BlackBerry has snapped up a couple of Android-y domain names very recently. Logs show that BlackBerry Limited bought AndroidSecured.com and AndroidSecured.net on July 7th. This move, of course, adds more fuel to the rumors that the company is planning to launch a Google-powered smartphone in the near future.
On the Google Cloud Platform blog, Google has announced that it has now publicly released its ‘Andromeda’ virtualization stack to all Platform users. Users on its US central and western European servers should see ‘major’ performance gains automatically. Google is rolling out the same changes to its other zones in the coming months, so all users will benefit from the same efficiency gains.
Andromeda’s goal is to expose the raw performance of the underlying network while simultaneously exposing network function virtualization (NFV). We expose the same in-network processing that enables our internal services to scale while remaining extensible and isolated to end users. This functionality includes distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, transparent service load balancing, access control lists, and firewalls. We do this all while improving performance, with more enhancements coming.
Hence, Andromeda itself is not a Cloud Platform networking product; rather, it is the basis for delivering Cloud Platform networking services with high performance, availability, isolation, and security. For example, Cloud Platform firewalls, routing, and forwarding rules all leverage the underlying internal Andromeda APIs and infrastructure. Our site presents the details of these and other advanced network capabilities.
Full technical details of the Andromeda changes can be found in the blog post.
Google is blowing up its Seattle presence, already the company’s third largest after Mountain View and New York City, reports the New York Times.
Google plans a major recruiting effort to increase its Seattle-area engineering staff by as much as five times. There is already fierce competition among tech companies for talented engineers, and many of those with skills in cloud computing work at Google’s rivals in Seattle.
“We’re not the first in this rodeo, but we have the history of Google,” said Brian Goldfarb, Google’s leader of cloud platform marketing, who joined the company last year after a decade at Microsoft. “We have the best data centers on the planet. You can’t really give engineers a bigger, badder thing to work on.”
Google is also adding 180,000 square feet to its office in Kirkland, Wash., which together with its Seattle office already houses more than 1,000 employees, making it Google’s third largest in the country after its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and its office in New York.
Oh, some interesting App Engine Stats were slipped into page 2:
The company says that 250,000 developers use it to run 1 million apps that generate up to 7.5 billion page hits a day.
Cloud Sherpas, last year’s Google Enterprise Partner of the Year, which helped over a million users migrate to Google Apps, today announced it will acquire two companies to accelerate growth: advisory and technology consulting services provider Navigis, and top CRM advisory and cloud integration services firm Innoveer Solutions. The terms of the deals were not disclosed, but CloudSherpas issued the following press releases:
Acquisition expands CRM advisory and cloud integration services in the U.S. and adds U.K. and India operations to cloud services brokerage
Atlanta, Georgia – January 15, 2013 – Cloud Sherpas has expanded domestically and internationally with the acquisition of Innoveer Solutions, a top CRM advisory and cloud integration services firm; terms were not disclosed. The transaction gives Cloud Sherpas its first physical presence in Europe, a growing market for cloud services according to Forrester, and squarely positions Cloud Sherpas as a leader in the cloud services brokerage ecosystem.
Innoveer is an award-winning global CRM consulting firm with over 750 customers and 2,000 successful deployments under its belt. The company was founded in 1998 and provides a range of services, including discovery and planning, CRM technology selection, business process improvements, implementation, change management and support focused on enterprise businesses in the Life Sciences, Insurance, Financial Services and Manufacturing sectors, among others. Key customers include Panasonic, Shire Pharmaceuticals and AXA, one of the largest installations of Salesforce worldwide. Innoveer pioneered a CRM Excellence Framework to help clients transform their customer-facing operations, and is well known for its expertise migrating clients from Siebel to Salesforce. Innoveer also offers in-depth advisory services, focused on CRM planning, process improvement and industry best practices.
Cloud Sherpas’ Salesforce business unit is growing rapidly. The firm offers CRM advisory services, implementation, integration and custom cloud development. Combined with Innoveer, Cloud Sherpas has migrated more than 5,000 customers to the cloud worldwide. The acquisition of Innoveer gives Cloud Sherpas greater geographic density in the northeast and central U.S., an operation in the U.K., an offshore delivery team in India and one of the largest practices of certified consultants worldwide. This is Cloud Sherpas’ second CRM-focused acquisition in the past month. Following this acquisition, the firm now has Salesforce.com Platinum Partner status in North America, Europe and Australia.
“Our clients are expanding their cloud application footprint,” said David Northington, CEO at Cloud Sherpas. “Many of our global customers have experienced success in one area of their business and are eager to apply cloud-based sales automation, customer service, call center support and collaboration throughout their organizations. With the acquisition of Innoveer, we bring more than 500 cloud strategists and technical experts to bear on the market across six countries, including a solid platform for European expansion.”
“We’ve helped hundreds of customers achieve their business objectives with cloud CRM,” said Adam Honig, founder and CEO of Innoveer Solutions. “Our customers are now asking us, ‘what additional value can we get from the cloud?’ As one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages, Cloud Sherpas is uniquely positioned to help our clients aggregate, integrate and customize an increasingly wide array of cloud-based solutions, including email and collaboration, platform development, mobility solutions, single sign-on and data integration, just to name a few.”
Atlanta, Georgia – January 15, 2013 – Cloud Sherpas has acquired Navigis, a leading global provider of advisory and technology consulting services to companies implementing ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW); terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition allows Cloud Sherpas, which has strong footholds in cloud advisory, messaging, collaboration and CRM, to expand its market and geographic footprints and capitalize on global interest among enterprise organizations in cloud ITSM.
Cloud Sherpas’ customers — now over 5,000 worldwide — are transitioning to cloud solutions from on-premise applications. These companies recognize the cost and productivity benefits of cloud software and want more of it. Acquiring Navigis allows Cloud Sherpas to meet this need by offering current as well as prospective customers the leading cloud ITSM solution. The acquisition also furthers Cloud Sherpas’ mission to provide best-of-breed cloud solutions to the enterprise as a leading Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB).
“Our number one job is listening to customers and providing them with the services they need to grow their businesses,” said David Northington, president and CEO at Cloud Sherpas. “Many of our customers have expressed an interest in cloud ITSM software, and acquiring Navigis – a strong operation that’s generating good profit and has doubled in size year over year – boosts our ability to support these companies. Between Google, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow, we’re establishing a ‘Sherpa stack’ of the top cloud solutions.”
Navigis has been a leader in IT Service Management since 1996. The company’s certified ServiceNow consultants provide value-added implementations, custom enhancements, administrative support and training to help ServiceNow customers automate their IT operations. Navigis clients include a roster of Fortune 500 enterprise IT customers and other leading edge companies. Navigis founder and CEO Philip Sidebottom will become president of Cloud Sherpas’ ServiceNow business unit with the acquisition.
“We’re thrilled to be joining Cloud Sherpas,” said Sidebottom. “The ITSM space and cloud in general are poised for massive growth. As part of the leading CSB, our customers will benefit greatly from Cloud Sherpas global scale and ability to aggregate multiple best-in-breed cloud applications, implement and integrate those applications, and customize them to meet the unique requirements of an industry or business.”
“Navigis has long been a trusted partner for ServiceNow and has provided considerable value to customers,” said David Schneider, senior vice president of worldwide sales and services, ServiceNow. “We look forward to continued success working with the new organization.”
“In cloud computing, the need for intermediaries to aggregate, integrate or customize cloud services grows as the number of cloud services and the rate of consumer adoption grow,” says Tiffani Bova, Research VP at Gartner in her November 2012 report, Service Provider Primer: Cloud Services Brokerage. “Cloud services brokerages (CSBs), will help organizations adopt and derive more value from multiple cloud services during the next five to 10 years.”
About Cloud Sherpas
Cloud Sherpas, the Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year and a Platinum salesforce.com Partner, is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages. Since 2007, the company has helped over 5,000 customers adopt, manage and enhance cloud solutions from Google, salesforce.com, ServiceNow and other leading cloud vendors. Whether working with a global retailer to help them make their business more connected and collaborative with Google Apps or helping a financial services firm deploy Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to better manage their customer relationships, Cloud Sherpas has the experience and expertise to help organizations leverage the cloud and respond with agility to the rapid consumerization of IT. Cloud Sherpas is headquartered in Atlanta, GA with offices throughout the United States and operations in Australia, Dubai, India, Japan, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.cloudsherpas.com.
As 2013 kicks off, Babak Parviz, head of the Google Glass project that launched in spring of last year, sat down in an interview with IEEE Spectrum to give word on what to expect next.
We saw several prototype versions of Google Glass, as it readies shipping to the mainstream, and today, Parviz gave some insight into what has changed. “We constantly try out new ideas of how this platform can be used. There’s a lot of experimentation going on at all times in Google,” said Parviz. “We’re also trying to make the platform more robust. This includes making the hardware more robust and the software more robust, so we can ship it to developers early this year.” The early 2013 shipping time was announced at Google I/O 2012. It is nice to see Google is still on-track; however, new features for the platform have not been revealed. “The feature set for the device is not set yet. It is still in flux,” Parviz said.
Parviz also covered how Google will make a business out of Google Glass, and, maybe as a surprise to many, the Mountain View company currently doesn’t have plans to include advertising—its bread and butter. The business model is still being worked on: “This is still being worked on, but we are quite interested in providing the hardware…At the moment, there are no plans for advertising on this device.”
Other revelations in the interview include a cloud-based API so developers can integrate their Android apps into Google Glass. An example given was email and calendar services. Lastly, Parviz said the Glass team has worked hard on battery life and making sure the device is safe on the eyes. You can read the full interview for more. [IEEE Spectrum]
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Google’s reduction of energy use for servers and server cooling.
Google wants businesses to make Google Apps their primary productivity suite, so the company is recruiting at full swing today with a new blog post that discloses a few stats about its energy efficiency.
Google Apps is a Google service that features several Web applications like traditional office suites. The services vary per edition but generally include Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Sites, Groups, Video, and Marketplace. Its popularity among businesses and academicians is rapidly increasing due to enhanced sharing features, accessibility, and cost.
According to Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure Urs Hoelzle on the Official Google Blog:
At Google, we’re obsessed with building energy efficient data centers that enable cloud computing. Besides helping you be more productive, cloud-based services like Google Apps can reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions and save you money in the process. Last year, we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to 80 times more energy-efficient than running traditional in-house email. We’ve sharpened our pencils again to see how Google Apps as a whole—documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications—stacks up against the standard model of locally hosted services. Our results show that a typical organization can achieve energy savings of about 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps.
Hoelzle further explained how lower energy use equals less carbon pollution. The executive supported this statement with an anecdote about the U.S. General Administration. It switched to Google Apps for Government to save $285,000 annually at a 93 percent cost reduction, and it reduced energy consumption by 90-percent and carbon emissions by 85-percent.
Spring is finally here, and Google announced it wants to clean house again with the seasonal change by killing a slue of products.
“Focus is crucial if we are to improve our execution. We have so many opportunities in front of us that without hard choices we risk doing too much and not having the impact we strive for,” explained Cloud Services Director Matthias Schwab on the Official Google Blog.
Here is a list of products being nixed:
While Greenpeace’s “How Clean is Your Cloud” report had not so great things to say about Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft’s use of coal energy in their data centers, Google was praised for its “comprehensive energy reduction plan”. The organization is urging consumers to contact the companies to convince them to change their approach to powering the cloud and read the 50-page report to learn more.
“Google has been the most open in the industry about the importance of increasing not only energy efficiency within the sector, but also the need to move our energy sources to renewable energy… Google has a comprehensive energy reduction plan that has resulted in its data centers using half the energy of the industry standard… Google’s commitment to using renewable energy as much as possible has set the bar for the industry.”
Google’s cloud-based email service has been available to Germans over for seven years, but they are just now getting the official Gmail domain.
A local businessperson previously held the domain, which forced Google to provide “googlemail.de” addresses to users in Germany. However, according to a recent story by The Financial Times (translated), the Gmail trademark and domain were effectively transferred to Google earlier this month.
There are no further details regarding the settlement.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/vT503jUG4Y4]
A leaked video suggests Microsoft’s world-renowned productivity suite will soon feature cloud-like options in an effort to curb Google Apps’ growing market share with its alternate offering.
The 30-second promo above is hosted on YouTube by Within Windows. It emphasizes “Office 15” as the suite’s newly re-branded name. It also focuses on the accessibility of the next iteration through remote access to documents, which is enabled by a normal sign-in procedure. The cloud options will tracks and store all of a user’s virtual papers in Microsoft’s cloud-based Sky Drive service.
Microsoft Office is dueling many cloud-based productivity suites, such as Google Apps, and it is steadily losing market share. The downward spiral even caused the once-great Word processing giant to embark on a smear campaign against Google, where it lambasted the Mountain View, Calif.-based Company as a shady advertiser with alternative motives.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/9jGvCdthQso]
YouTube now automatically allows short 1080p videos to convert to 3D.
The video-sharing platform just announced on the official YouTube blog that it is expanding a beta feature released last year, which gives users the option to convert YouTube videos to 3D with just a click of a mouse. Since the beta launched, creators have converted hundreds of thousands of videos to 3D.
The popularity of the feature encouraged YouTube to implement 3D viewing in the Quality settings under the gear icon on the YouTube player.
“Then pop on your 3D glasses and see YouTube in another dimension (like the video above),” explained Technical Staffer Deb Mukherjee and Software Engineer Chen Wu in the blog post.
The Googlers even recommended watching “YouTube Rewind 2011” to get the full YouTube 3D experience (below).