The rise of smartphones is having an impact across the entire technology food chain from chip makers to handset manufacturers. San Francisco-based Heroku, which has been focused on being a Ruby-on-Rails cloud platform, has seen a sudden demand for its service from mobile app developers.  Read More →

One of the most fun areas of any tradeshow is the startup pavilion: a place where smaller companies can rent a kiosk. So I wandered through the pavilion at VMworld and discovered plenty of interesting startups attacking the hot market segments today. Here are some.  Read More →

Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at ARM Holdings , a Cambridge, U.K.-based company that makes semiconductors powering a majority of the smartphones, tablets, 70 percent of world’s hard drives and half the world’s printers, is on a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley. And what everyone (including me) wants to talk to him about is servers, or rather low-power server chips that can power the data centers of tomorrow. With... 

This week, a relatively large group of technology companies, along with NASA, launched OpenStack , an open source project designed to give businesses and service providers a top-to-bottom, and already proven, cloud computing platform. I’m all for openness, but as I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, it’s do not too difficult to play devil’s advocate and make the case that OpenStack won’t create true rivals for leading cloud providers... 

Say hello to OpenStack , an open-source cloud platform, which hopes to compete with several proprietary cloud platforms including those being developed by Microsoft and VMware . RackSpace is spearheading the project and is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers to the OpenStack project. The project is also going to incorporate technology from the Nebula Cloud Platform developed by NASA. Here are the key components of... 

I wrote a few weeks ago that “Microsoft taught the world how to succeed in PC and business software, but it might [be] teaching the world how to not succeed in cloud computing” However, that’s a fate it could avoid if it just delivered on a clear vision. As I point out in my weekly column for GigaOM Pro, it looks like Microsoft has decided on that vision: Treat cloud computing like it treated the PC business. With the announcement... 

Server virtualization created cloud computing. Without the ability to run multiple logical server instances on a single physical server, the cloud computing economics we know today wouldn’t be possible. Most assume that server virtualization as we know it today is a fundamental enabler of the cloud, but it is only a crutch we need until cloud-based application platforms mature to the point where applications are built and deployed without... 

Twitter has scaled back its plans to store billions of tweets using Cassandra, a non-relational database project that Facebook created and open sourced. Friday night, Twitter said that it will still use Cassandra in a new real-time analytics project it is building, but the decision to move away from plans to migrate tweets from its current MySQL database to Cassandra is seen by some as a blow to startups and open-source projects that are attempting... 

The race to find relevance in the reams of social data that flows past us every day is never-ending. To take just two examples, Facebook is busy trying to filter the “likes” of half a billion users and turn the results into a usable search engine , while Twitter (along with a number of third-party services) is attempting to figure out who follows who so it can make recommendations to them. The biggest problem for both is that analyzing... 

There are public clouds like Amazon’s EC2, and private clouds run by many large institutions that exist behind firewalls, but some networking and storage experts believe that the big opportunity for infrastructure companies and service providers in the future will be in finding ways of blending the private and public, or creating bridges between the two. As Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, told the GigaOM Structure conference , there... 

Supercomputer experts, including the chief information officer of NASA’s Ames Research Center and a computer strategist for the U.S. Army’s research and development center, said at the GigaOM Network’s Structure conference today that scientists are still working towards developing an “exascale” computer — that is, one that can do a million trillion calculations per second — to try and keep up with the... 

A few years ago when working for Wily Technologies (acquired by CA), Issac Roth, then an enterprise application management expert became increasingly frustrated with how long it took to develop and deploy applications inside an enterprise. He watched his friends develop web applications and run them off Amazon’s cloud services. He decided to do something about it — in 2008 he left his job and started Makara , cloud application platform... 

Selling cloud computing –- especially of the externally hosted variety -– to established businesses is no easy feat. They understand the potential benefits, but they’ve just spent years and possibly large sums of money on virtualization efforts , and they have their own specific problems that aren’t easily addressed by one-size-fits-all cloud offerings. As I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro , in order to remedy such sales obstacles,... 

Computing is finally transitioning from a long-in-the-tooth, client-server paradigm to a network-centric one, and in the process opening up opportunities for companies that want to duke it out with incumbents such as Microsoft and Oracle. Among them is Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware , which has made a fortune selling virtualization products under the leadership of CEO Paul Maritz. Maritz will be participating in a fireside chat with me at our... 

Among the many innovations that virtualization has brought to the data center is server mobility, or the ability to live-migrate virtual machines (VMs) across physical servers. With it comes a marketing story that dynamically moving VMs inside a single data center or between two data centers is a seamless process. While at some point that will undoubtedly be true, it’s far from an operational reality today. In the meantime, there are numerous...