Rackspace Offers Windows Cloud Servers
Today, Rackspace announced the release of Windows based Cloud Servers to compete with Amazon EC2 Windows instances and Windows Azure. According to Rackspace, the new service delivers a highly scalable environment ideal for Windows-based hosting, testing and developing applications and supporting the high levels of traffic required for launching online gaming platforms or the next [...]
OSCON Week: Microsoft And Interoperability
Using Microsoft and Interoperability in the same sentence makes me chuckle every time. Well, partly it could be due to my open source bias and I am not denying that. Off late, Microsoft has been making half-hearted attempts to embrace open source. I use the term “half-hearted” here because they do show some serious willingness [...]
Why Windows Azure Is Not Available For On-Premise Deployments?
When Microsoft announced Windows Azure appliance few days back at PDC10, I was critical of their plans to sell the technology bundled with hardware from their partners. What I expected from Microsoft was the availability of Azure stack to be used with the existing infrastructure, something like what one can do with Eucalyptus, for example. [...]
After Dilly-Dallying For A While, Microsoft Jumps Into Private Cloud Business
After sending confusing signals for some time, Microsoft firmly jumps into Private Cloud game with their “Azure Appliance” announcement today at their Worldwide Partner Conference at Washington DC today. In June this year, I quoted an interview given by Bob Muglia to CNET and ranted that Microsoft’s use of the term cloud for a combination [...]
Zuora and Azure Hook Up to Bill the Cloud
And here was me thinking the cloud was all about altruism – no folks, it’s about money, pure and simple. Saving it at the buy-side, making it at the sell-side. News today from Zuora (see disclosure) that they will join the Microsoft Windows Azure Technology Adoption Program (TAP) as the first on-demand billing and subscription [...]
Microsoft’s Private Cloud Is #NotACloud?
Image by ahockley via Flickr While talking about Private Clouds on Twitter, Sam Johnston (who is currently with Google and involved in OCCI , Cloud Audit, etc.) used to refer to them as #notacloud. His argument is that the so called Private Clouds are nothing but virtualization with management interface slapped around it. Even though [...]
T Shirt Friday #45 – Microsoft Azure
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with [...]
EngineYard Goes Upmarket with its Ruby PaaS
Just the other day Krish posted about the new partnership between Apigee and Heroku the Ruby PaaS player. Hot on the heels of that announcement comes news that EngineYard are partnering with TerreMark to provide a more enterprise class Ruby PaaS. First some background – EngineYard already has AppCloud, a mid level Ruby PaaS offering [...]
Differentiating in a Commoditized World: On Syncplicity and Expanz
At the Cloud Connect event in San Jose, Allister Croll gave an excellent presentation, actually as an aside, Croll ran close to half of the Cloud Connect sessions and really did a sterling job of managing the conference. Anyway – in his session Croll was talking about the opportunities for investment in the cloud and [...]
Dissecting Steve Ballmer’s Cloud Talk
Yesterday Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a talk on Cloud Computing at the University of Washington, Seattle. Check out the video of the entire talk here. Let me briefly highlight the key points from his talk and then offer my perspectives on it. He was highlighting five key dimensions of the cloud Cloud creates opportunities [...]
How HP could give IBM a run for its money in Cloud Computing Security
HP starts offering a unified Cloud and in local data center security package that aims to take on IBM directly. With the deals that HP has been making with Microsoft and using the skills and talents that came along with HP’s acquisition of EDS, this just might end up being an interesting race to the [...]
Microsoft Flicks the Switch on Azure, Acumatica Standing By
Yesterday at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference the switch will finally be flicked on Microsoft’s long awaited cloud computing offering Azure. Of course spinning up an infrastructure offering is one thing, having products and services to run on it is another – and this is where my accounting/ERP interest dovetails nicely with our cloud computing [...]
Are You Ready For Some Azure?
Today is the first day at PDC ’09 and lots of talk about Windows Azure. Being a Cloud focused blog, I thought Cloud Ave should do some coverage here. Unfortunately, none of us are attending the event but I am catching up with their video. If you want to watch the video, feel free to [...]
Windows Azure TCO Calculator
It has been just over a year since Microsoft announced about their Cloud Computing platform, Windows Azure. This year’s PDC is just around the corner and Azure is going to dominate the event. You can check out some of the sessions you can expect in this year’s event. For those who were in deep coma [...]
Yes, Microsoft Can Become The General Motors Of Software
Recently, Jay Galbraith wrote an article on Fortune Brainstorm Tech asking “Will Microsoft become the General Motors of software”. He was pointing out to the complex politics inside the software giant, especially the middle managers in the desktop division. It is a great article to read. He even doubts whether the Azure efforts will get [...]
