Cisco FabricPath at Center of Data Center 3.0 Cloud Design

Cisco unveiled a slew of new products, as part of its growing Data Center 3.0, a platform that is moving closer to a complete cloud architecture.
The most significant product is Cisco FabricPath, a networking technology designed to improve network scalability, and resource agility.
In its report, InfoWorld noted…
Cisco is also drawing on its growing Cloud [Read More →]

New directory listing: AlertLogic

We’ve just learned about a new security tool for cloud management. Alert Logic’s tools for managing threats and intrusion detection. See the new listing in the Cloud Admin directory.

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Google gaives a big thumbs up to Spring Java nd VMware’s Open PaaS

Spring Java, an enterprise Java development environment acquired by VMware last year, got a big boost today as Google announced direct support from within Google AppEngine. Spring fans went so far as to claim that Spring is now the preferred development platform for Google AppEngine.
VMware acquired SpringSource last year as part of a strategy to [Read More →]

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Investors advisory: PaaS companies have the best upside potential

A long, thoughtful analysis of the business prospects for cloud companies was just published at Seeking Alpha. The author, Sunit Gogia, is a senior analyst with Morningstar and he looks at how the technology shift will affect the current large IT companies before settling into some predictions about today’s opportunities for investors.
His best advice: PaaS [Read More →]

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Google Apps Marketplace launches and a tree falls in the forest

I suppose this is what you would call a soft launch. Google unveiled its new Google Apps Marketplace at a meeting it held for developers on its campus last week (see Mashable’s report here). And the new storefront did go live right away, but there was only one big name, Intuit. And Intuit has [Read More →]

Google buys SaaS tool for managing Microsoft software

This deal is just as much about hurting Microsoft as it is about competing in the SaaS field. For $25 million, Google is acquiring DocVerse, a startup that offers a free tool for storing Office documents in a cloud.
DocVerse’s free plugin is actually a way to get more from Office. It is a plug-in that [Read More →]

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Steve Ballmer: 90 percent of Microsoft development will be focused on cloud within a year

University of Washington students were told that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would talk about the future of computing on campus yesterday. But his talk was all about the shift toward cloud computing.
Ballmer made a surprising statement when he emphasized how serious Microsoft is about this shift, telling the students that 75 percent of the company’s [Read More →]

Microsoft and Cray collaborating on a low-power super-cloud design

Supercomputers are supposed to solve big problems that require massive computations. Now Microsoft and Cray have put together a deal that is supposed to solve one of the biggest problems of all: how to reduce energy consumption in a meaningful way.
The specifics of the deal: Cray’s custom engineering group will work with Microsoft Research to [Read More →]

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Salesforce gives cloud strategy credit for strong Q4

Salesforce grew revenue by 22 percent and earnings by 45 percent in the fourth quarter and the company is crediting its focus on a cloud computing agenda as the main reason.
“While most software companies went backward last year, Salesforce.com went forward in a dramatic way,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, while raising his forecast for [Read More →]

CA continues buying with purchase of AppLogic platform

It’s not clear how much of the $300 million it set aside for cloud acquisitions is left but the pile is getting smaller. CA announced it has reached an agreement to acquire 3tera, maker of the AppLogic platform. Terms were not announced but the purchase price is probably well under $100 million. 3tera has 80 [Read More →]

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Chatter enters beta

Salesforce has started a phased introduction of the Chatter beta. Interest in the platform has been high, since the November preview at the Dreamforce conference.

Cloud hosting revenue more than doubled in 2009 for Rackspace

To the early leader goes the spoils. Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is reporting very healthy results for 2009. Net revenue was up by 18 percent for the year (to $169.5 million) and net income was up 32 percent for the year (to $9 million). But cloud computing revenue grew by 124 percent to $56 million [Read More →]

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Battling for the brightest minds, IBM provides free services for academia

Days after Microsoft offered scientists free use of the Windows Azure platform, IBM announced a program to give schools free use of IBM’s cloud services. The program is part of the IBM Academic Initiative and open to any research professional or faculty member at an accredited school.
The cloud can be used to provide academic [Read More →]

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Scaling Java apps within Amazon EC2 with Eucalyptus and Terracotta

A partnership between Eucalyptus Systems and Terracotta should help developers scale their Java applications on the Amazon platform. Terracotta is a developer of tools for improving Java application performance. Its Ehcache FX provides a cache partition that will manage scaling of applications; it is designed specifically to improve Java appilcations ineraction with relationship databases.
Eucalyptus provides [Read More →]

Terremark reports strong gains in revenue and bookings

The move toward a cloud platform appears to be paying off for Terremark (Nasdaq: TMRK) a 28-year-old managed service provider. Financial results show a 13 percent year-over-year increase for the quarter ending Dec. 31. Perhaps more promising is the growth in the number of customers and bookings. Cloud computing services grew at 30 percent and [Read More →]

Conference on cloud marketing and P2P planned for March

The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) is organizing the first P2P & Cloud Market Conference in New York on March 9. Speakers will discuss market strategies, business models and issues surrounding the use of intellectual property over P2P networks and clouds.
The agenda is not yet complete but it appears to be aiming at [Read More →]

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Microsoft gives NSF projects a free pass

Hoping to gain a toehold in the government’s move toward cloud computing, Microsoft has presented the National Science Foundation (NSF) with an offer that is difficult to refuse: any project approved by the NSF can run on Windows Azure at no charge.
The NSF has already gained access to cloud-based software services from Google and [Read More →]

IBM wins Air Force contract in major test of cloud security

The momeuntum coming out of the U.S. government for cloud projects continues to build. IBM announced it won a contract from the U.S. Air Force for a the design and demonstration of a secure cloud computing infrastructure capable of supporting defense and intelligence networks.
One of the challenges — and opportunities — for IBM is [Read More →]

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NASA commissions a platform for shared computational modeling

You might call this a cloud platform for modeling clouds. NASA is awarding a $600,000 contract to develop a platform that will allow engineers and scientists to execute computational modeling from a browser. The contractor is Parabon Computation Inc., a ten-year old DC-area company that focuses on computational analysis for distributed systems, especially grids.
The new [Read More →]

Startup Makara offers cloud portability solution

One of the main objections to deploying applications in a cloud platform is the fear of being locked-in, after customizing legacy apps to work within a specific platform (PaaS). A startup backed by several high-profile VCs is coming to market with a solution.
Makara’s Cloud Application Platform works like a cloud management layer for applications, sitting [Read More →]