Grazed from GeekWire.  Auhor: Tricia Duryee.

Amazon has made a rare investment in Acquia, a Burlington, Mass.-based digital marketing company that operates on Amazon’s cloud services.  The undisclosed investment piggybacks on a $50 million round closed in May from major investors, including Sigma Partners and New Enterprise Associates.

In all, the company has raised more than $100 million over several rounds of funding.  The company said the money will be used to help deliver an open cloud platform for content, community and commerce.  Investments made directly by Amazon, and not Jeff Bezos, are fairly infrequent. Recent examples include small investments in e-commerce companies in China or India…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

The Internet of Things has reached the height of its hype, according to Gartner.  Each year the research firm puts out a Hype Cycle of emerging technologies, a sort of report card for various trends and buzzwords. This year, IoT tops the list.

Gartner believes that most emerging technologies go through a natural process in which they are triggered by some innovation, then they rise to a peak of inflated expectations. As the technologies mature, markets generally become disillusioned by them, before they start to become mainstream and just part of everyday technology…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

It’s not discussed and written about as much as it probably should be, but cloud applications crash at least as often as their on-premise counterparts. It’s simply a fact of IT life: Any application running anywhere—whether on a physical server or in a virtual machine halfway across the world—can crash at any time.

While minimizing downtime remains a key IT challenge, cloud computing disasters require a slightly different approach. Increased flexibility does mean that IT administrators have to give up a degree of control. When disaster does strike, there’s no physical data center you can visit to investigate the problem—or at least it’s usually not close enough to access quickly…

Grazed from BusinessWorld.  Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware is an American technology company that provides cloud and virtualisation software and services. Virtualisation in computing refers to the process of creating a virtual (rather than a real) version of hardware, operating systems, storage devices, and computer network resources. It has helped technology companies reduce expenses by boosting efficiency and agility.

Though VMware is majority owned by data storage giant EMC, it operates independently and works with even competitors of its parent. It accounts for a quarter of EMC’s revenues, and more than 70 per cent of EMC’s market capitalisation of nearly $60 billion. VMware, which had revenues of $5.21 billion in 2013, is the fifth-largest software company in the world…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews.  Author:  Nick Razey.

If we ever lose a bid for a data centre contract, it is for one of two reasons.  Either the customer insists on being close to London and is happy to pay the premium for doing so, or the customer is obsessed by paying the lowest possible price and will accept any quality of data centre service to achieve this.

While I struggle to understand both points of view it is the latter approach which is totally incomprehensible in the modern world.  I see the IT infrastructure as an inverted pyramid. At the bottom is the cheapest element, the data centre service.  It is staggering to think that the cost of this per rack (at NGD at least) is only £20 per day or less…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Editorial Staff.

There are some very important business and operational reasons why companies must adopt the cloud or risk being left in the dust. This HP whitepaper outlines these reasons and shows why those that have adopted the cloud will continue to thrive.

Opex over Capex

In business, capital expenditure can be a drain on operational performance. Just like buying a new car that is then worth half its original cost after about a year’s driving, the same can be said for servers and data storage equipment, as well as on-premise software.  Constant outlays on hardware and software have a detrimental effect on cashflow and a drastic effect on the company’s bottom line. This is where cloud computing comes to the rescue, by allowing customers to use the systems provided at a much cheaper cost using the Opex model. Those companies doing everything themselves in-house, with their own hardware and software, are at a cost disadvantage…

Grazed from CNet.  Author: Dara Kerr.

Venture capital investor confidence is on the up and up, and they’re setting their sights on the tech world, according to a new survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte.  The two firms released the results of their annual Global Venture Capital Confidence survey on Wednesday, which shows that investors are increasingly being drawn to top categories in the tech industry, including cloud computing, mobile tech, and robotics.

"It’s very positive results on the market overall, and very positive on tech," Jim Atwell, national managing partner for Deloitte’s Emerging Growth Company, told CNET. "Tech companies are the sectors that have the most confidence the most excitement around them."…

Grazed from WSJ.  Author: Steven Norton.

For enterprises dabbling with the Hadoop data analytics framework, on-premise is usually the route they choose. New research suggests it may be time to start thinking about Hadoop in the cloud.

The market for so-called “Hadoop as a Service” is projected to grow to $16.1 billion by 2020, according to a report from Allied Market Research. While the exact size of the market is hard to gauge, growing acceptance of cloud computing among CIOs signals that the growth trajectory is headed in a positive direction…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Dan Heilman.

Following nine months of development, CenturyLink this week announced the open-source availability of its Docker management platform, Panamax. The platform is designed to ease the development and deployment of any application sitting within a Docker environment.

CenturyLink touted the release as being ideal for even complex Docker architectures, offering developers a single management platform by which to create, share and deploy Docker-containerized applications. Docker automates the deployment of applications inside software containers, providing a layer of abstraction and automation of OS-level virtualization on machines running Linux…