Cloud Computing: Oracle’s Ellison downplays threat of NSA database snooping
Grazed from Reuters. Author: Noel Randewich.
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.
"To the best of our knowledge, an Oracle database hasn’t been broken into for a couple of decades by anybody," Ellison replied. "It’s so secure, there are people that complain," he added. Oracle, Salesforce.com and other major Silicon Valley companies are increasingly offering Internet-based business services for things like human resources, accounting and sales management, in a trend known as cloud computing…
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.
The 4th Cloud And Big Data Summit
Citrix Systems Inc reported lower-than-expected quarterly revenue as sales of its cloud-computing software and licenses grew by less than 1 percent. Citrix shares dropped 4 percent in extended trading. Overall revenue rose 8 percent to $802.4 million but missed analysts’ average forecast of $805.4 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Dell’s long-promised, cloud-tapping, enterprise-computing-environment-on-a-stick is finally here. The company on Wednesday announced the general availability of the Dell Wyse Cloud Connect dongle, 
If the hardest part of the “Internet of Things” is getting to the Things, Cisco Systems is offering a lifeline. The so-called IoT encompasses a range of Internet-capable devices that could be almost limitless: Thermometers, electric meters, brake assemblies, blood pressure gauges and almost anything else that can be monitored or measured. The one thing they have in common is that they’re spread out around the world.