The Open Cloud Manifesto was released today to a flurry of comment and criticism from the media, including GigaOm, eWeek, ZDnet, and others. This comes after last week’s post from Microsoft, complaining about the closed nature of the manifesto’s development. Although few can argue with any of the broad principles in the document (including us), [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based virtual lab solutions, today announced it completed a $7 million Series B round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s product development, sales and marketing efforts.
See the full press release here.
We attended CloudCamp Seattle on Saturday and participated in the first CloudCamp unconference to visit the emerald city.
Seattle is home to an impressive list of cloud computing companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s seattle campus), as well as a growing list of emerging startups (Decho, Skytap, and a plethora of SaaS companies). This makes Seattle a [...]
According to Forrester and Gartner, consolidating servers through virtualization can result in up to 50% savings on hardware costs¹ and a 15-20% reduction in total cost of ownership² once a project is complete and project costs have been included. I’d wager most IT managers would agree that virtualization has been a cost saving strategy for [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Crowdsourcing and cloud computing are two exciting trends in the tech industry. We’ve teamed up with our friends at uTest to show how you can combine online communities and cloud-based infrastructure to build better software. Join our 30 minute live Webcast tomorrow to learn:
• How crowdsourcing and cloud computing can be used together to improve the [...]
Phil Wainewright recently wrote an article in ZDNet that referenced IDC’s forecast that SaaS growth will surge by more than 40 percent in the current year. He highlighted one particularly interesting statement:
“… the harsh economic climate will actually accelerate the growth prospects for the software as a service (SaaS) model as vendors position offerings as [...]
Gartner issued a press release predicting the 3 phases of evolution for cloud computing. In the first phase, pioneers and trailblazers, Gartner predicts successful vendors will focus on rapid-application-development-oriented tools and solutions where return on investment can be acquired within 18 to 24 months.
We agree that successful cloud providers will need to prove their value [...]
John Willis’ blog post and Reuven Cohen comments bring up the ongoing debate on cloud ontology. I posted some thoughts on who will win in the different cloud segments around the launch of Microsoft Azure and the new breed of cloud solutions that combine different elements of the stack to solve specific business problems. Skytap [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The January 2009 release of Skytap Virtual includes lots of new capabilities and feature requests from our user community. As always, thanks for your continued input and feedback on the product!
Here is what’s new for January:
- Per-User Usage Quotas
- Usage Metering & Reporting Enhancements
- Auto-Suspend Configurations at Specific Times
- Specify Access Time Windows for Published [...]
Network World has named Skytap a top 10 start-up to watch in 2009. You can see the full top 10 list in Network World’s Outlook for 2009.
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