Two of the most flamboyant CEOs in the IT industry -- who have each demonstrated mutual disdain for the other -- seem to have buried the hatchet. Or perhaps they just decided to form a marriage of convenience.
Actually, it's probably more like the two renewed their vows. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison got together on a webcast Tuesday to say they have formed a "strategic partnership." Salesforce.com will use Oracle's suite of software, ranging from its distribution of Linux, to its Exadata appliances, the Oracle database and its Java-based middleware platform. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/27/2013 at 12:49 PM0 comments
Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service is slated to support dynamic auto-scaling and other key enhancements, company officials said during the second day of the Microsoft Build conference taking place in San Francisco this week.
Windows Azure took center stage during the keynote, as Microsoft's top execs touted a number of deliverables -- some available now, others in the pipeline. In addition to the new auto-scaling capability, Microsoft is planning to upgrade its recently launched Windows Azure Active Directory with new single sign-on capabilities. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/27/2013 at 12:49 PM1 comments
Stratus, a provider of hardware and software for mission-critical, high-availability computing, will deliver a solution designed to enable fault-tolerant operations in OpenStack clouds.
The company has watched the evolution of cloud computing and has come to the conclusion that the open source OpenStack effort has the strongest support behind it, said Dave LeClair, Stratus' senior directory of strategy. "OpenStack is gaining a lot of momentum in the public and private cloud space," LeClair explained. "The OpenStack community is expanding rapidly." More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/27/2013 at 12:49 PM6 comments
Savvis late last week said it has acquired AppFog, a startup focused on providing application orchestration on multiple Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds. Terms were not disclosed.
The PaaS orchestration software from AppFog is based on VMware's Cloud Foundry platform and is designed to let organizations move applications among multiple cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft via Windows Azure. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/20/2013 at 12:49 PM2 comments
The large brokerage firm Fidelity Investments is running private clouds based on the OpenStack open source environment with an eye toward eventually bursting to public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds.
Kevin Finn, group technology VP at Fidelity, on Wednesday gave the nod to the company's OpenStack initiative at the GigaOM Structure conference during an onstage interview with Rackspace CTO John Engates. Also on the panel was Jim O'Neill, CIO of HubSpot, a marketing services startup that is using OpenStack for private clouds. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/20/2013 at 12:49 PM0 comments
After more than a year in beta, Red Hat this week used the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston to announce that its OpenShift-based public Platform as a Service (PaaS) is now available.
The new OpenShift Online Service, which starts at $20 per month, is geared toward developers looking to build and host applications in a PaaS-based cloud. Red Hat emphasized the fact that the service supports multiple languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js and Perl. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/13/2013 at 12:49 PM0 comments
Hewlett-Packard this week used its annual Discover technology conference in Las Vegas to flesh out its cloud hardware, software and services portfolio.
The company released its new HP Cloud OS, an operating system designed to provide a common environment for public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Ironically, HP and Microsoft have chosen to use the "cloud OS" term to define their common approach to deploying cloud apps across public, private and public clouds. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/13/2013 at 12:49 PM1 comments
Salesforce.com this week made clear it wants to be a clear player in cloud marketing with its agreement to acquire ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. The acquisition will help extend the breadth of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, adding ExactTarget's marketing automation service called FUEL.
Marketing automation, of course, is a natural extension of customer relationship management (CRM), where Salesforce.com has its roots. Salesforce.com has made a number of acquisitions to bolster its marketing service, including social media intelligence provider Radian6, BuddyMedia and Social.com. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/06/2013 at 12:49 PM0 comments
OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis on Thursday said it has raised another $10 million in venture funding, doubling the amount raised since December. The move comes as Mirantis recently released its configuration and deployment libraries called Fuel to the open source community under the Apache 2 license. The latest round comes from Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP Ventures, along with existing investor WestSummit Capital.
Mirantis said it will use the funds to extend the capabilities of Fuel, a set of configuration and deployment libraries, which are scripts that let enterprises and service providers implement various OpenStack configuration scenarios ranging from basic dev and test to highly available infrastructure for mission-critical apps. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/06/2013 at 12:49 PM0 comments
In a move that will substantially extend its public cloud network, IBM on Tuesday said it is acquiring SoftLayer, believed to be the largest privately-held Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider.
Though IBM said it is not disclosing terms of the deal, numerous reports state the deal is valued at $2 billion. SoftLayer has 13 datacenters spread across North America, Europe and Asia, which complements IBM's 10. IBM also said its SmartCloud platform runs 100 Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud networks. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/04/2013 at 12:49 PM0 comments
Perhaps the biggest buzzword in IT these days is BYOD, which of course stands for "bring your own device." The trend has emerged as more employees find they can be more productive using their own tablets or PCs than what is provided by their organizations.
"Bring your own cloud," a term not floated as much as BYOD, is also a popular step many employees use when they want an application or infrastructure faster than IT can approve or deliver it. That's fueled the success of Software as a Service (SaaS) providers such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Workday, while also embraced by entrenched app software vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/30/2013 at 12:49 PM2 comments
Google announced its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering nearly a year ago, and at the time I asked: Will it sink or swim? Soon enough, it'll be apparent whether Google Compute Engine gives Amazon Web Services EC2, Microsoft's Windows Azure and Rackspace Cloud Servers a run for their money.
The company announced the general availability of Google Compute Engine at its annual Google I/O developer conference earlier this month. Google Compute Engine is a component of the Google Cloud Platform, which includes the Google App Engine Platform as a Service (PaaS), Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and BigQuery. Overall, Google said 300,000 unique developers use the Google Cloud platform with 3 million apps. With Google Compute Engine, now it can let customers spin up servers on demand. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/30/2013 at 12:49 PM2 comments