Cloud services provider Interoute has announced the launch of a new virtual data centre (VDC) in Hong Kong, joining other vendors in setting up shop in the lucrative Asian region.

The company also announced that its customers can move data and apps across the entire services platform, across VDC zones, for no cost.

Lee Myall, the general manager of Interoute’s enterprise app store CloudStore, told CloudTech that while European expansion was still key, this was big news for Interoute on a global...

UK-based hosting provider FlintHosts has announced the launch of Flint|Charity, a service which offers free shared hosting and discounted cloud hosting to charities.

The free shared package allows for up to 1GB of storage, one hour of free technical support and a name check from the company, while the cloud package offers the requisite name check, hosting on Flint’s enterprise level platform at a 50% discount with fully managed service.

Paul Hopkinson, FlintHosts managing director, believes having...

Microsoft has announced price cuts on its compute facility by up to 35% and its storage by up to 65%, days after Google and Amazon Web Services did likewise.

Perhaps this is the least surprising news of the year – Amazon’s price cuts being the second least surprising. That said, everyone suspected Redmond’s cloud announcement wasn’t going to be just renaming Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure.

Cloud is ‘driving the bulk of change’ in the software market as Salesforce.com becomes the first pure play cloud company to make the top 10 companies for global software revenue, according to analyst house Gartner.

“The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of Things movement,” said Gartner...

Sketch “We apologise for bringing the rain down with us from Seattle,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services SVP in a slightly sheepish opening.

It was an opening delayed by half an hour because of weather and traffic fears, but those who had made it through the elements to San Francisco were treated to various client testimonials. Ranging from Adobe, to Airbnb and Twilio, they came in a variety of industries and a variety of languages – the latter seemingly to prove AWS’ customer base was...

Amazon Web Services has announced big price cuts across its cloud computing portfolio at an event in San Francisco – one day after rival Google did the same.

Andy Jassy, AWS senior vice president, explained to delegates in his keynote speech that lowering prices was “not new” for AWS, laying out the company’s latest price drop.

The facts: Amazon’s S3 storage cloud gets a pricing tier decrease from 36% to 65%. M3 gets an average 38% decrease, while C3 gets 30% - these were Linux...

You need a PhD to work out the best option, says Google SVP

Google has cut prices for its cloudy infrastructure across the board, aiming to “blend IaaS and PaaS” as well as change the outlook of the cloud pricing wars.

The Mountain View giant is reducing the price of its IaaS offering Compute Engine by a third (32%) ‘across all sizes, regions and classes’, ‘significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances’ for the PaaS product App Engine, a two...

You can’t say it wasn’t coming. Cloud storage provider Box has announced its public offering after a huge amount of rumour and conjecture, with the overall amount raised expected to hit around $250m.

The company is looking to trade under the NYSE symbol ‘BOX’ and confirms reports in January that the cloud storage bods had confidentially filed.

The number of shares and their price wasn’t disclosed in the...

German giant misses its emissions target, slowly moves towards the green cloud for its customers

SAP has announced that it will power its data centres, and all other facilities, using 100% renewable electricity, pushing an environmentally friendly message as the software giant moves towards a cloud business model.

The news was included in SAP’s 2013 Integrated Report, which was made available last week, with overall energy figures creeping up –...

A survey of over 2000 respondents by Microsoft and 451 Research has shown that half of companies have deployed some form of hybrid cloud.

The report, which clocks in at a mammoth 75 pages (pdf here, if you’ve got an hour or two), revealed that 989 (49%) of the 2041 execs surveyed had configured a hybrid for interoperability. Of that number:

• 60% had used an on premise private cloud alongside a hosted private cloud
• 42.1% had combined an on premise private cloud with a public...

Box CEO Aaron Levie might have said that there was no direct rivalry between his company and Dropbox, but as both companies hurtle towards an IPO, it’s difficult not to compare the two.

According to Cromwell Schubarth writing for Biz Journals: “Levie downplays talk of a rivalry between the companies, pointing to questions about which social network would survive in the early days of Facebook,...

Amidst the World Wide Web turning 25, a company in Seattle was having a little celebration of its own.

On March 14 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of Amazon S3, described as “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.”

To say the eight years which have passed since then have...

Research from Eduserv has revealed that for three in four UK charities, inertia from the IT department is stunting growth and putting doubt into future fundraising activities.

The research, of 100 digital and IT leaders in UK charities including Oxfam, Macmillan and Unicef, found concern from heads of digital over moving with the times. Survey respondents argued this lack of ‘digital transformation’ would impact fundraising (73%), reputation (71%), and the ability to deliver the right services...

Feature IBM wants your cloudy dollars – and it’s making an extremely aggressive play to be the market leader in enterprise cloud computing.

In some minds, however, it already is.

Exhibit A: chief executive Virginia Rometty, in an open letter to investors published as part of the company’s 2013 annual report, spelled it out: “IBM today is the leader in enterprise cloud.”

The reason? Investment. Big Blue has shelled out $7bn on 15 acquisitions, with...

It’s been almost 10 years since Salesforce.com filed for IPO, on June 23 2004. And with a 56.4% gain in initial trading, it was the first genuine indicator of the huge monetisation potential in software-as-a-service (SaaS).

While Salesforce remains the leader in SaaS, there have been a plethora of public offerings since then – but not at the lightning pace that would have been expected.

Back in December Altos Ventures wrote about the first decade of...

Research from IT services bods MTI has revealed that UK channel businesses are struggling to meet the needs of their demands due to the accelerated growth of cloud computing.

No prizes for guessing the angle of this research; if your instant thought was ‘resellers struggle in a cloud-heavy market, thus they’ll need a partner to help monetise’, then you’d be right. Yet the stats, taken from over 150 respondents with seven in ten resellers, make for interesting reading.

The results show...

PaaS provider CloudBees has secured series C funding to the tune of $11.2m (£6.7m), in a round of investment led by Verizon Ventures.

The latest round puts the total investment at $25.7m (£15.4m), with Verizon joining existing investors Matrix Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners, as well as new investor Blue Cloud Ventures.

According to CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey, the money will be used in two capacities – increasing go-to-market capability in different geographies, as well as further...

It’s official. IBM is now a cloud company. Big Blue has announced it is to push $1bn (£597.6m) of its resources and investments into cloud, including a developer-friendly platform as a service (PaaS) offering called BlueMix.

The Armonk giant also revealed it was to push SoftLayer into a variety of new zones, including making Watson available on the platform.

Amidst a plethora of announcements within the billion dollar investment, IBM SVP software and cloud solutions Robert LeBlanc described it as...

Enterprise PaaS provider CloudBees has today announced a partnership with Verizon to make its platform as a service available on Verizon Cloud.

This represents another hefty addition to the telco’s rapidly growing cloud ecosystem, after announcing a middleware partnership with Oracle back in January.

For Sacha Labourey, CloudBees CEO, the marriage seems a perfect fit, due to CloudBees’ market position in PaaS and Verizon’s enterprise...

In September 2012, the European Union released its “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe” document, aiming for a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2020 and a gain of 2.5m by the rollout of cloud.

A full 15 months later, the response by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) was published. The ‘Cloud...