January 31, 2014
Cloud Costs And Other Conundrums
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Howard Baldwin.
There has been a whole lotta brouhaha recently about public clouds – that is, the cloud services provided by such tech heavyweights as Amazon, Google GOOG +2.55%, IBM IBM +0.54%, Hewlett-Packard HPQ +0.79%, Microsoft MSFT +0.55%, Oracle ORCL +1.16%, and Rackspace.
They theoretically represent a less-expensive way for enterprises to provide computing infrastructure without actually spending on hardware and management. They are not to be confused with SaaS applications, which theoretically represent a less-expensive way for enterprises to provide computing infrastructure without actually spending on software and management…
After trotting out some impressive enterprise users at its conference in Portland, Oregon, early last year, OpenStack hasn’t been able to showcase many additional big names. Supporters tried to address "the debate about the opportunity for OpenStack in the enterprise" at a half-day conference yesterday that was held at the Computer History Museum and webcast.
After the delivery of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Office 2013, Microsoft “ramped-up our energy and sharpened our focus on the opportunities of cloud computing,” writes Quentin Clark in a post on the SQL Server Blog. “These opportunities stem from technical innovation, the nature of cloud computing, and from an understanding of our customers.”
I recently reviewed a slide deck IBM shared concerning cloud security and the mid-market. The deck offered a number of recommendations that were designed to help mid-market decision makers think about and implement processes that would help make their uses of cloud computing services safer. All-in-all I thought the suggestions were useful.
Oracle Corp CEO Larry Ellison played down concerns on Wednesday about possible government snooping in his business customers’ private data. At an industry conference in San Francisco, an audience member asked the Oracle co-founder what to tell potential Oracle cloud-computing clients who worry that the National Security Agency could access their information.
Amazon Web Services users today got a new reporting tool for the EC2 cloud computing platform. This will make it quite a bit easier to track how they are using their regular and reserved instances and what it costs them. Amazon used to do very little to hide the power of its cloud computing platform behind pretty, New Relic-like graphs and usage reports.
VMware, more than perhaps any other vendor, has helped enterprises around the world embrace server virtualization. In 2013, VMware’s efforts paid off as the company reported strong revenues as it gears up for the cloud-computing future. VMware reported fourth quarter fiscal 2013 revenue of $1.48 billion, which is a 15 percent year-over-year gain. Cloud Computing and VMwareNet income for the quarter was reported at $335 million. For the full fiscal 2013 year, VMware revenue came in at $5.21 billion, for a 13 percent gain over 2012, with net income reported at $1.01 billion.
MapR Technologies, Inc., the leader in Hadoop technology for Big Data deployments, is a winner in the Most Innovative Use of Big Data category of the 2013-2014 Cloud Awards program. Identifying and celebrating excellence in the field of cloud computing, the Cloud Awards program encourages entries from across the globe, from entrants of any size, including start-ups.