by Lydia Leong | August 11, 2011 | 1 Comment
(This is part of a series of “catch-up” posts of announcements that I’ve wanted to comment on but didn’t previously find time to blog about.) Recently, Citrix acquired Cloud.com. The purchase price was reported to be in the $200m+ vicinity — around 100x revenues. (Even in this current run of outsized valuations, that’s a rather [...]
Category: Industry Tags: Citrix, Cloud, RAX, software, VMware
by Lydia Leong | September 17, 2010 | 2 Comments
Rackspace has teased a preview page for a SaaS marketplace called AppMatcher. (It looks to be more of a front-page mock-up than anything actual; note that the “1,000 apps”, “100,000 businesses” bits look like placeholders.) The concept is pretty straightforward: app providers provide info about their target customer, and potential customers provide info about their [...]
Category: Industry Tags: Cloud, ecosystem, hosting, software
by Lydia Leong | August 3, 2010 | 1 Comment
Many businesses fail to save significant amounts of money when they migrate to cloud IaaS, because of the cost of their software stacks. This can happen in a myriad of ways, such as: Getting on-demand hardware by the hour, but having to pay for permanent, peak-load software licenses Paying an “enterprise” uplift on software licenses [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, software
by Lydia Leong | July 21, 2010 | 3 Comments
Rackspace is open-sourcing its cloud software — Cloud Files and Cloud Servers — and merging its codebase and roadmap with NASA’s Nebula project (not to be confused with OpenNebula), in order to form a broader community project called OpenStack. This will be hypervisor-neutral, and initially supports Xen (which Rackspace uses) and KVM (which NASA uses), [...]
Category: Industry Tags: Cloud, CTXS, hosting, open source, RAX, software, VMW
by Lydia Leong | May 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
Historically, software vendors haven’t had to care too much about exactly how their software performed. Enterprise IT managers are all too familiar with the experience of buying commercial software packages and/or working with integrators in order to deliver software solutions that have turned out to consume far more hardware than was originally projected (and thus [...]
by Lydia Leong | May 29, 2009 | Comments Off
The cloud industry is young. Amazon’s EC2 service dates back just to October 2007, and just about everything related to public cloud infrastructure post-dates that point. Your typical cloud start-up is at most 18 months old, and in most cases, less than a year old. It has a handful of developers, some interesting tech, plenty [...]
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by Lydia Leong | March 9, 2009 | 1 Comment
On my more cynical, read-too-many-press-releases days, I wonder if there’s some hapless, tortured PR gnome at Amazon whose job consists solely of vetting one empty cloud fluff piece after another, proclaiming how such-and-such a vendor is now offering deployments on EC2, and how this therefore gives them an on-demand cloud offering (“please think of me [...]
by Lydia Leong | February 22, 2009 | 1 Comment
I have found at a partial solution to my communication proliferation problem. The tool I’m employing, at least for the moment, is Digsby, a free client that combines cross-platform instant messaging with access to social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This has replaced my usual IM client (Trillian, which I like a lot), [...]
Category: Analyst Life Tags: software
