CloudyNews / Directory

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Microsoft kept to its schedule and has promoted Windows Azure from its very long beta status to full-fledged paid product. And the first market reaction came almost immediately, as Amazon dropped prices. The timing could not have been more obvious. The same day that Amazon agreed to change pricing policies on Kindle eBooks in reaction [...]

The 2011 budget allocates $79 billion for IT spending and one of the priorities is going to be implementation of cloud computing platforms. 2010 will be a year of pilot projects with cloud architectures becoming part of the long range plan for greater efficiency. The reasons are buried deep within the OMB (Office of Management [...]

William McCracken wasted very little time. Within hours of being named to the position of CEO at CA, he set his sites on a major cloud computing acquisition, and said he had up to $300 million to spend. Just a few weeks ago, CA acquired Oblicore which provides a platform for service level management (SLM). [...]

As the acquisition of Sn Microsystems finally closed, one of the first official acts taken by Oracle is to terminate the program known as Sun Cloud. It would have been a platform for building cloud architectures using an API based on Sun’s standards, including Java, MySQL, and OpenSolaris. Larry Ellison has gained a reputation [...]

The Wall Street Journal posed a time-honored question to EMC’s chief executive Joe Tucci yesterday. “What keeps you up at night?” EMC holds controlling shares in a number of major technology companies, including VMware and RSA Security, and it has just reported 2009 income was up 58 percent. “What keeps you up all night is these [...]