Showing posts with label cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cloud. Show all posts

10 cloud startups to watch in 2012


The past few years have been nothing if not a boon for entrepreneurs looking to cash in on venture capitalists’ lust for all things cloud.  All the activity has been great, and we’ve seen some exciting new companies emerge and prosper — companies such as Heroku, RightScale and New Relic — but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Startups that want to get noticed, get funded, and ultimately have a winning exit must either find their own unique niche or stake out ground on a different field altogether.

Here are 10 cloud computing startups that launched in 2011 and that have a chance to make it big in 2012.
1. AppFog 
AppFog is one of a handful of Platform-as-a-Service startups to launch in 2011, but AppFog is unique because it leverages the open-source Cloud Foundry code as its core. The switch to a Cloud Foundry foundation over the summer resulted in a name change from PHP Fog, as the company was immediately able to support numerous new programming languages. Going forward, AppFog can ride Cloud Foundry’s development wave, while focusing its own efforts on building the best user experience.

2. Bromium
Little is known about Bromium other than that is plans to use virtualization technology as a tool for securing the myriad endpoints (e.g., desktops, mobile phones and tablets) that connect to enterprise networks. While securing cloud servers, as other startups such as CloudPassage attempt to do, is important, the advent of consumerization means endpoints need security. Among Bromium’s founders is Simon Crosby, who co-founded XenSource and served as virtualization CTO at Citrix Systems.

3. Cloudability
Cloudability provides a simple service with a lot of value: it monitors customers’ spending on cloud computing resources. It might uncover something as commonplace as cloud-server sprawl because so many employees are spinning up instances, or it might find something nefarious such as hackers using a company’s instances serve boatloads of network traffic. As use of cloud services proliferates, companies will need an easy tool to help them keep track of what they’re spending and where.

4. CloudSigma 
The Infrastructure-as-a-Service space is a tough racket to enter because it means competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, but CloudSigma has a plan. The company is all about giving customers high performance and lots of control. CloudSigma sits in the impressive SuperNAP data center and offers 10 GbE interconnects as well as solid-state drives, and developers can buy and manage resources with the granular control normally found in co-location.

5. Kaggle

Kaggle, a crowdsourcing platform for solving big data challenges, is about the hottest thing going in big data right now. The idea behind the service is simple: although not everyone has data scientists in-house, there are plenty of them floating around the world perfectly happy to put their skills to work on a problem for cash prizes and a little bit of credit. It takes a lot of computing power to host hundreds of teams on any given competition, as well as the data sets, which is why Kaggle utilizes Amazon Web Services.
6. Nebula 
Nebula isn’t the only company pushing a commercial version of the open-source OpenStack cloud computing software — it isn’t even the only one founded by a former NASA employee — but it does have a unique approach and an impeccable pedigree. Nebula ties OpenStack to an optimized hardware platform designed to make building public clouds a plug-and-play experience. Among its founders are former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, and investors include Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram.

7. Parse
Parse is trying to become a PaaS specialist for mobile apps, a laudable ambition given how many people now rely on their mobile devices just about everything. It will be difficult to distinguish itself from competitors such as Stackmob, as well as from web-app PaaS offerings such as Heroku and AppFog, but Parse seems to have the right ideas in mind. It has a backend focused on the needs of mobile apps, and a frontend designed for mobile developers that might not have extensive programming chops.

8. ScaleXtreme
What ScaleXtreme lacks in sexiness it makes up for in functionality. Everyone needs server-management software, but not everyone needs the big, expensive software offered from traditional software vendors, or even wants to manage software at all. ScaleXtreme gives users a cloud-based service to manage both physical and cloud-based servers, and, it says, has also garnered a lot of interest from cloud providers thinking it might be a good value-added service to their users who want more control.

9. SolidFire
SolidFire wants nothing less than to revolutionize cloud computing by making it palatable to large enterprises wanting to run mission-critical applications. The company targets cloud providers with SSD-based storage systems that make it possible to store virtual machine images in the cloud and still deliver high performance. Cloud providers utilizing SolidFire gear could find themselves hosting far more relational databases and other applications that presently remain in house.

10. Zillabyte
Zillabyte, still operating in private beta mode, wants to provide users with both data sets and the algorithms needed to process them. Data sets aren’t uncommon on the web, but they usually don’t come with algorithms and a processing backend. The service will initially focus on web data and text-based algorithms, but there’s plenty of room for growth into new types of data and algorithms as the service matures. Zillabyte was co-founded by two former Google software engineers and a former Intel engineer.


Reference: http://gigaom.com
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Beware Cloud Computing Advice from IT Research Firms


 CIO — I don't know how I missed this, but at the Gartner IT Symposium in October, Darryl Plummer (Chief of Gartner Cloud Research) apparently stated that enterprises should deploy applications in a public cloud provider as a default, and only deploy them in a private cloud if the public alternative is not appropriate.
I became aware of Plummer's recommendation, which caused quite a stir in the blog world when he first announced it, via Twitter earlier this week.
Naturally, much of the furor over Plummmer's pronouncement was a reaction to the quick summary: Gartner prefers public cloud. Wow. That's a big deal, right? Gartner is probably telling all of its clients that they should trim their private cloud plans and instead focus on public cloud service providers. And, in response, all of its clients are scrapping their private cloud initiatives and planning a big move to public providers, right?

Actually, that's quite unlikely, for some very sensible reasons.
First, people misunderstand the nature of analyst firms. They assume that these firms are corporate in nature and monolithic in their positions. In fact, a better way to look at analyst firms is that they are much like professional firms (e.g., law firms, consulting partnerships, etc.). Such firms are comprised of relatively independent individuals, each with his or her own opinion.
For example, one can present the same issue to two attorneys within the same law firm and get two different recommendations about what to do (I speak here from personal experience). Likewise two analysts from the same firm will hold different opinions about the right approach to a specific technology issue.
Consequently, even if one or more (or most) analysts at a firm hold one opinion, there are probably others who hold a different opinion. At the very least, when presented with a specific issue, analysts will likely proffer different recommendations, based on their interpretation of the issue. Of course, it's important to keep in mind that every situation is specific and different. If blanket advice were sufficient, there would be no need for analyst firms. Let me be clear, I'm discussing this phenomenon in general—not picking on Gartner specifically. As I said last week, I am not one to gainsay Gartner.
Second, as a complement to the fact that opinion at analyst firms differs, clients tend to take their recommendations selectively. Companies tend to have their goals and they seek support and affirmation for them, searching until they find third-party advice that can be cited as impartial evidence for pursuing the direction that they have already decided upon. This is crudely referred to as "shopping for an opinion." 

Continue Reading at CIO.com

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Domestic cloud computing estimated to grow at 53%: Study


As per a report published on Moneycontrol.com website:
The domestic cloud computing industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 53% to be a Rs 2,434 crore market by 2014, a study conducted by CyberMedia Research India said.
"The public cloud computing market in India is estimated to touch Rs 2,434 crore in 2014 after growing at a CAGR of 53% between 2010-2014," a company statement said.
"Cloud computing is witnessing widespread interest from the vendor-service provider-channel community on the one hand and business leaders and CIOs on the other," CyberMedia Research India Software and IT Services Research Lead Analyst Kamal Vohra said.
This is fuelled by the strong belief that cloud computing will allow a large number of SMB enterprises to adopt the same enterprise class software and technology solutions, it added.
As per the study, penetration in cloud computing is expected to grow by 6.8% in 2012 from 4% in 2010.
On the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry, the study said the market was expected to grow by 50% to touch Rs 465 crore by this year-end.
The Infrastructure-as-a-service Industry (IaaS) was also expected to pickup pace after 2012. The overall CAGR for the India IaaS market during 2010-2014 was expected to be at 49%, the statement added.

Reference:
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Microsoft Updates Office 365 | Cloud Computing Journal

Microsoft Updates Office 365
— Microsoft has released its first major update of its cloud-based Office 365, the online combination of Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync. It’s also expanding the service to 22 additional markets including Argentina, Iceland, Indonesia, South Africa and Taiwan.
Office Division president Kurt DelBene said in a statement that “Customers are adopting Office 365 eight times faster than our previous service, and the solution is on track to become one of our fastest-growing offers in Microsoft history. We are also seeing great traction with small businesses, with more than 90% of our early Office 365 customers coming from small businesses.”

Article URL:
http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2086224
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SAP buys SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion

SAP has agreed to buy San Mateo's SuccessFactors Inc. for $3.4 billion in cash in a bid to catch up with rival Oracle in the cloud-computing market.

The move is the latest acquisition by co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, who took charge of SAP when CEO Léo Apotheker was forced out in 2009.

McDermott and Snabe have pledged to make the largest maker of business-management software better at meeting demand for new technologies, such as cloud computing, real-time analytics and mobile applications.
The SuccessFactors deal shows SAP's previous go-it-alone approach to the cloud was lacking, said Thomas Otter, a vice president at Gartner Inc.

"My first reaction was: What took you so long?" Otter said. "This means a fundamental shift in terms of their cloud strategy, which has been rather slow to get off the ground. This is a tacit admission that their cloud strategy was a failure."

Stock takes a hit

SAP shares dropped 1.6 percent to 44 euros in Frankfurt Monday, valuing the company at 54 billion euros.
"In addition to the high price paid, which we think investors will see negatively, the other question will be whether the decision to acquire reflects a sign of SAP's strength or its weakness," UBS analyst Michael Briest said Monday. He cut his rating on SAP shares to "neutral" from "buy."

SAP, Oracle and companies such as Apple, Salesforce.com, IBM, Amazon.com, Dell and Microsoft are promoting cloud computing as a secure way to outsource data centers and reduce the need for pricey servers and other hardware.

SuccessFactors, which makes software used to manage employee performance, has more than 3,500 customers and 15 million subscribers in 168 countries. The company is predicted to have $502 million in revenue in 2013, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
SAP is paying 8 times SuccessFactors' forecast revenue for next year, compared with a median of 3 times revenue companies paid for 32 North American software targets over the past five years, Bloomberg data show.

'Crown jewel'

"You get what you pay for, and if you want the crown jewel in this industry, you have got to pay for it," McDermott said. "We are very comfortable with the relationship between the price and 2012 revenues. It's very much in the medium range. We don't consolidate old, tired companies that don't grow anymore."
SAP may take a break from large deals after the close of SuccessFactors, while it concentrates on expanding in cloud computing, mobile business software, data analysis and in-memory computing, McDermott added.

"For now, I think we have the assets we need to win," he said.

McDermott and SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard first met on Sept. 27 at SuccessFactors' office in San Mateo. One asset SAP gains is Dalgaard himself.
Dalgaard, 44, will have the job of overseeing SAP's broad software-as-a-service efforts, including its Business ByDesign Web programs for midsize companies. Peter Lorenz, an SAP executive vice president in charge of the group of products, will report to him, McDermott said.
"Lars will oversee the entire SAP cloud," McDermott said. "This is our catalyst."

Owning SuccessFactors, which helps companies decide which employees to retain and how much to pay them, can help SAP sell "human capital management" software to the highest echelons of its customers' management, McDermott said.

SuccessFactors may also add programs for handling logistics and supply-chain operations, Dalgaard said.
"The talent management market will probably be worth about $3.5 billion this year," Otter said. "SAP has essentially spent what the whole market will be worth this year in one swoop. It is a lot to pay for a niche in their portfolio, but human resources technology is a hot space."

The global market for cloud services may surge to $148.8 billion in 2014 from $68.3 billion in 2010, Gartner estimates.
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Six Types of Cloud Computing


Article Summary:
Six Types of Cloud Computing — Everyone is talking about cloud computing today, but not everyone means the same thing when they do. While there is this general idea behind the cloud – that applications or other business functions exist somewhere away from the business itself – there are many iterations that companies look to in order to actually use the technology. Cloud computing offers a variety of ways for businesses to increase their IT capacity or functionality without having to add infrastructure, personnel, and software.
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Top 10 cloud computing providers of 2011

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India leads in cloud storage adoption


Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi recently announced survey results indicating that India is leading in cloud storage and converged system adoption in Asia Pacific. The survey results also revealed that more than 50 percent of the large Asia Pacific enterprises that participated in the survey are not anticipating or planning for the advent of “Big Data.”
The survey results are published in an HDS-sponsored IDC white paper titled “The changing face of storage: A rethink of strategy that goes beyond the data”. The survey was conducted by IDC from August to September 2011 with 150 IT executives from large enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore. HDS commissioned the survey to better understand their storage management challenges, needs and strategies.


"There is a great potential for the information cloud because it will analyze content independently of applications or media and enable analytics of Big Data


- Kevin Eggleston, Senior Vice President and GM, Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific


“HDS believes that data and information must be stored, governed and managed for insight and innovation in order to drive strategic and competitive value,” said Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president and general manager, Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific. “Embracing the latest technologies, like cloud services, not only enables enterprises to manage data growth but also to collect and connect data to create valuable information. Our three-tiered strategy of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud uses a dynamic infrastructure and enables fluid content to gain faster and more sophisticated insight and greater value from stored data.”

The Indian market is the most mature in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies and the highest usage levels of converged systems. 50 percent of respondents in India are using or planning to use cloud storage in the next 6 to 12 months. 30 percent of respondents in India are using converged systems and 35 percent are either evaluating or planning to use such systems.

The Indian market responses indicate that the move to more advanced datacenter architectures is well underway, and the growing pains are keenly felt. Data management issues due to explosive growth and new challenges uncovered through the virtualization of the server platform dominate concerns. However, fundamental issues such as managing email growth and backup also remained high.
Other key highlights include: 
1. Having access to accurate data on a timely basis key to gain deeper business insight. About 70 percent of respondents in India stated that the demand of the business for deeper analysis outpaces the ability for their systems to ensure the data they had is relevant, timely and useful. Their data growth is outpacing their ability to effectively manage it.
2. Virtual server sprawl remains a key concern. 70 percent cited problems from virtual server sprawl, as they are unable to keep a close track of the virtual platform assets and their alignment to storage.
3. Justifying storage investments is a key challenge as budgets remain tight. 60 percent cited aligning IT costs to business budgets and growth as a main challenge to adopting their IT strategy amid current market conditions.
4. Insufficient backup window a key issue. Due to the nature of their business, 60 percent  of Indian organizations do not have enough time to back up systems.

5. Managing email is getting more difficult and expensive. 60 percent of respondents in India cited concerns over the rising costs in managing email growth.


“Data needs to be shared, compared, analyzed and visualized more holistically. Only then can data become information used for insight, trending, and leveraged proactively in anticipation of things to come,” said Eggleston. “There is a great potential for the information cloud because it will analyze content independently of applications or media and enable analytics of ‘Big Data’ to better align itself to human behavior for deeper, more relevant insight, driving innovation, advancing research, enabling better collaboration, and building more sustainable societies.”

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15 Cloud Computing Companies to Watch...


Cloud computing is spreading like wildfire. The number of enterprises moving their IT operations to the cloud is tremendously growing. Established vendors like Salesforce, Amazon and Google, including other startup firms that provide tools and services for cloud computing continues to increase and clamors for attention.
In this emerging industry, here are the lists of 15 promising cloud computing vendors based on cloud security and storage to apps and infrastructure offerings that should be on your radar screen.
Zimory
Zimory, a Berlin-based company, offers a technology suite for enterprises to transition virtual data centers into cloud-based infrastructure. The company aims to provide high-quality cloud solution while maximizing efficiency as it taps into underused resources. Zimory’s open-technology can scale up to thousands of machines and connect with multiple clouds.  The firms Carrier Grade Cloud Computing portfolio is billed to be a comprehensive solution for deploying and managing secure and scalable public, private and hybrid clouds.
Abiquo
Abiquo is one of the most promising upstarts in the cloud computing arena. It boasts of a comprehensive hypervisor support portfolio including leading vendors such as  Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and Zend. The firm offers a permission-based hierarchy that enables enterprises to forge public, private or hybrid clouds spanning data centers on- and off-premises. It provides a support system to remove vendor lock-in problem through a  drag-and-drag conversion for virtual machines from one hypervisor to another.
Standing Cloud
Standing Cloud provides enterprises with a simple proposition: “We do the sys admin so you don’t have to. Sure, you could handle Web application management. But why?” The firm provides management services on a variety of big-league cloud operators.
Standing Cloud enables users to “deploy myriad open source software solutions to IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), but goes a step farther in letting you choose from multiple clouds,” according to Forrester analyst James Staten.
Appirio
Appirio engages itself with both the technological and consulting challenges of enterprise adoption of cloud computing. Since 2006, the firm has helped implement cloud deployments for 200 enterprise clients with some of the leading vendors, including Google, Salesforce and Amazon. Earlier this month, it has acquired VMG, a consulting firm specializing in learning programs and  cloud training.
Spanning Cloud Apps
Spanning Cloud Apps, a company specializing in backup services for Google Apps on its LinkedIn page, was founded to become the Norton Computing of the cloud computing era. The firm offers its signature Spanning Backup product for a free trial and acceptable annual subscription
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Bluelock
Bluelock is considered as a leading VMware vCloud hosting provider that offers both technology and services in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space. The firm’s services are tied to VMware’s virtualization technology. It delivers a tailored solution for establishing a virtual data center hosted on a public or hybrid cloud.
Skytap
Skytap, self-service cloud automation, announces the release of a new technology that claims to establish a secure hybrid cloud that connects to an on-site data center with its cloud in 10 minutes. The firm anticipates winning with a dead-simple hybrid cloud deployment solution that provides the security of the traditional data center with the scale of the cloud.
CloudOptix
CloudOptix, backed up by MeghaWare product line, is a cloud virtualization software player that offers businesses and users a way to create a private cloud from different vendors.  With the preconfigured MeghaWare Cloud Appliance’s portfolio of storage, and applications, it promised low-cost deployment in less than 15 minutes. To defang the problem of vendor lock-in, its CloudTop application, allows customers to choose among devices, apps and cloud providers.
RightScale
RightScale, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor offers a fully automated management platform for cloud computing deployments. It aims to lower the entry barriers to cloud deployments with server templates through its “cloud-ready” mechanism for connecting servers with the customer’s cloud environment.
Recently, RightScale and Zend Technologies announces their new offering that pairs RightScale’s cloud management platform with Zend’s PHP architecture and Zend Server. This technology deploys and manages Php applications in the cloud.
CloudSwitch
CloudSwitch, known as an enterprise cloud gateway, provides software in line with the policies and tools rooted in the data center with a cloud environment. It offers security for businesses that requires maintenance of in-house and cloud-based IT assets. Earlier this month, CloudSwitch conjoined with Riverbed to boost performance and security in the cloud.
Kaavo
Kaavo considers itself to be “the first and only company to deliver a solution with a top-down application-focused approach to IT resource management across public, private and hybrid clouds.”  The firm believes that its application-centric approach  is necessary for effective cloud management. Its core product, IMOD, an application management assures speeding up of server systems online, configuring middleware, and other steps to hasten the transition to a cloud-based environment.
Prolexic Technologies
Prolexic Technologies is a provider of cloud-based security technology that mitigates DDoS attacks. The firm caters to SMN, enterprise and government clients. It features proprietary mitigation and control software that helps detect and fend off DDoS attacks through pairing with a global network of “scrubbing centers.”
At the end of March, the firm received $13.9 million fund from Kennet Partners, an organization that is rumored to be helping a major electronics manufacturer guard against a DDoS attack.
Nimbula
Nimbula, founded by a management team that helped develop Amazon EC2 coins itself as a “cloud operating system company.” Recently, the firm released its flagship product, Nimbula Director 1.0 that provides management for both cloud-based resources and on-premises data centers. This Director 1.0 is also available for free download for smaller deployments up to 40 cores, and an optional-fee based annual support for larger systems.
Nasuni
Nasuni, through its partnership with cloud-computing providers offers a “cloud gateway” that searches for the best aspect of the cloud and on-premises storage. This year, its Nasuni Filer product features a “snapshot retention,” that allows IT managers to set storage and retention policies on the cloud. With this feature, managers can determine the point then a snapshot can be deleted irrevocably
NephoScale
NephoScale is one of the more recent entrants in the IaaS market. The firm’s public cloud infrastructure platform offers pay-by-the-hour servers, object-based storage, and dedicated, on-demand servers. Its signature innovation, the CloudScript, enables users to control all elements of their cloud deployment using a single, one-to-many API call.
Recently, the firm offers a free, one-year trial of a 256 MB cloud server and as much as 1 GB of storage through its Cloud Computing and Storage Starter Package. According to NephoScale President Bruce Templeton, this offering will allow start-up companies to familiarize themselves with their services without spending too much.

Reference: http://cloudtimes.org/

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