Author: Barb Darrow

The Cambridge Innovation Center, where numerous Boston-area startups have spent time, plans to launch similar workspaces in Baltimore and St. Louis, according to a report in Monday’s Boston Globe.  It also plans to add more space locally.

Located in Kendall Square near MIT  – and with VMware, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and Oracle offices within a stone’s throw — CIC hosts innumerable hackathons and meetups, becoming a hub of the Boston-area startup scene.

Startups can rent a desk at CIC’s Cambridge Co-working Center for $535 a month or, if they prefer, they can plunk down $5,200 per month for  a swank, three-person office with a view.

CIC claims to have launched more than 1,000 companies since opening 23 years ago

Tim Rowe, CEO of the center and a partner at New Atlantic Ventures told the Globe, the goal is to “create communities of people who are making an impact … We really should be doing that everywhere.”

Co-working spaces are booming — especially in areas where real estate prices are sky high. Many San Francisco area startups launch from RocketSpace, and New York has lots of co-working options, as GigaOM’s Ki Mae Heussner has reported.

Photos courtesy of Flickr user ilamont.com

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Amazon bests Apple in consumer appeal

Amazon is the most widely admired U.S. company, edging out last year’s favorite, Apple, according to the new Harris Interactive Poll on most reputable companies. The online book seller and cloud services provider ranked in the top five in five of six criteria and its combined  reputation quotient or “RQ” score was 82.62. Harris takes various factors including quality of products and services; workplace environment; social responsibility; financial performance; and emotional appeal to calculate the RQ, querying some 14,000 respondents.

Anything over 80 is viewed as excellent. Amazon got nearly 100 percent positive rankings on “all measures related to trust and tremendous support  and “word of mouth,” according to Harris’ summary. Those words must come as music to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ears. He continuously champions Amazon’s customer service and low pricing as key to its success — although some bearish Wall Streeters might differ with him on that.

To be fair, this score is probably more related to amazon’s consumer-focused e-commerce service than its less visible (to consumers anyway) Amazon Web Services IT services for rent business

Apple trailed Amazon with an RQ of 82.54.

Other fun facts from Harris:

• Bank of America remained in Harris’ bottom 5 companies, but also saw the largest reputation rebound of 6 points.
• Google was the only other tech company in the top ten with an RQ of 81.32
• Microsoft ranked 15th an RQ of 76.46
• Dell came in 26th with 73.05
• IBM logged in at 28th at 72.21
• Hewlett-Packard ranked 34th with  70.01
• Facebook, new to the list, debuted at 42nd with an RQ of  65.63

NTT climbs aboard Cloud Foundry

NTT, Japan’s gigantic telco is making Cloud Foundry the basis of its upcoming Platform as a Service. It  joined Cloud Foundry Core,  a push launched last year by VMware to make its open-source Cloud Foundry the basis for a slew of compatible higher-level PaaSes. And a bunch of companies – AppFog, ActiveState, Uhuru, and Tier 3– now all offer Cloud Foundry-based platforms.

According to a February 12 NTT guest post by Hideki Kurihara, product lead for NTT Communications’ Global Cloud Services on the Cloud Foundry blog, the telco is reacting to customer demand for an agile, flexible development platform:

“But we also hear concerns about vendor lock-in and ability to meet the needs of a complex enterprise environment. We chose to build Cloudⁿ PaaS on top of Cloud Foundry because of its multi-cloud nature, ability to integrate with existing assets, and solid API foundation for adding management and monitoring features. Using Cloud Foundry as the base, we are extending Cloudⁿ PaaS for developers and enterprise customers in Japan. Together with other Cloud Foundry Core partners, we are delivering cloud portability to Japanese users as well as global users of Cloud Foundry.”

The Cloud Foundry Core Definition baseline includes runtimes and services built on Java, Ruby Node.js, MongoDB, MySQL, PostreSQL, RabbitMQ and Redis.

VMware launched Cloud Foundry two years ago  but is now in the process of spinning that work off into the Pivotal Initiative, a move which has some members of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem worrying about what changes could be in store.

States rethink cloud computing sales taxes

Fearing that cloud computing companies will flee for business friendlier environs, several states are moving to remove sales taxes levied on cloud computing services. Last week, a legislative panel in Idaho agreed to hammer out that topic once and for all, according to the Idaho Spokesman Review. The Idaho House’s tax committee said it will introduce legislation that will classify cloud computing services as, well as services, not tangible physical goods the sales of which are taxed.

Nineteen years ago, a state law held that software is taxable regardless of how it is delivered.

Meanwhile, cross country in Vermont, Governor Peter Shumlin is also working to remove a state tax on cloud services, according to VTdigger.com. 

Shumlin’s administration “backed a retroactive cloud computing moratorium that reimbursed businesses for about $2 million in taxes that had already been collected. This time, the proposal would make the exemption permanent,” according to the publication.

Removing yet another source of revenue from cash-strapped states is bound to stir up controversy however.

Feature art courtesy of Shutterstock  userGena96

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Inspired by the wild success of Apple’s retail stores, Google plans to open some brick-and-mortar stores of its own, according to a report by the 9to5Google web site.

The move makes sense now given Google’s big push into physical (i.e. non-software) products including Chromebooks, Google TV, and Google Glasses. These are the kinds of products people want to touch and feel before buying. Microsoft launched its own retail stores (pictured above) a few years ago for many of the same reasons and is currently using those stores to drum up excitement around its new Surface devices and other products.

According to 9to5Google:

“The mission of the stores is to get new Google Nexus, Chrome, and especially upcoming products into the hands of prospective customers. Google feels right now that many potential customers need to get hands-on experience with its products before they are willing to purchase.”

The internet search giant is not totally new to the world of face-to-face retail sales: Best Buy hosts Google-themed stores in several locations.

Google could not be reached for comment.

 Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user blakespot

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Every six months or so stories crop up about startup companies leaving Amazon Web Services in whole or in part. Heck, I’ve done a few of those stories myself. These defectors usually cite fear of vendor lock-in as their rationale. And smart competitors — OpenStack players like Rackspace as well as Joyent, SoftLayer et al, do their best to capitalize on this “Amazon-has-gotten-too-big-for-its-britches” meme.

Wanted: Startups to use our clouds

ProfitBricks USA is the latest to tout its ability to successfully woo startups — it claims 35 to 40 percent of 130 startups that have come aboard left AWS. And today it launched a nationwide program to convince more startups to “break up with Amazon on Valentine’s Day.” Qualified startups — those making less than $1 million in annual revenue — get a 20 percent discount on ProfitBricks IaaS services for a year. A limited version of the promotion rolled out in Boston five weeks ago.

CEO Robert Rizika, who explained ProfitBricks’ take on scale-up cloud computing said the company offers a modern cloud for a modern era — one with a graphical dashboard to make it easier for mere mortals to deploy infrastructure with drag-and-drop ease. And it offers resources by the minute, not by the hour, which has been the AWS model. ProfitBricks pricing is here.

Some background; Since AWS launched in 2006, startups have flocked to its inexpensive compute and storage infrastructure. In essence, AWS decimated barriers to entry for dot.com boom startups. Until AWS showed up, those fledgling companies  pretty much had to turn a huge chunk of their VC money over to Oracle for database licenses and Sun Microsystems for hardware. Amazon was the only game in town when it came to reliable infrastructure for rent cheap.

Changing times mean changing clouds?

But things have changed. For one thing, a bunch of other very capable, albeit smaller, IaaS players have arrived. They may not be as huge as Amazon, but they’re plenty big for most purposes.

And, while startups were quite happy to rely on low-level Amazon services, many are less wild about moving up to higher-level and more complex AWS offerings like Simple Workflow Services, which make it difficult for them to back out of Amazon if they want to change cloud providers. Some see Amazon’s ever expanding list of services as competitive to their own plans. Many Amazon partners/customers, whether it’s due to fear of lock-in or fear of competition with their primary cloud provider, now run on multiple clouds.

They also find it hard to track the constant  pricing changes and tweaks that get posted to the AWS blog seemingly every other day.  A whole flock of startups has grown up around explaining AWS usage and pricing to AWS customers. So much for transparency. Dissidents also complain that to get the best AWS price, they have to lock into 1- or 3-year contracts for Reserved Instances.

“With us, you automatically get the lowest price, our menu is all graphical — you drag and drop — you don’t need to be an expert to order up your resources,” Rizika said.

Amazon’s enterprise shift

Others say Amazon’s own growing focus on enterprise accounts,  a big theme at its inaugural AWS: Reinvent conference last November, is diluting its focus on startup customers.

Whatever the case, two things are certain: First, more credible IaaS players are coming online by the month. Second: Amazon has no intention of ceding ground to any of them. It’s gonna be an interesting year.

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Amazon recommends that users of its various Amazon Web Services divvy their workloads among different availability zones in its data centers. And, in the case of its Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon always stores primary data in one availability zone (AZ) but the associated backup data in another AZ — for a fee. Now that fee is getting lower. Amazon announced the price cuts in its AWS blog late Wednesday, but they are retroactive to February 1, 2013.

“The price for backup storage beyond your free allocation reflects this extra replication that occurs to maximize the durability of your critical backups,” according to the RDS FAQ.

Here are the before-and-after prices of  for a small on-demand RDS Database Instance (running either MySQL or Oracle databases) in a multi-AZ deployment:

This is just the latest in a continuing flow of pricing tweaks that Amazon unleashes. Early this month, for example. Amazon cut prices on data transfer charges to make it easier and cheaper to distribute workloads between actual regions.

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Cedexis, the company behind the Openmix load balancing service, is drilling down into customers’ infrastructure with Cedexis Fusion, an API that integrates with popular New Relic and AppDynamics application performance software. That integration gives Cedexis a deeper look into how customers’ servers and applications are running. It also ties into Akamai, Level3, Edgecast and ChinaCache content delivery networks (CDNs) and SoftLayer’s server management data.

Big companies — and Cedexis’s customers include EuroDisney, Hermes and Nissan — need to make sure their e-commerce sites run smoothly, that pages load fast, that content gets delivered optimally around the globe. A service that can quickly flag when an application or server is approaching overutilization and automatically redeploy would be a very valuable. The new data from inside customer shops augments data Cedexis already gleans from Radar, a crowdsourced service that collects data about cloud and CDN performance around the world.

“Fusion Radar collects data from outside all the various clouds … [and] Fusion gives us the inside-out view that you’d normally get from a server vendor or monitoring provider,” Cedexis CMO Rob Malnati said in an interview. The company said Fusion can also tap into Catchpoint, Keynote and Gomez to detect slowing e-commerce processes and sniff out cloud outages early, using data from Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer and other cloud service providers.

If it works as advertised, Fusion could help alleviate operational headaches for enterprise customers.

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Development teams love Vagrant, the open-source tool that automates — and really speeds up — configuration of the virtual environments they need to build and test software.  Now Hashicorp is previewing a Vagrant plug-in for Amazon Web Services that will let developers who use Vagrant for local configuration, hook right into Amazon’s public cloud as well.

Reached by email, Hashimoto said there is pent-up demand for this product.

“Vagrant + AWS is a big deal because it is the first time developers can use Vagrant outside of their own local machines. This unlocks capabilities never before seen with Vagrant before. This is really just the tip of the iceberg with what is possible with Vagrant 1.1, the release I’ve been working on for nearly a year now.”

Excellent news > RT @hashicorp: Vagrant AWS Provider. Launch, provision, and manage EC2/VPC instances hashicorp.com/blog/preview-v…—
Tim Freeman (@peakscale) February 13, 2013

Used by companies including Expedia, LivingSocial, Yammer, and Mozilla,Vagrant was the brainchild of Mitchell Hashimoto, who developed it in 2010 as a University of Washington student for his own projects. Last November, he launched Hashicorp to bring Vagrant — which thus far only supports Oracle VirtualBox —  to more mainstream platforms including VMware Fusion, Workstation and vSphere. That support is still on its way.
According to the web post announcing the AWS news:

“Using the same Vagrant workflow you’ve come to know and love, you will be able to launch and provision instances in EC2 or VPC, just as you would a VirtualBox machine today. Paired with local virtualization, the AWS provider can vastly improve your end-to-end workflow, unlocking use cases for Vagrant which simply didn’t exist before.”

Hashicorp is now offering a sneak peek at its AWS provider plug-in for Vagrant 1.1 which will be made available under the open-source MIT License. The actual software will be released — along with Vagrant 1.1, later this month, according to the post.

As more applications get deployed on the public cloud or in hybrid cloud environments, a tool like this one, that lets developers set up and deploy their work across boundaries, will be critical.

This story was updated at 5:51 p.m. PDT with Hashimoto’s comment.

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The thing about collaboration is that you can’t do it alone. That’s the rationale behind Do More, an enhanced version of Salesforce.com’s Do task and project management software that was designed to make it easy for small business staffs to work together and with partners and customers using popular tools. Do More claims easy integration with Dropbox, Google Drive, Harvest, Contactually and Wufoo.

Most small workgroups already have favorite consumer-oriented tools they use every day (hello Dropbox!), so it makes a lot of sense to make it drop-dead easy for them to keep using those tools instead of trying to lure them away.

Do morphs into Do More

The original Do app, viewed as a way for individuals to manage tasks, has evolved into a project tracking and management tool for workgroups. These new links to other collaboration products are a further push in that direction.

Do co-founder Amit Kulkarni claims more than 100,000 small companies use “Do” as their collaboration home base and hopes to capitalize on that.

“As they use this tool, they also use Dropbox or Google Drive [for file sharing], Harvest for time tracking and Wufoo forms for leads — we thought it would be cool if you’re using Do as your persistent browser tag for you to be able to see all that information from the other applications inside of Do,” Kulkarni said in an interview.

Do More makes it easy to attach a Dropbox file to a project, comment on that file and then, if necessary, share screenshots just by clicking on the Dropbox icon, Kulkarni said.

With Do More, users can now:

• talk to customers and prospects using Wufoo online forms
• use Contactually to create and manage email contact lists
• share pertinent files with Dropbox or Google Drive.
• use Do Chat for instant messaging and collaboration.
• automate time tracking with Harvest
• use Salesforce.com’s Desk.com for customer service

Collaboration battle gets intense

Do, and now Do More, come out of Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Manymoon and its social productivity application — then at the top of the Google Apps Marketplace charts — two years ago.

Easy collaboration continues to be a big selling point for vendors old and new — with IBM pushing Connections; Google touting Google Apps and Google Drive; and of course Microsoft beating the drum for Office plus Skydrive plus SharePoint. Consumer fan favorite Dropbox is adding more IT-friendly controls to attract more business customers. Younger, potentially more nimble startups like Asana are also in the mix, so the competition here will be fierce.

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You need help scoping out a new architecture for an application? Or maybe some for-real 24 X 7 support for that application once it’s built? Now Heroku is offering a premium tier of paid services you can tap into, provided you build and host that application on Heroku’s Platform as a Service.

An eagle-eyed colleague (thanks Derrick) spotted the Heroku business critical applications page on Tuesday and sure enough, it’s a new offering that goes beyond the all-in-one Heroku services that developers get when they put up their credit card for basic PaaS services. The new services include one-on-one consulting, problem support escalation all based on a custom pricing model.

An exec with a rival PaaS vendor said these new paid options are “right out of the Salesforce handbook for how to monetize cloud.” Salesforce.com bought Heroku, which was then a Ruby-oriented PaaS, three years ago. Since then Heroku has added support for several more languages.

PaaSes like Heroku, AppFog, Google App Engine, and Microsoft Azure, target developers who want to build applications without sweating all the underlying infrastructure stuff. But, to date, the category has struggled for acceptance beyond that demographic. Classic IT types are usually not wild about running company applications on someone else’s platform so they often push to move the finished application back inside the firewall. Higher level services like these might appeal to  corporate developers and their IT counterparts.

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OpenStack updates

The OpenStack community keeps chugging along, with Morphlabs the latest to come out with an updated version of its OpenStack cloud. MCloud Osmium is designed and priced for third-party service providers wanting to offer Amazon-like public cloud services.  The OpenStack Foundation  recently voted to name the next major release of its technology Havana. There should be a lot more information on that at the OpenStack Summit in Portland come April.

Rackspace to staff up, with some help from Texas

One of the original OpenStack backers, Rackspace plans to add 1000 people to its ranks in the next 2 years. The San Antonio, Texas-based company is getting some help from its home state, with Texas funding a $2.5 million grant, according to Computerworld.

Rackspace will get help educating people in “cloud-specific IT” like Ruby or Python programming languages.

Eucalyptus co-founder returns to academia

Rich Wolski, the University of California Santa Barbara phenom who co-founded Eucalyptus, will spend more time back at UCSB and less at the private cloud company he helped create, as GigaOM reported Friday.

Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos also confirmed that Said Ziouani, a Red Hat veteran who came aboard two years ago to lead sales, has left.

Late last year, Mickos told me that Eucalyptus is now running its EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region out of the US and that David Butler, the SVP of marketing that joined the company two years ago, left last fall.

Other news you can use

Government IT reseller DLT adds Amazon Web Services to its GSA contract.

Oracle releases still more Java patches.

Microsoft makes collaboration easier by dropping SkyDrive sign-in requirement.

Belgian startup ComodIT takes on Puppet and Chef with autoscaling.

 Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user mnsc

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There’s some moving and shaking going on at Eucalyptus, a provider of open-source cloud technology. Co-founder Rich Wolski is stepping back from the company to spend more time back at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And, Said Ziouani, the former Red Hat exec who signed on two years ago to head up sales, is gone. Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos (pictured above) confirmed both pieces of news Friday afternoon.

Mickos said Wolski’s transition back into academia was always part of the plan. Asked if there was a shake up going on, he said: “Anytime, Marten Mickos is CEO there is going to be change and adjustments.” Tim Zeller now heads up sales, he added.

The company, which went commercial and closed its first venture capital round in April 2012, grew out of work by Wolski and others at UCSB — the company actually has 7 co-founders.

It may be true that these changes are part of the natural ebb and flow of business. But it’s also definitely true that Eucalyptus competes with CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula open-source clouds, as well as VMware’s proprietary vCloud Director. There are a half dozen different distributions of OpenStack alone from Rackspace; Cloudscaling; Piston Cloud (see disclosure), HP and others. The real question is whether there’s enough market demand to sustain that many choices for the long haul.

In the words of one VC executive, there are too many “me-too” cloud stacks. “Demand is not there for 90 flavors of OpenStack plus Eucalyptus plus these others,” he said.  Perhaps rising demand for cloud computing will float all boats. But it’s as likely that there will be consolidation. Watch this space.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Microsoft wants to make it easier for workgroups to collaborate using its SkyDrive cloud-based storage service. Starting now, users with an invite link to a shared document can work on that document without providing a Microsoft account number.

That should grease the skids for folks who find logging into yet another online account annoying and enable invited workgroup members to edit a document simultaneously if necessary.

According the SkyDrive blog:

“One piece of feedback we’ve consistently heard, especially from students, is that our current SkyDrive edit links can be frustrating for recipients when they find that they need to sign in or sign up for a Microsoft account just to make a quick edit to the document.”

Microsoft is putting a lot of weight behind Skydrive, integrating it with Windows 8 and Office (and Office 365.) Skydrive competes directly — and ferociously — with Google Drive — which also allows its users to edit documents without logging  in. Both of these entries also have to face off against Dropbox, the hugely popular consumer-based file storage and share service, as well as  Box and dozens of other smaller players.

Group leaders wanting to keep tighter control over who can collaborate can invite people into the document via email and check a “require the user to sign-in” box.

In a market this competitive, lowering barriers to entry is really important. Let’s face it, signing up for yet another online account can be a pain and many folks will just skip it if they can. So, this is a smart move for Microsoft. Oh, Microsoft also said that Skydrive is now home to 1 billion Office documents.

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If you’re a fan of Netflix’s Chaos Monkey, stay tuned — there’s a lot more where that came from. And a few hundred developers showed up for  Netflix’ open source open house Tuesday night to get a sneak peak of more tools to come.

The company, which famously relies on Amazon Web Services to do “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” as Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockroft described it, really wants people to deploy its components together. That’s why it continues to put the source code for these tools on Github why it hosts open houses and meetups focused on its tools and components.

And it’s very interested in getting other, non-AWS cloud vendors to kick the tires of these tools and, ideally, deploy them. Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, was in the crowd and I’m told many of the OpenStack players are here as well.

Netflix would really, really like folks to use many of its tools together. “While the parts are cool and shiny, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,”  Ruslan Meshenberg, director of cloud platform engineering, told attendees. 

So what’s coming from Netflix? Some quick hits:

• Denominator: a tool to manage and handle multiple DNS providers — something that surprisingly, Cockcroft said, no one has done yet.
• Odin: an orchestration API that can be invoked from Jenkins and into Asgard, the Netflix deployment tool, that will let developers deploy work jobs smoothly over time.
• Recipes: Lots of them. These are blueprints to make it easier to deploy many Netflix components together.
• Launcher: to enable easy push-button launch of those recipes.
• More monkeys: Stay tuned.

So what’s the end game here? Clearly, Netflix thinks it has a lot to contribute to making massive-scale cloud computing more resilient and able to withstand random failures. Just as clearly, it would like to see other AWS API-compatible clouds (hello ,Eucalyptus!) augment their capabilities with the Netflix tool set.

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With more people jumping from laptop to tablet to smartphone, Google has decided it’s time to tweak Adwords to make it easier to manage advertising campaigns targeting each of those platforms.

That’s the idea behind its new Adwords Enhanced Campaigns, according to a Google blog post. The unstated rationale is that click rates for mobile ads aren’t exactly setting the world on fire. Google, like Facebook, has a mobile problem. It needs people to click on the ads on their phones and tablets and it needs to find a way to wring more dough out of each click.

Here’s the example Google uses:

“A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for “coffee” or “breakfast” on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.”

According to the Google blog:

“With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.”

Folks had been expecting Google to change its Adwords strategy. Richard Zwicky, CEO of Blueglass, a digital marketing agency and software provider predicted the change and is not a fan.

In his blog, Zwicky wrote that “less complicated campaign management means less campaigns to manage, which is simpler, but also will likely result in lower ROI for advertisers whose campaign managers now need to restructure every campaign they run to adjust for the new reality.”

In his view these changes don’t make things less complicated, just different and “less transparent.” Bottom line, this isn’t good for anyone but Google, according to ZDNet’s Larry Dignam. More on the news from SearchEngineLand.

In other news, Yahoo said it signed a deal with Google to display ads on Yahoo properties using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services. “By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we’ll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful,” according to a Yahoo statement.

While this is a nonexclusive agreement, Yahoo watchers expect there could be more collaboration with Google since former Google exec Marissa Mayer took the reins as Yahoo CEO. Yahoo is reportedly not happy with the results of its partnership with Microsoft  which made Bing the search engine for Yahoo.com. Gee, I wonder what other search engine they could use?

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Cloudyn thinks you’re using a lot more Amazon storage than you think, and not all of it shows up in your AWS console. That’s the problem it’s attacking with its new S3 Tracker.

We all know that people are putting tons of their digital stuff into Amazon; The S3 object count hit a trillion in June and it’s gone nowhere but up since.

Sharon Wagner, CEO of Raanana, Israel-based Cloudyn, said his company’s experience monitoring some 400 AWS customers shows surprising things about their usage, many of them relating to storage.

“We found huge inefficiencies. You’d be amazed at the amount of storage that is retired. We slice and dice that and make recommendations that you move that inactive stuff from S3 to Glacier,” he said. Glacier is a lower cost option for archival storage. If you haven’t looked at that document in a year, perhaps its time to ship it off to Glacier and pay less.

If a customer is running versioning on its storage, all those versions do not show up in their AWS console, Wagner said. That means they’re paying for them but don’t necessarily have visibility into them.

If you think of Amazon’s various storage tiers, the old analogy holds. Elastic Block Store (EBS) is your active storage — think flash — while S3 is disk and Glacier is tape. Wagner’s argument is you keep your hot storage in EBS, close to your application, move your less active stuff to S3 and all the rest you cart off to Glacier.

Cloudyn also introduced a new service that helps track usage of Amazon’s RDS database and recommend when it’s time for a customer to move from pricier on-demand instances to less costly reserved instances that are typically booked in one- and three-year blocks.

“A database is not the kind of thing that you spin up and down… If a customer has RDS instances they’re not using, we recommend they sell them back to the market. We already do that for EC2 [compute instances.]“

Cloudyn is one of a half dozen or so companies including Cloudability, Newvem and CloudVertical, that are trying to make money helping customers optimize their use of Amazon infrastructure and minimize their spend. The problem is Amazon itself is coming out with more granular tools to help customers monitor its own services. This week it came out with an email alert system for RDS usage, for example. You can elect to get notifications when your database shuts down or restarts, when a backup starts or ends, or when a failover of a multi-zone instance starts or finishes. Amazon also offers its own Cloudwatch service to provide billing alerts etc.

But, as Forrester Research analyst Dave Bartoletti pointed out: “Amazon’s tools will get better and better but Amazon has no desire to get you to use less of its services. It’s like in storage — You’d think EMC would be the best vendor of storage management but historically they haven’t been.”

Bartoletti said this ecosystem of small third parties comes in handy now that many cloud adopters have gotten over the first high of cloud use and need to settle down and get serious about tracking cost and usage. Cloudyn, in his view, has an interesting perspective because of the historical data it keeps about its customers’ use.

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Private equity firm Silver Lake and Michael Dell are officially acquiring Dell, the world’s third-largest PC company, for $13.65 in cash in a deal worth about $24.4 billion.

Dell’s board unanimously approved a merger agreement under which Mr. Dell, the company founder and CEO, and Silver Lake have acquired the Round Rock, Texas-based company.

Mr. Dell, who owns about 14 percent of Dell’s shares, recused himself from discussions by a special committee of independent directors that was considering the deal, according to a statement e-mailed by Dell at about 6:30 a.m. PDT Tuesday morning. Financing includes a $2 billion loan from Microsoft.

According to Dell’s statement:

“A Special Committee was formed after Mr. Dell first approached Dell’s Board of Directors in August 2012 with an interest in taking the company private. Led by Lead Director Alex Mandl, the Special Committee retained independent financial and legal advisors J.P. Morgan and Debevoise & Plimpton LLP to advise the Special Committee with respect to its consideration of strategic alternatives, Mr. Dell’s proposal and the subsequent negotiation of the merger agreement.”

Reports that this deal was in the works surfaced more than a week ago, sparking questions about whether Dell could recover its mojo under a new arrangement. The company once led the world in PC sales and was a strong contender in servers. But in the past few year it, like other PC-and-server rivals, missed the boat in the shift to tablets and smartphones.

The fact that Microsoft’s participation comes in the form of a loan rather than an equity investment may be telling. Microsoft’s role in a new privately-held Dell has been the subject of much speculation. Dell has been a staunch Microsoft ally, preloading Windows and other Microsoft software on most of its gear. But as Microsoft, which also misplayed the tablet-and-smartphone transition, decided it would manufacture its own Surface devices. That decision stung its erstwhile hardware allies. Many of them, including Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, and Acer, now offer devices running Google’s Chrome OS, a Windows competitor. Skeptics think that a Microsoft with an ownership stake would have treated Dell as a captive audience for its software going forward.

This story was updated continuously on Tuesday morning with additional detail.

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MorphLabs is banking that service providers wanting to take on Amazon Web Services will want to take a look at mCloud Osmium, the company’s new OpenStack-based public cloud infrastructure.

Other OpenStack distributions have been available for a while but MorphLabs claims that its offering can provide a secure, multi-tenant infrastructure that these companies can pay for on a subscription basis, and that will provide them with the billing capabilities, credit card validation and processing that they need, said Yoram Heller, VP of business development for the Manhattan Beach, Calif. based company.

There is indeed a market for something like this. As Amazon.com’s AWS arm takes on more IT loads for customers of all sizes, it’s competing more with traditional IT outsourcing companies and hosting companies — that is just the sorts of service providers MorphLabs is targeting here. If you don’t believe that, check out the big enterprise push outlined at AWS: Reinvent, the company’s first trade show last November.

But it’s a tall order. Heller acknowledges that no service or cloud provider offers anywhere near the scale of AWS which some estimates runs more than 250,000 servers. “No one company can beat Amazon — not even Rackspace or Dell — but the perspective is that the whole industry can compete with Amazon and that’s good for us. There are 4,000 outsourced infrastructure providers in the world,” he said in an interview.

“Companies that are being disrupted by Amazon now could either download OpenStack and build a do-it-yourself cloud or they can get it from a vendor like Morph plus Dell, which provides an industrial-strength combination of hardware and software,” he added. That hardware is optimized to run MorphLabs cloud. Over time, that hardware will be built to Open Compute Foundation specifications, he said. Heller said the company will name two additional hardware partners soon.

The cost to service providers can work out to about $10 per virtual machine per month — with a hardware cost of $5 to $10 per month. With markup, they can compete with Amazon on price and — Heller insisted — get better performance.

Last March, MorphLabs and partner Dell announced mCloud Helix, an all SSD-based private cloud based on OpenStack, which it just updated. mCloud Osmium fills in the public cloud check box.

Right now customers can source their hardware from Dell — which builds optimized gear for the cloud — and software from Morph or buy everything from Dell.

MorphLabs is not alone in wanting to draw big service providers to its cloud. HP and others in the OpenStack cloud, and others outside it  are also targeting such customers.

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It’s Microsoft’s turn to have a bad day at the office. On Friday morning, Microsoft Office 365 users reported the cloud-based service is down in part or as a whole over the past few hours, according to the Office 365 community forum. The timing may be due to the broad launch of  Office 2013 and Office 365 Home Premium just three days ago, according to ZDnet blogger Ed Bott in a tweet.

I suspect the Office 365 outage is related to making the "new" Office 365 plans available to current subscribers.—
Ed Bott (@edbott) February 01, 2013

More here from  Neowin.net and Engadget and ZDnet.

This snafu — which appears to be resolved — comes a few weeks after a Hotmail and Outlook outage. Microsoft resolved that issue in a day,  although judging from comments on GigaOM’s January 8 post, the problems persisted for some users.

This has been a bad week for a lot of online services, with both Twitter and Amazon.com (no not AWS — Amazon.com) experiencing glitches yesterday. But Microsoft faces unique issues as it tries to move more of its productivity applications revenue over to a subscription-based SaaS model without denting its juggernaut on-premises Office business. The growing popularity of Google Apps makes this a particularly pressing issue for Microsoft.

RT @mvanhorenbeeck All in all, the #Office365 issues got solved relatively quickly. <- Indeed. One hour orso?—
Dave Stork (@dmstork) February 01, 2013

Microsoft has been contacted for a comment. Story will be updated when they get back.

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It’s a truism among Amazon Web Services customers that it’s not the cost of storage or compute that gets you, it’s the data transfer charges. Thursday night, Amazon launched price cuts that will make it considerably cheaper for you to move your stuff between AWS regions. Amazon typically recommends that large customers distribute workloads between Availability Zones. Making it cheaper to move data between regions could encourage customers to distribute their workloads geographically.

The new data transfer pricing, which takes effect Friday, applies to data in S3 storage, EC2 compute instances and Glacier archives. The discounts range from 26 percent to 83 percent off.  This may come as very good news to companies that want to spread their cloud loads beyond Amazon’s US-East data center, which is the focal point of virtually all of the AWS outages over the past year.

The discounts also apply to Amazon’s Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN). The cost of using CloudFront with static data stored in S3 or dynamic data coming from EC2 will also fall, according to the AWS blog post announcing the news.

In other AWS news, Amazon also made use of its M3 extra-large high-CPU performance instances available in data centers beyond US-East. These 64-bit instances — which target batch processing and web serving applications — can now be sourced from both US-West regions, AWS GovCloud, Europe and Asia Pacific (Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney). M3 will come to the South America region soon.

Amazon typically launches new features and functions in US-East because it is the largest and oldest of its data center facilities; it then broadens availability over time. One thing to keep in mind: pricing can be lower in US-East than the other regions — it was unclear if there was a price differential here, however.

Finally, AWS also cut prices of some of its Linux On-Demand EC2 instances worldwide by 10 to 20 percent as of Friday.

 

Robert Shear, president of Greystone Solutions, an IT consultancy that does a lot of AWS work, said that as of now, “multi-region solutions are not as common in the wild as they are on paper. The [data transfer] cost reduction will give us more freedom in the ways we architect cross-region solutions,”  he said via email.

Most of his customers will see  more immediate benefit in the reduction of on-demand instance pricing.

Amazon makes a habit of rolling out new features fast and furiously and then slicing prices; it looks like that trend will continue. What’s different this year is that more companies are offering cloud infrastructure that will compete with AWS for business workloads, although none of the rivals — with the possible exception of Google Compute Engine – are expected to come close to Amazon’s overall scale and capacity any time soon.

This story was updated at 7:36 a.m. PDT with user comment.

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Amazon.com’s web page is down and there is no explanation as to what is going on. Pinging the site for the last 15 minutes yielded an “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” message on an otherwise white screen.. The mobile app appeared to work fine and if users know which subsite they want, say books or video , they can get there by plugging in the appropriate URL.

We have calls into the e-commerce giant and will update this story when we hear back. Gizmodo was first to report on this at 11:25 p.m. PDT. As of 12:05 p.m. PDT, there were no indications of problems with Amazon Web Services on the AWS status page.

Update: As of 12:34 p.m. PDT, the main Amazon.com page was accessible again.

Since the subsites appear to have worked all along, the inactive main page could be due to a DNS configuration issue, or as some have claimed on Twitter, a DDOS (distributed denial of servie) attack on the site, as reported by  BetaBeat.

While there have been quite a few instances of Amazon Web Services glitches over the past year, for the main site of the online store to disappear is quite a big deal, as evidenced by user reaction rippling through Twitter (which had its own issues today) and other outlets.

Amazon has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Update: At 2:06 p.m. PDT  An Amazon spokesperson issued this comment via email: “The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes.  Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted.”

This story was updated several times during the day.

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