8th May 2012
The mobile cloud is set to ‘subsume’ cloud computing as we currently know it, according to a study released yesterday by Heavy Reading. Despite cloud’s obvious benefits to the business enterprise, it is the mobile industry where recent hype has centred, with much of the focus based on how companies such as Google, Apple and Samsung are using cloud to woo new customers.
Most of the commentary written about companies moving to the Cloud focuses on the loss of control over company data as a consequence of giving up self-hosted infrastructure. There is usually an implication that this is bad. I believe that is not necessarily a given. How may stories do you read daily about data breaches unrelated […]
It has been more than two years since the European Commission published in January 2010 its pioneering report about the Future of Cloud Computing. A group of experts was established with the aim to evaluate the state-of-the-art and develop future research directions in cloud computing. Since then, there has been considerable advances in the field, developments have closed some gaps that were identified in this report, but more challenges have emerged.
We were re-convened by the European Commission in 2011 in order to capture these changes and maintain a state-of-the-art view on cloud computing technologies, its position in and its relevance for Europe. The experts, led by Keith Jeffery, Lutz Schubert and Maria Tsakali, have produced a final version of this report entitled Advances in Clouds – Research in Future Cloud Computing.
The report brings valuable information for people defining Cloud Computing strategies, developing innovative research lines, or exploring emerging market opportunities beyond today’s Clouds. It is a must-read.
The bare bones skeleton of the Canada Cloud Roadmap is now available – This provides the outline document that we will then populate with exciting new Cloud products and services. The first of these is ‘UCaaS’ – Unified Communications as a Service. How we build and launch new Cloud services is the magic formula that […]
About six years ago I wrote a blog titled “I have no idea what Web 2.0 means“. That blog had link to a video where IT leaders were helplessly trying to explain what Web 2.0 means. One guy said something like this, “Everyone wants to do it, and you can’t find enough people to do […]
Gaining visibility to application performance is key. Application Performance Management (APM) solutions are not new and provide insight to tiers within an application stack. With the entry of cloud based computing in the past couple of years, the APM world got a bit more complex. APM is mature enough to consider cloud-based providers in the […]
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Patrick Houston — VCs devoted $6.9 billion in 2011 to “Internet-specific” startups, a proxy term for “cloud” because that’s what most of them are doing, according to Steve Bengston, a director of a startups practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. That’s up 68% from last year.
In Q4 alone, cloud-related investments of $1.8 billion outdistanced the dollars that went into biotech ($1.3 billion), cleantech ($883 million,) and medical devices ($498 million.)
It’s not just the amount. It’s the number of deals, too. During all of 2011, VCs funded 1,004 software startups that were mostly in the cloud–or more than double the 446 biotech companies that received dough.
Not all those companies will survive to deliver a product one day, of course. A large number of startups makes the chance of success more likely.
Remember, VCs have a clear imperative to find the money. But it …
When Yahoo ignored Third Point’s ultimatum to fire CEO Scott Thompson for cause by high noon Monday Third Point read Yahoo Delaware General Corporation Law and demanded that the company open all its records about how it came to hire the man at the center of “ResumeGate.”
It wants them ready for inspection and copying by Friday, another deadline.
Section 220(b) of the Delaware General Corporation Law says any stockholder can inspect certain books and records of a public company on written request. If Third Point doesn’t get what it wants it will doubtless sue in Delaware’s reportedly stockholder-leaning Chancery Court.
Meanwhile, the Yahoo board is supposed to be doing its own investigation of how it came to make a regulatory filing saying Thompson got an undergraduate degree in computer science and accounting from Stonehill College, a Catholic school near Boston, when it was only in accounting.
Yahoo claimed last week that it was just an “inadvertent error,” but it appears that Thompson has been making that “inadvertent error” for years like at eBay where he was president of PayPal.
In a letter to the board Monday Third Point said, “We believe that this internal investigation by this Board must not be conducted behind a veil of secrecy and shareholders deserve total transparency.”
Third Point is Yahoo’s biggest shareholder and is embroiled in a proxy fight with the company aimed at filling four board seats with its own people.
The hedge fund happened upon and immediately advertised the discrepancy in Thompson’s CV last week.
It also discovered that the head of the board’s search committee Patti Hart fudged her resume too and claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics when it’s really in business administration. It wants her gone too.
Third Point wants any records related to her appointment to the Yahoo board as well as any records of how Peter Liguori, John Hayes, Thomas McInerney, Maynard Webb, Jr. and Fred Amoroso happened to get board seats.
If it gets its hands on the documents, Forbes thinks Third Point is going to find that Thompson wasn’t vetted at all; that no head hunter was involved; that there were no other candidates; and that Thompson simply reached out to the board and two weeks later was CEO. If so it will strengthen Third Point’s case of board mismanagement, an easy enough case to prove given Yahoo’s history.
It wants the board to drop its resistance to Third Point’s nominees for the board which include Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb, Maeva Group CEO Harry Wilson, former MTV Networks president Michael Wolf and former NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker. Yahoo claims Loeb isn’t qualified to sit on the board.
Meanwhile, and utterly coincidently, Yahoo is supposedly working on a new deal to sell maybe 15%-25% of its holdings in Alibaba back to the China e-commerce company. A deal, which has previously eluded the two companies, could reportedly be done in weeks.
Thompson has supposedly been leading the latest negotiations.
This deal is supposed to be simpler than the others they tried and would see Yahoo pay heavy taxes on its gains. Of course selling an increasingly valuable asset that’s supposed to represent a large part of Yahoo’s $18.8 billion market cap may not strike everybody as the sensible thing to do right now no matter how much Alibaba complains.
Yahoo owns about 40% of Alibaba and the valuation is unclear. Its valuation last year was $32 billion. Yahoo hasn’t been able to bridge a “valuation gap” with Softbank, the majority owner of Yahoo Japan, so that deal’s going nowhere.
SYS-CON Events announced today that ComputeNext Inc. will exhibit at 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.
What’s the scope of your “single pane of glass”? If you’re a cloud architect wouldn’t you be better suited with a telescope than a magnifying glass? The ComputeNext marketplace and workload manager sprawls across public clouds, eliminating vendor and platform lock-in.
A single point of payment and integration enables choice and flexibility to build, deploy, and manage servers from a vast selection of platform-agnostic infrastructure – empowering businesses to maximize utilization of compute resources.