Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Netflix runs a lot of Hadoop jobs on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform, and on Friday the video-streaming leader open sourced its software to make running those jobs as easy as possible. Called Genie, it’s a RESTful API that makes it easy for developers to launch new MapReduce, Hive and Pig jobs and to monitor longer-running jobs on transient cloud resources.

In the blog post detailing Genie, Netflix’s Sriram Krishnan makes clear a lot more about what Genie is and is not. Essentially, Genie is a platform as a service running on top of Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service. It’s part of a larger suite of tools that handles everything from diagnostics to service registration…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Jeff Bertolucci.

The iPad, like all mobile devices, is inherently cloud-centric. Without an Internet link to ferry data, the tablet computer’s capabilities are severely limited. And its dependence on cloud-oriented apps will only increase. Gartner predicts that 40% of mobile app projects by 2016 will leverage cloud back-end services.

Cloud-focused apps, such as storage and syncing services as well as productivity suites, have a particularly strong appeal to business users. The iPad, of course, is designed to work well with Apple’s in-house cloud services, such as iCloud and iTunes, but an increasing number of third-party apps provide attractive alternatives, particularly for enterprises managing devices from multiple vendors: iPads, Windows PCs, Android phones or tablets, and so on…

Grazed from Wall Street Cheat Sheet.  Author: James Flaherty.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will headline a list of new clients for Oracle’s (NASDAQ:ORCL) most recent foray into cloud software.  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Thursday hinted at the fact that his company had new alliances with their cloud technology. Microsoft then announced that on Monday they would be holding a press conference to highlight a new partnership with Oracle. According to The Wall Street Journal, the headliners for the press event are Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Oracle President Mark Hurd, and the president of Microsoft’s division with server and cloud software, Satya Nadella.

In Oracle’s earnings call Thursday, Ellison let slip that his company would be announcing new partnerships for its cloud computing software — also known as SaaS, for software as a service…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Ellen Messmer.

Trusting the cloud to handle sensitive transactions and security services isn’t for every enterprise, but organizations from banks to app developers are starting to give it a try.  Gartner predicts the global cloud computing market will grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion, with business process-as-a-service accounting for the biggest chunk of that at 28%. According to Gartner’s numbers, management, security and automation accounts for just 2.8%.

Even more traditional and conservative types of companies, such as banks, are venturing into the cloud to carry out complex processes that, in some cases, they find they can do far more efficiently outside of internal data centers…

Grazed from I.T. World Canada.  Author: Howard Solomon.

An oracle, according to one online dictionary, is a statement given by a highly regarded person that can be ambiguous or obscure.  By that measure Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison issued a few oracles on Thursday.   During a conference call with financial analysts after releasing the company’s latest results, Ellison briefly mentioned an upcoming version of its database that will more directly challenge SAP’s HANA in-memory platform.  

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Raj Sabhlok.

Companies are moving more and more of their IT functions online in the form of publicly-available cloud computing services, software-as-a-service applications and the like. That’s not really a big surprise. Where the controversies, or at least the questions, arise are in the company’s IT department.

For instance, does the rise of the public cloud render the enterprise IT department obsolete? With so much IT activity performed by third-party SaaS and cloud service providers, what activities are left for the company’s internal IT team? And what does the future look like for enterprise IT?  Spoiler alert: The answers are “no,” “plenty” and “cloudy.” Let me explain…

Grazed from Google. Author: PR Announcement.

Google is collaborating with Red Hat to enable developers to run Java application designed for Google’s App Engine Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in private cloud installations, according to a post on Google’s Cloud Platform Blog. Both companies have been working together, improving the open source App Engine Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) to further interoperability between Google’s own platform and Red Hat’s third party implementation CapeDwarf.

The result is an implementation on top of Red Hat’s JBoss application server that allows users to transfer their Java code from Google’s infrastructure to their internal JBoss installation and back. The lion’s share of the interoperability work was taken up by Google engineers providing tests for their native App Engine implementation for the TCK while Red Hat developers contributed tests for CapeDwarf. All tests were then run against Google’s App Engine service, a locally installed App Engine SDK and a CapeDwarf implementation…

Grazed from Fort Mills Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

Gravitant, a cloud services brokerage and management software company, has been awarded the 2013 American Technology Award for Internet Services, E-Commerce & Mobility by the TechAmerica Foundation at a gala event Thursday in Washington, D.C. The American Technology Awards recognize the best products and services from across the technology industry.

Gravitant’s cloudMatrix cloud services brokerage platform helps organizations transform their IT departments and simplify the use of cloud technology. cloudMatrix tackles the complexity and provides a practical path to cloud adoption, helping customers truly realize the benefits of cloud computing, including agility and cost optimization…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

SaltStack is a Salt Lake City startup that beat out five other startups to win the Structure 2013 LaunchPad competition. Actually, the two companies committed to DevOps types of systems emerged as the winners. A three-judge panel of venture capitalists — Luis Robles of Sequoia Capital, Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad and Bipul Sinha of Lightspeed Venture Partners — selected SaltStack for its comprehensive deployment management system and its early traction and rapid buildup of customers. The Salt open source project on which it is based is only two years old.

CEO and co-founder Marc Chenn said developer interest in Salt, a Python-based system, has propelled it into the top 10 open source projects in the world, ranking just behind the big cloud project, OpenStack, according to a GitHub ranking in December. SaltStack itself is "cloud agnostic" and can be used on top of multiple cloud systems…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat OpenStack was mentioned 32 times during the Linux company’s Q1 2014 earnings call earlier this week. The open source cloud platform is receiving tons of hype. But here’s the reality check: Red Hat (RHT) concedes OpenStack will NOT drive any material revenues, billings or bookings for the next 12 months. Does that mean Red Hat partners and customers can ignore OpenStack for now? Not necessarily. Here’s why.

When asked about Red Hat OpenStack during the earnings call this week, CEO Jim Whitehurst offered these revealing sound bites:

• "Regarding OpenStack, we’re very excited about the momentum we have around OpenStack, the interest, the early customers who we’re working with on it. But I also want to temper expectations."
• "My guess is we will do a lot of POCs [proof of concepts] in the next year on OpenStack, but people don’t start writing even 6-figure checks for software. They may for some services, but for software, until they get a little closer to production, that’s probably still a year or 18 months away."…