Author: Barb Darrow

LogMeIn,  the company behind user-friendly web conferencing, screen sharing service and a Dropbox alternative, is about to add identity and application management capabilities to its menu.

On Tuesday, the Boston-based company is launching a preview of AppGuru which aims to help IT  deal with the burgeoning bring-your-own-application (BYOA) craze which forces admins to deal with cloud-delivered personal applications that employees use at work but may not be officially sanctioned.

AppGuru promises a central console for managing multiple apps; an easy way to create, import or move users which works with Active Directory if it’s installed; and tools for managing licenses. It also vows to provide an easy way to set policy management and granular controls as needed. That’s a mighty tall order.

Michael Simon, CEO of the Boston-based company, said LogMeIn gets invaluable perspective from both the consumer and the IT side of the BYOA divide.

“We don’t just have heavily used applications — with 55 million users — but we get visibility from consumer and IT perspectives,” Simon said.

AppGuru will manage LogMeIn’s web conferencing and collaboration application; Joinme screen sharing and Cubby, a Dropbox alternative for businesses, as well as Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, he said.

Simon said small and medium sized businesses are the company’s sweet spot but it has some very large enterprise accounts as well. Last quarter, for example, it announced a seven-figure deal with Hewlett-Packard, for LogMeIn Rescue, the company’s’ remote support offering.

Simon did not disclose pricing but said AppGuru should be commercially available this fall.

LogMeIn may have the chops to attack both the consumer and admin side of the equation, but it also faces formidable competition on the file-sync-and-share side of its business. Dropbox, the consumer champ, is gearing up Dropbox for Business while Google and Microsoft are pushing their respective application and storage tandems; and other competitors include Accellion, Egnyte and OwnCloud. They all claim to combine Dropbox-like simplicity with enterprise management perks.

That’s probably why LogMeIn is adding enterprise perks that go beyond file storage and sync.

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Amazon Web Services can now claim a rare blessing among cloud providers: it has earned the FedRAMP accreditation that certifies that it has met a variety of security standards. That certification, which covers AWS GovCloud as well as Amazon’s other U.S. regions, should make it easier for state, local and government agencies to put workloads on Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure without having to jump through so many hoops.

FedRAMP, which stands for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, “is a U.S. government-wide standardized approach to security assessment, authorization and monitoring,” said Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS. If a service gets certified by FedRAMP for use by one agency, it will be easier for other government organizations to adopt it as well, he said.

In government parlance, Amazon now has a three-year “Authority to Operate,” or ATO. That certifies that a range of government data can be stored or processed on Amazon infrastructure. Companies seeking FedRAMP certification typically work with a sponsor agency, which in Amazon’s case was the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS has used AWS to run for the Centers of Disease Control’s BioSense program for tracking health problems in the U.S. and for the National Database for Autism Research. 

FedRAMP blessing greases the skids for more government use

AWS now has both a FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) Moderate and a FedRAMP Moderate ranking.The latter designation means that ”sensitive data” can be stored and managed on AWS infrastructure.

“This is a journey, a sliding scale. Sensitive data is a term of art used in government. Even more top secret categories of data require additional certifications,” Selipsky said.

To date, exactly one cloud provider — Autonomic Resources, a small North Carolina company — had earned the FedRAMP seal of approval from the General Services Administration. Now AWS is in the mix, but the two companies won’t have the arena to themselves for very long. Up to 15 providers are expected to clear FedRAMP hurdles this year with double that number expected to do so in 2014 when FedRAMP certification becomes mandatory, according to Federal Computer Week,

AWS is the kingpin in public cloud infrastructure where it’s had a 6 year head start. But now enterprise-focused rivals — VMware will announce its AWS response on Tuesday, HP and Rackspace have rolled out their own public clouds. An early FedRAMP certification which should make government IT types feel better about deploying work on AWS, may well be another early-mover advantage.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels may well talk about the importance of public sector workloads when he speaks at GigaOM Structure next month in San Francisco.

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Dell has changed up its cloud strategy again. As of Monday, it has officially backed off on plans to anoint OpenStack as the basis its upcoming public cloud and said it will rely instead on third parties to offer that capability. Dell will act as the single-source supplier front-ending all these diverse clouds, and that decision makes Enstratius, which Dell bought two weeks ago, the focal point of its cloud strategy.

The company’s first public cloud partners are Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag. The rationale: Dell customers don’t want to be locked into a single cloud vendor and would like assurances that workloads can be moved as needed if their requirements change or their current cloud is not up to snuff. ZeroLag gives Dell a VMware-based cloud option.

There are two takeaways from the news, Nnamdi Orakwue, VP of Dell Cloud, said in an interview on Monday. “First, private cloud success is our bread and butter there our top priority on the open-source side is OpenStack. The second is multi-cloud management and helping our customers deal with it via Enstratius.” The Enstratius management offering supports more than 20 different clouds.

Orakwue acknowledged that Dell’s cloud strategy has been a work in progress. Late last year, the company said its public cloud would be based on OpenStack and would come out a year later than expected. Today’s news changes that.

Dell may add other cloud partners to the mix later and could take an equity stake in some of them. (GigaOM’s Derrick Harris wrote in 2011 that Joyent would be a smart investment for Dell if it’s serious about the cloud biz.)

On the one hand, Orakwue said Dell will be “platform agnostic,” on the other he said OpenStack is clearly its platform of choice on the private cloud side. You have to wonder if that’s a consolation prize for the OpenStack faithful.

Things are heating up on the public cloud front for sure. VMware is expected to re-announce its public cloud platform – which will run in as-yet-unnamed partner data centers — on Tuesday and the whole topic of public, private and hybrid cloud deployments will doubtless come up at GigaOM’s Structure event in San Francisco next month.

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Dropbox wants to convert more of the millions of users of its free file-sync-and-share service into paying customers — and it’s banking that select IT consultants and managed service providers (MSPs) will help it do so.

The San Francisco company says it has more than 100 million users overall. More to the point, it claims a presence in more than 2 million businesses, including 99 percent of the Fortune 500. But like other vendors that led with a free version of its service to win mindshare, it won’t disclose how many pay for the Dropbox for Business version. Dropbox execs say its name recognition among consumers — many of whom brought it to work — is a draw for these resellers that can provide services around Dropbox for Business.

Pent-up demand?

“We’ve seen a lot of inbound requests from MSPs and IT consultants who want to bring Dropbox to customers and at this point we feel Dropbox for Business is ready,” Kevin Egan, VP of sales for Dropbox said in an interview.

Dropbox for Business, once known as Dropbox for Teams, adds IT-friendly features including Active Directory integration, single sign-on and an admin console for managing corporate users — and pricing starts at $795 per year for 5 users.

Neither Egan or Adam Nelson, the Dropbox executive in charge of the partner push, would share details about the number of partners Dropbox seeks or what sort of incentives they can expect. Nelson said the goal is to select MSP, IT consultant and VAR partners to work collaboratively with the company’s own sales team. “We view partners as an extension of our sales force, evangelists who go out and fulfill demand externally and create a great customer experience,” he said.

Of course, that’s the pitch most tech vendors make, but the reality is that inside sales teams and third-party partners often end up competing for sales and for the incentives they bring. The rationale here seems to be that there is so much demand for Dropbox and related services, that there will be enough work for everyone.

A couple of partners familiar with Dropbox’s plans — both of whom requested anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak about them — said the company has a shot.

One MSP said he gets “a ton” of requests for Dropbox and he sees huge opportunity moving small and medium businesses over to the service instead of updating aging file servers. In return he will get recurring revenue from a service that requires little or no end-user training and will be easy to support.

An IT consultant said Dropbox inside sales can provide a list of employees in any given account that are already on the free Dropbox version. He can then use that data to convince IT it’s time to go to the paid version that will give admins more control.

‘Dropbox of the Enterprise’ wannabes on the rise

Dropbox has huge name recognition and a devoted consumer base, no question.

But this is a hotly contested space. Microsoft hopes to parlay its Office-and-Windows-and-SkyDrive play here while  Google  does the same with Google Apps and Google Drive. At the same time, Box has staked its claim as an IT-sanctioned cloud storage and file sharing service and then there’s an array of other players including Accellion, LogMeIn  and OwnCloud  vying for share.

All of those companies would love to become the “Dropbox for the enterprise.” As Dropbox rolls out more IT-friendly features and a business-focused partner program, it’s clear that it plans to assume that title for itself.

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Google I/O, which saw the public launch of Google Compute Engine, also spawned a “I know you are, what am I,” slapfest between two companies that would like to unseat Amazon Web Services as the king of public cloud. Apparently Google CEO Larry Page doesn’t think the company’s “Don’t be Evil” mantra applies to trash talking rivals. And someone should clue in him in that a billionaire whining about how other billionaires have done his company wrong is a tad unseemly. Especially coming as it did after Page bemoaned the “negativity” in press reports about Google technology.

“Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.” Page said Google struggles “with people like Microsoft,” he said. As for Oracle, which is suing Google over Android’s use of Java, Google has “a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court … Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

In comments emailed to CIO.com, Microsoft responded:

“It’s ironic that Larry is lending his voice to the discussion of interoperability considering his company’s decision — today — to file a cease and desist order to remove the YouTube app from Windows Phone, let alone the recent decision to make it more difficult for our customers to connect their Gmail accounts to their Windows experience.”

Page’s words came a few days after Microsoft announced interoperability between its Outlook.com email service and Gmail and just after word came out that Google demanded that Microsoft rip its home-built YouTube app from the Windows store (and remove the app off the Windows Phones that were already running it.)

So, who’s the winner in this melee? Neither vendor comes out looking good. For Microsoft to complain about Google’s business practices is laughable given its own track record. But for Google to claim it’s not evil while restricting consumer choice is also awful. Consumers might just say a pox on both their houses.

IBM spreads Watson around …

Watson, the natural-language-understanding software that played (and won) at Jeopardy, will be made more broadly available to third-party software makers, IBM CEO Ginny Rometty said last week. Thus Watson technology could be used perhaps even by IBM competitors, to build self-teaching computer systems, according to Bloomberg News.

IBM has made the most possible PR use of Watson capabilities, working to embed that intelligence in medical and other applications. Last week, IBM took its show on the road to Washington D.C. last week to show Congress the progress Watson has made in healthcare applications.

… as SAP doubles down on HANA

German enterprise software giant SAP, in a move you could see coming miles away, said this week that HANA, it’s in-memory analytical database, will be the brains and guts of its ERP software going forward, according to InformationWeek and other  outlets.

Running do-or-die ERP and CRM applications on HANA is a big step up from data warehouses because ERP and CRM cannot go down for hours or a day without severe blowback. And yet at the annual SAPPHIRE conference last week SAP announced general availability of its core Business Suite applications on HANA. Or, as CRN put it, it “bet the farm” on HANA.

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Don’t look now but it looks like Yahoo’s mobile apps push is bearing fruit, at least according to new data from Onavo.

Case in point: Yahoo Weather, which rolled out recently, already has what Onavo CEO Guy Rosen calls an “unprecedented” 3 percent market share among U.S. iPhone owners. That’s about 1.5 million users total which makes it the 91st most popular iPhone app three weeks after release, according to Onavo Insights data. That’s very good for a new app, Rosen said in an interview.

Other Yahoo mobile apps including Yahoo Messenger and the Yahoo app are also doing well. “In general, what we found is that although Yahoo has been quiet on mobile, when we look at the top apps, we see quite a few up there. They have a decent footprint.”

How does Onavo get to these numbers? It uses data gleaned from its free iPhone (and now Android) apps including Onavo Extend, which compresses data flowing into and out of your phone; Onavo Counts, which watches how much time you actually spend using a given app; and Onavo Protect, which scans traffic flowing into your phone for malware. Then it aggregates that data (minus the personally identifiable bits) and runs statistics to suss out usage patterns. That data forms the core of reports that the company then sells to app developers.

This data is far more useful to app makers than app store download figures because it shows actual engagement. If your app is the mobile equivalent of shelfware, it’s helpful to know that.

Rosen said “millions” of people use Onavo’s iPhone apps but would not specify further. “We use a panel methodology with our user base as the sample and apply statistical methodologies to make sure it’s valid,” he said in an interview.

The current app stats do not yet factor in Onavo’s Android users, although they will be incorporated in time.

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Here’s something we often forget: Competition is good.

The Microsoft that produced the Windows-Office monopoly let its products get fat, dumb and happy. The Microsoft that must contend with the Oracle database juggernaut puts out a pretty good database. That’s why the sudden influx of new public cloud riches exemplified by this week’s official launch of the Google Compute Engine, coming a few weeks after Microsoft launched its Windows Azure IaaS options, may be tough on the competitors but could be very good for smart IT consumers.

Look for price cuts to continue, along with a flow of new services, and better APIs to access those services.

While I haven’t parsed the instance-by-instance price comparison between GCE and AWS, Google’s decision to sell compute instances in sub-hour increments could lead to cost savings vs. Amazon, which prices by the full hour. Don’t be surprised if Amazon responds, however.

We’ve already seen several price skirmishes in cloud including five or six price cuts in cloud storage in the span of a few weeks late last year between Google, AWS and Microsoft. Heck, even Rackspace, which touts its fanatical support rather than low prices, got into the act a little bit later.

Look for this sort of one-upsmanship (one-downsmanship?) to continue as these extremely well-funded and highly motivated competitors angle to get your workloads on their respective clouds. For the discerning IT buyer, whether she’s at a startup or a Fortune 100 company, that is only good news.

Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery

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Now that the fog of hype is starting to lift from the Moscone Center  where Google rolled out its promised Amazon cloud killer, don’t expect the folks up in Seattle to stand still. As Amazon Web Services has made clear over the past 7 years, inaction is not an option.

Here are a few things AWS (which after all, remains the cloud to beat) could do to shore up its defenses as GCE, Windows Azure and soon VMware’s AWS competitor (to be re-announced May 21) come online.

1: Get more granular in pricing

One headline item Wednesday was Google’s decision to rent cloud instances by the minute instead of by the hour (well, you have to buy a minimum of 10 minutes with incremental charges for each additional minute.) AWS rents by the hour, which is something it could well change. Both companies are late to this particular feature however: Both Cloud Sigma and Profitbricks have offered sub-hour models for some time.

2: Keep pounding on enterprise support …

And management options like Trusted Advisor, which instructs AWS users on how to deploy their workloads more efficiently and more securely.  The knock on Google remains that it (let alone its cloud) doesn’t “get” the enterprise — millions of  Google Apps and Gmail business users notwithstanding. A CIO might ask herself: “Gee, do I want to trust my workloads to a search and advertising company? I still can’t believe I’m trusting some of them to a book seller! “

If enterprise is a key business, you have to keep earning it.

3: Prove that AWS is an Amazon corporate priority

The perception that Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos and corporate don’t care that much about AWS continues to dog the cloud services arm. It was a big deal that Bezos showed up at AWS: Reinvent last year, but he really doesn’t talk about the cloud business all that much. What might help there? BREAKING OUT AWS REVENUE! If AWS is a $2 billion-a-year-plus business, get transparent about it. And talk profitability, not just revenue. Come on guys, it’s time.

4: Keep the services coming

Much was made of Google’s brand new NoSQL database service, which, as my colleague Derrick Harris pointed out, is “eerily similar” to Amazon’s DynamoDB. Google SVP Urs Hölzle noted that Google, 11 months after announcing GCE, rolled out 10TB persistent disk, something that an “unnamed competitor” hadn’t done in its 7 years. That may be, but AWS has lots of other services and perks and maturity counts — especially among corporate buyers.

So, Amazon. It’s your move.

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Newvem made its name monitoring your Amazon Web Services workloads and recommending where you can extract savings with another instance type or where you need to close security gaps. Now it’s adding analagous services for Microsoft Window Azure as well.

The theory behind tools like these is basically this: sure, public cloud computing is billed as cheap, but too often it turns into a wasteland of dormant instances and other fallow resources. So as inexpensive as it can be, it’s not necessarily efficient or as cheap as it could be. Companies like Newvem, Cloudability, Cloudyn, CloudVertical et al say they can help you optimize all that and save more.

Newvem for Windows Azure covers many of the same core usage and cost metrics as the AWS version. A “heat map” helps users visualize their workloads as they move from on-premise implementations to the cloud, according to Newvem VP of marketing Cameron Peron. The free beta is available now to all Azure users. Newvem’s AWS version started out free as well, and a base level of capabilities remain free, but as of late last year, the company started charging for higher-level services.

Newvem said it sees Azure — which launched its AWS-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service  capabilities last month — gaining traction.

“The size of the Azure installed base is probably one of [Microsoft’s] best-kept secrets,” Peron noted. Well, not that secret since Microsoft recently said Azure is a $1 billion-a-year business – a claim that some find difficult to swallow. Newvem would not comment when asked if Microsoft helped fund its Azure tool, but given that Microsoft wants to build the Azure ecosystem and compete better with AWS (as well as the spanking new Google Compute Engine), I’d say it’s a safe bet.

It’s also true that companies like Newvem, which built services around AWS, have been perplexed to see AWS adding richer and deeper monitoring and management services like Trusted Advisor. Given that, it makes sense that these companies offer multi-cloud capabilities.

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Drum roll, please. Google Compute Engine is now available to everyone, not just those who pay $400 per month for Google Gold support. (Update: Actually, it turns out folks can sign up for GCE starting at 6 p.m. PDT on Wednesday.)

Notably, Google will offer its resources in sub-hour increments — something that public cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services does not support (although other providers like Cloud Sigma and Profitbricks do). Users don’t have to buy a whole hour of an instance, but can buy instances by the minute with a 10-minute minimum, Google SVP Urs Hölzle, said in a Google I/O 2013 session Wednesday afternoon.

Other perks, per Hölzle’s blog post:

• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.
• Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers that enable you to build applications spanning your local network and Google’s cloud
• Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10X the industry standard

Hölzle also noted that Google will offer 10TB persistent disks, something an “unnamed cloud competitor” does not offer after seven years in business. As some expected, Google also announced PHP support for Google App Engine (GAE).

Google announced GCE at last year’s event in June, and started opening up access to select users a few months later. Last month, it let Google Gold customers in.

The ecosystem is getting ready too: MongoLab announced support for the Google cloud platform.

This story was updated at 1:47 p.m. PDT to update availability information. 

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If you’ve talked to a CIO lately, you’ve likely got an earful about having to support employee smartphones and the problems they bring — users sending off company files to Dropbox or their personal Gmail account or God knows where else. They loathe the idea that a user may be running Twitter or Scrabble on what they view as a piece of business equipment. If only there were a way to cordon off the personal from the professional …

Now, VMware and Verizon Enterprise Solutions say their newly released VMware Horizon Mobile service eases that angst. The news comes two years after the effort, called Project Horizon, was first announced. Two new VMware-ready phones — the Motorola Razr and LG Intuition — will run the new service with additional “VMware Horizon”-ready devices to come. And these devices running this service will bring fulfill “dual persona” promisew which segregates work email and access to applications from Twitter and Facebook.

According to the press release, those devices running in VMware Horizon Mobile environments provide:

” …  a corporate workspace that is controlled and managed by IT, and is completely separate from the employee’s personal information, applications and data on the device. The workspace contains its own operating system, applications and policies, enabling IT to remotely manage the entire lifecycle of the workspace. IT is able to provision the workspace, deploy applications and monitor the flow of information to and from the workspace for security.”

According to a blog post VMware’s Srinivas Krishnamurti:

“Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).”

A perpetual license for the service costs $125 per user.

Ah, Angry Birds and truly secure corporate email in one small package. If these devices deliver as promised, that is the best of both worlds — although one might quibble at the lack of immediate support for iPhones or Samsung Galaxies –both hugely popular among business users.

 

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Drones, or unmanned, aircraft are already used in military intelligence operations; Airware is betting that they will be big in commercial jobs as well and now has $10.7 million in Series A venture funding to help make that happen.

Founded in 2011, the Newport Beach, Calif. startup builds the autopilot or the “brains” that drive drones. One current Airware customer, Deltadrone in France already has drones conducting skier search-and-rescue and for open-air mining operations, said Airware CEO Jonathan Downey.

Downey, an MIT grad who knows about aircraft having spent a few years at Boeing, sees upcoming commercial applications including prevention of wildlife poaching and agriculture although to date, commercial use is limited until the FAA comes up with regulations on and requirements for their use. Congress has mandated that be done by 2015.

Airwave clearly thinks demand will be huge once the regs are in place. A survey by  the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) — admittedly a non-partial observer — projects that the manufacture and use of drones built in the U.S. could create 70,000 jobs in the first three years, adding $13.6 billion to the economy.

Potential competition for Airware could come from the big aerospae companies but so far, drones have had “only one customer and are only used for one purpose — military surveillance, ” Downey said in an interview. “We started this company because we think  there will be a wide variety of applications on the commercial side and those drones will probably be flown by people who will not be as trained or skilled so the hardware and software have to be customized for various users.”

The company will furnish APIs to allow that customization of the autopilot which is an integrated bundle of sensors, computer and communications gear and software — thus also be adaptable for specific uses and power fixed-wing, helicopter or multi-rotor drones. “We provide the APIs to allow companies to customize the autopilot for their needs,” he said.

The initial applications will probably require that the person with responsibility of the drone stays within sight and in low-population areas, he said. Agriculture could be big. “We could provide imaging to determine which areas are over- or under-watered, what is the ideal time for harvesting, and what areas need pesticide,” he said. By letting farmers pinpoint where water or pesticides should be applied, drones could cut the use of both.

Other applications could include the inspection of large buildings or power lines; mapping; and perhaps even sports or event photography. Hey, if a blimp can do it … Other companies propose the use of drones for news gathering purposes. And, as GigaOM’s Amanda Alvarez reported recently, David Lester at UC Berkeley helped create a hack group to investigate the use of small drones for commercial purposes.

Prior to this round of funding, Airware which si a Y Combinator and Lemnos Labs graduate, netted about $3 million in seed money from First Round Capital, Firelake Capital, RRE Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Promus Ventures, brings total funding to date to $13.7 million

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PernixData, the startup founded by former VMware and Oracle technologists, now has $20 million in Series B funding to pursue its goal of virtualizing all that flash memory that’s getting shipped with new servers.

The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from original investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and individual investors including Mark Leslie, co-founder  of Veritas; John Thompson, former CEO of Symantec and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks. It brings total funding to about $27 million.

The company plans to use the cash to build out its enterprise support, sales and marketing staff and to add capabilities as the software heads for general availability. That should happen in about two months, company CEO Poojan Kumar said in an interview. There are about 30 employees now, with the goal to add 70 to 80 more in the next 9 to 12 months, he said.

“Enterprise software requires staffing and expertise,” he said. He should know — Kumar led Exadata development for Oracle and then headed up data products for VMware. His co-founder Satyam Vaghani was principal engineer at VMware, where he worked on the vSphere kernel and the clustered file system.

PernixData says its software-only approach makes a disruptive technology a non-disruptive install that will run with a company’s existing server and storage hardware, take all the server flash available and virtualize it into a shareable pool. The company’s goal is to become “the VMware of server-side flash.”

As more servers ship with on-board flash, there’s a desire to make the most of that resource — especially for tier 1 applications like database and ERP applications that have proven difficult to virtualize.

San Jose-based PernixData is early to this battle but it won’t be alone for long. It’s safe to say that legacy storage  and server players — ranging from EMC and NetApp to Hewlett-Packard and Dell, as well as flash storage players like Fusion-io and Violin Systems — are scrambling for traction here.

PernixData is betting that its product — now in beta at 50 companies — will beat them to market by a good two years and build from there.

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When it comes to winning enterprise workloads, delivering the right services is obviously table stakes, but providing credible support and metrics is also critical. That’s one reason Amazon is staffing up Trusted Advisor, a service which guides customers on how to best deploy the Amazon Web Services they use — to choose the right instance type for a given task; to plug security gaps etc.

For example, the company is looking to hire a  software development manager for its “Kumo team” who will manage:

” .. software development engineers who are developing algorithms and building systems to automatically solve a variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the AWS Trusted Advisor — one of the company’s biggest assets.”

The Kumo team is also looking for a software development engineer and a senior product manager.

For enterprise support, more is more

That AWS should seek to add richer functionality to Trusted Advisor should come as zero surprise. The boilerplate describing the service says AWS will continually add to the number of checks it performs.

Reached for comment, a spokeswoman said AWS is investing heavily in support “not just with Trusted Advisor but also with the Service Health Dashboard, Forums, Social Media Monitoring, Service Health Checks Support APIs” and other tools that allow its engineers and associates to deliver a good user experience.

As for “Kumo,” it means cloud in Japanese and is the name of the AWS Support software development team.

But what about third-party partners?

It’s clear that as AWS wants to make itself as enterprise-friendly as possible, providing services like these is a no brainer. But, for a half dozen or so small companies that were founded to provide cloud implementation guidance, particularly on AWS, this has to be a concern. Companies including Cloudyn, Cloudability, CloudVertical, and Newvem all harvest — with customer permission — usage data from Amazon’s APIs and use that to make their recommendations. Some of them monitor multiple clouds. Others are for AWS only, a strategy they want to reconsider going forward.

Earlier this month, AWS made a support API available that, among other things, gives customers API access to their Trusted Advisor recommendations. That was seen as a huge deal by some in the AWS partner community.

Some of these partners flipped out when Amazon made Trusted Advisor available for free for a short period. They really don’t like that it’s now making all that key data programmatically available.

Said the CEO of one of these companies: “This is another step, in a roundabout way, of AWS giving their customers a Cloud Economics toolset. I’m not sure they haven’t just head-on launched a Cloud Economics tool — users need quite a lot of expertise to hack together the various data sets you can get exported to S3 – and now this. I suppose that’s the short-term opportunity for companies like ourselves.”

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Windows Blue, which will be officially known as Windows 8.1, will be a free upgrade to existing Windows 8 or Windows RT users, Tami Reller, CFO of the Windows business unit at Microsoft said on Tuesday. She also said attendees of the Microsoft Build Conference kicking off June 26 will get a preview version of the OS upgrade.

Reller did not provide much more detail around when customers can get the OS upgrade, but said Microsoft is “very aware” of the holidays and would like to have the OS preloaded on hardware for that selling season. But that desire notwithstanding, buyers can get any Windows 8 device and be assured that 8.1 will be an easy update from the start button, Reller told attendees of the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference.

She also characterized 8.1 as an update, more than the usual product tweaks deliverable online, but less than a full new release.

Earlier remarks by Reller in the Financial Times seemed to indicate that Microsoft was rethinking Windows 8 broadly, in response to user feedback, but today 8.1 was positioned as an easy, seamless update. No new interface perks were mentioned.

Windows 8 and RT, which Microsoft launched last fall to put Windows on new form-factor and touch devices, have met mixed reviews. But Reller said it’s met its objectives — running lots of innovative devices including “detachables” where the keyboard can be snapped off to leave a touch-device; convertibles which can shape-shift from laptop to touch device; and plain old traditional laptops and PCs.

Reller also said that Microsoft’s ability to sell into enterprise accounts remains strong and is actually getting stronger. And, for all the angst around Windows 8, the company on its last earnings call said it expects to reap nearly $4 billion in Windows-related licensing revenue this fiscal year. That’s a big number even Windows bashers would have to respect.

This story was updated at 8:31 a.m. PDT with more information about Microsoft enterprise sales.

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Here’s an interesting tidbit: Microsoft is making it easier for users of its Outlook.com email to chat and collaborate with Gmail users.

Or, as the Microsoft blog post announcing the move put it:

“… you can already chat with your Facebook and Skype friends. But we heard that some of you who switched over from Gmail still want to chat with friends stuck on Gmail. Today, we’re excited to announce that you can now also chat with your Google friends.” (Emphasis is mine.)

And lest you still think we’ve entered a new era of good feelings, remember that Microsoft’s Scroogled campaign is still active, as I was reminded by one of my colleagues.

So, if you’re reading an email from a Gmail user, you can reply with a chat icon from your Outlook.com inbox. Or, if you and your Google-oriented buddy are collaborating on a document in Microsoft Skydrive (as opposed to, say, Google Drive), you can send an instant message to your Google contact with the click of a button. Microsoft is also rolling out Google Chat integration.

Basically, Microsoft is asking its Outlook.com users to use its automated process to connect with all their contacts on other services.

The timing is interesting here. Tomorrow, Google kicks off its big Google I/O conference in San Francisco. And, Microsoft is coming off a rather rocky migration of millions of its Hotmail users to Outlook.com. (To be fair, Google Drive has seen its own share of snafus lately.)

To be sure, Microsoft Office remains the desktop productivity giant but given this move, it’s clear it’s feeling pressure from Google Apps and Gmail.

 

This story was updated at 7:07 PDT to add the Scroogled reference.

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Cloudant which has been spreading its database layer across multiple clouds, just closed $12 million in Series B funding from investors including Fidelity-backed Devonshire Investors, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital.

The money will mostly flow to add staff and infrastructure partners.  ”First, we need to invest in operational expertise around the world — we’re building an office in San Francisco, we’re based in Boston, and now we have presence in the U.K. and will open one in Hong Kong probably in the next 120 days — we need to staff that,” Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle said in an interview.

Current staffing is at about 60 people, with plans to hit maybe 100 within the next year.

Cloudant’s NoSQL database service runs on Rackspace, Softlayer, Joyent, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon cloud infrastructure so Rackspace’s stake could raise eyebrows although  Schoettle was quick to say that won’t make Rackspace the first among equals. “They see an advantage to partnering with us more closely than just reselling hardware to us. they’ll more tightly integrate our service with their infrastructure offerings,” he said.

This is a case of the coopetition fever that’s gripping cloud companies. I. Another example is Dell and Intel took a stake in Mirantis, self-proclaimed vendor agnostic OpenStack integrator.

While Rackspace now owns a piece of Cloudant, it also fields several database services. In February, for example, it bought a seat at the MongoDB table with its acquisition of ObjectRocket.

Last month, Xeround, another database service provider, pulled the plug in a move that causes some to question whether there’s enough business for umpteen different players. Schoettle said Xeround’s woes were company specific. “Xeround had two issues. First, MySQL is not ideal for next-gen mobile web apps and that’s where the lion’s share of opportunity is. Second, it’s tough to start in 2005 with $30 million and then change course a number of times.”

Cloudant has raised a total of about $16 million to date. Earlier investors including Avalon Ventures, In-Q-tel, and Samsung Venture Investment also participated in this round. How companies are adopting cloud services — including databases — will be on the agenda at next month’s Structure event in San Francisco.

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At Google I/O this week, the elephant in the room cloud-wise, will be whether the company announces “general availability” of the Google Compute Engine (GCE), the Amazon Web Services competitor announced at last year’s event. A month ago, Google cracked open access to GCE by making what had been an invite-only service  available to any customers who pay $400 a month for Google Gold support. It’s unclear how many customers took advantage of that offer — or even how many customers have Gold support. My money’s on Google taking the GA plunge but then again the company is known for fielding “preview” products for years. Still, Urs Hölzle, SVP of technical infrastructure for the Google and Greg DeMichillie, director of product management for Google’s Cloud Platform, will host a session Wednesday afternoon on the next-generation of cloud computing which will feature “announcements and demo important new features of the Platform.” Hmmm, smells like a GA announcement to me. A Google spokeswoman said she had nothing to share at this time but referred users to the above-mentioned session. One of the things Google is expected to do is drive use of its cloud platform via its Google Drive and Apps franchises and right on cue, Google on Monday said customers will get 15 GB of unified storage across Google Apps, Drive and Google +. According to the Google Drive blog post:

“So, instead of  having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.”

While that’s not really tripling the amount of storage for Google users, as some have reported — it actually spreads it across Google properties. But 15GB is still more than what competitive free services offer. Dropbox offers 2GB for free; Microsoft SkyDrive starts users at 7GB for free while Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Storage provide 5GB before charges apply.

GA or not, here it comes

But getting back to GCE, here’s the thing:  even some AWS cronies say that GCE is the cloud infrastructure to watch in the upcoming year given Google’s experience in scale-out computing. It would also make sense for Google to roll out a for-real load balancer service, which one AWS partner said is a huge hole in Google’s platform strategy compared to both AWS and Rackspace. Google has also been working to beef up Google App Engine capabilities, something that Snapchat co-founder Bobby Murphy will doubtless address at GigaOM’s Structure event next month. The popular Snapchat photo sharing service runs on GAE. Google telegraphed (by virtue of its Google I/O agenda) that will add a new language to the fold for its Google App Engine Platform as a Service (PaaS). GAE now supports Java, Python, and Go. Speculation at Reddit is that PHP will get the nod . Thomas Clayburn over at InformationWeek would prefer to see Google add Node.js or JavaScript first, so we’ll see. Some also say Google needs better integrate its Cloud SQL database service into its cloud platform

Battle for public cloud workloads ratchets up

Whatever Google’s official roll-out plans, GCE is already considered a contender in a hard-fought battle for public cloud infrastructure dominance by virtue of Google’s size and expertise.  AWS, launched in 2006, has a prodigious head start, but now with Microsoft’s Windows Azure  and GCE coming on line, AWS faces two extremely well-funded and tech-savvy rivals, both of which seem  determined to carve out a healthy chunk of this market. And then there are all the OpenStack-based public cloud options from Rackspace, HP and others. It’s still very early on in the cloud deployment game so things should get very interest in the race to add services — and cut prices. It could be a very good time to be a buyer of cloud services over the next few years.

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Google casts its lot with Debian

Just in time for Google I/O, Google will support the Debian Linux distribution in its Google App Engine, which is still in preview mode. From now on, Debian will be the “default image mode” for GAE, according to the Google AppEngine Blog. Google cited Debian’s improved handling of 32/64 bit compatibility as one reason for the move

According to the Thursday blog post:

“Today we’re adding Debian images for Google Compute Engine.  Debian, in collaboration with us, is providing images for both Debian 7.0 “wheezy” and the previous stable release, Debian 6.0 “squeeze.”   This support will make it easy for anyone using Debian today to migrate their workloads onto Compute Engine.”

A Google spokesperson told eWeek  that “customers will get a great experience having a Linux distribution that is maintained by the Debian community. Debian and derivatives thereof (such as Mint and Ubuntu) are among the most popular on the Internet, and Google itself is a heavy contributor to the Debian code base. We will also continue to offer CentOS, and are actively exploring other operating system options based on feedback from our customers.”

Google has a complicated relationship with the open source world. Most of its underpinnings are built on open source software and it does contribute a lot of technology to the community. But its own infrastructure is seen as a black box to many in that community. It’s interesting that there were a grand total of two comments as of Sunday on this blog post — one was removed and the other offered good wishes but added “the thing I’d like to see in future is how community members could be part of this project.”

While Google isn’t saying, folks expect the company will announce general availability of Google Compute Engine, which will compete with Amazon Web Services this week at the big show. GCE was announced last June and the preview was expanded to anyone paying for Gold support last month. Many cloud watchers say GCE, once fully available, will be the second-largest IaaS in terms of capacity after Amazon Web Services or AWS. Microsoft launched its Windows Azure IaaS capabilities in April.

In other words, buckle up, the cloud wars we’ve seen so far, are going to get rougher.

New tool allows AWS management from Microsoft consoles

Speaking of AWS and Microsoft, the new AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center means that a Windows admin at a company — at least one running System Center 2012 — can now use one console to monitor on-premises Windows resources as well as EC2 Linux or Windows instances, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk running on AWS.

As GigaOM PRO analyst Janakiram MSV pointed out in his report Thursday (subscription required), this move is just one more example of Amazon’s push into the enterprise where  Windows reigns.  He points out that Tom Rizzo, a Microsoft vet, headed up this project at Amazon. Janakiram wrote:

“In 2010, Microsoft launched the Management Pack for Windows Azure deployments making it easier to manage on-premise and cloud infrastructure. Customers running Windows-based workloads on Amazon EC2 had to use a different set of tools based on Amazon CloudWatch, Nagios, OpsView, Nimsoft or other third-party software to monitor their deployments.  Through the AWS Management Pack, Amazon made it easy for enterprise IT teams to manage the servers running within on-premise, Windows Azure and AWS. Microsoft enterprise customers will welcome this.”

Interestingly Rizzo’s AWS blog post does not mention that the console was part of a joint effort with Microsoft, something that Microsoft rectified in it’s post about the news a day later.

Adobe tests the market for all-cloud delivery

Well, my  post on Adobe’s plan to move all updates of Creative Suite to a subscription service characterized it as a low-risk gamble. For Adobe anyway. Well, gauging by reader response,I should have talked to more graphic designers and artists who are fighting mad. Many vowed to stick with their old version as long as possible and then seek other non-Adobe options. Their beef? That even $50 per month per user will end up costing them way more than the current pay-once-use-forever model.

A Change.org petition asking Adobe to rethink its plan had more than 8,500 signatories as of Sunday morning

At any rate, Microsoft ,which has more at stake here than anyone with its zillions of Office users, was quick to weigh in. In short, it says subscription SaaS is the way of the future because it ensures users are always on the latest-and-greatest versions and can use their subscriptions across devices.  But:

” … unlike Adobe, we think people’s shift from packaged software to subscription services will take time. Within a decade, we think everyone will choose to subscribe because the benefits are undeniable. In the meantime, we are committed to offering choice–premier software sold as a package and powerful services sold as a subscription.”

News from around the web:

From Data Center Knowledge: Equinix unveils new crown jewel Ashburn Campus

From GigaOM: Box acquires Crocadoc to make document previews richer

From CITEworld: Office web apps: Not bad for free, but on demand is way better

From TechCrunch:  Microsoft to fold Yammer sales team into Office 365, identity surfaces as a core focus

From GigaOM:  Laggard Rackspace growth sparks concerns: is there enough cloud growth to go around?

From Fox Business News; U.S. judge orders Hewlett-Packard to face shareholder lawsuit

From InformationWeek: Google I/O preview

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Our invitation must have gotten lost in the spam folder but apparently there was a swank ‘do Thursday night at the Embarcadero’s Pier 27 to celebrate the launch of Larry Ellison’s latest release — The Wind Gods – an account of the Oracle chairman’s quest to regain the America’s Cup for God and Country (and Larry.)

From the movie’s web site:

“Awe-inspiring boats that reflect the unlimited reach of human ingenuity, breathtaking views, action, tension, excitement, consummate skill, the pursuit of lifelong dreams and the tempestuous romance between sailors and the sea, set against a soaring musical score: this is The Wind God’s, the story of the 33rd America’s Cup race.”

Thank God, MarketWatch‘s Therese Poletti has the scoop on the red carpet event. The movie, she reports, will be “great PR for Ellison and the sailing team that would ultimately prevail in what became a major grudge-match involving the America’s Cup, where billionaire faced off billionaire in Valencia, Spain.” San Francisco Business Times has another account.

Forbes Magazine estimates Ellison is worth $43 billion and he’s not averse to spending it. The America’s Cup chase reportedly cost him $100 million.

And, he is not new to show biz. He appeared in Iron Man 2 (seen in screen grab above.) And two of his children have gone Hollywood.  Son David Ellison is an actor, writer and producer (he produced The Wind Gods) and daughter  Megan Ellison is a producer with more than a dozen titles to her credit including Jack Reacher and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Ellison has also bought up a sizeable chunk of pricey real estate in the star-studded Malibu beach community.

It’s unclear if any mention was made about the death Thursday afternoon of another America’s Cup competitor, Andrew Simpson. A member of the Artemis Racing team, Simpson apparently drowned, after his catamaran capsized in the bay.

Oracle Team Racing’s defense of the America’s Cup will begin July 4 in San Francisco Bay.

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