April 9th, 2013

Rackspace Rolls Out Its Mobile Plan As Vendors Get Giddy About Backend Data Pipes And Spigots

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Suddenly all this backend stuff is hot. Who would have ever thought that data pipes and the spigots would get so much attention? Salesforce is getting into the game and now so is Rackspace with the launch of its mobile push. Rackspace does not call its new offering backend as a service (BaaS). Instead they call it a “mobile-ready” stack that pre-packages the backend for developer so… → Read More

March 29th, 2013

State Of The Platform As A Service Market, A Discussion For Deploycon

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The spring tech tour continues next week in Santa Clara with Deploycon, and I will be there to discuss the spectrum of PaaS providers and how they play across this broad, malleable and often manipulated sector of the market. It has become apparent that the platform as a service (PaaS) market has reached a pivot point. I have written about two companies that have pivoted in recent weeks, and we… → Read More

March 10th, 2013

How App Stores Can Become A Catalyst For A Developer-Focused IT Universe

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After my panel on Friday at SXSW, Paul Underwood of Deloitte and Will Lovegrove, CEO of Datownia, approached me to talk about their companies. Their viewpoints demonstrate the direction of enterprise app development and the shift to a developer-centric IT world. → Read More

February 20th, 2013

Appsecute Offers Social Stream For DevOps To Manage Apps On Cloud Services

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Appsecute launched last year with a platform that gave customers a single view across any platform as a service (PaaS). Today the company is showing a change in focus with an activity stream style service for developer and operations (DevOps) professionals to see across the multiple services that are used for application management. → Read More

December 17th, 2012

Forrester Report Shows Amazon AWS Reigns Supreme With Developers As Windows Azure Gains Momentum

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Big surprise: Amazon Web Services (AWS) reigns supreme as the developer platform of choice while Windows Azure is showing impressive growth, according to a survey conducted by Forrester Research.

The third-quarter survey compares how cloud developers are using the cloud. The report looks at the potential growth of the different services; the state of the platform as a service (PaaS) market; how… → Read More

December 15th, 2012

Google Could Loosen Amazon’s Cloud Grip With Pay-Per-Use API Services

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Editor’s note: Chris Potter is co-founder of ScreenLight, a cloud video collaboration service for video producers to review and approve video with their teams and clients.

Google recently rolled out a number of enhancements to its Cloud Platform products. With these changes, it’s clear that Google is aiming its sights directly at Amazon Web Services and other IaaS providers, such as Windows… → Read More

December 4th, 2012

Heroku’s New Add-Ons Marketplace Is A “Program In A Box” For Developers

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Heroku announced a new version of its Add-Ons Marketplace to give developers a “program in a box,” so they can focus on the apps they’re developing instead of spending time on such issues as marketing and billing. → Read More

November 28th, 2012

An Interview With Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy

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I interviewed Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy today at the AWS re:Invent conference. Before the interview I asked my Twitter followers for questions to ask.

I could not use all of the questions but I’ve included a few here to give you a snapshot of the full recording, which is embedded below. → Read More

September 11th, 2012

Pagoda Box Is Easier Than Amazon Web Services, But More Customizable Than Heroku

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I’ve had a sense for a while that infrastructure-as-a-service (like Amazon Web Services) and platform-as-a-service (like Heroku) are converging. Developers love the idea of using a PaaS to speed up provisioning and deployment, but don’t necessarily want to completely give up control of their environments. One sign of this convergence is Pagoda Box, a PaaS that provides a deeper level of control… → Read More

August 1st, 2012

AppFog And Rackspace Want To Break Your App Out Of Amazon’s Walled Garden

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During the great Amazon Web Services outages of April 2011 and June 2012 many users were stuck. They could, in theory, move their apps to another AWS region, or to another cloud provider altogether. But in practice the architecture of AWS regions are unique – each one supports slightly different features and APIs.

The thing is, every cloud provider will eventually have some downtime. Quite… → Read More

July 28th, 2012

Why Platform Clouds Need to Be More Like App Stores

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The app store model, pioneered by companies like Handango and popularized by Apple, has become the preferred method for distributing software on everything from desktops to post-PC devices. We’re also seeing this model in the cloud, mostly through software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, such as the Google Apps Marketplace. But what’s been missing so far is a platform-as-a-service that allows you… → Read More

July 16th, 2012

Paul Maritz Out As VMware CEO And Mentioned As Candidate For Top Spot At EMC Or Cloud Foundry Spin Off

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Paul Maritz is out as the CEO of VMware and will be replaced by EMC COO Pat Gelsinger.

Maritz spent four years at VMware. It’s uncertain what he will do but rumors have swirled all day about about his departure. → Read More

July 13th, 2012

Nodejitsu Takes On Heroku, Microsoft Azure With Node.js Platform Cloud

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Nodejitsu announced a long awaited public beta for its Node.js platform cloud service this week, that runs on Amazon Web Services, Joyent or Rackspace. The company also offers suites of tools for deploying, monitoring and managing Node.js applications in both public and private cloud environments. → Read More

July 11th, 2012

IBM Tweet Chat Today: The Economics Of IT – What It Means In The New Age Of The Cloud and Big Data

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I am moderating an IBM tweetchat that starts in just a few minutes at 10 a.m. PST. The topic: “The Economics of IT – Cost and Benefits of Integrated Systems.” Follow the hashtag #ExpertSysChat to participate.

There is a debate about the relationship between the cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the solutions oriented offerings that you see from IBM. I expect we will… → Read More

July 4th, 2012

Sorry IBM – A Big Box Is Not A Platform As A Service

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In April, IBM rolled out a big new machine called IBM PureApplication Systems, a member of the PureSystems technology family.

At the time, I  called IBM out for calling it a “PaaS in a Box.” It reminded me of Larry Ellison calling Oracle’s hardware a “cloud-in-a-box” back in 2010. Well, IBM is continuing its PaaS washing. Krishnan Subramanian just tweeted about a new IBM post that went up… → Read More

April 13th, 2012

Readers: What’s Your Cloud Strategy?

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I get press releases every week about some new (or old!) company and their so-called cloud solution. Some folks are clearly abusing the popularity of the “cloud” buzzword, and others are actually doing interesting things with distributed computing, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service, orchestration, and related technologies. Amazon is the prime mover on IaaS, but OpenStack, CloudStack and… → Read More

December 19th, 2011

VMware Cloud Foundry PaaS adds support for .NET

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VMware, whose core products specialize in virtualizing Windows and Linux workloads, is making some interesting maneuvers in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space with their Cloud Foundry offering.

CloudFoundry.com is a hosted PaaS solution, in which people can deploy and run their web apps without ever mucking around with the underlying OS or application stack. There’s also the Micro Cloud… → Read More

November 15th, 2011

Red Hat’s OpenShift Adds Full Java Lifecycle Offering

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Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service offering has been in public beta for a while now. It offers a fairly simple way for people to jumpstart “cloud” development efforts by abstracting out all the messy business of setting up application and database servers. Instead, you simply publish your source code to OpenShift, and their platform does the rest. Supported languages are those used heavily… → Read More

August 23rd, 2011

Engine Yard Acquires Orchestra To Add PHP Support To Its PaaS

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Engine Yard, a provider of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, this morning announced it has acquired Orchestra, developer of a platform for deploying, scaling and managing PHP applications.

Engine Yard, which is backed by investors like Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com, opted not to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. → Read More