Hit the Road, Jack: Autos Motor to the Cloud Cloud computing has always sought to empower consumers with a bit more vroom. The auto industry now looks to capitalize on the cloud’s abundant horsepower for tech-savvy motorists. As with most pioneering pushes into the car world, auto shows look to be the inaugural playing field for cloud computing in the cars of the future. Ford Motors was astute in publicizing its newfound appreciation for the cloud at the Detroit Auto Show. Though beleaguered by decades of economic dilapidation, Detroit remains America’s auto manufacturing Mecca. The city offered a backdrop of
Companies
Can Cloud Computing Be Bad For Microsoft? Microsoft and Cloud Computing share a strange relationship. On one hand, Cloud Computing threatens Microsoft’s dominance in the personal computing space through its Windows OS and Office suite; on the other hand, Microsoft accepts the inevitable progress of Cloud Computing and is investing considerable resources in that space – some may even argue, a bit too much (See: Is Microsoft Taking A Risk By Putting All Its Eggs In The Cloud Computing Basket?). Now, analysts have started asking questions whether cloud computing can be bad for Microsoft’s bottom line. According to Goldman Sachs
Some Recent Cloud Computing Acquisitions As an industry matures, consolidation occurs and some prominent players emerge. With big companies already staking their claims in this space – a phenomenon which I had argued differentiated the cloud computing fervor from the dotcom bubble (See: Are Cloud Computing Stocks Overvalued?) – it was only time that the bigger fish started swallowing the small ones (See: Is Consolidation Coming to Cloud Computing?). While startups are always on the acquiring companies’ radars (See: Acquisitions of Cloud Computing Startups Speed Up), some mid-size companies are also attracting considerable interest. This article features two such recent
LAPD Refuses To Go On the Cloud Google Mail may be the most popular email service in the world, but it evidently fails to meet strict security guidelines as laid out by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). On 14 December 2011, the Los Angeles City Council voted to scale back the city’s email services contract with Google partner Computer Science Corp. (CSC) from 30,000 to 17,000 employees citing Google Apps’ inability to meet certain FBI security requirements. Consequently, the city’s 13,000 law enforcement employees will continue to use the existing Novell GroupWise applications. To add salt to its wounds,
(Super)computing On the Cloud $1279 an hour – seems a lot to hire a computer, right? What if it’s a supercomputer capable of performing 240 trillion calculations per second, or 240 teraflops (a flop is the acronym for floating point operations per second, the universal measure of a computer’s performance)? This is the performance promised by the latest innovation from the Amazon stable – the supercomputer on the cloud. This cloud supercomputer runs on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and features Intel’s Xeon 8C 2.60 GHz processor with 10G Ethernet interconnects providing 65,968 GB of capacity and 17,024
Promising Cloud Storage Start-ups for 2012 As always, storage remains an integral part of the Cloud in 2012 with a number of storage start-ups that you should an eye on. With big data set to become even bigger this new year you can see some Hadoop regulars in our list along with some other new mentions. Check them out below: Nimble Set to launch its paid services in January 2012 Nimble has had a more than reasonable time to spread and create interest in the social CRM market. While it’s offering of $15 per business user may be somewhat higher
