Red Hat acquires Makara for cloud platform

Red Hat jumped back into the acquisition game announcing this morning that it has acquired

Makara, a start-up focused on providing a cloud platform (platform-as-a-service, or PaaS) for Java and PHP applications on both public and private clouds.

The open-source stalwart has been on the PaaS march for the last few months for a number of reasons, including the necessity to support applications in multiple environments and demand for private cloud solutions from large enterprises.

If you read between the lines from Red Hat executive comments (and the rumor mill), it seemed like Red Hat had Makara, or a Makara-like … Read more

IBM floats new government clouds

This week IBM announced new cloud offerings for federal and state governments aimed at providing the scalable infrastructure and ease of deployment available from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

These clouds are hosted at IBM data centers and are multi-tenant offerings restricted to government entities. And while the world doesn't need yet another definition of cloud, this use case of hosted private cloud (note: I'm not sure if this fits as virtual private cloud) is one that I suspect we'll see more and more large data center providers move toward.

For clarity, these clouds are both private and hosted, leading me to wonder if this type of offering will be more appealing than behind-the-firewall private cloud solutions. After all, in this scenario you don't have to buy hardware or hire staff to manage your infrastructure.

To a large extent, these new services look just like hosting did a few years back with the only real difference that the infrastructure is designed to be used in a multi-tenant manner as opposed to having dedicated servers. (Note: most hosting companies ran multi-tenant servers anyway, but the actual technical way of separating the tenants is different with cloud providers.)

It's not that services such as Amazon Web Services EC2 can't perform at the same level of a government-specific cloud offering, but the often challenging requirements related to government computing require a specific way of doing things.

A few weeks back I spoke with IBM CIO Pat Toole, who emphasized the fact that IBM corporate IT has a strong focus on optimizing virtualized servers in cloud-like ways to reduce costs. With nearly 400,000 employees, IBM is as big or bigger than many government entities and has similar challenges related to uptime, security, and storage.… Read more

Microsoft updates SQL for the cloud

Microsoft's latest salvo in the war for cloud relevancy has taken shape as an update to SQL server, the software giant's flagship database product.

Denali, the code name for the next SQL server release, introduces a new development tool for Visual Studio that bridges the gap between building and deploying applications that cross the borders between the enterprise and the SQL Azure cloud service.

According to The Register, Microsoft is scheduled to make the first preview of Denali available to subscribers on MSDN and TechNet. The software will be released at the annual Professional Association for SQL Server … Read more

Optimistic outlook for venture financing

Slated to be released this week, CB Insights Q3 2010 venture capital report shows that more venture-backed deals are happening, but at lower dollar volumes, with seed deals replacing the megadeals we saw in the first half of the year.

According to the report, seed deals (typically less than $1 million) represented just 1 percent of finance deals in the third quarter of 2009, but grew to 11 percent of deals in the third quarter of 2010. In light of the growth of seed finance deals, the median deal size for Series A deals grew to $3.4 million--a five-quarter … Read more

Report: Linux makes gains in server applications

A new report from the nonprofit Linux Foundation shows that Linux continues to grow at breakneck speed and will outpace all other server operating systems over the next five years. Additionally, Linux will be chosen for more than 66 percent of new or "greenfield" applications.

The report, titled "Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users," reflects the results of an invitation-only survey with responses from 1,900 individuals. According to the report, Linux adoption continues to grow for a number of reasons, not just driven by reduced costs, but by technical superiority and security … Read more

Why relational databases make sense for big data

In 2010, the talk about a "big data" trend has reached a fever pitch. "Big data" centers around the notion that organizations are now (or soon will be) dealing with managing and extracting information from databases that are growing into the multi-petabyte range.

This dramatic amount of data has caused developers to seek new approaches that tend to avoid SQL queries and instead process data in a distributed manner. These so-called "NoSQL," such as Cassandra and MongoDB databases, are built to scale easily and handle massive amounts of data in a highly fluid manner.

And while I am a staunch supporter of the NoSQL approach, there is often a point where all of this data needs to be aggregated and parsed for different reasons, in a more traditional SQL data model.

It occurred to me recently that I've heard very little from the relational database (RDBMS) side of the house when it comes to dealing with big data. To that end, I recently caught up via e-mail with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, whose company provides services, support, and training around the open-source relational database PostgreSQL.

Boyajian stressed four points:

1. Relational databases can process ad-hoc queries

Production applications sometimes require only primary key lookups, but reporting queries often need to filter or aggregate based on other columns. Document databases and distributed key value stores sometimes don't support this at all, or they may support it only if an index on the relevant column has been defined in advance.

2. SQL reduces development time and improves interoperability

SQL is, and will likely remain, one of the most popular and successful computer languages of all time. SQL-aware development tools, reporting tools, monitoring tools, and connectors are available for just about every combination of operating system, platform, and database under the sun, and nearly every programmer or IT professional has at least a passing familiarity with SQL syntax.

Even for the types of relatively simple queries that are likely to be practical on huge data stores, writing an SQL query is typically simpler and faster than writing an algorithm to compute the desired answer, as is often necessary for data stores that do not include a query language. … Read more

The short, sweet life of a retweet

New research from social-analytics company Sysomos reveals--surprise!--that your tweets have fleeting value over the course of a day and, moreover, a lifetime.

Using the retweet as a key indicator for the life of a short message, Sysomos examined 1.2 billion tweets posted in the last two months. The data shows that 29 percent of tweets produced a reaction, either a reply or retweet, and that 92 percent of retweets occur within the first hour of the original message.

This is an interesting set of data, with respect to the fact that companies have begun to embrace social media … Read more

International callers ready to go mobile

Consumers are ready to dump their landlines, move to Internet and video calls, and use their mobile devices to call internationally, according to a new survey from Harris Interactive.

While there are many reasons why consumers are looking to switch, the survey data based on a sample size of 2,258 U.S. adults 18 and over suggests that the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones is the primary driver. This is not terribly surprising but does show the vast opportunity still awaiting application developers who can crack the mobile market and evade the carriers.

Here are some tidbits from the … Read more

2010 acquisitions--Microsoft: 0, Google: 23

A recent blog post from information service provider CB Insights reveals a truly shocking piece of news: Microsoft has announced zero acquisitions in 2010, while Google has acquired 23 companies, 75 percent of which are venture financed or angel-backed.

Somewhat perversely, Twitter, which still can't figure out a sustainable revenue model, made three acquisitions related to social media and analytics, while IBM absorbed much of the enterprise software market. In fact, there were only a few acquisitions--primarily hardware related--that wouldn't have been interesting to Microsoft.

There are no doubt a multitude of reasons why Microsoft hasn't been … Read more