Disruptors

Open source is winning the Java application-server war in the age of the cloud, according to a new survey.

Web application performance company New Relic released results of its recent study on commercial vs. open-source Java application server usage among enterprises. The result: open source is winning by an overwhelming margin when it comes to web applications.

New Relic surveyed 1,000 customers to get some data on the state of open-source in business today. According to the results, over 80 percent of enterprise users across five main industries (business software, consumer internet, ecommerce, gaming, and social web) are using … Read more

A tool from Visual.ly that analyzes and visualizes users through Twitter posts demonstrates one way make easy-to-understand visualizations of big data.

One example of the increasingly important trend of combined analysis and visualization is evident in Visual.ly Labs' Twitterize yourself application, which provides a good representation of how companies can use large data sets to quickly identify user characteristics to increase engagement or upsell goods and services.

I spend most of my time in my day job looking at data across the extended software development life cycle (design, develop, deploy, maintain, etc.), looking for the patterns that show … Read more

You may not need to use the 42nd fastest supercomputer on Earth, but if you want to, you can for just $1,279 per hour.

As reported by Wired, Amazon Web Services latest salvo into the computing on demand landscape is a platform known as the Elastic Cloud Computer, which at $1279 per hour, or $11 million a year if run full time, is probably on par in comparison to the time, effort and expense of procuring the same level of compute power in your own data center.

Amazon's virtual super computer is capable of running 240 trillion calculations … Read more

Re-reading a piece I wrote a few weeks back about the uptick in online sales during Black Friday, I started to wonder if real-time customer intelligence is what is driving online retail growth.

There are undoubtedly a number of aspects to the growth in online sales. But after spending some time with a few of the major online retailers last week--including one who might not be considered a "retailer" in the traditional sense, I realized that the online world has a huge competitive advantage in its predilection toward data analysis with actionable near real-time results.

Amazon's suggested … Read more

Recently, I've noticed a meme spreading through Silicon Valley that questions whether Amazon Web Services' (AWS) current dominant position will hinder the cloud. The short answer: not at all.

I was in a venture capital meeting last week where we were told by one prominent VC that, "Two years ago Amazon was a blessing to startups. Today it is neutral. In two years it may well be a curse." How so? By building up Amazon Web Services to include many services currently offered by other vendors.

And while Amazon does continue to roll out new services, it'… Read more

BlazeMeter, a new cloud-based service for load and performance testing of Web apps, today announced $1.2 million in venture funding.

BlazeMeter--based on the Apache JMeter open-source project is a load-testing application designed to measure the response of putting demand on a system or device.

Load testing typically simulates heavy usage (among other things) to stress the Web application to see how it responds. The aim, of course, is to release into productions Web applications that don't break or degrade--two things that drive away users quickly.

BlazeMeter's founder and CEO Alon Grimonsky told CNET that he built … Read more

The big IT vendors continue to miss the key factor to the adoption of their cloud products: developers.

This past week Oracle announced that it would soon release a new "cloud" product--WebLogic Server 12c (the "c" is for cloud, get it?). The release is geared toward deploying Java EE 6 applications via servers that can be virtualized in a private cloud environment.

Essentially this new offering lets users deploy apps that they would have previously deployed on a physical server into a virtualized environment. And yes, this is something they can pretty much do already, … Read more

Apple's iPhone and iPad helped make mobile devices a key driver of Thanksgiving and Black Friday e-commerce this year, according to a report from IBM Coremetrics.

Online Thanksgiving shopping grew by 39.3 percent year over year, creating momentum that continued into Black Friday, where online sales grew by 24.3 percent compared with the same period last year, said the report (PDF).

And Black Friday witnessed the arrival of the mobile deal seeker, who embraced his or her mobile device as a research tool for in-store and online bargains. Mobile traffic came close to tripling year over year, … Read more

As everything moves to the cloud, the underlying network can make or break your apps.

To address the need for network visibility, Boundary, a developer of real-time network monitoring-as-a-service, today announced a $4 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Boundary, which is focused on providing continuous visibility into network and application traffic flows in public cloud environments, was founded by Ben Black, previously part of Amazon.com's infrastructure team, and Cliff Moon, who was part of Powerset (acquired by Microsoft).

In terms of business models, this is clearly a case where cloud computing has helped … Read more