While it is fun to watch the 800 lb Gorilla squash every one, Amazon has to face competition at some point.

Even just for the sake of something to write about! While AWS is fundamentally amazing, it’s now quite a well established and therefore boring facet of the market. It’s far more interesting to explore who might rise to give them serious threat, and how.

My bet is on Google, who else. They’re eating the whole world so why not Cloud hosting, and who does large-scale data centres better? These guys are the ‘Titans of Cloud’, they’re fighting it out on a playing field far above any one else and once they go at it, this will be like a boxing match between Zeus and Odin!

One key point I’ve highlighted to folks about Google IaaS is that in contrast to its other products, like …

Last spring SUSE announced the addition of a new channel program that provides further assistance to SAP channel partners. Since then SUSE has signed up more than 400 members in 57 countries that are SAP channel partners delivering the version of the SAP Business One application that works with and is powered by the SAP HANA platform.
The SUSE channel program, in conjunction with the overall SUSE partner program operated by PartnerNet, provides members direct access to free SUSE technical training, pre-sales support and installation software. This provides them with the tools they need to deploy SAP Business One version for SAP HANA, running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Linux technical training through the SUSE Certified Linux Administrator Academy, a 10-week online program, has been the most requested service. In addition, channel partners authorized to resell the version of SAP Business One designed for use with SAP HANA receive access to the SUSE Installation Wizard, a powerful automation tool that streamlines deployment of SAP Business One running on SAP HANA with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Esri will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Esri inspires and enables people to positively impact the future through a deeper, geographic understanding of the changing world around them.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10–12, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Much of the dialog over net neutrality seems rather dated. This is understandable, since the debate has been going on since last century.
The January 14th Federal Appeal Court decision in favor of the Internet access providers gave those companies (apparently) a degree of latitude to selectively block or prioritize edge provider services. We know that they want to do this, even though they might be coy about admitting it. Verizon, the plaintiff in the recent appeal case, issued a statement saying that nothing much will change as a result of this decision. We all expect Verizon and the other ISPs to take advantage of this change to the maximum extent they can. If they don’t their shareholders might be a bit upset, after spending all that time and money.

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TwinStrata on Wednesday announced the results of its “Industry Trends: Data Backup in 2014” survey. Conducted between December 2013 and January 2014, the report analyzes responses from 209 IT personnel.
The results indicate an urgent need for organizations to make significant improvements to their backup strategies with one in five organizations experiencing back-up failures at least monthly and one in 10 weekly. As a result, 53 percent of organizations plan to make changes to their backup strategy this year. Incorporating cloud storage was the remedy most often cited by these respondents.

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To say that cloud security for cloud computing is gaining traction would be the understatement of our era. Whether in public clouds, private clouds, or hybrid scenarios – it seems like everyone is in the cloud. Healthcare providers, eCommerce, disaster recovery services, data storage . . . the types of cloud services available seem to cover every base. What would Darwin think about his “Survival of the Fittest” evolving from animal species to businesses who take advantage of the flexibility, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing?

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Patrik Sallner, the CEO of Finnish database proprietor SkySQL, wants to make something clear. His company’s latest product, MariaDB Enterprise, was not designed with a certain Redwood-based relational database provider in mind.

“We’re not specifically targeting Oracle or anybody else here,” he tells CloudTech. “We’re just making an offering available which we clearly know there’s a strong demand for.”

This appears to be the company line, although other tech outlets, from The Register to ZDNet, thought otherwise.

The MariaDB Enterprise product, announced last week, is built upon the open source MariaDB Server and Galera Cluster software, on the Linux OS, and is offered as a renewable one year subscription package either on-premise, virtualised or in cloud.

Sallner instead describes the update as “something which is feasible for somebody without deep MySQL expertise”.

The product’s high availability comes from being able to cluster databases without a …

We all know the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, but have you heard the one about Goldie Locks and the three clouds? This tale is playing out throughout the IT marketplace.
Goldie Locks – an IT executive for a state government – has once again found herself in a dilemma. “If only I could choose one of the three options,” she sighs. Goldie’s dilemma is a result of competing requirements within her enterprise. Regarding infrastructure costs, Goldie has been told to “do more with less.”
“If someone says that one more time, they’re going to have porridge thrown at them,” she huffs. Goldie knows that standardizing infrastructure requirements to serve the business and its processes securely, reliably and quickly is a proven way to reduce capital and operational costs. On the other hand, various business units and their departments have specific requirements for their mission-critical applications. They are resisting giving up control.

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Olivier Amar loves the Internet and the experience that a good application can provide by accessing your data. But with years of experience in online performance marketing for companies like AIG, WSOP, Harrahs, ElAl, GetTaxi and Toyga Financial, he understands how exposed our personal information is in apps and in the cloud, and how breaches of trust that can occur when we ignorantly trust a developer with our private information.
With over 700K applications on both the Android and iOS market, tens of millions of sites and services using connection protocols, and rough privacy guidelines for developers to follow at best, there is simply no real way for an end user to know whether or not they should trust an application or the developer to use their data securely and ethically.

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