Open cloud hosting provider Rackspace has announced it has given cloud support to the tune of almost £250,000 in order to aid UK-based startups get a foothold in the cloud.

The scheme falls under the Rackspace Startups Programme, which has been operating in the UK for six months and has already signed up more than 300 members.

The money comes from Rackspace alongside 50 partners and investors, with the CSP adding that startups who sign up with the scheme get “mentoring, expert technical advice and...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has today launched Amazon WorkSpaces, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution with data all stored in the cloud, at its AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas.

In the morning keynote Andy Jassy, AWS senior vice president, announced the launch alongside giving a few soundbites about how far ahead of the pack Amazon is – as well as an obligatory pot shot at cloud competitor IBM.

Amazon WorkSpaces, as Jassy explained, aims to go where previous VDI technology has failed, because...

IBM has patented a solution which the tech giant claims is a “green button” that distributes a cloud service to lower power systems to help save environmental costs.

According to the Armonk firm, patent 8,549,125 took its inspiration from energy firms offering consumers alternate, environmentally-friendly energy streams.

“We have invented a way for cloud service providers to more efficiently manage their data centres and, as a result, significantly reduce their environmental impact,”...

A new report from sourcing providers Alsbridge has revealed that, in the UK, cloud computing accounts for only one fifth of the IT budget.

This puts doubt in the thinking that cloud adoption in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market is accelerating – or, more particularly, that executives see cloud as the cornerstone of a bright, shiny IT future.

Last month research from Robert Half Technology revealed how cloud computing is...

Open cloud provider Rackspace has rolled out a complete revamp of its public cloud with Performance Cloud Servers – and according to Nigel Beighton, international VP technology and product, it represents a serious shift in how companies use their servers.

The architectural redesign of the Rackspace Performance Cloud Server comes with four times the total RAM, double the CPU performance and 132 times the I/O of its competitors, according to benchmark tests.

But Beighton argues that simply drooling over...

The Switzerland-based telco Swisscom is in the process of building a national “Swiss Cloud” – but denies claims that the primary motivation is around acquiring customers spooked by the NSA scandal.

The story first broke on Reuters, with the news agency reporting that the move is “driven more by a desire to cut costs and make its systems more dynamic”, according to Swisscom head of IT services Andreas...

Research from recruitment specialists Robert Half Technology has revealed that cloud computing is the most lucrative skill to have in the IT job market today.

Cloud topped the bill in the survey of 100 IT directors and CIOs across the UK, with 39% of respondents citing it as the most important.

Security (37%) and project management skills (33%) were the next popular, with virtualisation (29%) and network administration (27%) rounding out the top five.

Interestingly, coding and development skills were...

The latest cloud study, this time from IBM, has revealed that companies who use cloud computing as a competitive advantage can expect to have their revenue margins doubled compared to those who don’t have high adoption.

In the global survey of over 800 business decision makers and users, IBM found that leading organisations are moving to the cloud to move away from their competitors in a crowded space.

The report puts companies into three categories: pacesetters, who are “deploying cloud on a...

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider SoftLayer has been making all the right noises since its acquisition by IBM back in July.

Earlier this month CloudTech reported on the health of the IBM-SoftLayer relationship, with many IBM divisions reputed to be actively collaborating with the SoftLayer team to migrate existing apps and develop new ones.

And for Jonathan Wisler, EMEA general manager, speaking at

Dennis Moore, SVP and GM, master data management at Informatica, speaks to CloudTech about the data sector, the big players in the database space, and how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing everything.

Plenty of column inches in the past months have been focused on the various solutions vendors have put together for databases.

Oracle and SAP, the big traditional enterprises, have made plenty of hot air with their in-memory solutions – but only time will tell if the ripples on the market match up....

With Oracle, SAP and IBM fighting for precious market share on the in-memory relational database market, and the likes of MongoDB, Couchbase and DataStax putting together momentum in the NoSQL space, it almost feels like whoever wins the battle will win the war of database customer buy-in.

Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold told CloudTech his company’s position was that the market was going to move to the “disruptive” NoSQL...

Updated Oct 10: IBM’s bid to derail Amazon’s awarding of a lucrative $600m CIA cloud computing contract has been rebuffed after a federal judge ruled in favour of Amazon - but the Armonk company says it is planning to appeal the decision.

The ruling from Judge Thomas Wheeler, which was posted on PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) earlier this week, puts to an end – in theory anyway, IBM can of course still appeal – a saga which has been played out in courtrooms and behind...

With executives satisfied that they can get a return on investment for low-level apps in the cloud, 2014 is going to be the year when enterprise mission-critical apps will take charge, according to cloudy infrastructure platform provider Virtustream.

The findings have been released in a report, entitled “ERP – The Cuckoo in Cloud Land”, and gives insight both into the ERP (enterprise resource planning) landscape as well as the position of mission critical apps in the cloud.

The report...

Gartner has been gazing into its crystal ball once again, and now the smoke signals have cleared the message is simple: get going with a hybrid cloud solution, because half of big enterprises are going to be deployed by 2017.

The analyst house puts hybrid cloud where the private cloud was in 2010; plenty of companies wanting to get on board, but the actual uptake remains low.

But it’s not going to be available instantly: Gartner recommends chief execs should consider the cloud because of its agility...

Exclusive Steve Wozniak says he’s “a fan” of the cloud, yet he’s still worried about what could happen if consumers and companies don’t back things up locally.

This may come as something of a surprise to the tech fraternity, for whom the general consensus was that Woz wasn’t too keen on cloud – to put it politely.

Last August, after a showing of the Mike Daisey monologue ‘The Agony and...

Cloud storage provider Nirvanix has announced it has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as expected, following the news earlier this month it was to shut down effective September 30.

The Nirvanix website paints a sorry picture this morning, with a company update put almost out of the way at the bottom of the page stating that bankruptcy was sought “in order to pursue all alternative to maximise value for its creditors while continuing its efforts to provide the best...

Microsoft has announced that its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure has been given the sought after FedRAMP accreditation for US federal cloud computing.

As the American government is trying to go ‘cloud first’, this represents an important milestone for Redmond – if perhaps a little late.

Back in June, competitors HP and Amazon announced that their clouds were secure after gaining federal...

The database wars are about to kick off in spectacular style. Not just Oracle vs SAP – as Big Red announced its new in-memory database at the start of this week – but relational vs NoSQL.

Oracle and SAP have been making plenty of noise about their in-memory capability; SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott once claimed that its HANA technology was “the fastest growing...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote speech at the Oracle OpenWorld event this year had heavy billing.

And rightly so; the software giant was going to announce its in-memory database, and we were going to be told just how far ahead of the competition it was.

Oracle announced two primary products; the in-memory Oracle 12c database, and a new server, the M6-32 Big Memory Machine, which includes 32 TB of memory. Ellison said that, with the new database, data will fly around at “ungodly...

Enterprise-level cloud storage provider Nirvanix has unexpectedly announced it is shutting down effective September 30, with customers frantically searching for another place to store their data by then.

Several sources have reported the news, with the Wall Street Journal claiming that the storage provider had lost its latest round of funding, and had run out of money to continue operating.

The Twittersphere was varied as the community took the news in: