Category: News

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

Last week, Amazon Web Services’ High I/O Quadruple Extra Large instance in Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) made its debut. It provides 2TB of local SSD-backed storage with 60.5GB of RAM running on eight virtual cores. Most enterprises can’t afford such high-performance data center equipment, and the cloud providers are hoping that the capacity, formerly only dreamed of, might draw faster cloud adoption.

Many organizations look to public cloud providers to provide access to commodity hardware and software, but it’s clear the state-of-the-art computing and storage services offered well exceed what’s considered "commodity." Of course, there are higher rates for accessing the fast stuff…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

With the advent of open data and new, powerful methods for analyzing it, we’re learning a lot that could challenge longstanding beliefs on public policy. Politicians, social workers and other civil servants have always had data, of course; they just never had as much and could never do with it what they can today. They should listen to what the computers tell them.

What’s possible

Recent HIV research from Brown University is a great example of what’s possible. Researchers formulated a computer model based on numerous factors relating to drug use, sexual activity and the medical aspects of HIV infection. To ensure it was accurate, they calibrated the model until it could accurately reproduce known HIV infection rates in New York City from 1992 until 2002. They ran the model thousands of times on a supercomputer…

Grazed from Noozhawk.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A website loads at a crawling pace or it has completely crashed. Everyone’s been there — some are even ready to throw their monitor out the window.

But worse than frustrating, a company is losing revenue each second that the site’s down. Servers can handle only a finite amount of simultaneous users. Michael Crandell of RightScale calls them “success disasters.”

“Exactly at the moment you are succeeding and throngs of people are using your service, it becomes slow and inoperable. That’s the irony, and that’s the terrible side of it,” he said. “So what needs to happen is you need to have the software architecture and hardware to expand resources really quickly so you can keep serving customers.”…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Chris Kanaracus.

SAP’s revenue for the second quarter grew 18 percent over the same quarter last year to AA!3.9 billion (US$4.9 billion) following record software revenue of over AA!1 billion, it reported on Tuesday.

The business software company in Walldorf, Germany, said all regions posted double-digit software revenue gains, while demand for SAP’s new offerings continued to grow.

SAP said it benefited in the cloud market from its February acquisition of cloud software company SuccessFactors, leading to a 112 percent increase year-on-year in 12 month new and upsell subscription billings for SuccessFactors on a stand-alone basis. Cloud revenue was AA!69 million in the quarter…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Stephanie Overby.

When you’re a global, engineering-driven firm in a competitive industry, the last thing you want is a group of 2,200 ticked-off designers. But that’s what Applied Materials’ CIO faced a few years ago.

The $10.5 billion maker of semiconductors and solar power cell equipment had moved to a fully integrated product lifecycle environment to streamline its engineering operations.

But users said the new 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) systems made their jobs harder. They emailed the CEO about data integrity issues, complained about long load times, and some left the company altogether, calling out poor software performance in their exit interviews. According to one design leader, engineers were losing 30 percent of their productivity…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Joe Panettieri.

Logicworks, a top 100 cloud services provider, is branding around a new tagline dubbed “the cloud your way.” The concept: Whether customers need a private, public or hybrid cloud, Logicworks stands ready to help — even if you want to extend your applications into third-party clouds like Google Compute Engine.

That’s the message from CEO Kenneth Ziegler. “We grew up as a hosting company but our focus has always been on service and being a trusted advisor,” said Ziegler. Hence, the company offers guidance as customers seek to navigate multiple clouds.

Yes, traditional hosting services are a big piece of Logicworks’ business. But the organization is also working closely with media companies, software companies and other types of organizations that demand highly available cloud technologies. Whether you have a private cloud running Citrix XenServer or VMware, you can burst over onto Logicworks’ public cloud. “We’re hypervisor agnostic. We’ll even manage your infrastructure.” (Call it managed services meet cloud services.)…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Remember Mono, Novell’s open source .NET-for-Linux project?

Well, after they were fired last year in the Novell acquisition, Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman, the guys responsible for Mono started Xamarin and got perpetual rights to Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android.

Now they’ve got a $12 million A round from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate on the strength of their 7,500 paying customers and reported 150,000 developers.

Xamarin’s focused on mobile apps with Visual Studio and C# and will use the money to scale adoption.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Now that VMware has bought Nicira and its software-defined networking expertise, doubts about the future of the VCE Vblock effort have multiplied. VCE is the three-year-old partnership between EMC, Cisco and VMware. The goal was to sell Vblocks — converged bundles of EMC storage, Cisco servers and networking and VMware virtualization. The theory was that companies want pre-integrated data center technology as opposed to piece parts.

There was strife early as could be expected when three tech powerhouses with their own agendas try to make nice. What’s new is that with Nicira in the fold, VMware gets more directly competitive with Cisco, further stressing the partnership. Cisco is attacking software-defined networking with its $100-millionInsieme spin-in.

“I think [the VMware-Nicera deal] is the last nail in VCE’s coffin,” said Vanessa Alvarez, president of Alvarez Consulting…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

DocuSign, which claims to be the global standard for legally binding, secure electronic-signatures, has raised a $47.5 million D round led by Kleiner Perkins, an investment that will put Kleiner partner Mary Meeker, once Wall Street’s leading Internet analyst, on its board.

Accel Partners and Salesforce.com, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures and the National Association of Realtors also participated, the cloud-based San Francisco operation said.

The round brings total investment in the digital platform that replaces slow, expensive paper transactions to $104 million…

Grazed from Seeking Alpha.  Author: Christopher Bayliss.