisco's forecast. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/30/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Are you frustrated by the high cost of heating your home? With the winter weather arriving in many parts and furnaces kicking into high gear, once again we can look forward to exorbitant bills for oil or natural gas.
If you can't justify the hefty investment in solar panels or other alternative energy sources, would you consider replacing that furnace with a cabinet full of servers, storage and network gear? More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/30/2011 at 1:14 PM2 comments