Rackspace is going to acquire a two-year-old Y Combinator e-mail start-up called Mailgun.
Terms were not disclosed but, aside from Y’s seeding, it looks like the fledgling only raised $1.1 million last year.
Mailgun provides a web service for integrating e-mail inboxes into apps like Twilio lets developers build voice and SMS in their apps.
It says it enables functionality like private user mailboxes, photo uploads from cell phones, e-mail-driven comments and discussion groups.
Rackspace says the deal will let it offer cloud-based e-mail services in applications and web sites.
Freshbooks Takes SMB Accounting Mobile with new iPhone, iPad App
FreshBooks today launched a new mobile accounting app designed to fit the lifestyle of today’s small businesses owners, giving them the freedom to run their business anytime, anywhere.
Following their recent re-positioning as cloud accounting, the free mobile app further demonstrates the FreshBooks commitment to being in the corner of service-based businesses. The mobile app strengthens existing features like expense management, P&L reporting and online payment integration to help make the lives of small business owners easier.
The new FreshBooks iPhone app works anywhere, whether you’re tracking time from the coffee shop, logging expenses from the airport lounge or sending an invoice right from the client’s office. Simple and intuitive, FreshBooks makes it easy to have an at-a-glance view of your business.
“The FreshBooks iPhone app was created so that small business owners could have even more flexibility with their FreshBooks account and access it from wherever their work takes them,” said Mike McDerment, FreshBooks co-founder and CEO. “We know that people go into business to pursue their passion and serve their customers, not to learn accounting. That’s the difference with FreshBooks cloud accounting: it’s simple, accessible everywhere, and saves small businesses time on their billing.”
The FreshBooks iOS app has all the key features of the web version of FreshBooks, including the streamlined ability to send professional-looking invoices, get paid online with Paypal and attach expenses directly to invoices. Invite staff or sub-contractors to projects to log hours as you work and generate invoices from timesheets to enjoy seamless collaboration. FreshBooks is designed to support businesses of all types: lawyers, marketing and IT professionals, plumbers, interior decorators, even an architect–anyone who creates value for their clients by applying their time and expertise.
Download the free iPhone app to create a new free account.
The Human Factor in Cloud’s Next Big Thing
Where will the cloud computing model of service-based virtualized computing resources for data storage and processing grow next? This is arguably the biggest question facing technology analysts today – and if we knew the answer we could all probably sleep a little more soundly.
Before we can answer this question, perhaps we need to break it down and determine what exactly we are really trying to clarify.
Migrating E-Commerce Applications to the Cloud
The e-commerce industry is experiencing a sudden spurt in their sales in India and thus we can see an explosion in the e-commerce business in near future. The e-retail industry in India is expected to touch USD 70 billion revenue by 2020. It’s a huge market and certainly would be a game changer in the way the IT industry is perceived in India. Indian IT industry would no longer be just a back office for outsourced software development work for US companies. This would certainly be a big push for MNCs such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft to re-think about their existing business strategies around India. Probably the technology centers they have in India would be given business targets and would not be treated just as cost-lowering technology centers.
Big Daddy Don Garlits & the Cloud: Capable Vs. Functional
I know what you’re thinking, yet another car analogy, but bear with me, I think you’ll like it…eventually 
When I was a kid, like around 11 or 12, during the summers I would ride my bike into town to go to the municipal pool to hang out with my friends and basically have fun. On my way to the pool I used to ride past a garage and body shop in my neighborhood and sometimes I would stop to look around. One day I found it had a back lot where there were a bunch of cars parked amongst the weeds, broken concrete and gravel. I don’t remember thinking about why the cars were there except that maybe they were in various states of repair (or disrepair as the case may be…lots of rust, not a lot of intact glass) or that they were just forgotten about and left to slowly disintegrate and return to nature.
Back then I do remember that I was seriously on the path toward full-on car craziness as I was just starting to dream of driving, feeling the wind in my hair (yeah, it was that long ago) and enjoying the freedom I imagined it would bring. I was a huge fan of “Car Toons” which was sort of the Mad Magazine of cars and basically lusted after hot rods, dragsters and sports cars. I was endlessly scribbling car doodles on my note books and in the margins of text books. I thought of myself as a cross between Big Daddy Don Garlits and a sports car designer. In fact, I used to spend hours drawing what I thought was the perfect car and would give the design to my dad who, back then, was a car designer for the Ford Motor Company. I have no idea what ever happened to those designs but I imagine they were conspicuously put in his briefcase at home and dumped in the trash at work.
Anyway, among the various shells of once bright and gleaming cars in that back lot, almost hidden amongst the weeds was a candy-apple red Ford Pantera or, more accurately; the De Tomaso Pantera that was designed and built in Italy and powered by a Ford engine (and eventually imported to the US to be sold in Lincoln/Mercury dealerships). The car sat on half-filled radial tires (relatively new to the US) and still sparkled as if it just came off the showroom floor…haa ha, or so my feverish car-obsessed, pre-teen brain thought it sparkled. It was sleek, low to the ground and looked as if it were going 100 miles an hour just sitting there. It was a supercar before the word was coined and I was deeply, madly and completely in love with it.
Of course, at 12 years old the only thing I could really do was dream of driving the car—I was, after all, 4 years away from even having a driver’s license—but I distinctly remember how vivid those daydreams were, how utterly real and “possible” they seemed.
Fast forward to now and to the customers I consult with about their desires for a building a cloud infrastructure within their environments. They are doing exactly what I did almost 40 years ago in that back lot; they are looking at shiny new ways of doing things: being faster, highly flexible, elastic, personal, serviceable—more innovative—and fully imagining how it would feel to run those amazingly effective infrastructures…but…like I was back then, they are just as unable to operate those new things as I was unable to drive that Pantera. Even if I could afford to buy it, I had no knowledge or experience that would enable me to effectively (or legally) drive it. That is the difference between being Functional and Capable.
The Pantera was certainly capable but *in relation to me* was not anywhere near being functional. The essence and nature of the car never changed but my ability to effectively harness its power and direct it toward some beneficial outcome was zero; therefore the car was non-functional as far as I was concerned. The same way a cloud infrastructure—fully built out with well architected components, tested and running—would be non-functional to customers who did not know how to operate that type of infrastructure.
In short; cloud capable versus cloud functional.
The way that a cloud infrastructure should be operated is based on the idea of delivering IT services and not the traditional ideas of servers and storage and networks being individually built, configured and connected by people doing physical stuff. Cloud infrastructures are automated and orchestrated to deliver specific functionality aggregated into specific services; fast and efficiently, without the need for people doing “stuff.” In fact, people doing stuff is too slow and just gets in the way and if you don’t change the operations of the systems to reflect that, you end up with a very capable yet non-functional system.
Literally, you have to transform how you operate the system—from a traditional to a cloud infrastructure—in lock-step with how that system is materially changed or it will be very much the same sort of difference between me riding my bicycle into town at 12 years old and me driving a candy-apple red Pantera. It’s just dreaming until the required knowledge and experience is obtained…none of which is easy or quick…but tell that to a 12 year old lost in his imagination staring at sparkling red freedom and adventure…
Clustrix to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Clustrix, provider of a radically simple SQL database, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Clustrix is the scale-out SQL database for Big Data applications. Clustrix provides a radically simple SQL database that enables applications to scale to unlimited users, transactions and data, while eliminating database sharding and automating fault tolerance. Customers include Symantec, AOL, MakeMyTrip, Photobox, and Massive Media.
Amazon “just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper”
Good article in the New York Times on the effect of AWS on startup access to major computing resources. Great takeaway quote:
“I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I’d need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue’s 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”
He conceded that “I don’t even know what the ballpark number for a server is — for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”
Read the full article.
The Challenges of Cloud: Infrastructure Diaspora
One of the negative’s of cloud computing is it’s one-size-fits-all approach to infrastructure. A single load balancing system (and subsequently configuration) is considered acceptable for all applications. After all, it’s just about distributing requests, isn’t it?
Except it isn’t, and neither are myriad other infrastructure services that provide not only customized services for applications but additional benefits not currently offered by what are commoditized versions of functionality.
Even assuming an organization is using a fairly non-customized Load balancer, there is a disparity between the algorithms supported by the industry and those supported today by cloud computing providers. If you don’t think something as simple as the choice of a load balancing algorithm has an impact on availability and performance, think again. The reason there’s a list of more than six “industry standard” algorithms is the maturation of distribution algorithms over time. Different methods are better suited to specific types of applications and usage patterns, while those same algorithms are wholly unsuited for others. Determining the best algorithm is part of the process of deploying said solutions, and one that’s completely ignored by providers of cloud computing load balancing services.
On Dog Years, Cloud Years, and A-years
Innovations are commonly judged by how fast they reached 50 million users (Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years, etc.). Another way to look at this is by time equivalents: If one Dog Year equals 7 human years than how many years of traditional IT do we travel in one Cloud Year?
This cloud year we saw quit a lot of change – also from existing mega vendors entering the cloud market – but did it match 7 years of progress in traditional IT (taking us roughly from SOA till today)? And do we really expect the next three years to bring as much change as we saw since the days of client-server or the next seven years to be the equivalent of the journey from the days of the mainframe to today?
IBM Buys Kenexa in $1.3 Billion ‘Me Too’ Move
IBM is following in the recent footsteps of Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com and buying a cloud-based talent recruiting and management platform.
Its pick is Kenexa which also sells consulting. It’ll pay about $1.3 billion or $46 a share, a 42% premium to Kenexa’s close on Friday so you know the shares shot up to close the divide.
IBM says the acquisition will let organizations act on insights-driven analytics to create a smarter workforce across every line of business. It sees an “enormous opportunity” to apply advanced social business and analytics capabilities to front-line business operations and quotes CEO Ginni Rometty saying “organizations can think of Big Data as the next great natural resource.”