“I have taken some time to assess my ability to balance the demands of leading the Rack with the needs of my family,” wrote Rackspace President Lew Moorman in an email to all staff this morning. For a variety of health-related family reasons, he told them, he will be handing off his day-to-day responsibilities to other members of Rackspace’s senior leadership team. The process will take several months, after which – Moorman explained – he will “step down as president and chief strategy officer and assume a much more limited role.”
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Intel Wants To Re-Architect the Data Center
Intel wants to re-architect the data center to rapidly deliver new services efficiently and at scale through the cloud in an age of massively growing network connections and scads of real-time unstructured data, not to mention its need to ensure its own continued relevance and growth.
With no real mobile business to offset the global plunge in PC sales, down lately 11% year-over-year, Intel last week reported Q2 revenues down 5% year-over-year to $12.8 billion while returning earnings of $2 billion in line with expectations. It trimmed its Q3 expectations to $13.5 billion plus or minus $500 million.
Cloud Computing, Big Data & Smart Mobile Apps to Drive IT Spending in 2014
Big bucks continue to be spent on hardware and software, with a marked increase in cloud services, according to a new report.
Forrester released the data of its annual survey on IT spending worldwide and detected areas with higher spending, including apps and tablets.
Forrester Research’s annual report on worldwide IT spending split the amount of $2.06 trillion spent this year from businesses and governments between hardware, software and services related to the IT world. CIOs and IT decision-makers plan their biggest software spending increases in mobile applications and middleware, analytics, security, and collaboration software, according to an article on CloudTimes.org.
Software registered the largest share of tech spending in 2013 and companies will continue to spend in this segment particularly on smart and cloud computing in 2014. While investment in legacy applications (both desktop and server) begins to languish, most investment moves towards cloud computing solutions, SaaS solutions development and towards the smart computing, i.e., Big Data and mobile application development.
Ben Golub, Who Sold Gluster to Red Hat, Now Running dotCloud
Ben Golub, the former CEO of Gluster, the storage venture gone to Red Hat for $136 million, is now CEO of another promising venture-backed open source start-up, two-year-old dotCloud.
DotCloud first came to market toting a multi-language Platform-as-a-Service that proved revenue-producing but is now consumed with a project called Docker that has claimed much of its technology.
Docker is an open source engine that quickly wraps up any application and all its peculiar dependencies in a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that can run virtually anywhere on anybody’s infrastructure.
It’s a take on the old Java promise of write once, run anywhere.
CoreSite Reports Second Quarter Results
CoreSite, provider of network dense, cloud enabled data center solutions,has announced financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2013.
Tom Ray, CoreSite’s Chief Executive Officer, commented, “We are pleased to record a solid quarter of growth for CoreSite, and importantly, one that reflects the continued success we are seeing in our network-centric, differentiated strategy. We remain focused upon continuing to increase the number and quality of customer deployments in our portfolio and enhancing the value proposition of the CoreSite Mesh. We executed 115 new and expansion leases in the quarter including agreements with 33 new customers. Additionally, we are pleased with the continued evolution we saw in our sales mix, recording an increasing number of leases bringing high-value applications to our platform.” Mr. Ray continued, “Regarding growth, we continue to invest to meet customer demand, with four data center projects under way. We believe that we have considerable upside embedded in our portfolio as we increase the utilization of existing and new inventory, positively mark to market expiring capacity, and most importantly, continue to drive increased network density and valuable customer communities across our data centers.”
Cloud Computing: How Can Companies Reduce the Security Risk?
In the last five years, organizations have increasingly embraced cloud applications to help them innovate and transform their business. Applications that automate sales processes, HR management, collaboration, email and file sharing are growing fast and enabling organizations to meet their needs in a shorter timeframe than ever before.
Cloud applications are ubiquitously employed across all industries. However, there are increased concerns about security and compliance of sensitive information, particularly in banking, insurance and in the public sector. A wide range of regulations and privacy laws make organizations directly responsible for protecting regulated information, but when this data is stored in the cloud, they have less direct control over leaks, theft or forced legal disclosure.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: The Hybrid Cloud
“I think 2013 is the year of hybrid cloud – it’s really starting to take off now. It’s the combination of public cloud, private cloud and dedicated infrastructure working seamlessly together to provide the best application platform, but it’s also providing reliability, availability, performance and lowest TCO,” stated Lisa Larson, VP of Enterprise Cloud Solutions for Rackspace, in this in this interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at our Times Square Studio in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Prolexic Raises $30 Million Round
Prolexic Technologies, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation company, has gotten a $30 million Series C round led by new investors Trident Capital and Intel Capital.
That makes $51.9 million altogether. Its existing shareholders include Kennet Partners, Camden Partners and Medina Capital.
Trident will get a board seat.
The 10-year-old company says its year-over-year revenues are up 65% and its EBITDA is positive.
The company says this year it mitigated the single largest attack in its history (167 gigabits a second), as well as the world’s most powerful attack campaign (144 million packets a second).
AWS Goes to Court over CIA Contract
Amazon has gone to the US Court of Federal Claims in Washington, DC, to get the CIA to follow through on the four-year $600 million cloud contract it was awarded earlier this year.
IBM, which also bid for the contract, objected to Amazon getting it claiming price discrimination because the evaluation wasn’t apples to apples, so to speak, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found some terms were relaxed only for Amazon, recommended that negotiations be reopened and the RFP clarified.
The CIA is supposed to decide what it’ll do early next month. Amazon is hoping for a judicial decision by September 23.
It claims the spy agency got it right based on Amazon Web Services technical superiority and best value. And wouldn’t you know, most of the complaint is under seal. Seems some information in it is under a GAO protective order.
SOA Software API Management Honored by American Business Awards
“We’re leading the charge into the cloud for American businesses,” said SOA Software EVP Roberto Medrano as SOA Software announced that its API Management solution is a Finalist in the American Business Awards “APIs are the backbone of the new, interconnected world of web commerce – we make it safe and manageable for everyone,” noted Medrano. “We are honored for the recognition of the American Business Awards for this work.”
A panel of corporate executive judges conferred the honor on the API Management Solution, deeming it the best new cloud platform software product of the year. The awards, known as the “Stevies”, were created to honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and business people worldwide.