WebProNews

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • Rackspace Teams Up with NASA on Open Source Cloud Project

    Rackspace and NASA are collaborating on an open source cloud platform aimed at "fostering the emergence of standards and cloud interoperability." The platform is called OpenStack.

    Rackspace is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers products, and NASA is contributing its Nebula Cloud Platform. From there, the two will actively collaborate on joint technology development.

    OpenStack from RackSpace and NASA "Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand" said Chris Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT. "To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source"

    "We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies" said Lew Moorman, president, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. "We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres"

    Rackspace says that using the components of the OpenStack initiative, organizations will be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code that is currently in production, serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

  • Some Guy Says He Owns the Majority of Facebook

    Facebook has found itself the subject of a lawsuit from a guy named Paul Ceglia who claims to own an 84% stake in the company. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2009, New York’s Attorney General accused him of defrauding customers of his wood-pellet fuel company.

    Of course this is not the first time Facebook has defended itself from claims about its origins. There have been books written about it (not to mention an upcoming film), but this one kind of came out of nowhere, and the guy’s claims to appear to fall in line with more well-known accounts of the company’s founding.

    iPhone 4A lot of irritated iPhone 4 owners are calling for the company to issue a recall, and PR experts are calling one inevitable according to Cult of Mac. Kevin C. Tofel at GigaOm suggests they just hand out free cases to correct the problem. This uproar was amplified by Consumer Reports declining to recommend the buying of the device this week. According to various reports, Apple has been deleting threads talking about the subject from its message boards.

    Microsoft made another handful of cloud-related announcements from its WorldWide Partner Conference today.

    Amazon had a cloud-related announcement of its own as it introduced Cluster Compute Instances for EC2. These are described as a new instance type specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications.

    Microsoft launched its new Facebook integration for Outlook in the latest example of email and social media coming together in a single user experience.

  • More Cloud Announcements from Microsoft

    Yesterday Microsoft had plenty of news coming out of its Worldwide Partner Conference, and today the news continues.

    The company’s new channel chief, Jon Roskill, addressed the Microsoft partner community for the first time, and unveiled business strategies and resources to help partners utilize the cloud (a major theme of Microsoft’s during the event).

    Joe Roskill of Microsoft makes announcements"The industry is at an inflection point, and Microsoft is leading the charge through what will be one of the biggest industry transformations of our time," said Roskill. "Partners have always been fundamental to Microsoft’s business, and we are committed to helping our partners adapt and find the right cloud opportunities so we can grow and succeed together."

    During the keynote, Roskill detailed partner opportunity guides for cloud services, the new Microsoft Cloud Essentials Pack and Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Program designation, as well as new solution incentives for partners. More from Roskill here.

    Andy Lees, senior VP of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business, announced that Windows Phone 7 will be complemented in the cloud by a new Windows Phone Live site. This will include a "Find My Phone" feature that lets users find and manage a missing phone with map, ring, lock and erase capabilities (BlackBerry just unveiled a similar security app as well).

    Also today, Microsoft is launching Practice Accelerator aimed at making training and offering IP more accessible to partners, and Intuit is developing an SDK for Windows Phone 7.

  • eBay Turns to Microsoft for Cloud Computing

    Microsoft and eBay made a joint announcement this morning, declaring that eBay will be one of Microsoft’s first customers for its Windows Azure cloud computing platform appliance. eBay will incorporate Azure into two of its data centers.

    "Microsoft’s focus on and investment in the Windows Azure platform appliance shows they are committed to world-class cloud computing solutions. eBay has the right blueprint for next-generation software-as-a-service-based applications with our platform’s architecture, scale and reliability," said James Barrese, eBay VP of technology. "Joint engineering on the Windows Azure platform appliance with eBay’s massive, high-volume systems allows Microsoft to demonstrate its leadership in this space and helps eBay improve our user experience through a flexible, scalable and cost-effective solution."

    "eBay has one of the world’s largest ecommerce platforms, meeting the wide-ranging needs of customers around the world. We are thrilled to work with such a technology and business leader as we help foster the new era of cloud computing with the Windows Azure platform appliance," said Bob Muglia, president of Server and Tools Business, Microsoft.

    The companies will deploy the Windows Azure platform appliance sometime this year.

  • Google Explains Cloud Computing Benefits to Washington

    Mike Bradshaw, Director of Google Federal, is delivering a testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today. This will take place during a hearing on federal IT and cloud computing.

    On the Google Public Policy Blog, Google has listed the three main points that Bradshaw will make:

    • Mike Bradshaw - Google FederalFirst, cloud computing can provide improved security. Under legacy computing models, data is stored on local computers – this is the equivalent of keeping cash under your mattress. Storing data securely in the cloud is like keeping cash in a bank. (To learn more, check out our Google Apps security whitepaper.)
    • Second, the cloud can save taxpayer dollars. The Brookings Institution found that government agencies that switched to some form of cloud computing saw up to 50 percent savings. To put that in context, the federal government is currently spending $76 billion per year on IT, with $20 billion of that devoted to hardware, software and file servers.
    • Third, in addition to securing data and lowering costs, cloud computing can improve efficiency and collaboration in ways that are simply not possible under the legacy IT model. Millions of individuals, businesses, and governments are already enjoying these benefits. We’re beginning to see federal cloud initiatives and more robust pilot programs, and we support efforts like FedRAMP to accelerate the process.

    His entire testimony is available here. Google says there will also be a video of the testimony available soon.

  • Yahoo Aims to Mainstream Hadoop with New Security and Workflow Offerings

    Yahoo made a significant announcement at its Hadoop Summit today. The company says it’s made significant enhancements to the open source software, accelerating the potential for enterprise-wide adoption by mainstream businesses.

    "Hadoop is where science meets big data – it’s the technical underpinning that powers our innovative consumer and advertiser products on the world’s most-advanced digital canvas," says Blake Irving, Yahoo Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. "Yahoo!’s cloud and Hadoop make it possible for Yahoo! to rapidly personalize our content and advertising, and deliver highly relevant experiences, while maintaining the trust of our 600 million users."

    Apache HadoopYahoo says Hadoop plays a key role in its home page, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and other properties.

    "Businesses across all sectors are looking for ways to leverage the vast quantities of data they are accumulating, and Apache Hadoop is an efficient solution for processing data at scale," says Melanie Posey, research director at IDC Research. "Now organizations of various sizes can leverage Yahoo!’s Hadoop investment and deployments to run it on their own systems and build out their own Hadoop deployments without starting from scratch on internal science experiments."

    Specifically, Yahoo announced the beta release of Hadoop with Security and Oozie, the company’s workflow engine for Hadoop. This means enterprises will benefit from better controls for managing business-sensitive data, according to the company.

    The Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop with Security (beta) and Oozie are available through the Yahoo Developer Network.

  • Pew Predicts Cloud Computing Dominance By 2020

    The term "cloud computing" might well be shortened to just "computing" by the time 2020 rolls around.  The results of Pew’s latest study show that a significant majority of Internet experts believe cloud computing will represent the main way in which people will interact with software at that point.

    PewPew contacted 895 "internet experts and other internet users," and found that 71 percent of them agree on that detail.  Only 27 percent took an opposing stance.  That’s good news for companies that are focused on the cloud, and perhaps Google in particular.

    Here’s why: Pew didn’t throw out the phrase "cloud computing" and see how people voted.  It defined cloud computing – and referenced a certain search giant – by suggesting, "By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC.  Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones."

    Respondents also indicated that cloud computing pioneers need to address concerns about security, control, and reliability, though.

    The first companies to do so will probably benefit most from the changeover between PC-based computing and the cloud-based approach.

  • Google Cloud Print’s Arrival Getting Closer

    Google has provided an update on the Google Cloud Print service it announced back in April. Google Cloud Print was described as a service that would allow any desktop, web, or mobile app on any device to print to any printer that the user sets up.

    Google now says development is progressing quickly, and they’re testing the service internally. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that Google hopes to launch the service in the coming months.

    "Google Cloud Print will work with all printers, including those that are not themselves web-connected (we call these ‘legacy printers’)," says group product manager Mike Jazayeri. "However, as we said in the April announcement, the best experience will be with a new generation of web-connected printers that are natively cloud aware. We are working with a number of printer manufacturers to bring cloud print capabilities to their printers."

    Google Cloud Print

    This week, HP announced a suite of cloud-aware printers and these will all work with Google Cloud Print from the start. Jazayeri and Google VP for Client Products Sundar Pichai joined HP for its announcement of its new printers, and demonstrated Google Cloud Print. Video can be found here.

    In April, Google said that the service was in the very early stages of development, so it is somewhat surprising that it looks like it will be ready in the pretty near future. Google Chrome OS will be out later this year though, and they’ll probably want it ready for that.

  • Google Releases Savings Calculator Tool to Push Google Apps

    As Google continues its push to get businesses using Google Apps, the company has now introduced the "Go Google Cloud Calculator". This is a tool that lets you enter your company’s name, tell it how many employees you have, and gives you Google’s estimates for how much money you could save, how much more productive you will be, how much more storage you will get, how many hours you will save, etc.

    The tool provides an "assumptions" tab to let you edit the assumptions the estimates are based upon. This includes things like IT manager’s hourly wage, current email inbox size, how many spam messages an employee receives per day, how many people work on a team project, etc.

    "Whether your company is big or small, brand new or been around for a while, this tool will give you a sense of the benefits of going Google in an easy-to-understand way," says Vivian Leung of Google’s Enterprise team.

    Sidenote: At Google I/O a couple weeks ago, WebProNews spoke with Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise about Contextual gadgets for Gmail, updates for Google Apps Script, its partnership with VMWare around cloud portability, transitioning to the cloud in general, and Google App Engine for Business:

    The calculator will give you a custom URL, presentation PDF, spreadsheet or poster to pass along to decision makers. You can access the tool here.

  • Microsoft Exec On Cloud Computing: “We’re All In”

    Expect to see a lot more headlines with the words "Microsoft" and "cloud" both in them over the coming years.  Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, indicated today that his company is very, very interested in virtualization technology.

    Stephen ElopElop was speaking at a Microsoft event in Amsterdam when, according to Dan Grabham, he said, "The world really is changing.  The trend that is the most significant, the most disruptive, is the advent of cloud computing.  I’d like to compare it to the arrival of GUI, or the internet arriving through the browser . . . all of a sudden we’re seeing customers en masse [adopting] cloud computing."

    And Microsoft isn’t exactly interested in watching this trend from the sidelines.  Rather, it seemingly wants to go head-to-head with Google and every other company interested in the cloud computing space.

    Elop asserted, "We’re all in," explaining that "70 per cent of Microsoft engineers are working on something to do with the cloud," and that as many as 90 percent of them should be working on cloud-related projects within the next few years.

    For the record, Microsoft Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith wrote an official blog post today titled "Unlocking the Promise of the Cloud in Government," too.

  • Amazon Brings U.S. Government To The Cloud

    The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board said today it has moved Recovery.gov to a cloud computing infrastructure hosted by Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

    The board says the move will allow for more efficient computer operations, improved security and reduced costs.

    Recovery.gov is now the first government-wide system to move to the cloud. The board says the move to Amazon’s EC2 will save $750,000 during its current budget cycle and significantly more over the long-term.

    "Cloud computing strikes me as a perfect tool to help achieve greater transparency and accountability,” said Earl E. Devaney, the Board’s Chairman.

    Recovery-Amazon.jpg "Moving to the cloud allows us to provide better service at lower costs.  hope this development will inspire other government entities to accelerate their own efforts. The American taxpayers would be the winners.”

    The board says Recovery.gov is more secure and has better protection against network attacks and real time detection of system tampering. Amazon’s security platform has been added to the board’s own security system, which it will continue to maintain and operate.

    More than $1 million in computer hardware and software will be redirected to the board’s oversight operations to help identify fraud, waste and abuse in the Recovery program.

    "Recovery.gov is demonstrating how government agencies are leveraging the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform to run their technology infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of owning and managing it themselves," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services.

    "Building on AWS enables Recovery.gov to reap the benefits of the cloud – including the ability to add or shed resources as needed, paying only for resources used and freeing up scarce engineering resources from running technology infrastructure – all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security."

     

  • Google Cloud Print in the Works for Printing from Chrome OS

    If computing is going to the cloud, does that include printing? It does in Google’s plan. The company has introduced preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that would allow any desktop, web, or mobile app on any device to print to any printer that the user sets up.

    "Rather than rely on the local operating system (or drivers) to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs," explains product manager Mike Jazayeri. "Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app."

    Google Cloud Print

    It’s important to understand that Google Cloud Print is in the early stages of development, and there’s no telling when it might become available, but Google has released all the documentation and code as part of its open source Chromium and Chromium OS projects.

    My guess is that they will want to make something available before too long, as the release of the Google Chrome OS devices gets closer. In case you don’t remember, that’s Google’s web-based operating system, on which all applications on a device are run from the cloud.

    "While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices. Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system– from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices — simply isn’t feasible," says Jazayeri. "Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today."

    Google says it will have more information to share about which Google products will use Google Cloud Print in the coming months. The company will eventually offer an API for any app to use it.

    The company expects "cloud aware" printers to become standard, although it acknowledges that none exist today. Google says it will engage with the printer OEM community in the coming months to help drive the effort forward.

    For regular printers, users will be able to install a print proxy on their PCs to enable functionality with Google Cloud Print.

  • SalesForce Launches ChatterExchange, Centers “Entire Strategy” Around Chatter

    SalesForce Launches ChatterExchange, Centers “Entire Strategy” Around Chatter

    Back in November, Salesforce announced its Chatter product, which it referred to as Facebook for the Enterprise. It launched in private beta in February, and now Chatter is set to become integral to the very core of what Salesforce has to offer. I spoke with Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president, product marketing at Salesforce.com ahead of the announcement, who tells WebProNews, "Chatter is at the center of our entire strategy moving forward."

    Cloud 2

    Swensrud explained this concept of "Cloud 2", which is an internal term the company has been using, and basically refers to the next generation of cloud computing, which stems from the rise in general social media use and mobile/smartphone use, where people are accessing the Internet more from their pocket, as opposed to their desktop. Salesforce sees its strategy as "accelerating the market shift" to Cloud 2, which it says is "inherently social, collaborative and delivers real-time access to data and information across new mobile devices."

    Swensrud tells us that since the company formed in 1999, they’ve been taking many of the leading trends on the web and applying them to the enterprise. Chatter is simply an extension of this. In fact, Swensrud says the company’s mantra now is along the lines of "Why doesn’t all enterprise software work like Facebook?"

    Milestone

    One announcement Salesforce is making today is that Chatter has achieved a new milestone of 500 companies in its private beta, with another 1,000 companies on the waiting list, and it will be coming to all customers later this year.

    With the Force.com platform, users began using Facebook-style collaboration technology, Swensrud says, and users started thinking, "why don’t we have the same-style collaboration in all business apps – not just CRM app – basically, anything that runs inside of a company?"

    That’s why Salesforce is allowing companies to build Cloud 2 apps with Force.com, Swensrud says. It will run all over the web and have all the features of Chatter. Companies can "Chatterize" any app they build with Force.com – Cloud 2 apps.

    20 companies are going live with such apps right away.

    AppExchange2 and ChatterExchange

    Salesforce today is also introducing AppExchange2, a new version of its market place for cloud business apps, with a new category of social enterprise apps – the ChatterExchange, which will include the apps from the 20 companies and others that get built in the future. This can be found at appexchange.com/chatter

    Service Cloud Goes Chatter

    A big part of Salesforce’s announcement is that Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 is going Social with Chatter. The company has extended the Chatter private beta to more than 250 Service Cloud 2 customers. Salesforce says that in combining the Service Cloud and Chatter, companies can boost productivity gains by empowering service agents with new capabilities for:

    – Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates

    – Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company

    – Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster

    – SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet

    – Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business

    Swensrud says the companies in this private beta range in all sizes and across industries, with the largest being in the Fortune 500. ServiceCloud2, he says allows companies to not only communicate with customers via social networks and search engines, but when they receive customer inquiries, they can now use Chatter to work with all the departments within the company to sort things out.

    Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Service Cloud 2 is available now and pricing starts at $65 per user per month. AppExchange 2 and ChatterExchange are live today, and customers should contact partners for pricing and availability of their applications.

     

  • Google, Microsoft Part of Coalition to Get Privacy Law Updated

    A coalition that includes Google and Microsoft is aiming to get the Electronic Communications Privacy Act updated to reflect the needs of today’s technologically fast-paced world, where much consumer and business data resides in the cloud. I listened in on a conference call this afternoon, which featured several members of the coalition, including representatives from both companies.

    Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology led the discussion, and ran down the four principles the coalition is trying to get instilled in the legislation. As laid out on the coalition’s site, these include:

    – A governmental entity may require an entity covered by ECPA (a provider of wire or electronic communication service or a provider of remote computing service) to disclose communications that are not readily accessible to the public only with a search warrant issued based on a showing of probable cause, regardless of the age of the communications, the means or status of their storage or the provider’s access to or use of the communications in its normal business operations.

    –  A governmental entity may access, or may require a covered entity to provide, prospectively or retrospectively, location information regarding a mobile communications device only with a warrant issued based on a showing of probable cause.

    –  A governmental entity may access, or may require a covered entity to provide, prospectively or in real time, dialed number information, email to and from information or other data currently covered by the authority for pen registers and trap and trace devices only after judicial review and a court finding that the governmental entity has made a showing at least as strong as the showing under 2703(d).

    –  Where the Stored Communications Act authorizes a subpoena to acquire information, a governmental entity may use such subpoenas only for information related to a specified account(s) or individual(s). All non-particularized requests must be subject to judicial approval.

    The ideas have been sent to Capitol Hill, but the goal at this point is to simply begin a dialogue around these issues. "We’re not expecting these will be enacted this year," says Dempsey.

    Mike Hintze of Microsoft says the company’s interest is based on the fact that the statute, which was passed in 1986 hasn’t kept up with technological changes, and as a result has led to confusion among companies, law enforcement, and customers. "we don’t believe the balance between privacy and law enforcement should be turned on its head," he says.

    "I don’t think there is a single incident that I would point to for the need for this change," says Richard Salgado, Google Senior Counsel, Law Enforcement and Information Security. Other members of the coalition voiced agreement with this.

    So far, members of the coalition include: ACLU, American Library Association, Americans for Tax Reform, AOL, Association of Research Libraries, AT&T, Center for Democracy & Technology, Citizens Against Government Waste, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Computer and Communications Industry Association, eBay, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, Integra Telecom, Intel, Loopt, Microsoft, NetCoalition, The Progress & Freedom Foundation, and Salesforce.com.

    More information about the initiative can be found at DigitalDueProcess.org. Google also has more about it on its official blog.

  • Google Launches Log Search for the Cloud

    Google just introduced message log search for Postini, its group of cloud security and archiving services.

    "When messages pass through the Postini service, header and transaction data about these messages is stored in a log," explains Gopal Shah of Google Postini team Previously, admins only had access to this data through customer support. With the Message Log Search feature, email administrators can now easily run searches on these logs and drill down to the details about how specific messages were processed."

    Administrators can look at things like whether messages were delivered, quarantined, archived, or encrypted.

    "Say an admin was checking the delivery status of all inbound emails from Matthew Smith," says Shah. "Message Log Search returns results which include who received the message, date/time, disposition, and more."

    Log Search

    Log Search

    The feature has been available in beta testing, and Shah says customers have found it useful for things like tracking errant emails, figuring out why certain people didn’t get messages, proactively searching for "problem senders", etc.

    Log search is now available through the Postini service administration console, and in Google Apps Preimier Edition.

    Related Articles:

    > Google’s Postini Suffers Problems

    > Google Pushes Its Security And Compliance Products

    > Google Rolls Out New Email Security Services