Economics

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

After nearly 25 years of relative consistency and market dominance by the likes of EMC and NetApp, there's been a recent flurry of activity in the storage industry. In the past few weeks, Fusion-io was valued at nearly $1.95 billion after its first day of public trading and next-generation storage start-ups Pure Storage and Tintri each closed sizable new funding rounds ($28 million for Pure Storage, $18 million for Tintri).

Spurred by the rise of technological innovations like cloud computing and virtualization, storage is undergoing a major transition--the likes of which it hasn't experienced since the rise … Read more

Most open-source companies rely on business models (and development models) that aim to leverage large global communities of users and developers. The goal? Monetize some percentage of a very large number of community members. So it's hard to imagine a more unlikely candidate for an open source play than Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), an industry dominated by big enterprise proprietary vendors such as Oracle and SAP that sell to Global 2000 organizations.

Openbravo, a Spanish-based ERP start-up, recently expanded its sales and executive footprint to the United States (the company's third largest market), with new CEO Paolo Juvara … Read more

New Relic is one of those unusual companies where an entrepreneur who helped create an entire product category--application performance management (APM), a billion-dollar industry--comes back for a do-over that aims to put his first company, Wily, out of business.

New Relic CEO and founder Lew Cirne (the company name "New Relic" is an anagram of his name), spawned the first SaaS-based APM start-up in 2008 as an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. Today, New Relic is announcing what it says is the first Real User Monitoring solution from a SaaS vendor.

Cirne compares real user monitoring with … Read more

Marketers have become more realistic about how to best engage their audiences, according to the results of a new IBM survey.

The State of Marketing 2011 report presented today at a marketing event in Boston covered nearly 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes. Results reveal that marketers have become more practical about their expectations for both mobile and social marketing, as well as the realization that their efforts are strongly tied to IT, especially when it comes to making marketing campaigns actionable for the end-user.

From the survey results:

Private company research firm CB Insights is set to release a new report today on the state of venture capital financing for the first quarter of 2011. The short version: things are looking good, if a bit frothy, with Q1 registering $7.5 billion of venture capital funding invested in 738 deals.

In relation to the last quarter of 2010, there were only three more deals in Q1 of 2011, and both quarters included roughly half of Groupon's $1 billion funding, which doesn't quite explain how Q1 saw roughly $1 billion more in financing for roughly the same … Read more

The Hadoop open-source project for distributed compute processing continues to be one of the most interesting projects for managing the vast amount of data being analyzed and collected in a wide variety of scenarios.

Today, Cloudera, a provider of Hadoop data management software and services, is set to release a major release of its open source software distribution--Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH), including Apache Hadoop v3.

Cloudera's CDH3 distribution is an integrated set of components and functions that interoperate through standard APIs and manage required component versions and dependencies.

CDH3 is an integrated stack that includes not just software … Read more

Tintri this week is coming out of stealth mode with a new storage system designed to solve the unique storage problems of virtual machines (VMs). Founded by the former head of VMware R&D, the company is also announcing it raised $17 million from venture firms NEA and Lightspeed Partners.

Storage has long been a lucrative market, heavily dominated by just a few players. The introduction of a virtualization-oriented solution brings new blood and a new approach to a rather stagnant industry. And, considering the enormous growth of virtualization, an approach that IT staff should certainly be interested in. … Read more

IBM is putting its expertise in data analysis and business process to work under a new initiative called "Smarter Commerce" to help make sense of what consumers want and help vendors to better target offers.

"Smarter Commerce" is a reaction to the shift in the dynamics of commerce as a whole, with the customer leading the path to sales, according to Yuchun Lee, VP of enterprise commerce for IBM. The newly packaged offerings are designed to help businesses engage customers with a higher level of relevancy, putting the customer back to the center of the business … Read more