SaaS: partnerships, acquisitions, and exciting times (or, an exciting week)
SaaS: partnerships, acquisitions, and exciting times (or, an exciting week)
This week has been really exciting, in the world of cloud computing.
SaaS and cloud news
Latest news from the Saas world. Don't get lost in the cloud, fly above it. From the makers of Apollo.
AT&T, its broadband network, Android phones, and their API: riding the cloud?
AT&T doesn't exactly have a good name, in terms of customer service and AT&T network availability. They were the only carrier releasing iPhones, and were quite late in the game releasing Android-based devices.
The cost of downtime is driving companies onto the cloud
A recent study by CA Technologies revealed that downtime costs a lot of money. The study won't shock people who have found themselves staring at a disconnected workstation in the middle of a work session. Downtime costs a lot of money, and recovery can be one of the most stressful things a system administrator does (surpassing divorce and moving house).
The study is interesting.
A string of patented cloud technologies: where is this all going?
Over the last few days, there has been a string of announcements by companies who work in the cloud.
Asankya has been issued the patent number 7,742,404. Their press release was pretty vague: "Asankya's solution differs from conventional network monitoring, which allows only limited flexibility in choosing what type of traffic is captured and subsequently analyzed.".
Then cloud.cm let the whole world know that "its team of computer engineers are planning to develop the first prototype laptop that works exclusively on the world-wide web". They probably didn't hear about Chrome OS, and while they talk about two patents in their press release, they don't specify which ones -- and a search was unsuccessful.
Then Ekahau Inc. announced an upgrade to its flagship RTLS solution, which is based on Ekahau Positioning Engine which is also patented by 7,293,008. The short story is that if you have several access points in your office, the office will be able to tell you where you are within your office.
Finally, Crosscheck Networks released a cloud-simulation program; basically, it allows you to see how your system will behave when under stress, simulating a large number of users using it at the same time. Their patent is 7,328,403.
IBM, Carbonite, KnowledgeTree: the moving (data) cloud
One of the most interesting uses of the "cloud" as a concept is data storage. When applications ran within your computer's boundaries, there were very few issues: you knew where your data was, and knew that you had to back it up. Sometimes data moved to a network server, but it was never more than a few meters away from you. Then, the Internet came along. Store a file onto Amazon's S3, and then tell me where it is. Really.
Microsoft and the cloud -- will it be enough?
Microsoft is definitely jumping into the cloud -- big time. Over the last little while, they introduced a number of initiatives which see the cloud as the main (buzz?) keyword for their business.
Their main step into the cloud seems to be with Azure. Understanding what Azure is can be a little challenging.
ActiveVideo -- or, join "my" cloud, and my cloud only
When ActiveVideo's CEO Jeff Miller made a plea to pretty much everybody (the media, entertainment, and consumer electronic "communities") to agree on a "single, unified platform for the delivery of Web video to the television" (his own words), my first uninformed reaction was definitely good. I did have some doubts about the use of the word "communities" -- there's media producers, the entertainment world, and the consumer electronics producers... but which communities was he talking about, exactly? It was a curious choice of words, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. However, I was wrong.
Amazon announces RDS Read Replicas
This piece of news went pretty much unnoticed to the wider community: Amazon RDS Announces Read Replicas.
SimpleDB is simply not enough for most enterprise users. This is why Amazon, last year, released its Amazon Relational Database Service. Anybody who managed a high-traffic site knows that managing a database server is one of the most painful duties: databases need to be redundant, secure, non-corrupted, and -- most importantly -- need to be backed up. When your DB very big, backups become tricky at best.
PHP makes a giant step in the cloud
Programming for the cloud has been tricky to say the least for a long time. One of the main issues is that there are several different "types of clouds" out there, and picking one is often a lifetime commitment in terms of development. By releasing Zend Framework 1.11, PHP is about to change everything once again: they included their "Simple Cloud API".
Cloud talk is often very... cloudy. So, what does the Simple Cloud API actually do?
Google to spend 1.2 billion dollars in lobbying -- some of it for cloud computing
For a big corporation, lobbying is a way of life. Microsoft's powerful lobbying landed the US onto the software patents minefield, used by big corporation (like Microsoft) to make it harder for anybody else to build pretty much anything without asking permission to the "big guys".
Google's lobbying seems to be less evil.
