Will Amazon Offer Analytics as a Service?
Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.
Amazon.com, through its Web services business, stores vast amounts of data for companies worldwide. Does it want to start analyzing it too?
Specialists in data science say the company has become increasingly interested in the business models of firms that make and sell pattern-finding algorithms for extremely large data sets. They theorize that Amazon wants to move beyond its cloud services businesses — which rents data storage and raw computing power — and add to these offerings analysis software that can be rented, and possibly modified, to suit a company’s needs.
“Amazon has the expertise and the computing power to do something like this,” says Kyle McNabb, a vice president at research firm Forrester. “They could rent an analytics engine to people on a quarterly basis, possibly offer to match your data to other large data sets and find something useful.”…
The National Cloud Technologists Association (NCTA), in partnership with NJVC a premier technology services provider delivering information technology and strategic solutions, has announced it will hold a Cloud Computing Open House on Saturday, January 21, 2012 at its Vienna, VA Headquarters. Included in the presentation will be information on the CloudMASTER® and CloudGURU® Certification programs.
IBM said that it has acquired Green Hat, which provides software quality and testing for cloud computing tools.
Fasthosts’ ‘Cloud Attitudes’ study, conducted by IDC, has found that 60 per cent of UK businesses still do not leverage any type of cloud-computing service and so miss out on benefits such as increased performance, scalability, and cost savings. Taking the example of storage, whilst a pleasing 82 per cent of firms recognise the need for data back-up off-site, only 16 per cent are using a flexible cloud-based storage option for this. Over two thirds (69 per cent) have no plans to explore cloud-computing in this way.
Apache’s 
Check Point(R) Software Technologies Ltd. /quotes/zigman/60511/quotes/nls/chkp CHKP -0.57% , the worldwide leader in securing the Internet, today announced its security gateways are now available to customers through Amazon Web Services, enabling organizations to extend their security to the cloud with a full range of protections, or Check Point software blades, such as Firewall, Intrusion Prevention, Application Control, URL Filtering and many more. With a few simple steps, customers can easily deploy a Check Point virtual appliance — a security gateway for virtual environments — in the Amazon Cloud to activate protections that prevent network attacks and data breaches, while enabling secure connectivity in dynamic cloud computing environments.