While Amazon Web Services is the undisputed leading provider of cloud computing services, competitors often are able to legitimately put forth a value proposition centered on customer support. That argument might become a tad more difficult now that Amazon has said it will offer higher-touch customer support.
Amazon announced today it is extending its free support and reducing the cost of premium tiers while adding more support services. The company also said it is will be more proactive in alerting enterprise customers of opportunities to lower their costs or improve performance. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/14/20120 comments
Culminating seven years of development and billions of dollars in investment, Larry Ellison officially took the wraps off Oracle Public Cloud. At a launch event Wednesday, which was expected, Oracle CEO Ellison said all the vendor's key infrastructure and applications are now available as cloud services.
The long-planned effort, known internally as "Fusion," will allow customers to procure Oracle's broad product line as elastic, consumption-based services. Despite trailing its rivals in offering a broad cloud portfolio, Ellison argued Oracle is now delivering a public cloud service that lets enterprise IT customers seamlessly move their premises apps to its cloud and vice versa. "You can move things gracefully back and forth. You're not making a forever commitment to keep it on our cloud," Ellison said. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/07/20120 comments
Whether or not Microsoft succeeds in making its Windows Azure platform a viable alternative to the Amazon Web Services cloud portfolio, it won't be for lack of trying. Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off a major refresh of its two-year old Windows Azure service that could make it a formidable infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider.
At an event in San Francisco that was webcast, Microsoft corporate VP Scott Guthrie outlined the new Windows Azure. In addition to offering IaaS, Microsoft is adding support for Linux servers. Though Microsoft revealed its plans late Wednesday, Guthrie made it official at Thursday's launch event and in a blog post. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/07/20120 comments
Looking to broaden connectivity from its private cloud portfolio of hardware and software, Hewlett-Packard this week said it is extending links to Amazon Web Services EC2 as well as its own forthcoming HP Cloud service.
The move to allow customers to burst workloads between its private cloud software and hardware and public cloud services is one of a number of noteworthy announcements HP made at its Discover 2012 conference taking place in Las Vegas this week. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/07/20120 comments
Identity management is a key focus in managing ensuring security in the cloud, a technology Microsoft has invested heavily in. The company has a major effort afoot to extend Active Directory, the widely used component of Windows Server for enterprise authentication and identity management, into the cloud.
Microsoft already lets users access Office 365, Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune services via its new Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD), but its goal is to broadly offer cloud-based authentication and single sign-on as a service.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/31/20120 comments
Look next week for Oracle to release its public cloud platform as a service (PaaS). CEO Larry Ellison presaged the June 6 kickoff Wednesday evening at the D: All Things Digital conference in an interview with influential blogger and editor Kara Swisher.
"We're announcing the general availability of the Oracle Cloud," Ellison said. "Platform as a Service. Database Service, Java Service and a bunch of applications. All on top of other acquisitions, like Taleo for talent management."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/31/20120 comments
10gen, the company backing the popular open-source NoSQL-based MongoDB database and a cloud-based monitoring service to support it, today said it has received a cash infusion of $42 million.
Leading the latest round of venture funding was New Enterprise Associates and backed by existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. In total 10Gen has raised $73 million. The huge investment is the latest sign that MongoDB is gaining momentum as a repository for emerging big data applications.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/29/20120 comments
Google has picked up another key security certification for its namesake cloud-based productivity suite. Google Apps is now ISO 27001-certified, the company announced Monday.
The ISO 27001 standard is recognized internationally and like other cloud security certifications such as SAS 70, SSAE 16/ISAE 3402, and FISMA, it is important to enterprise customers wary of using the cloud because they don't know if their data is safe. Gaining ISO 27001 certification requires an independent third-party audit. Google's auditor, Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, certified Google Apps.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/29/20121 comments
Software giant SAP doesn't get much recognition when it comes to the topic of cloud computing, but it's not for lack of trying. The company last week used its annual Sapphire conference in Orlando to talk up some new SaaS initiatives, including new pairings from its recent $3.4 billion acquisition of human capital management provider SuccessFactors, a pact with Amazon Web Services to support SAP's Business All-In-One and Business Objects software on the EC2 cloud service, and plans to offer SAP's Sybase Afaria mobile device management platform on the AWS Marketplace.
But the big news came Tuesday when SAP said it is shelling out $4.3 billion to acquire Ariba, which operates the giant B-to-B cloud-based supply chain management network. Ariba gained fame in the late 1990s with its supplier relationship management (SRM) platform, which matches those procuring goods with sellers. SRM networks helped level the playing field and reshape the economics of supply chain management once defined by costly legacy electronic data interchange (EDI) networks. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/24/20120 comments
GigaSpaces this week rolled out a new version of its application virtualization software designed to process massive amounts of streamed data and allow users to analyze it in real time.
The company's XAP 9.0 can run in an enterprise datacenter or within a public cloud environment. The software is designed to take the proliferation of big data coming from various sources -- such as social media and financial and Web transactions -- and allow business users to extract and analyze that data in real time. Founded 12 years ago, the Israeli-based company with U.S. headquarters in New York is well regarded for its in-memory processing technology. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/24/20120 comments
Hybrid clouds and big data took center stage at this week's annual EMC World conference in Las Vegas. EMC rolled out a record 42 new products crossing all of the company's key lines -- and some new ones.
Describing this year's bevy of new products as a "sweeping refresh" that spans its portfolio of storage, backup, virtualization and management hardware and software, EMC is taking such a holistic view of hybrid clouds and big data. EMC's emphasis on hybrid clouds and big data, though not surprising, is an important indicator that like most major IT providers, the company expects its storage and Documentum enterprise content management platform to evolve into services that are consumed by enterprises. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/23/20120 comments
EMC has agreed to acquire closely held Syncplicity, operator of a cloud-based file management service. EMC, which made the announcement on Monday at the EMC World conference, is the latest to jump into the file storage market, now dominated by the likes of Box and Dropbox, along with established players including Amazon, Apple, Citrix, Google and Microsoft.
Syncplicity counts Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com as partners and, like many looking to expand in the cloud storage space, the company is targeting business users. In its announcement, EMC argued Syncplicity's service is different than others because it is aimed at enterprise users, allowing them to share data on any device with security and governance. The services let organizations maintain, synchronize, share and backup their files. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/23/20120 comments