Category: IaaS

Oracle Partners With Verizon To Deliver Enhanced Connectivity Solutions For The Oracle Cloud

Oracle has partnered with Verizon to enable customers of the Oracle Cloud to use Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect service to connect to Oracle Cloud infrastructures in the U.S. and Europe. Oracle’s partnership with Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect service enhances the ability of enterprise customers to migrate workloads to the Oracle Cloud in addition to delivering improved connection reliability and lower latency. The collaboration between Verizon and Oracle to deliver Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect for Oracle FastConnect gives Oracle Cloud customers augmented capabilities to customize and monitor network performance using Verizon’s SDN functionality. Furthermore, Verizon Secure Cloud Interconnect supports Oracle Cloud capabilities such as dedicated, high speed MPLS connections as well as access to data spanning hybrid cloud infrastructures. Oracle’s partnership with Verizon underscores the seriousness of its intent to develop its cloud business and is likely to presage a bevy of future partnerships that empower it to build next generation cloud computing infrastructures that can compete with Amazon Web Services, per Oracle CTO Larry Ellison’s bold proclamation that “Amazon’s lead is over” at its OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco in September.

Rackspace Purchased By Private Equity Firm Apollo Global Management And Goes Private

Rackspace has been purchased by Apollo Global Management LLC, a private equity firm, for $4.3 billion or $32/share. The purchase of Rackspace, a public Infrastructure as a Service company headquartered in San Antonio, TX famous for its fanatical customer support and managed hosting capabilities, reflects Rackspace’s inability to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. In response to increased competition within the IaaS space, Rackspace transformed its business model to ensure its services were supported Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform but it nevertheless found itself unable to carve out an anointed place for itself within the landscape of IaaS players despite its early entrance into the IaaS market. Rackspace’s acquisition by Apollo Global Management LLC represents a milestone in the history of cloud computing by affirming the dominance of IaaS cloud market share by Amazon Web Services and the concomitant challenge of carving out a niche within the IaaS space. The industry should expect greater consolidation within the IaaS space over the next 24 months as the ascendancy of Amazon, Microsoft and Google with respect to infrastructure-related cloud services soars and renders it increasingly difficult for smaller players to compete, particularly given their ability to drop prices and enrich their infrastructure as a service offerings with big data, data analytics, cloud monitoring and security solutions.

Amazon Web Services Acquires NICE TO Boost High Performance Computing Offerings

Amazon Web Services has acquired NICE, a company headquartered in Asti, Italy that provides software for high performance computing. NICE’s products enable customers to optimize their high performance computing workloads. NICE’s EnginFrame product delivers a grid portal for accessing and utilizing grid services and resources. Meanwhile, NICE’s Desktop Cloud Visualization “enables Technical Computing users to remote access 2D/3D interactive applications over a standard network.” The acquisition of NICE points to an interest on the part of Amazon Web Services in deepening its high performance computing product and service offerings. AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr noted in a blog post that NICE will retain its branding for EnginFrame and Desktop Cloud Visualization products. The acquisition is expected to be finalized by Q1 of 2016.

Intel Leads $100M Funding Raise For OpenStack Vendor Mirantis

On Monday, Intel announced its intent to lead a $100M capital raise for Mirantis, one of the few pure play commercial OpenStack vendors in the market today. Intel leads the investment alongside Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures and WestSummit Capital. The investment marks the second $100M capital raise on the part of Mirantis in the space of a year given that Insight Ventures led a $100M funding round with Mirantis less than a year ago. The October 2014 $100M capital raise led by Insight Ventures represented the largest funding raise in the history of open source computing and, as such, this year’s investment marks another notable milestone in the history of capital raises for open source-based technologies. Intel’s decision to lead the $100M capital raise builds upon its support of OpenStack as a Platinum member of the OpenStack consortium as of 2015. Today’s investment constitutes another emphatic affirmation of OpenStack that promises to transform the cloud computing landscape significantly by giving Mirantis the capital to innovate with respect to its commercial distribution of OpenStack. As one of the only remaining pure play OpenStack vendors in the marketplace, the investment bolsters the valuation of Mirantis and empowers it to consolidate its positioning as a distributor of an enterprise grade platform for building private, IaaS clouds that interoperate with other OpenStack-based cloud platforms.

Apprenda PaaS Announces Forthcoming Availability In Cisco Intercloud Marketplace

.NET and Java enterprise PaaS company Apprenda recently announced that it will be available in the Cisco Intercloud Marketplace. Slated for launch in the fall of 2015, the Cisco Intercloud Marketplace aggregates applications that run on Cisco’s Intercloud platform for building hybrid clouds. As part of the collaboration between Apprenda and Cisco, Apprenda will support Cisco SDKs and APIs. The partnership between Apprenda and Cisco underscores the co-implication between Platform as a Service vendors qua Apprenda and hybrid infrastructures such as Cisco’s intercloud, a “cloud of clouds” that facilitates the creation of hybrid, OpenStack-based clouds by delivering infrastructure and application development functionality. Apprenda’s forthcoming availability within the Cisco Intercloud Marketplace builds upon recent partnerships with Piston Cloud (recently acquired by Cisco) and Microsoft Azure in a clear sign that, with the exception of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the days of a standalone PaaS platform may well be numbered as the industry churns out partnerships between application, database and infrastructure technologies such as the Basho Data Platform and Piston Cloud OS 4.0. The bottom line here is that PaaS is increasingly morphing into an appendage to IaaS-focused platforms albeit, a critical one by way of its ability to deliver a ready to use database and application stack that can be immediately consumed by developers.