Small and medium businesses want to build private compute clouds as much as the larger enterprises that the top-tier server makers are focused on. But many of the pre-integrated cloud stacks coming out of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and the Acadia partnership -- Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware -- are overkill for SMBs. And so Amax Information Technologies has forged its CloudMax private clouds just for them.
It's been a rough week for service providers. First Sony's Playstation Network (PSN) was broken into and the service has been down ever since. Then part of Amazon's EC2 cloud service went down without warning. Although everyone knew about these outages, details surrounding the issues have been very vague and users were wondering whether any specific information would be provided in the future.
Usage of Amazon's cloud services skyrocketed in 2011, with the company reporting that its cloud storage service Amazon S3 played host to 762 million objects as of the fourth quarter of 2011. This was up by 500 million objects over last year, year-over-year growth of 192 percent and the biggest expansion in the service's five year history.
Amazon Web Services today said it is removing the fees for inbound data transfers and lowering outbound data transfer among all its cloud services, including its CloudFront content delivery network.
As people increasingly use a constellation of devices, such as PCs, laptop computers, tablets, and smart mobile devices, they are facing a persistent problem. They wonder how to keep their preferences, contact lists, calendars, user data and the like synchronized across all of the devices now and what in the world are they going to do when they move to cloud-based services. AppSense believes that it has an answer. AppSense calls this "User Virtualization" even though virtual machine software may not be in use and the user is not being placed into an artifical environment. After all, there may be laws against this in many places.
Google is preparing anyone using Chrome 10, which released yesterday, for launch of Chrome OS. The new standalone browser has reached feature parity -- for business, consumer or IT pro evaluator users, anyway -- with Chrome OS browser front-end running on Google Cr-48 laptops. Chrome 10 is a much bigger browser release than even Google's boasting -- "speedier, simpler, safer" -- lets on. Google is beginning its biggest push yet to the cloud, and Chrome OS is quickly, and I do mean quickly, approaching v1 release. Apple and Microsoft had best watch out, because among major platform developers they have the most to lose should Google's cloud ambitions succeed.
Jumping into the quickly growing market of cloud software providers, virtualization software provider Citrix has purchased open-source cloud software provider Cloud.com, the companies announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cloud computing security concerns outweigh the potential cost savings by a two to one margin, according to a recent survey of government and industry IT professionals by nCircle.
It's been nearly five years since Amazon introduced its groundbreaking Simple Storage Service, or S3, as it's more commonly known. But despite that offering's track record, many enterprise IT executives still struggle with the notion of using cloud-based storage services to hold their corporate data.
Cloud services make mobile devices -- like smartphone and tablets -- more productive, while making users better connected to enterprise resources and work processes. On the other hand, mobile devices -- with their ubiquitous, non-stop wireless access -- make cloud-delivered applications, data, and services more relevant and more instantly available anywhere.
Cloud.com has released a new version of its CloudStack platform, a means of transforming your existing data center setup into an Amazon EC2--like "infrastructure cloud".
The world's largest email provider, Microsoft, was struggling to restore its services Friday after outages that reportedly affected up to 365 million users worldwide.
David Kocher has announced the final release of CyberDuck 4.0 for Mac and Windows. CyberDuck is a FTP client that is also capable of providing access to various cloud-based storage providers, including Google Docs, Amazon S3, WebDAV and Windows Azure (but not Windows Live SkyDrive) through a desktop application.
Being online to serve your customers is not enough anymore. You have to spy on your customers and prospective clients, as well as anyone else you can get data on, and mash it all up to do big data analytics to drive more revenues and profits.
Now you can discover, create, and share Microsoft Office documents with your Facebook friends. Built using Microsoft Office 2010 - Docs for Facebook lets you work from just about anywhere with the familiar Office experience.
The end of June marks the launch of Microsoft's biggest cloud initiative so far: Office 365. Some of you will have been playing with the beta, some of you will have it scheduled for the future, and some of you will see it implemented over your dead bodies.
Though the Netherlands is 'experimenting' with Google Docs and Dropbox, it is ruling out U.S. cloud suppliers from Dutch government contracts, amid Patriot Act concerns.
Whoa, think enterprises are rushing to the cloud? Think again. It's still early days and slow going. Seventy percent have used software-as-a-service projects for less than three years, says Gartner. That's less time than consumer cloud services like Facebook and Twitter have been around or even Apple's iPhone. One-third of organizations have migration plans in place -- from on-premise to SaaS solutions. Among those enterprises already in the cloud in some way, 95 percent plan to maintain SaaS investments or increase them.
An application like email has the ability to swallow most of your time, just so it works as badly as it ever did. Oil and gas recruitment company Swift Worldwide Resources can't function without email, but spent long hours just keeping its creaking POP3 servers online. It solved the problem by switching to hosted email instead.
Astonsoft Ltd has released version 4.5 of both free and Pro editions of its personal information manager, EssentialPIM. Version 4.5, which is also available as a portable build, adds a number of new features and improvements.
YouTube, Google Inc's video website, is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company.
With more and more of our everyday activities moving to the cloud, you would think that Mozilla -- like Google -- would be over the moon. The browser is the portal through which the entire web is experienced, after all. In actuality, cloud-based computing represents a serious conflict with Mozilla's primary purpose. In the words of Mitchell Baker, Chairperson and Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mozilla's mission is to "build user sovereignty into the fabric of the Internet."
Microsoft might not be the first name you think of when considering enterprise cloud offerings. But then again, the company does handle 10 billion Hotmail and Windows Live messages a day and has a 15-year history of deploying and managing massive data centers.
Many of us would be lost without our calendars--they're where we schedule meetings, pencil in appointments and set project deadlines. And without the proper tools, managing a calendar can become a headache.
Keep important files at your fingertips - anywhere. All file changes are automatically synchronized between linked computers, so you are always accessing the latest documents, photos, and files.
Google Apps will become a more secure and easier-to-manage collaboration and communication suite now that Google has started integrating e-mail security features into it from its Postini suite.
Google is introducing a revamped interface to its Gmail webmail service, similar to the much-praised look and feel of the Google+ social network. The new interface is part of a Google-wide effort to unify the user experience across its services and is slowly rolling out to users now.
Under the existing system, Gmail ads are based solely on keywords in the message you're currently reading. In the coming months, Gmail will get smarter, borrowing methods from Priority Inbox to learn which ad topics are most important to each user.
Just a day after unveiling a variety of upgrades to its mobile Gmail interface, Google took the wraps off a new Labs feature for the desktop edition of its famed webmail client: Preview Pane.
Last Monday, I attended Google's Atmosphere, a conference at its Silicon Valley headquarters. Other than journalists, the packed audience consisted of CIOs attending at Google's invitation.
How the world has changed! In February 2007, Google launched Google Apps, its cloud based suite of communication and collaboration tools, in Europe and in the US.
Google has launched new cloud data storage options for its Google Apps customers. Storing terabytes of docs and data online has its advantages, but there are also some key issues with the new Google storage offering.
In a Google+ post from yesterday, Google product manager Scott Johnston announced the latest enhancement that boosts the maximum Google Docs file size from 1 GB previously.
Remember Google Wave, the innovative although sadly unloved e-mail and chat hybrid that was retired last year? Well, it sounds like Google couldn't stand to turn it out into the cold, and several of its features have made their way into Google Docs.
Google is aiming to put a new spin on the traditional digital presentation format (i.e. Powerpoint), and integrating a theme core to Google as well as on the minds of most businesses: collaboration.
Since Google Docs officially went out of beta on July 7, 2009, the Web-based office application suite has steadily gone through a series of changes and tweaks.
For do-most-of-it-yourself brides, wedding planning means lists, lists and more lists, with some spreadsheets thrown in for good measure. There are also the long, endlessly pored-over documents of vows, readings, even toasts. Did I mention lists?
Google is developing an über-API meant to facilitate interaction between web applications, and it plans to integrate the project -- known as Web Intents -- with its Chrome browser and Chrome OS browser-based operating system.
If you use Google services such as Gmail or Google Docs, you can't have failed to notice some major redesigns happening over the past few months. The last update saw Gmail get a brand new look, which not everyone liked due to the increased use of white space.
Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony all chipped in to buy the patents, which cover critical 4G and wireless broadband technologies, leaving Google empty handed.
Google engineers have enhanced the encryption offered in Gmail, Google Docs, and other services to protect users against retroactive attacks that allow hackers to decrypt communications months or years after they were sent.
Google has released a new version of Gmail that operates without an internet connection, and it plans to offer similar offline versions of Google Docs and Google Calendar over the coming week.
Google will allow companies to sign up users for its paid Apps for Business hosted collaboration and communication suite on a month-to-month basis, without having to commit them to an annual contract.
Google may see its Chrome operating system as more secure than traditional alternatives, but one security researcher believes the cloud-based OS is vulnerable, according to a Reuters story published yesterday.
Google's lightweight, Linux-based, cloud-powered Chrome OS is set for its consumer debut on a Samsung netbook in the next few days. Google I/O starts tomorrow, May 10, and Samsung -- which has long been signed up as a Chrome OS launch partner -- is hosting a mystery party just after Google I/O finishes. It's likely that Google will demonstrate the latest version of Chrome OS at I/O, and then, at the party, Samsung will release the first publicly-available Chrome OS netbook.
Google did not, as some assumed it would, kill the Chrome OS today at Google I/O 2011. If anything, it reloaded the Chrome OS quiver and pointed an arrow straight at Microsoft Windows' vigorously beating heart.
Over the past few months we've been hearing about the progress Google has made in developing their Chrome operating system. However Sundar Pichai who is Google Chrome's senior vice president has stated that for now, Google is only interested in pursuing the notebook form factor and won't be going further afield.
Now that the Google I/O conference for developers is just a day away, speculation as to what will be revealed in San Francisco this week is reaching a fever pitch.
The evidence is clear: changes in the coding explicitly reference a virtual keyboard, an "optimized for touch" interface, and more. Though the company never said it wouldn't use Chrome OS on tablets, up until now it seemed as though Google was content giving it, perhaps foolishly, to the dying-if-not-dead netbook.
The Chrome Web Store has made lots of headway since it's initial release -- Google took the time today to tell us all some stats behind the Web Store and the numbers are quite impressive to say the least. Developers are on board all the way and users have now downloaded 17 million apps.
As the U.S. arrival date approaches for the first Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer, hardware maker Xi3 on Friday announced its own entrant in the form of a desktop PC running Chrome OS.
Shortly after releasing software for audio and video chat as an open-source project called WebRTC as open-source software, Google is beginning to build it into its Chrome browser.
Google has established a software engineering center in Taipei to work with Asian laptop makers on computers running its Chrome OS, a Google executive said Tuesday.
Google is betting that slow and steady will prove a winning strategy for its ChromeOS platform, and is reporting some successes for the system in the education sector.
Quite a while back, Google introduced different channels to Chrome OS -- stable, beta, and developer just as it offers for the Chrome Web browser. Until very recently, however, only the developer and beta channels were listed if you checked the chrome://settings/about page. Now, the stable channel has been added to the drop down menu.
Here in the ExtremeTech bunker, we've spent a lot of time ruminating on concept of the web as an "operating system". The web has certainly become a larger and important component of our daily computing routines over the last several years with the arrival of more powerful web apps and rich, immersive gaming experiences. The web as an OS is a concept Google has pushing with both Chrome and Chrome OS, where the browser becomes less of an application and more of a "task manager" that merely ensures pages have a stable, efficient base on which to run. As it turns out, Google has also been working on some other ways to make the web feel more like a cohesive platform and less like a vast, haphazard collection of meme sites and streaming media services.
The web as a platform is a really old idea, by tech standards. You really began to hear people talk about it seriously 15 years ago, although of course the tools were primitive then. It was no later than 1998 when I began to see products to implement this, including client systems that were "web-only." I recall terminals from the likes of Neoware and Wyse that were really Linux boxes with a browser user interface as the shell. The Java PC from Sun and IBM was a similar idea in that the client was dumb and manageable and all the software resided on the servers, although it used mainly Java apps. Yes, the web has changed and improved a whole lot since then, but so have client systems and the management of them. This is why the Chromebook is old wine in new bottles.
If you like living your digital life in the browser, then the Chrome OS (review) could be a clanging clarion siren that's hard to resist. It's fast, geared for an Internet tether yet able function on its own, and it's a bold step into the future of how operating systems work. The Chrome OS will be available to the public on June 15, and Google and Samsung gave CNET an early look at the coming Samsung Chromebook.
If it weren't for Android, Google would have a pretty lousy record when it comes to working with hardware manufacturers. Google TV has been a bust to date, and sales of Chromebooks, systems that run the search giant's Chrome OS, have been very modest.
A look at the Chrome Web Store shows a vibrant, lively catalog of software, allowing you to do anything from photo editing to playing games right in your browser. It is populated with many of the same titles as you would see in Apple's iTunes App Store, from well-known applications to popular games.
I have a bone to pick with you. All of you. There is a serious problem with the way we have been collectively thinking about this whole technology thing. I first noticed it with tablets, and then Chrome OS and layer systems like JoliCloud. I've had enough. We are accidentally destroying something so important that, if left unchecked, could have disastrous side effects. I think we might be destroying the very basis of innovation, exploration, and technological creativity.
Open video on the web is getting a boost, with a service that can shovel tens of thousands of files onto the net for consumption via the new open-source player Video.JS as well as Google's royalty free WebM codec.
When email is down, businesses cease to function. If the email goes down due to a mishandling of the Exchange server, the appropriate sysadmin is found and duly berated.
Last fall, perfume giant Coty purchased cosmetics companies OPI and Philosophy, acquired a brand out of Germany, bought the sixth-largest makeup manufacturer in China and signed Lady Gaga to develop a signature fragrance.
Bing is a big money-loser for Microsoft, shedding billions of dollars per year, but the company is far from giving up on beating Google in the search engine wars.
The commercial Chromebooks are almost here, but if you want to try Chrome OS sooner than that you can do it. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as you might think. Here's how to do it.
Ever since launching Google+, the Mountain View team has been rolling out a new look for its myriad services one by one, and now it's Google Docs' turn for a freshening.
This is cool, even if it doesn't deliver fully on its promise yet: Inbox Influence. Its a Gmail plugin developed by the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit that creates widgets and Web interactive tools to explore political contributions in an attempt to throw a little light on who's funding what and whom.
It's one of the small features in word-publishing software that we take for granted--pagination. But it's taken Google up until now to add page breaks to its Docs offering. The new update also adds native printing; the ability to print right from the browser in a WYSIWYG-stylee.
Aimed at shaping the future of cloud computing and how increasing numbers of everyday devices will add computing capabilities, Intel Labs announced the latest Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) both headquartered at Carnegie Mellon University.
Internap on Wednesday announced plans to enter the public cloud market later this year with two offerings: one based on VMware and another using the open source KVM hypervisor.
Earlier this morning, at the Build Windows conference in Anaheim, California, Microsoft made it patently clear that "To the cloud!" is not merely a throwaway phrase: it is the entire future of the company. Every single one of Microsoft's services, platforms, and form factors will now begin its hasty, leave-no-prisoners-behind transition to the always-on, internet-connected cloud.
Joyent has built a sophisticated infrastructure cloud founded on the open-source Solaris environment with the hopes of taking on Amazon's EC2 -- and now it has a big pile of cash with which to globalize that cloud.
Google's Web-centric Chrome OS operating system has drawn considerable interest since its birth two years ago, but not everyone can enjoy it because of the limited hardware it's available on.
Microsoft Corp. has finally reached a long-sought and expensive goal - its Bing search engine now ranks second behind Google in the Internet's most lucrative market.
Microsoft has been heavily promoting its Office 365 online platform. For the most part, it has been well received by its users. But, as of today, Microsoft is currently facing its first disruption to the service.
The battle between Microsoft and Google for office cloud dominance reminds me of the clash of the Titans. Microsoft and its classic on-premises business model is like Gaia, the earth goddess, and Google with its disruptive lightening bolt, is like Zeus, a sky god and a next generation kind of god.
While Microsoft has begun detailing some of the planned packaging and pricing for its Office 365 suite of cloud-hosted applications, a few details still remain murky.
LiveSide.net posted earlier this month about a new SkyDrive interface that will be part of the Windows Live Wave 5 set of services, which Microsoft is building alongside Windows 8. LiveSide also noted on May 25 that the overhauled SkyDrive may support streaming music for Windows Phone Mango customers (though Microsoft has not stated this officially).
Microsoft made their Office 365 cloud-based document service publicly available on April 18th. What might not have been expected is that Microsoft is already targeting Google Docs, having created a mini-site specifically drawing comparisons between the two services. Interestingly, the service provides an example document allowing users to see precisely what Office 365 does differently.
At Monday's TechEd 2011 keynote event, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Robert Wahbe made his case for the software giant's embrace of cloud computing, noting that the company offered a unique blend of hosted, hybrid, and on premises solutions that the competition can't match. And he carted out a bewildering series of products to prove his point, with functionality that spans across operating systems, databases, management, security and identity, and virtualization.
After my first experiences with Microsoft's Office 365 (see Trying out Microsoft Office 365 beta. for my initial comments on the Office 365 beta), I had an opportunity to talk with John Betz, Director of Online Services at Microsoft. We had a frank discussion about what the product was and was not. Thanks for taking the time to reach out to me, John.
Microsoft's launch of Office 365 has Google feeling pressure to explain why businesses should use Gmail and Google Docs instead of Microsoft's cloud-based Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office.
Microsoft is driving sustainability into its datacenters and networks, which provide the foundation for more than 200 cloud services such as Bing, Hotmail and Office 365, to deliver long-term environmental benefits.
The recent Amazon cloud outage at its Northern Virgina data center from 5 am Thursday, April 21, 2011 to roughly 5 am Friday, April 22 has shaken the confidence of some executives on public cloud computing. Most notably, FourSquare, HootSuite, Reddit, and Quora publicly suffered visible performance issues. The industry's reassurances in the past on up time performance and massive redundancy capabilities combined with the massive corporate adoption had everyone believing that public clouds were bullet proof.
The battle for the conventional "fat? mobile OS is won and lost. But the fight to control the user interface to the cloud is wide open, and with Apple and Microsoft on the back foot, a Linux-based winner looks logical. Google has pitched Chrome OS, Hewlett-Packard has webOS and Intel has MeeGo. Now enter Mozilla, and Chinese search engine Baidu.
Mozilla today announced an ambitious new project "to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web", which they're calling (for now, at least) Boot To Gecko, or B2G. The purpose of the initiative is to develop a mobile OS, seemingly inspired by Google's Chrome OS, where developers can easily build web apps, and in particular those built in HTML5, that are "in every way" as good as native iPhone, Android and WP7 apps.
Both Google and Mozilla have been pushing the concept of the web as the operating system of the future for some time now. It's a move that not only makes sense for two of the most prominent web-centric entities around, but also for end users, since we spend an ever-increasing amount of time performing daily computing tasks on the web.
And with this, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials finally gets interesting. Microsoft announced today that a beta version of the Office 365 Integration Module (OIM) for Windows SBS 2011 Essentials is finally available, proving integration between its new SMB-focused server offering and its market-leading cloud productivity service.
One of the big complaints I've had about Microsoft over the past several years is that the once-dominant software giant seems to be pulling its punches these days, and it's rarely, if ever, as aggressive as the company used to be. We've attributed this behavior to various factors, including the grinding antitrust trials of the past decade, a creeping corporate hierarchy that stifles innovation, and the failure of major product initiatives such as Longhorn. But whatever the reason, there's no arguing that today's Microsoft moves more slowly and more tentatively than it did in the past.
One of the big criticisms of Google's Chromebooks is that they're significantly less useful when you don't have an Internet connection or are paying by the megabyte for a wireless data plan. That drawback is particularly glaring when it comes to Google Docs.
The options for cloud and SaaS (software as a service) data integration grew larger on Wednesday with the announcement of Talend Cloud, a new product from open-source vendor Talend.
Troubled tape and disk storage vendor Overland Storage has seen revenues drop and losses rise over its last fiscal year, but fared better in its final quarter. A clustered filer product and private cloud offering is coming, hopefully lifting Overland out of the prolonged hole it has been in.
OwnCloud, a Linux-based program that enables you to set up your own personal cloud, is on its way to becoming a commercial program under former SUSE executive Markus Rex.
Puppet Enterprise 2.0 is an enhanced open source management platform for the cloud and on-premise servers that features new cloud provisioning, change monitoring and management orchestration from a sole console an d new GUIs. The 10-month-old commercial version's first upgrade will ship Oct 21.
Rackspace's chief OpenStacker has quit the company, saying the 'Linux-of-the-cloud' initiative is not functioning properly as a community project and that it deserves full independence from Rackspace.
The company will close its Virtual File Store services, which is targeted at archival of inactive file data and its Archive Service Platform , which allows software vendors to integrate the Iron Mountain API to leverage the company's cloud architecture.
According to a newly released forecast by IDC, the IT segment is projected to grow its spending in public cloud services by a compound annual growth rate of 27.6 percent over the next four years.
Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud-based web service topped the list of the best performing cloud servers in a new report released this week. According to Ars Technica, the report comes from Compuware which used its CloudSleuth tool for the tests. They were conducted between August 2010 and July 2011. During that time period the CloudSleuth service performed 515,000 tests across 30 testing nodes around the world. The testing involved a simulated web site with two pages, one with a lot of smaller images and the other with a big 1.75 MB image.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has launched a new service that not only extends access to Microsoft Office 365 but lets businesses better manage their BlackBerry devices.
Starting today, we're rolling out pivot tables in Google spreadsheets. Pivot tables make it easy to process and summarize large data sets in seconds. Check out the video below for a look at how pivot tables work in Google spreadsheets:
Text chat operators offers Live text chat services, SMS messaging services Email processing, Live website chat support, Chat Room Help and SE0 service.
I recently was offered the opportunity to try out Microsoft's Office 365 beta. It appears that this is Microsoft's answer to Google's online services. It offers online versions of Outlook and Exchange; team versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; and Lync (Microsoft's stab at instant message as well as both audio and video calling.) It also wants to be the company's web presence. I'll try this out and let you know a bit about my experiences. So far, I'm not impressed.
Dive into Tucows-tested and rated Internet software. All manner of editors, Internet utilities, viewers, Web-design programs and browser tools are at hand.
Google can legitimately say that its service has 99.9 percent uptime, unlike Microsoft, which is still being investigated over false advertising claims.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer launched the much-awaited Office 365 on Tuesday, after a beta program of about nine months, as the company responds -- some critics say belatedly -- to the rising popularity of cloud-based applications for collaboration and communication.
Rackspace cooked up OpenStack--a cloud operating system--with NASA and has been among its largest evangelists as 125 companies have joined the movement.
At its annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), held this week in Los Angeles, California, Microsoft provided a number of interesting updates related to Windows. The most interesting, I think, is the public beta release of Windows Intune 2, a major update to the cloud-based PC management service that Microsoft launched earlier this year.
Pivot table reports are very powerful tools for analyzing data to derive information that can lead to better business decisions and now they are available in Google Docs.
Have you ever quickly uploaded a video to YouTube and then realize that you would like to change its look? Until today, you would have to edit the video with separate stand alone tools and then upload it again. Now YouTube has announced that it has added a series of editing tools that allow users to do some simple but important changes to a video, even after it is uploaded and in place.
Zoho, maker of a wide variety of Web-based productivity apps similar to Google Docs, has increased the market for Mac-friendly online meeting services by one.