Yahoo Sunday finally cut a deal with Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd.

It’s agreed to sell half its 40% stake back to the Chinese e-commerce company for at least $6.3 billion in cash and $800 million in preferred stock. Alibaba will also pay Yahoo $550 million up-front and royalties for operating Yahoo China for at least four years.

The companies have been trying to negotiate a deal for the last two year through four Yahoo CEOs, whichever way you count.

Alibaba is supposed to go public by the end of 2015, which will give Yahoo the opportunity to dispose another 10% of its shares. Either Alibaba will buy them at the IPO price or Yahoo will sell them in the IPO.

Yahoo bought its stake in Alibaba in 2005 for $1 billion. If Yahoo had only been as astute in valuing Microsoft’s $47.5 billion acquisition offer four years ago. Microsoft offered $33 a share for Yahoo, which hasn’t seen the upside of 20 bucks a share since.

Alibaba represents a hefty piece of the US company’s $19 billion market cap.

The Chinese company is looking for $2.3 billion from existing investors to pay the tab and the amount Yahoo realizes depends on how equity financiers value Alibaba. It needs a valuation of $35 billion-$40 billion to pay Yahoo $7.1 billion; $45 billion would give Yahoo $7.6 billion and $50 billion $8.1 billion. Alibaba was valued at $32 billion in September.

According to Yahoo CFO Tim Morse Yahoo intends to pay capital gains taxes on the deal, netting at least $4.2 billion after taxes and return “substantially all” of that to shareholders. The deal is expected to close in the six months.

Alibaba runs Alibaba.com, its core B2B site, as well as two of China’s biggest online shopping sites Taobao and Tmall, the first for small merchants and second for established brands.

One of its biggest problems is logistics, which basically stink in China. Payments are also a problem, according to Bloomberg, and it’s facing share-eating competition. Being Chinese, counterfeit goods are a constant issue.

Alibaba spun off its Alipay payment unit last year to a company controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma without telling Yahoo and claimed later that the Chinese government wouldn’t license an electronic payment service that wasn’t entirely Chinese-owned. It eventually made some restitution. It’s believed Alibaba may want to expand its payments position.

Softbank still owns 30% of Alibaba. It and Yahoo have agreed to dilute their voting rights below their combined 50% share ownership, giving Ma the control he craves.

Yahoo will be able to make other investments in China if it chooses. Yahoo and Alibaba are also reportedly talking about strategic initiatives.

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Cloud computing is creating the new Wall Street boom, according to NIA. The only industry that is as bright as cloud computing on Wall Street is social networking, NIA said in a recent report.
2012 will be known as the year cloud computing became widely adopted worldwide. Cloud computing is expected to create 14 million new jobs globally by 2015. In the consumer space, Gartner predicts cloud services will be on 90 percent of personal consumer devices by 2015 so consumers can store, connect, stream and synchronize content across multiple platforms at different locations. That’s a lot of tunes and apps.
So far this year, there have been three IPOs of cloud computing stocks, and all three IPOs have been major successes, indicating cloud computing is ready for primetime on Wall Street. And where the money goes, jobs follow.

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EMC is throwing itself a little party known as EMC World this week in Las Vegas, and has already made several cloud-related announcements while in town. One of them (see end of this article) led me to think about sending Big Data to the moon.

Hybrid Approach
Hybrid cloud – a term I hope goes away soon, along with public and private cloud – was central to an announcement about the VMax family of enterprise-storage arrays. In a nutshell, EMC says this storage is bigger, faster, and easier to deploy. It’s also aimed at customers with concerns about Big Data, too. The “simplified management capabilities (of VMAX) are central to achieving the level of performance, data protection, and management customers are facing,” according to Benjamin Woo of IDC.
The VPlex operating environment received an upgrade, too, and now delivers 40% more performance than before, according to EMC. The company claims “the industry’s only high availability three-site data center protection solution for active/active Hybrid Cloud deployments with its RecoverPoint software running within VPlex.”

I’ll Recover
Speaking of backup and recovery, EMC also announced new deduplication systems and software aimed to address bottlenecks caused by legacy backup systems, ie, “dealing with slow and unreliable tape-based recoveries.” Jason Buffington from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) said EMC meets the need of “IT transformation initiatives (who) are driving new requirements for backup and recovery, and users need to be able to architect and optimize their data protection infrastructure to meet their specific needs.”

BFF VMware
EMC didn’t leave VMware out of the mix, announcing an extension of the companies’ partnership, to deliver to storage analytics. Specifically, the EMC VNX Storage Analytics Suite and EMC VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite are planned to be available this quarter, the companies said.
VMware VP Ramin Sayar said, “the powerful combination of EMC storage intelligence and VMware’s vCenter Operations Management Suite will offer automated optimization and simplicity for our joint customers…organizations of all sizes can proactively manage their overall infrastructure system health, as they continue to automate and transform their IT infrastructure.”
Rich Napolitano, President of EMC’s Unified Storage Division noted “the benefits of total transparency into storage systems, in both physical and virtualized infrastructures, (which) are staggering. VNX Storage Analytics Suite is designed to capitalize on this transparency by offering simplified storage management, optimized performance and easily maintained service levels for unprecedented efficiency.”

Big Data
As far as Big Data goes, EMC’s cloud announcement was a bit more vaporous, with an announcement of “readying” the next version of the Isilon OneFS NAS operating system – code name “Mavericks.” The company said the new version, due sometime this year, will bring “new levels of data protection, security, system performance and interoperability.”

IDC’s Benjamin Woo was quite excited about this one, saying, “A major factor that sets Isilon apart in this era of Big Data is its interoperability with a wide array of applications delivered through a range of industry standard protocols. Isilon recently enhanced this capability to include native integration with Hadoop. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is again raising the bar on interoperability with enhanced integration with VMware and a new platform API that provides additional options to enterprises to integrate and manage Isilon storage systems with third-party applications….innovations like these strongly position Isilon scale-out NAS to help enterprises successfully address the challenges of Big Data.”
ESG’s Terri McClure was also enthusiastic, saying, “EMC Isilon pioneered the delivery of scale-out NAS to address these needs. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is building on that leadership by providing increased levels of data protection and performance to meet the still emerging business requirements in this new world of Big Data in the enterprise.”

VaaS, perhaps?
“IT-as-a-Service” – isn’t that the same thing as Infrastructure-as-a-Service? – was the topic of EMC’s DataBridge enterprise management tool announcement. Databridge “mashes up” (ie, converges) IT operations data, “transforming silos of disparate compute, storage and network management information into use-case specific DataBridge widgets for better visibility across the infrastructure,” EMC says.
Also available “later this year,” DataBridge puts real-time IT infrastructure management onto ye olde “single pane of glass,” the company says. Oh, I get it .. it’s IT-Management-as-a-Service. Howzabout Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS)?
In any case, EMC’s DataBridge “will include the DataBridge studio, an enterprise mashup environment where customers will go to build DataBridge widget. With DataBridge studio, customers can build and add new DataBridge widgets to their DataBridge library to share with others in the organization,” the company says.
Stuck in the Middle With You
You mid-range customers shouldn’t feel left out, as EMC has reduced by 38% the initial acquisition cost for Flash drive tiers. Its VNXe series will also deliver 50% more performance and capacity per rack unit, the company says.
ESG weighed in on this one, too, with Mark Peters saying, “EMC’s multifaceted enhancements to its VNX unified storage family hit on many different, crucial storage pain points experienced by IT generalists. EMC’s transformation of its midrange storage offerings…demonstrates its deep understanding of its target customers.”

To the Moon & Beyond
Finally, EMC announced a Atmos enhancements designed to allow the biggest of Big-Data customers to manage a 100-petabyte cloud as a single system across distributed sites, with obligatory performance improvements.
You know, if you stacked Quad Density, 720K, 5.25-inch floppy disks, at about six disks per inch, a 100-petabyte stack would reach far beyond the moon…seriously.

read more

EMC is throwing itself a little party known as EMC World this week in Las Vegas, and has already made several cloud-related announcements while in town. One of them (see end of this article) led me to think about sending Big Data to the moon.

Hybrid Approach
Hybrid cloud – a term I hope goes away soon, along with public and private cloud – was central to an announcement about the VMax family of enterprise-storage arrays. In a nutshell, EMC says this storage is bigger, faster, and easier to deploy. It’s also aimed at customers with concerns about Big Data, too. The “simplified management capabilities (of VMAX) are central to achieving the level of performance, data protection, and management customers are facing,” according to Benjamin Woo of IDC.
The VPlex operating environment received an upgrade, too, and now delivers 40% more performance than before, according to EMC. The company claims “the industry’s only high availability three-site data center protection solution for active/active Hybrid Cloud deployments with its RecoverPoint software running within VPlex.”

I’ll Recover
Speaking of backup and recovery, EMC also announced new deduplication systems and software aimed to address bottlenecks caused by legacy backup systems, ie, “dealing with slow and unreliable tape-based recoveries.” Jason Buffington from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) said EMC meets the need of “IT transformation initiatives (who) are driving new requirements for backup and recovery, and users need to be able to architect and optimize their data protection infrastructure to meet their specific needs.”

BFF VMware
EMC didn’t leave VMware out of the mix, announcing an extension of the companies’ partnership, to deliver to storage analytics. Specifically, the EMC VNX Storage Analytics Suite and EMC VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite are planned to be available this quarter, the companies said.
VMware VP Ramin Sayar said, “the powerful combination of EMC storage intelligence and VMware’s vCenter Operations Management Suite will offer automated optimization and simplicity for our joint customers…organizations of all sizes can proactively manage their overall infrastructure system health, as they continue to automate and transform their IT infrastructure.”
Rich Napolitano, President of EMC’s Unified Storage Division noted “the benefits of total transparency into storage systems, in both physical and virtualized infrastructures, (which) are staggering. VNX Storage Analytics Suite is designed to capitalize on this transparency by offering simplified storage management, optimized performance and easily maintained service levels for unprecedented efficiency.”

Big Data
As far as Big Data goes, EMC’s cloud announcement was a bit more vaporous, with an announcement of “readying” the next version of the Isilon OneFS NAS operating system – code name “Mavericks.” The company said the new version, due sometime this year, will bring “new levels of data protection, security, system performance and interoperability.”

IDC’s Benjamin Woo was quite excited about this one, saying, “A major factor that sets Isilon apart in this era of Big Data is its interoperability with a wide array of applications delivered through a range of industry standard protocols. Isilon recently enhanced this capability to include native integration with Hadoop. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is again raising the bar on interoperability with enhanced integration with VMware and a new platform API that provides additional options to enterprises to integrate and manage Isilon storage systems with third-party applications….innovations like these strongly position Isilon scale-out NAS to help enterprises successfully address the challenges of Big Data.”
ESG’s Terri McClure was also enthusiastic, saying, “EMC Isilon pioneered the delivery of scale-out NAS to address these needs. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is building on that leadership by providing increased levels of data protection and performance to meet the still emerging business requirements in this new world of Big Data in the enterprise.”

VaaS, perhaps?
“IT-as-a-Service” – isn’t that the same thing as Infrastructure-as-a-Service? – was the topic of EMC’s DataBridge enterprise management tool announcement. Databridge “mashes up” (ie, converges) IT operations data, “transforming silos of disparate compute, storage and network management information into use-case specific DataBridge widgets for better visibility across the infrastructure,” EMC says.
Also available “later this year,” DataBridge puts real-time IT infrastructure management onto ye olde “single pane of glass,” the company says. Oh, I get it .. it’s IT-Management-as-a-Service. Howzabout Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS)?
In any case, EMC’s DataBridge “will include the DataBridge studio, an enterprise mashup environment where customers will go to build DataBridge widget. With DataBridge studio, customers can build and add new DataBridge widgets to their DataBridge library to share with others in the organization,” the company says.
Stuck in the Middle With You
You mid-range customers shouldn’t feel left out, as EMC has reduced by 38% the initial acquisition cost for Flash drive tiers. Its VNXe series will also deliver 50% more performance and capacity per rack unit, the company says.
ESG weighed in on this one, too, with Mark Peters saying, “EMC’s multifaceted enhancements to its VNX unified storage family hit on many different, crucial storage pain points experienced by IT generalists. EMC’s transformation of its midrange storage offerings…demonstrates its deep understanding of its target customers.”

To the Moon & Beyond
Finally, EMC announced a Atmos enhancements designed to allow the biggest of Big-Data customers to manage a 100-petabyte cloud as a single system across distributed sites, with obligatory performance improvements.
You know, if you stacked Quad Density, 720K, 5.25-inch floppy disks, at about six disks per inch, a 100-petabyte stack would reach far beyond the moon…seriously.

read more

The Cloud comes in many flavors, types and shapes and the terminology can be daunting. You’ve got Public vs. Private. vs. Home grown. You’ve got compute, storage and database not to mention identity, caching, service bus and many more. Then there are the several players including Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, Force, and too many others to list them all.
That’s a lot to learn, but if you’re curious to see what’s been happening with the Microsoft Cloud and get a feel for the direction things are heading then you want to check out the recently announced Microsoft event “Meet Windows Azure” live in San Francisco on June 7, where the people who are in the drivers seat will take time to share their space.

read more

The Cloud comes in many flavors, types and shapes and the terminology can be daunting. You’ve got Public vs. Private. vs. Home grown. You’ve got compute, storage and database not to mention identity, caching, service bus and many more. Then there are the several players including Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, Force, and too many others to list them all.
That’s a lot to learn, but if you’re curious to see what’s been happening with the Microsoft Cloud and get a feel for the direction things are heading then you want to check out the recently announced Microsoft event “Meet Windows Azure” live in San Francisco on June 7, where the people who are in the drivers seat will take time to share their space.

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As a Bronze Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, Appcore is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Appcore manufactures the business of cloud computing. Appcore delivers Infrastructure-as-a-Service technology to telcos, data centers, fiber rings, and enterprises to enable Public (service provider) and Private (enterprise) cloud environments. Appcore’s flagship product, Appcore Onsite, is a certified, integrated stack of hardware and software systems designed to be data center roll-in ready, accelerating the deployment of cloud environments.

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Perhaps the next technological wave that will revolutionize how we live is the communication between devices, known as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Humanity has imagined such a world many times in the domain of science fiction, including on TV shows such as “Star Trek” and “The Jetsons.” Now we see this concept coming to fruition as technology leaders make strides toward enabling intelligence in and between devices.
According to ABI research, there will be 50 billion new M2M devices on the market in the next 10 years. In fact, AT&T – once synonymous with just phones – has recently certified more than 1,000 new connected devices to work on its network, mostly within the M2M market. Additionally, most worldwide mobile network operators (MNOs) have created specialized business units to address this market, since wireless radio technology is one of the key communication mediums between devices to enable M2M applications.

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Vegas to Boston, with a nice glass of scotch in my hand, I settled in for yet another red eye flight (I am getting way too old for this). There was plenty of time to reflect on what had been a jam packed couple of days at the IBM Impact 2012 global conference themed, “Innovate, Transform, Grow.” Already in high gear, our partnership with IBM was highlighted in a 451 Research report IBM chooses AppZero as application virtualization partner for SmartCloud written by Rachel Chalmers @rachelchalmers.

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Many key benefits make the Dell MDC a compelling alternative for your data center solution.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Steve Cuming, Executive Director of Data Center Solutions at Dell, will take a look at the hyper-efficient, snap-together, flexible choice made by two of Dell’s key customers. He will discuss the reasons customers are moving away from traditional brick and mortar or pod-type data centers to the Dell Modular Data Center (MDC) solution.
Steve Cuming joined Dell earlier this year as part of the Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) group, one of the world’s leading suppliers of cloud computing infrastructure.

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