Apple and the Cloud, A Missed Opportunity?

Apple and the cloud: A magnificent missed opportunity | ZDNet: "....The dateline alone is poignant. Written in October 2010, the email represents Steve Jobs’ final opportunity to provide his guidance on Apple’s future. Jobs resigned 10 months after this email was sent and died of cancer two months after that. But the even sadder part is how thoroughly Apple has so far failed to deliver on one of the key goals Jobs laid out in this, his final strategy document. Jobs wanted 2011 to be the “Year of the Cloud.” With the digital hub moving from the PC to the cloud, he said, Apple was “in danger of hanging on to [the] old paradigm too long.”...."

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Red Hat Playing Hardball on OpenStack Software?

Rivals Fear That Red Hat Is Using Linux Dominance to Block Use of Alternative Cloud Software

Red Hat Plays Hardball on OpenStack Software - WSJ.com: "....In its quest to sell OpenStack, Red Hat has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The company's support, which includes providing bug fixes and helping customers if they run into technical problems, is a key reason people use Red Hat rather than free versions of Linux. Since Red Hat's Linux is used so widely in corporate computing systems, with a 64% share of the paid Linux market, according to IDC, some organizations say the lack of support can discourage them from using other versions of OpenStack. One senior engineer of a prominent research institute wanted to use Mirantis OpenStack software because he believed Mirantis had more experience with the technology than Red Hat, but once he heard Red Hat would drop support of its Linux software, "Mirantis was out of the picture," said the person. Red Hat says it would cost too much to support different versions of OpenStack, and that its cloud software needs to be tied tightly to its Linux distribution....."

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Alibaba IPO, Cloud Computing

Alibaba files for IPO that could be biggest in history for tech company - San Jose Mercury News: "...."eBay, Amazon and Google (should) be scared," said Matthew Turlip, an analyst with PrivCo financial group. "I think Alibaba is definitely going to be a major player. There's no reason for them not to go after the U.S. market. It's not a matter of if, but when." Alibaba did not price shares in the IPO filing and gave only a placeholder target amount of $1 billion, but some analysts expect the company could raise more than $15 billion, setting it close to or surpassing Facebook's record-breaking $16 billion IPO in 2012. Hong Kong-based Alibaba's platforms include online shopping, business-to-business sales, online payments, wholesale trade and cloud computing -- often described as a combination of eBay and Amazon, and at a fraction of the price. According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Alibaba's retail marketplace processes 11.3 billion orders a year worth $248 billion...."

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Cloud News Review: Cloud Trends, Cloud Services, Cloud Migration

Cloud News Review:

European Providers to Support a New Cloud Computing Marketplace for Science
IT News Online
HNX intends to deliver easy access to a range of commercial Cloud Services through the innovative broker technology deployed within the Helix ...

SAP Cloud Effort Pushes Forward Despite Exec Turnover, Official Says
eWeek
BOSTON—The recent executive shakeups at enterprise software giant SAP hit the company's cloud computing business particularly hard, with some ...

HP ramps up cloud investment
The Australian
US computer giant Hewlett Packard has unveiled an expanded offering of internet "cloud" services, pledging to invest $US1 billion ($A1.1 billion) over ...

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. Earnings: Will Price Wars Kill the Cloud Provider?
Motley Fool
Rackspace's business strategy has been to provide premium services for customers looking to take advantage of the power of cloud computing.

Top 10 trends for 2014 tech market: Cloud services, mobility services and more
Daily Bhaskar
Gartner has released trends for the technology market in India for the year 2014. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for ...

The Three Essential Steps to Successful Cloud Migration
Computerworld Australia
Businesses and enterprises have quickly realised the power and efficiency of cloud computing, but migrating to the cloud can be a challenging ...

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HP Spends $1 Billion On Helion Cloud Push

HP Spends $1 Billion On Helion Cloud Push: " . . . The cloud portfolio, known as HP Helion, is made up of a portfolio of OpenStack cloud products and services designed to help businesses build, manage and consume workloads in hybrid IT environments. To this end, HP said it will expand the availability of its cloud software from two data centres currently (out of a total of 80 data centres worldwide), to 20 data centres over the next 18 months. HP was already committed to OpenStack, which was created by Rackspace and NASA, and has strong backing from players including Red Hat, IBM and Oracle. The $1 billion investment over the next two years will be spent on cloud-related product and engineering initiatives, professional services. The HP Helion portfolo will include both new cloud products and services, as well as existing ones...."

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IBM Cloud Based Applications and Services

IBM Puts All Its Cloud Apps in One Place | Re/code: "It’s the latest step in IBM’s pivot away from its traditional business of selling hardware and software to customers, and toward selling them cloud-based applications and services. Big Blue has recently sought to argue — not quite convincingly — that it is the biggest cloud company when compared to Amazon, though it’s a tricky comparison. It has consistently promised that it will deliver $7 billion in revenue derived from the cloud by the end of 2015, and as of 2013 said it was more than halfway there at $4.4 billion." (read more at link above)

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Google and the Cloud

HEARD ON THE STREET: Google: Weapon of Choice in the Cloud - WSJ.com: "...Google already has a reputation as a high roller. It recruits at a ferocious pace and spends billions of dollars on projects well beyond the core advertising business that still accounts for about 90% of its revenue. These include things like Web-connected glasses, self-driving cars, and home automation. Rising spending reflects what the tech business has become: a platform game. This involves the provision of mobile and cloud-based services backed by large networks of data centers. Consumers now stream music, photos and movies on the cloud rather than store all this content on their devices. Businesses, meanwhile, are shifting from using on-site software and data storage to services provided over the Internet. The networks required for all this aren't cheap, and Google's largest rivals are building them as well....(read more at the link above)

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Microsoft, Mobile First, Cloud First Strategy

Microsoft's Mobile First, Cloud First Strategy, Explained - InformationWeek: "...IoT [internet of things] is a mega-bet, and Microsoft would be foolish to exclude Windows from the party. Even if IoT achieves only a quarter of the most optimistic projections, it will be a profoundly disruptive force, a tide that raises many ships and encompasses everything from wearable devices to smarter city infrastructure. In the PC world, Microsoft made its money by snaring around 90% of the market. In the IoT world, the company could generate a lot more cash with a lot less market share. The cross-platform opportunity is a mega-bet too -- and that's the point. When the bets are this large, Microsoft can afford for one to lightly infringe on the other. The company's focus is no longer the preservation of sacred cows; it's about synergies. Microsoft doesn't need to match Apple's smartphone sales to become the next decade's biggest IT player, but it needs a critical mass of users across every sphere -- datacenters, offices, consumers, professionals, wearables, embedded systems, PCs, tablets, phablets, smartphones, you name it. "This is gold rush time," Nadella said. "And when it comes to that, we have the broadest SaaS solution and the broadest platform solution. That combination of those assets doesn't come often." Indeed, at the heart of the synergies sits Azure, the cloud platform that supports Microsoft's services, and which benefits from new users wherever they come from. If you're using Skype on a Surface, Office on an iPad, or outlook.com on an Android device, you're feeding Azure all the same. It certainly doesn't hurt that as Azure grows more reliable and fully featured, it's also become a platform for others to build their own clouds...." (read more at link above)

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Mobile Cloud Services Platforms, Mobile Apps Back-End

Mobile Cloud Services Platforms: The Back-End of Mobile Apps: "...Mobile cloud services platforms are software suites that help enterprises create and manage APIs that extend data to mobile developers. These platforms also help mobile developers integrate APIs into their applications and support the network side or back-end of their apps. Over the past few years, vendors have focused on either servicing mobile developers with mobile back-end-as-a-service (mBaaS) solutions or enterprises with API management platforms. These types of platforms are quickly merging into a single offering connecting mobile developers with enterprise data and back-end services. We expect the market for mobile cloud services platforms to grow from $579 million USD in 2013 to $4.4 billion USD in 2017. A large portion of the revenues generated from the market will be from API management and discovery services, where as back-end services will comprise a shrinking share of revenues...."

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Cloud Computing, a Necessity

It's become common to consider cloud services as an alternative to on-premises applications and internal data centers. But with the new levels of pricing, controls, and options, it's now getting to the point where most organizations can assume cloud first, and only use internal applications and datacenters when they have a compelling reason to do so....(infra)


Cloud Computing: A Necessity, Not an Option: " . . . About a month ago, Google started this round of price cutting at its Cloud Platform Live event, where it cut prices on most of its services, some rather dramatically. Compute fees dropped by 32 percent, and standard storage prices went down to 2.6 cents per gigabyte per month. A similar drop in prices for its consumer product, Google Drive, gives you 1TB of storage for about $10 a month. That's quite compelling. More importantly was the company's assertion that "We think cloud pricing should track Moore's Law," which suggests that pricing decreases will continue...."

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Free cloud-based Windows coming

Report: New Start menu and free cloud-based Windows to debut this fall | PCWorld: "Microsoft will reportedly debut its revamped Start menu—along with a free, cloud-based version of Windows—this fall. According to information reportedly authored by Wzor, a Russian blogger notorious for his accurate leaks of Windows information, Microsoft will launch the revised, Windows 7-style Start menu inside of an entirely new Windows release. The report, published by Winbeta.com, combines two of the juiciest rumors in the Windows world: the launch of a free version of Windows to compete with Android and other low-cost operating systems, and the revised Start menu, a concession to folks who dislike changes made in Windows 8. The latter, of course, is no longer a rumor: Microsoft has already confirmed that it will bring back the revised Start menu, but it has not said when...."

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Cloud 2.0, Google Cloud Services, Amazon AWS, Price Wars

Dawn Of Cloud 2.0 And Why Google Started A Price War | TechCrunch: " . . . Google recently announced up to 85 percent reduction in pricing for its PaaS and BigQuery services. Soon after, AWS and Microsoft followed suit. Welcome to Cloud 2.0....AWS may well be the pioneer of Cloud 1.0, but it’s not clear whether it can play a full-on price war with Google and Microsoft — and others waiting in the wings to pounce on new opportunities....What will Cloud 2.0 innovation look like? There will be two types of startups in the next generation of cloud computing. One will be startups that leverage the incredible cost structure Cloud 1.0 just achieved for them to build cloud apps. Of the $100 billion cloud market, this is the largest category — possibly half of it, according to research analysts. Google is already in there with its own cloud apps like Google Docs. Both enterprise and consumer apps will combine with mobile in new and interesting ways to create huge new companies. The second type of innovation will be from startups that invent new Cloud 2.0 services, while the gorillas focus on the market-share war of Cloud 1.0 services in IaaS, PaaS and now BaaS...."

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Facebook, Gmail, Skype face Russia ban

Facebook, Gmail, Skype face Russia ban under 'anti-terror' data snooping plan | ZDNet: "Russia's parliament has passed a bill that could see Western technology firms barred from operating if they fail to store Russian data within the country. The legislation would require Silicon Valley companies, such as Facebook, Google’s Gmail, and Microsoft-owned Skype, to relocate Russian customer data back onto Russian soil in order to allow authorities to legally acquire and inspect data at will. Currently, Russian authorities have no powers to acquire data outside its borders, unless they submit a lawful mutual legal assistance request, which can be denied by that nation . . . ."

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