Latest News from Maureen O'Gara

AMD Aims for the Cloud via Seattle, Berlin & Warsaw

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:18:00 EDT

Over the weekend Barron’s put out a piece touting AMD’s chances of taking share in the mainstream server market that belongs to Intel with its SeaMicro microserver acquisition, a development that would tickle its tiny stock price, if it ever happened. But even the thought of it, although the possibility is a ways off, tickled the shares Monday. “SeaMicro’s technology looks good; its management team, astute; and the market opportunities, promising,” the story said. It was the opening salvo for myriad articles sketching out AMD’s already tipped plans to make its first ARM chip, a 64-bit processor that it expects to have sampling in the first quarter of 2014 with production following sometime in the second half.

HP Removes Bradley as PC Chief

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:38:00 EDT

Todd Bradley, the former Palm CEO who’s been running HP’s PC unit since 2005 and added printing last year when the Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) organization was formed, has apparently been pushed aside. He is trading his job running half of HP’s revenue for a newly created position as executive vice-president, strategic growth initiatives, where he’s supposed to increase HP’s business in China, extend its channel partner relationships worldwide and identify potential partners among early-stage start-ups. He will work directly with CEO Meg Whitman, who said in the Tuesday morning announcement that “There’s nothing more important to HP than our channel partners and the future of our business in China. I’ve asked Todd to use his expertise to focus on these areas. I’ve also asked him to study the landscape of small companies and start-ups that could partner with HP to spur growth.”

Red Hat Plays Its Trump Card

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Red Hat made its power play Wednesday. One it’s been itching to make for a couple of years. One that it hopes will ultimately jam a stick through the spokes of VMware’s front wheel. And to make sure that happens it’ll be telling everybody who’ll listen that its widgetry is a third the price of VMware’s vCloud. This is where Red Hat gets to play a card that only Microsoft can match – its operating system, commonly known as RHEL – and create a tightly integrated cloud platform by fusing RHEL with OpenStack, the open source cloud computing software. The move came as a one-two punch consisting of a kit called the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and another called Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure that deliver the company’s essential vision of an Open Hybrid Cloud.

Metacloud Outs Custom OpenStack for Fortune Firms

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Metacloud plays hardball. It has no patience with pilots or proofs-of-concept. It’ll only do production Infrastructure-as-a-Service installations, which is kind of uppity for a start-up that only hit the radar last October – even if it did come out of the closet with an unidentified Fortune 100 reportedly under contract. It didn’t even have a name for its OpenStack distribution until now. It’s calling the private cloud it’s built on the latest Grizzly version of OpenStack Carbon|OS. See, Metacloud's founders are pretty sure of themselves because they figure they've done this kind of thing before. When President Steve Curry was at Yahoo for over a decade he managed its global storage operations that handled hundreds of petabytes of content and user data. And when CEO Sean Lynch was at Ticketmaster, the third-largest e-commerce system in the world, he ran its technical operations.

Bromium Reduces a PC’s Attack Surface

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Bromium, where the old Xen team now lives, says it’s made it 105 harder for hackers to compromise a PC. CTO Simon Crosby says that means the bad guys would have to shoot an arrow through an apple on a kid’s head at the distance of 100,000 miles to penetrate a PC endpoint and that, in turn, means that Bromium has made the widget virtually impenetrable by making exploits prohibitively expensive to pull off. On Tuesday the UK company introduced vSentry 2.0, which improves secure mobility, safe enablement and enterprise manageability. For its next tricks Bromium intends to protect Windows 8, Android and the Mac, but that work is only at the alpha stage. It’s also got BYOD on its to-do list. The start-up is still not targeting the consumer. It doesn’t have the weight yet. Anyway, there are so many enterprises and ODMs.

Google’s Waze Acquisition in the Bag

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Google made its much anticipated move Tuesday and pocketed Waze, the Israeli real-time traffic map maker. It didn’t disclose how much it’s paid to close the deal, but the Israeli paper Globes put the price at $1.3 billion. Bloomberg put it at $1.1 billion. Either way it’s reportedly cash money. Google said in a short blog announcement that the “Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now.” Waze reportedly has 100 people in Israel. Facebook tried to buy Waze for a reported $800 million to a billion dollars in cash and stock, but negotiations supposedly broke down when it insisted the Waze folks move to California. The start-up has an office in Silicon Valley where it has a small staff and where its CEO Noam Bardin is located.

Salesforce Hires Oracle-Trained President-Vice-Chairman

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:00:00 EDT

In an interesting exercise in sharing that begs to be plumbed, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of cloud doyen Salesforce.com, has hired himself a president-cum-vice-chairman and where else would the wannabe-Larry Ellison look but among the veterans of Oracle, his alma mater. His pick is Keith Block, former EVP of North American sales at Oracle, head of a 11,000-man multibillion-dollar operation whose indiscrete Sun-knocking e-mails to a colleague where enshrined, thanks to legal discovery, in the HP v Oracle litigation over Itanium.

Centrify for SaaS Supports Office 365

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Centrify, which made its bones making Microsoft’s popular Active Directory accessible to Redmond’s enemies list, is spreading its wings and snuggling up closer to Microsoft at the same time by throwing it something of a lifeline. See, Microsoft expects Office 365 to be one of the fastest-growing businesses in its history. It’s already claimed it’s got a billion-dollar run rate. There’s only one little problem. The widgetry Microsoft supplies for Active Directory integration – ADFS or Active Directory Federation Services – is a pain in the proverbial tail for both Microsoft’s field personnel and the channel, which is paid to sell Office 365 and hardly needs to spend hours wrestling with the slippery stuff since it actually takes pricey dedicated hardware and specialized knowledge of the operating system to get it up and running.

SAP to Buy E-Commerce Firm

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EDT

SAP is buying hybris, a 16-year-old $85 million-a-year Swiss e-commerce company, expecting to deliver the next-generation e-commerce platform for on-premise and cloud deployment. It claims the purchase, which many have expected for a long time, puts it at the leading edge of the consumer economy, raising the stakes in customer relationship management (CRM) and defining the next-generation customer experience. Terms weren’t disclosed, but All Things Digital thinks the deal is costing SAP $1.2 billion-$1.5 billion. hybris just got $30 million from the VCs in March including Meritech Capital Partners and Greylock Israel. Its majority investor is Huntsman Gay Global Capital (HGGC), a private investment firm based in Palo Alto, California.

FoxConn’s Making Gismos Using Mozilla’s New Firefox OS

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 06:00:00 EDT

The big contract manufacturer Foxconn, which is looking to diversify beyond Apple, said at a press conference Monday that it’s developing over five devices including smartphones, TVs and large display boards using Mozilla’s new Firefox mobile operating system, which would love to be an alternative to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Foxconn means to hire 500-1,000 engineers in Taiwan to develop web-based software for Firefox. China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom and Singapore Telecommunications are also reportedly prepared to support the new widgetry. Sony, Huawei and LG Electronics are committed to producing Firefox devices. And ZTE and TCL Communications, the Chinese handset companies, mean to start selling Firefox smartphones in Latin American soon.

Cloudant Halves Price for Pre-Revenue Start-Ups

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Cloudant has announced an Accelerator Program to help young companies on a start-up budget go to market on its highly scalable, always-on NoSQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). The goal of the sales program is to make it more affordable for start-ups to launch their businesses on a data layer that gets them to market fast and doesn’t inhibit their growth or profitability. The services provided through the program are identical to Cloudant’s full-priced services. Cloudant figures many web and mobile start-ups are financially pressured into going to market without a growth strategy for their back-end operations and that sudden success can cripple the database systems powering their applications.

Dell Board Claims Icahn’s Math Off by $3.9 Billion

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:45:00 EDT

The special committee of Dell’s board and its JP Morgan advisers figure the Carl Icahn-Southeastern Asset Management counter to the $24.4 billion Michael Dell-Silver Lake buy-out offer can’t be done without another $3.9 billion in financing. They’ve sent a 37-page slide presentation to the SEC that will be used to persuade shareholders to support their go-private decision. A lot of it is a rehash of what is already known except the analysis that claims Icahn’s so-called leveraged recapitalization scheme doesn’t have legs – in their words suffers from what they call a “liquidity gap.”

Cloudmeter Unlocks Splunk’s Network Big Data

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:45:00 EDT

Cloudmeter has put out a way for Splunk users to unlock the Big Data gold mine in their network traffic data to see into their online applications, users experience and business outcome, turning it into actionable information for IT and business users. The widgetry, called Stream, which expands the value of Splunk Enterprise by shining a light on this data source, is now available for download on Splunkbase.

Panzura Raises Another $25 Million

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:05:00 EDT

Cloud storage start-ups don’t seem to be lacking for money. Panzura just raised $25 million in a reportedly oversubscribed D round that should take it to profitability. That makes $58 million since it got started in 2008. It’s the one that claims to have the most petabytes under management and the largest companies in several key verticals like finance, media, entertainment and government among its customers. It says it grew its customer base 700% last year and at this point in 2013 has already exceeded 2012 bookings.

CloudByte Hires New CEO

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:00:00 EDT

CloudByte, the little start-up whose software-defined, software-only ElastiStor widgetry guarantees cloud service providers (CSPs) quality of service (QoS) to every application from a shared storage platform, has hired former SanDisk general manager Greg Goelz as its new CEO.

IBM Reportedly Peels Off $2 Billion or More for SoftLayer

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EDT

IBM Tuesday said it’s going to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, the Dallas-based outfit that’s supposed to be the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider in the world. Terms were not disclosed but the good ole rumor mill, touched off by a Reuters report in March about how both IBM and EMC were interested in buying SoftLayer, pegged the deal at around $2 billion. Others venture that it could be worth as much as $2.5 billion. Either amount makes it the largest acquisition of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s new reign.

Salesforce Buys E-Mail House for $2.5 Billion

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 07:15:00 EDT

Salesforce.com, the poster child of the cloud computing era, has agreed to pay a giant $2.5 billion – at an equally giant 53% premium – for ExactTarget, the Indianapolis-based company that got started very late in 2000 intent on stuffing marketing e-mails from mid-sized companies into people’s inboxes, something now called social marketing.

Dell’s Destiny to Be Decided July 18

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:00:00 EDT

In what may prove a dangerous thing to do, Dell has turned its back on activist investor Carl Icahn and other large stockholders hoping to cash out at a higher return. The board wants to accept Michael Dell’s $24.4 billion buy-out offer and go private. And that’s what it’s telling stockholders ahead of a vote now set for Thursday, July 18. It says it approached over 70 potential strategic buyers and financial buyers and the Michael Dell-Silver Lake offer is the “best alternative available – in a challenging business environment.” Michael Dell can’t vote his 15.6% position and needs a majority of the rest of the shares to take his $13.65-a-share offer at a 25% premium over Dell’s price on January 11, when Bloomberg broke the news that the company was in talks to go private. The stock, which is being held up by the deal, could of course plunge if it doesn’t materialize.

CloudPassage Gets Patent on Cloud Security

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 07:00:00 EDT

CloudPassage, the security SaaS start-up, has gotten a big, embracing US patent on its Halo cloud infrastructure security technology. It’s patent No. 8,412,945 B2. It’s reportedly the first company to get a US patent on universal cloud infrastructure security.

Zynga Falters, Cuts Staff & Facilities

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 22:15:00 EDT

Zynga, the high-profile cloud-based games maker, is in trouble deep enough to raise questions about its continued survival. It can’t keep up with the defection of its user base to mobile rivals – which is impacting its bookings again this quarter – and so it’s going to cut back by firing 520 people, roughly 20% of its workforce, more than it’s done since starting to lay people off last year.

The Trouble with Clouds Is the Darn Hypervisor

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Parallels’ CTO of server virtualization James Bottomley claims there’s an inherent tenancy problem with PaaS and SaaS clouds because most applications are designed for single occupancy. And they’re designed for single occupancy mostly because it’s easier to write them that way, ignoring the fact that their data can leak or they can hog resources – or maybe not get enough resources – if they’re deployed in a multitenant cloud. He figures the software industry will pretty much treat the problem the way it did the need for high availability some years back and stick its head in the sand. Single-occupancy applications won’t get rewritten to oblige multitenant clouds. ISVs are unwilling to make the investment.

Waze Reportedly Talking to Google Now

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:45:00 EDT

Google is reportedly hot to mate with Waze, an Israeli map merchant that’s got a mobile satellite navigation application that renders real-time traffic. The two are in talks that could flounder at any point according to Reuters. But the first talks to hit the rocky shoals were reportedly with Facebook, which was reportedly willing to pay a billion dollars for the crowd-sourced service, which gets its real-time traffic information from the smartphones of 47.5 million members, something Facebook could conceivably do on its own with its million users. Waze got a term sheet from Facebook according to the Israeli paper Calcalist, along with the demand that the Waze team relocate to California, which stalled their talks.

Nimble Flashes New Private Cloud Reference Architecture Around

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:30:00 EDT

Nimble Storage, one of the darlings of the new storage breed – darling if for no other reason than it’s managed to collect $98 million from the VC crowd since it started in 2008 – that’s pretty darling – has been waving around the plans for a new Microsoft private cloud that’s pre-configured, turnkey and certified as a scalable on-premise infrastructure platform. The Microsoft reference architecture involves a Nimble SmartStack for Windows Server and System Center running on Cisco’s UCS servers. It’s supposed to be good for 75 virtual machines created by Microsoft’s Hyper-V in a highly available environment.

Apple to Make Cheap iPhone at Pegatron, Not Foxconn

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:00:00 EDT

Foxconn is losing its Apple monopoly. Apple has signed up $7.4 billion-a-year Pegatron to build the low-cost iPhone it’s expected to bring to market later this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Pegatron, which started making iPad minis last year and made some iPhones the year before, is another Taiwan-based contract manufacturer with factories in China. Actually it’s an Asustek spin-off. Foxconn had manufacturing problems with the iPhone 5 last year that scratched the metal cases and limited availability. It’s also not getting the cost advantages of scale like it used to because it’s been raising wages and improving working conditions following a string of suicides.

Is Jive Ready to Sell Out?

Fri, 31 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Since Bloomberg blew the whistle the other day after finding out that SAP had been in talks to buy cloud-based Jive Software, but dropped the idea after deciding there was too much overlap between their product lines and Jive wouldn’t add enough market share, there’s been speculation that somebody else big will come along and scoop it up. The names that come to mind are Oracle and IBM, even Salesforce.com, whose own social networking business software isn’t as comprehensive as Jive’s. Jive is run by CEO Tony Zingale, who sold Mercury Interactive to HP for $4.5 billion in 2006 and Clarify to Nortel Networks for about $2.1 billion in 1999. Jive’s market cap is currently $1.14 billion so it would take a few bucks to buy. Forrester Research projects the market for social enterprise software will be worth $6.4 billion by 2016, up 60%.

Cisco Buying JouleX for Cloud-Based Energy Software

Thu, 30 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Cisco is spending $107 million in cash and retention incentives to buy JouleX, whose cloud-based software is supposed to help companies reduce energy costs. It monitors, analyzes and manages the energy use of all network-connected devices and systems through a set of policies derived through analytics tailored to the enterprise. The widgetry, which provides policy governance and compliance as well, works across global IT environments. The company was started in Munich in 2009 and is now based in Atlanta with R&D in Kassel, Germany. It’s gotten at least $17 million in venture funding from such companies as Intel Capital.

AMD Takes Lead in HyperScale Chips

Thu, 30 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Once upon a time, children – though this might sound like a fable, it’s a true story – little AMD scared the bejesus out of mighty Intel and forced it to change all it’s carefully laid 64-bit server chip plans. Until it did AMD ruled the server roost and made a little money. Then AMD frittered away its lead with manufacturing glitches. That was a long ago in Internet time, beyond the ken of some younger readers, but now AMD is going to try repeating the experience by introducing cloud- and Big Data-oriented x86 server chips that beat out Intel’s current x86 Atom parts. Since the first Opteron and the advent of the cloud, things have changed. Newfangled companies like Google, Amazon, Baidu and Facebook that buy massive numbers of servers aren’t buying machines with faster, more powerful Intel chips inside. Instead they want dense, low-cost boxes that save on power and handle new workloads that cater to simple things like storing and calling up web pages and photos taken on smartphones rather than complex databases.

Delay & Mobiles Are Eating 7.8% of PC Sales: IDC

Wed, 29 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

IDC has once again looked into its crystal ball and sees worldwide PC sales dropping by 7.8% this year as compared to last and figures next year they’ll drop another 1.2% compared to this year, brutal news for the likes of PC and Dell. The researcher, which previously said PCs would only be down 1.3% this year and a gradual increase next year, finds that consumers are increasingly considering either delaying buying a PC or using tablets and smartphones as substitutes. By 2017, four and a half years out, it figures only 333 million PCs will ship worldwide compared to the 349 million that moved last year and the peak of more than 363 million in 2011.

EC Antitrust Police Unhappy with Google Proposal

Wed, 29 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Google is getting pushback from the European Commission, which wants it to come up with a better set of remedies to settle its antitrust case against Google’s search practices, the EC’s competition chief Joaquin Almunia said Tuesday. He also said the EC has gotten complaints about Google’s Android operating system but hasn’t decided yet whether to open a full-blown investigation. Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility recently got a statement of objections (SO) over its control of standard-essential mobile patents. Android has a 60% global market share.

Underworld Banks at Digital Currency Firm, Feds Claim

Wed, 29 May 2013 07:00:00 EDT

Federal prosecutors have accused the Costa Rica-based digital-currency firm Liberty Reserve and its founder of running a $6 billion money-laundering operation that authorities say made it a “bank of choice for the criminal underworld,” the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Five men have been arrested so far in Spain, Costa Rica and New York, including founder Arthur Budovsky. Two others are still sought. They have been charged with money laundering and running an unlicensed money-transmitting business as well as using accounts for credit-card fraud, identity theft, investment fraud, computer hacking, child pornography and narcotics trafficking. Prosecutors said they seized 45 bank accounts and five Internet domain names allegedly used for the operation, including the domain name of Liberty Reserve. Police in 17 countries were involved.

Splunk & Hortonworks Team Up

Tue, 28 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

Splunk, the software platform for real-time operational intelligence, and Hortonworks, the Hadoop Big Data distribution start-up, have allied so organizations can get operational intelligence using open source Apache Hadoop. Their pact means that data can be moved between Splunk Enterprise and Hadoop using Splunk’s Hadoop Connect. According to Splunk’s SVP of biz dev Bill Gaylord, “Splunk Enterprise delivers more value as organizations integrate larger and more diverse datasets to the platform. Hortonworks, with its open source roots and [unique] ability to operate on Microsoft Windows Server, brings an entirely new data proposition to Splunk customers utilizing Hadoop. The integration of HDP and Splunk Hadoop Connect opens up exciting new data possibilities. For example, customers can easily use Splunk Enterprise to collect machine data from across the organization and deliver it to Hadoop for batch analytics. Likewise, the output of Hadoop jobs can be imported into Splunk Enterprise for rapid analysis and visualization.”

CollabNet Out to Dominate Cloud Development

Tue, 28 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

CollabNet, the enterprise cloud development concern, figures the new version of CloudForge it’s put together kicks butt, leapfrogging GitHub and BitBucket by offering the broadest, freest toolkit around, while romancing developers by taking the shackles off its use. The multi-tenant development-Platform-as-a-Service (dPaaS) is now unrestricted even though it’s free. It can build web sites, mobile, cloud and web applications, and rapidly prototype and deploy business software. CloudForge can now be used by an unlimited number of users for an unlimited number of private projects, and it comes with Subversion and Git, the version control fixtures, so these users won’t get lost in their own underwear. If you’ve got something better, bring it along.

Yahoo Reportedly Bids on Hulu

Tue, 28 May 2013 06:00:00 EDT

Yahoo Friday reportedly bid somewhere between $600 million and $800 million for the Hulu video streaming site after it’s just laid out $1.1 billion in cash for Tumblr. The offer’s wide range can supposed be attributed to the various proposals it’s put on the table, including the length of the licensing rights for content and how much control the programming companies selling Hulu have over their media.

Cloudian Creates Connector for Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager

Mon, 27 May 2013 06:15:00 EDT

Cloudian, the cloud storage software company, has got a Connector for Citrix’ CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0 that simplifies the management and delivery of Storage-as-a-Service (StaaS).

Joyent Moves To Take On Amazon

Sat, 25 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Joyent, one of the original infrastructure clouds that set up about the same time as Amazon Web Services but without Amazon’s giant fallback cushion, restructured its cloud line Thursday, adding a bunch of new instances that pretty much map to Amazon’s. It also introduced reserved pricing plans.

VMware Takes Stab at Public Cloud

Sat, 25 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

VMware covered its flank Tuesday when it went into the public cloud business hoping to prevent its installed base of 500,000 strong from skipping off to the likes of Amazon or Azure – which are reaching out to the enterprise – simply because it didn’t have an Infrastructure-as-a-Service alternative that rents out virtual servers and storage over the Internet.

Juniper & Seagate Invest in Cloudscaling

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Cloudscaling, the four-year old start-up that insists it’s got the most advanced OpenStack infrastructure system, has picked up a $10 million B round from Trinity Ventures and two new investors, new strategic partners Juniper Networks and Seagate. It reportedly got a $4 million A round from Trinity in 2011. In April Cloudscaling wheeled out its turnkey Open Cloud System (OCS) 2.5, which it integrated with Juniper’s virtual network control (VNC) technology, JunosV Contrail, signaling their partnership. The two now plan other joint networking solutions that would support a new generation of cloud-aware enterprise workloads. The Register thinks Juniper may wind up buying the company. Cloudscaling also joined the Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance Partner program in April and, as part of the program, it and Seagate are focused on developing optimized storage solutions for OpenStack.

Intel’s New CEO Shakes Up the Joint

Thu, 23 May 2013 06:00:00 EDT

Intel’s new broom has begun to sweep, meaning its new CEO Brian Krzanich, in office four days, started reorganizing the place reportedly to make the old girl more focused and spry. The one-time plant manager has taken direct control of the company’s chip design unit, its fabled Architecture Group, which includes its PC client group, mobile communications operation and data center unit, giving its old boss Dadi Perlmutter the job of leading a so-called management transition effort whose point is unclear.

SolidFire Launches SSD Go-to-Market Program

Thu, 23 May 2013 06:00:00 EDT

SolidFire, the purely solid-state (SSD) storage house whose widgetry is designed for cloud infrastructure, has launched a go-to-market program for cloud providers suitably called “Fueled by SolidFire.” It’s supposed to support third-parties’ development, positioning and growth of services built on its storage technology.

HP Profit Off 32%, Revenue Down 10%, Stock Up 14%

Thu, 23 May 2013 01:30:00 EDT

It could have been worse. HP posted its Q2 results Wednesday when the market closed and came in with earnings down 32% on an adjusted bottom line that beat Wall Street’s tempered estimates. All its geographies and all its product units punked out but the company claimed to be executing to plan and it did generate $3.6 billion in cash flow from operations, up 44%.

Big Data & Cloud Start-Ups Successfully IPO

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Big Data and the cloud each contributed a start-up to the stock market last Friday. Tableau Software, a profitable chart-making BI data visualization firm, IPO’d on the Big Board in New York sporting the highly desirable ticker symbol DATA and selling at the open for $31 a share. It rose to $50.75 by the end of the trading day, up nearly 64%. It has subsequently inched up further and ran as high as $59.60 before falling back a few bucks. Its market cap was $1.9 billion at noon Tuesday.

AWS GovCloud Meets FedRAMP Standard

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:45:00 EDT

Amazon Web Services said Tuesday that its GovCloud (US) in all US AWS regions has gotten an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements at the moderate-impact level. FedRAMP is a US government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Since AWS has demonstrated it can meet FedRAMP’s security requirements, a wider range of government customers can use it to store, process and protect a diverse array of sensitive government data.

Adaptive Planning Gets $45 Million

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Adaptive Planning, which likes to stress that it’s the first and only pure Software-as-a-Service outfit in the performance management space, has taken in a $45 million D round, bringing its total funding to a nice round $100 million.

NetApp To Cut 900 People

Wed, 22 May 2013 04:15:00 EDT

NetApp, which is under pressure from activist shareholder Elliott Management to shape up and return value, said Tuesday that it’s going to can 900 people to spiff up its financials, 400 less that the 1,300 that Piper Jaffray estimated last week.

Dell Keeps a Toe in the OpenStack Camp

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:00:00 EDT

After trashing its public OpenStack cloud efforts Monday in favor of reselling third-party widgetry – and reportedly canning workers in the 300- man group according to TechCrunch – Dell folk who are left were anxious to say that Dell is still in the private OpenStack game, pointing to another press release put out Monday saying that Dell will enable Microsoft’s Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor on the OpenStack cloud platform.

Dell Discontinues IaaS Cloud to Sell Third Parties

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:30:00 EDT

Fancy that. Dell said Monday that its “current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the US in favor of best-in-class partner offerings” that it’ll deliver as a single-source supplier. While it’s preaching the gospel of customer choice, it’s saving badly needed money in the guise of freedom from vendor lock-in and a single point of control. It calls the concept the Cloud Partners Program. Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag have signed up. Dell expects to add more clouds and go beyond IaaS depending on customer reaction.

Yahoo Buys Tumblr for $1.1 Billion to Be Hip

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Looking to hang with the cool kids, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, swearing “not to screw it up,” is buying Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion, a big chunk of her $5.4 billion pocketbook since it’s “substantially all” in cash. The New York-based acquisition will remain a separate business with its 26-year-old founder, David Karp, sticking around as CEO. To try to separate the acquisition from the taint of the aging Yahoo, which is scorned by many of Tumblr’s users, Yahoo said the “product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit and commitment to empower creators.” Karp, soon to be worth an estimated $250 million, said, “Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing. But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo and their team who share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.”

Dell Can’t Make Out Icahn’s Proposal

Tue, 21 May 2013 06:15:00 EDT

Dell’s board has again asked billionaire Carl Icahn and his buddy Southeastern Asset Management for more information about their proposal to take over the company. Icahn asked Dell for more information after Dell posted its quarterly results last week and Dell flatly said “no.” It wants to scope out Icahn’s intentions and see if they’re better than founder Michael Dell’s.

Amazon Buys Display Unit from Samsung

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Amazon has bought Samsung’s mobile display operation Liquavista NV in Holland on undisclosed terms. Bloomberg previously said Samsung was looking for less than $100 million for the place. It’s believed to be for Amazon’s e-readers but it is also reportedly developing a couple of smartphones and a set-top box. Samsung bought Liquavista in 2011. The venture uses a technology called electrowetting that’s supposed to make displays clearer under any light and show videos without using much power. Perhaps it can manage a color screen for the black-and-white Kindle Paperwhite reader. E-reader sales dropped an estimated 28% last year, supposedly for lack of color. Liquavista imagines its widgetry in e-readers, smartphones, GPS devices, portable media players, cameras, laptops and TVs.

Splunk and Cloudera Team on Hadoop

Mon, 20 May 2013 06:45:00 EDT

Splunk, the real-time operational intelligence platform, and Cloudera, the Apache Hadoop player, have fashioned a strategic alliance to deliver Big Data analytics across the enterprise. Splunk Enterprise can integrate with Cloudera’s Enterprise Hadoop distribution using Splunk’s Hadoop Connect, which provides bi-directional integration to move data between Splunk Enterprise and Hadoop. It’s supposed to let customers to use Splunk’s machine data ingestion and management to deliver data to Hadoop, or ingest data into Splunk from Hadoop, such as the output of Hadoop MapReduce jobs, then analyze and visualize the data. Together they expect to attract a broader spectrum of end users. SNAP Interactive is a joint customer of Splunk and Cloudera. It owns and operates AYI, one of the largest social dating applications on the Internet, with more than 20 million Facebook-connected profiles and more than a billion interest data points. Splunk collects analytics data from all of its online systems so engineering and business users can do ad hoc analysis and visualize important trends. Splunk Hadoop Connect then sends data from Splunk to Cloudera for the specialized batch analytics that powers many features on Splunk’s site.