What’s Special about the Joyent Funding Round? There is nothing special about small companies or startups getting funding, other than the obvious vindication of the opportunities in cloud computing. In fact, such funding stories have been the focus of several articles here (See the latest one: Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money: UPDATE 8). However, there’s something different, and in my opinion, special, about the $85 million round of funding closed by San Francisco cloud services provider Joyent (http://www.joyent.com/). What’s special about this round of external financing is not the amount (which, by prevailing standards, is quite impressive) or the
cloud computing for dummies
Cloud Computing and the Travel Agent: Thomas Cook Signs 10-Year Deal with Accenture Calling Thomas Cook a travel agent may be akin to calling the Taj Mahal a marble building, but its business depends on the same things as any business – responding rapidly to customer demand and minimizing costs while maximizing revenue. Taking this into consideration, it’s not surprising that Thomas Cook has decided to go on the cloud through its service provider Accenture. England-based Thomas Cook Group plc is one of the world’s leading leisure travel groups with sales of £8.9 billion ($13.7 billion) and 22.5 million customers.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective CTOs “While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.” – Stephen R. Covey, management guru and author of the bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I will readily admit it; the title’s a derivative of Covey’s self-help book that has sold more than 15 million copies in 38 languages since it was first published in 1989. Although the seven “habits” I am about to mention will never help as wide an audience as Covey’s general advice, they can definitely help the
Gaming on the Cloud “Gaming is no child’s play; it’s big business!” Quick, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you visualize gaming? If you are thinking “unsocial teenager whose only exercise is moving his fingers on the computer keyboard”, you are wrong. While unsocial teenagers do comprise a big chunk of the gaming market, the appeal of video/computer games transcends demographics. Gaming’s universal appeal is why it racks up the big numbers. Since the last two years, gaming has been bringing in more revenue than Hollywood. Individual titles have outperformed the biggest blockbusters, and the trend is
Amazon Chief Technology Officer talks about the Cloud Computing Ecosystem At the Cloud Connect conference currently on in Santa Clara, California, Amazon Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Werner Vogels spoke about what he called the “cloud computing ecosystem.” By “ecosystem”, Vogels was referring to the gamut of services built upon the base of Amazon’s cloud-based platform EC2 that actually enhanced the cloud computing experience. These included those developed by Aspera, BitNami, Riverbed, Safenet, Acquira, etc. Although these are not household names, they are instrumental in making cloud computing more acceptable to organizations worldwide, thereby creating an environment where the technology can
Real Estate And Cloud Computing A recent report released by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) in the UK set me thinking about the potential of cloud computing in the real estate market. If there’s one professional who would really love remote access to prodigious amounts of data that have been filtered down to usable information, it’s the real estate professional. In this one sentence, we have mentioned application of shared storage, data mining and remote access – all possible, in fact the salient features, of cloud computing. Oh yes, there are the reduced cost implications to consider as
Cloud Computing For Dummies: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS And All That Was “I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils;” – From The Daffodils by William Wordsworth (1770-1850), famous English Romantic poet. There was once a time when you entered “cloud” on Google, and the results you got on the first page were of the cumulo-nimbus and cirrus varieties, in other words, those that dealt with the clouds which form through condensation of atmospheric water vapor. Not so today. Nowadays, you are
