Google announced today that it is reducing the cost of its Google App Engine storage from $0.24/GB/month to $0.18 per gigabyte. App Engine operations pricing is also going down: Google is dropping database writes from $0.10 to $0.09 per 100,000 operations and reads from $0.07 to $0.06.

Google App Engine is a relative newcomer to the cloud market, having just recently started to get serious about supporting non-Google-used languages such as PHP – the programming language that runs 75 percent of the web.

But it’s already in massive use, with 4.5 trillion monthly transactions at 99.95 percent uptime.

Google is in bitter competition with Amazon Web Services, which reduced prices by about 28 percent a month ago, and Microsoft’s Azure, which just entered full public availability but is already a billion-dollar business and also just reduced prices by 21 to 33 percent. Rackspace, also a big cloud competitor, recently chopped its prices as well.

This new price decrease appears to match those from Amazon and Microsoft. The challenge, however, when evaluating cloud costs from multiple providers is that each vendor calculates costs somewhat differently, so it’s hard to get an apples to apples comparison.

Google last cut prices in November 2012, also in an attempt to compete with Amazon. And the price war looks like it will continue for some time to come.

Essentially, it’s become fairly obvious that cloud is a commodity, and the cheapest provider will win. The question is, can companies maintain excellent service levels while cutting pricing to the bone.

photo credit: Hugo90 via photopin cc

If you had asked me last week to pick a single device that embodied everything Microsoft was trying to accomplish in 2013 and beyond, I’d instantly point to its Surface tablets. After yesterday’s Xbox One reveal, though, the answer is no longer as clear-cut.

Building on its experience with the original Xbox and Xbox 360 (and to a certain extent, its work on the Windows CE operating system for the Sega Dreamcast), Microsoft has fashioned a powerful gaming system in the Xbox One that will also serve as a media hub for the entire family. The Xbox One can integrate with your TV service, multitask like a computer, and give you instant access to media in the cloud.

It’s more a powerful home theater PC than it is a game console, making it a great tool for bringing Microsoft’s services into your living room. More so than the Xbox 360 — which started out as a simple gaming machine but evolved into an entertainment powerhouse thanks to a slew of regular software updates — the Xbox One is built to take advantage of Microsoft’s web services right from the start.

And it’ll only become more integrated over time.

Skype becomes a living room staple

While rumors have swirled for a while that Skype would eventually head to the Xbox 360, it turns out that the service is actually making its console debut on the Xbox One. You can thank the revamped Kinect sensor for that — it’ll be packed in with every Xbox One, and it also sports a much higher resolution camera than the initial Kinect (which essential for getting decent video from wide living room shots).

It’s not the first time Skype has hit the living room. The video chat app is also available on Google TV devices (with a special Logitech camera) and some smart TVs. But launching on the Xbox One will give Skype its largest living room audience yet, and it’s something no other video chat service will be able to easily match.

You’ll be able to participate in Skype group video chats on the Xbox One, and since the console supports true multitasking, you’ll also be able to jump into video calls while playing a game or watching a video. And of course, the Skype integration will let you easily chat with your friends using Skype on other platforms, like PCs and smartphones.

After two years, it seems like Microsoft’s $8.5 billion Skype acquisition will finally pay off with the Xbox One.

Azure brings console gaming to the cloud

Even though it was a fairly minor bit of the Xbox One’s announcement yesterday, the console’s integration with Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform has far-reaching potential over the next few years. It could be used to scale Microsoft’s Xbox Live service (the company is already adding 300,000 servers to power Live for the Xbox One, while it’s only running on 15,000 servers right now) and store your games and saves. Most intriguingly, Microsoft also mentioned that it could be used for offloading computational tasks to the cloud.

With Azure’s infrastructure, “Xbox Infinity” may have been a better name for the Xbox One.

The promise of cloud computation means that games on the console will only become more complex over time — imagine better in-game physics when you’re connected to the web or seamless loading for maps for massively multiplayer games. Console developers typically manage to eke out better performance from systems as they age, but with Azure’s cloud computing capabilities, Xbox One games could conceivably keep getting better indefinitely. The only limit will be our Internet connections.

Xbox with a touch of Windows

A simplified version of Windows is one of three operating systems powering the Xbox One, which means Microsoft’s new Windows platform now lives on your television in addition to tablets, PCs, and smartphones (Windows Phone 8 has a big chunk of Windows 8′s kernel, the main component of the OS). You can also see a hint of Windows 8′s flat live tiles on the Xbox One’s new interface.

On the Xbox One, Windows powers nongame applications like Skype and Netflix. This means developers can also create new apps easily — potentially with some of the code they’re using for existing Windows 8 apps. The console also runs an Xbox OS for gamers, as well as a hypervisor that lets the the Windows and Xbox sides play nicely together.

Having Windows baked in makes it easier for Microsoft to integrate even more of its services into the Xbox One down the line. It also helps to power the Xbox One’s intriguing multitasking capabilities, a first for a console. While the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 often struggled just to do more than one thing at once, the Xbox One will let you snap apps to the side of the screen just like Windows 8. During Microsoft’s demonstration yesterday, moving between apps on the console was also incredibly fast.

Voice commands have also been greatly improved with the new Kinect, a combination of the Xbox One’s faster processing power and multitasking capabilities. You can command the Xbox One to turn on (which flips on your TV and home theater receiver at the same time) and switch from game to media environments. Instant and accurate voice commands remove the delays it currently takes to navigate the Xbox 360, and it opens the door for even more creative uses of the Xbox One (perhaps as a central hub for home automation, or to remotely give commands to your PC).

I’ve always been intrigued by Microsoft’s initial strategy with Windows 8. Rather than repeat what’s worked with Windows for so long, Microsoft took a radically different route and built an OS that’s optimized for touchscreens. Simply looking at the Surface devices tells you that Microsoft envisions a feature where tablets and laptops merge.

With Windows on the Xbox and Windows Phone 8, it looks like Microsoft’s future isn’t just focused on predicting what computers will look like in 10 years — it’s also attempting to unify its platform on every screen in your life.

What does this mean for Sony?

While Microsoft seems dead-set on showing us the many ways the Xbox One fits into your life with its many services, Sony seems more focused on appealing to gamers with the PlayStation 4. We saw plenty more games during the PlayStation 4′s launch event, and there was also more talk about how its hardware will improve the gaming experience.

I can’t blame Sony for making its pitch to gamers, but Microsoft may have had the better idea by focusing on a more general audience. Microsoft isn’t just targeting gamers — it’s targeting everyone who sits in the living room. And unlike Sony, it has a wealth of services to make that pitch stick.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With the debut of the new Xbox One gaming system, we could focus on many things: hardware, flashy games, and entertainment options. But one aspect really gets me fired up: Developers should now be able to use Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever.

Wired reports that the game developers and studios can tap Azure for all kinds of things. Microsoft isn’t going to force developers to use the cloud platform, but it will certainly push them to do so.

The Xbox One will not have to be always connected to the Internet to play games, but it does generally require an online connection. And if developers do decide to tap Azure’s cloud computing platform to boost a game’s power, a web connection will be necessary to play that game.

Why Azure?

Microsoft has been building Azure’s cloud computing capabilities for a long while. Azure has been mostly known as a platform-as-a-service that (primarily .NET) developers use to make the process of app development easier.

Microsoft opened up Azure for pure cloud infrastructure use in June. It now competes with top dogs like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Google Compute Engine.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us this past October that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the entire world used in 1998. As of December, Azure’s cloud storage holds more than 4 trillion objects. It also handles an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, with a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

Azure applications in gaming

Now, let’s see what you could do with all that power.

The first and most obvious application of Azure on Xbox One is making Xbox Live more powerful and useful. All your downloaded games and achievements would be synced and available wherever you are. You would also have dedicated servers for every multiplayer game you participate in. Multiplayer matches would be able to host up to 128 gamers in a single session.

Xbox Live currently runs on 15,000 servers, but it will soon move to a stunning 300,000 servers later this year for the Xbox One launch. That’s a lot of power dedicated to making Xbox Live better.

Second (and this is a bit more crazy), developers can offload computational tasks to the cloud instead of relying on physical hardware to do the heavy lifting. Necessary game computations for physics, rendering, and the like could be immensely enhanced with a connection to powerful virtual servers in the cloud.

“It’s not like on day one, everyone will have figured out how to take advantage of that power,” Microsoft interactive entertainment CMO Marc Whitten told Wired. “It’s just one of those stakes we’re placing.”

Screenshot via Microsoft

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I visited Microsoft’s office in San Francisco yesterday to meet with some of these startups and learn more about the program and its progress.

(Also, so I could tell my Bubby I met some nice Israelis.)

Hanan Lavy is the accelerator director in Israel. He measures the program’s success based on how many startups get funding within a year, the average amount raised, and how many members of the current class refer startups to the next class. By these standards, Microsoft’s program is doing well. The second class graduated two weeks ago and 10 of the 13 companies have already raised funds. The average raise of the first class is around $900,000 and the number of applications has tripled.

“This was a new model for Microsoft to operate an accelerator fully owned and run by Microsoft,” he said. “We make sure the companies have a big vision, the entrepreneurs can execute, that a strong tech person is part of the core team, and that the participants are coachable and open-minded. Many startups get involved with what they think is a pain point, but it isn’t really.”

The program lasts for four months where the startups get out and talk to customers, iterate and develop the product, interact with mentors, and hone their pitch. At the end of it all, they come to the U.S. for marketing, fundraising, and publicity. While Israel has an active startup scene, a strong presence in the U.S. market is still important for growth.

Kitchenbug

Kitchenbug wants to tell the true story behind food. The startup uses natural language processing to analyze recipes and generate full nutritional data, as well as helpful clues to understanding what that data means.

Understanding the health impact of a dish is not as simple as checking calorie, fat and sugar content. A number of other factors are at play and people without extensive knowledge of nutrition may not be aware of the consequences of certain meals. Kitchenbug addresses this issue by attaching green or red icons to each dish that say things like “not very heart healthy” or “good for feeling full” or “bad choice for weight loss.” That way, instead of parsing through various dishes and nutrition resources, you can instantly know if a recipe is right for you.

The founders have known each other for 25 years and live close together in Israel. COO Dror Daliot said that they used to be “chin-up champions” who were fit, slim, and strong, and then “life happened.”

“I love my daughters but they are terrible for my diet,” he said during a demo. “Pancake mornings and evening pizzas are not the healthiest.  At a BBQ, I looked at my friends and our crumbling frames and said ‘guys, we have to do something about this.’ We decided to develop technology that takes any online recipe from any website and instantly provides dietary information you need.”

60 percent of the Western world is overweight and 25 percent is obese, with weight-related diseases and allergies on the rise. According to Daliot, recipes are the second biggest search category on the web with 2 billion searches a month, and almost 50 percent of Americans search for info about health food. The Kitchenbug founders are not alone in their efforts to prepare healthy, home-cooked meals.

Kitchenbug has a bookmarking button that collect recipes into an online recipe box. Clicking into an ingredient will yield a description and serving sizes can be easily adapted. The app is social so people can share recipes, follow others, and discover new recipes. The company launched a WordPress plugin in January for food bloggers and over 2,500 recipes have been published so far, receiving 40 million views in 100 days. In the pipeline for Kitchenbug are icons and filters for ideological, allergy, and religious constraints. The data is based on nutritional information from the USDA database, as well as food manufacturers and brands, Wikipedia, and FDA regulations.

The team has raised $650,000 to date.

Pages: 1 2

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Windows Azure Active Directory has processed more than 200 billion authentications for Microsoft services in two years, and it now processes an average of 4.7 billion logins a week, the company announced today.

Active Directory (AD) handles authentications for Windows Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Server Online Backup, and Windows Intune. Companies that sign up for Active Directory can use its cloud-based store for directory data and various identity services. Additionally, AD can let companies configure a single sign-on to “allow interoperability with their existing on-premises Active Directory environment.”

Microsoft has been notoriously shy to share key metrics about its Windows Azure growth. For a recent article outlining the Platform-as-a-Service market, Microsoft told me Windows Azure has “tens of thousands” of customers and that it had doubled its customers during the past 12 months.

But at least when it comes to Active Directory, which is processing 1 million logins every two minutes, this at least shows that Microsoft’s cloud can handle a ton of data flying around.

In a blog post today, Windows Azure GM Bill Hilf outlined a few other important details on Active Directory worth noting:

Windows Azure AD goes beyond the first party services delivered from Microsoft. It is being used by our customers and third party developers as well. By using Windows Azure AD we deliver cloud based authentication services for you at scale with fast response and, if desired, enable federation and synchronization with your existing on-premise Windows Server Active Directory (AD). This is important as Gartner estimates that 95% of organizations already have Active Directory deployed in their environment.

By connecting your existing Windows Server AD to Windows Azure AD you can manage a hybrid
environment that provides unified authentication and access management for both cloud and on-premise services and servers, eliminating the need to maintain new, independent cloud directories. In addition, Windows Azure AD supports multiple protocols and token types, therefore apps that use it can be accessed from any device that supports an industry standard web browser including smartphones, tablets, and multiple PC, desktop and server operating systems.

Clouds photo via Flickr/Nicholas A. Tonelli

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Looking to cloud-enable your mobile app? Looks like Microsoft can help make that a lot easier.

Microsoft just demoed some very slick new mobile and cloud connections today at its BUILD conference in Redmond, showing how simple it is for developers to store their data in the cloud and perform operations on that data.

Josh Twist from Windows Azure Mobile Services — which he announced now support Windows Phone 8 — connected an app to Azure authentication services live onstage. Authentication protocols not only include Microsoft accounts, but also Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts, and Twist showed how, in just a few lines of code, developers can add social login to their apps.

This works on any app on iOS as well as more traditional desktop apps for Windows Store, and now, of course, Windows Phone 8.

Even more interestingly, Twist demoed how simple it is to set event handlers in Azure that execute code securely and automatically in the cloud whenever data changes. One example he showed was to automatically grab a user’s Twitter avatar when the user logs in via Twitter. In a few lines of Javascript, saved on Azure and triggered automatically when a user logged in, Mobile Services talked to Twitter, retrieved the user icon, saved it locally, and sent it to the mobile app for use in the user interface.

Impressive!

Then Twist connected the cloud app to a live tile on his Windows 8 PC, enabling quick and easy desktop monitoring of his mobile app’s activity. Also impressive.

A preview is available today, Twist said, and developers who sign up will receive 10 mobile services for free.

And the Windows Phone app data arrives on the Windows 8 desktop, via Azure Mobile Services

Image credits: vernieman via photopin cc, Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Platform-as-a-Service is part of the booming cloud computing sector, one area of the cloud that some analysts, companies, and developers have overlooked. But recent research shows that PaaS is no longer the ugly duckling of the cloud industry — and that it’s ready to grow quite a bit during the next few years.

PaaS will make up barely 1 percent of the overall $109 billion cloud industry this year. But it will likely grow more than 30 percent annually over the next four years, according to research firm Gartner.

This could make PaaS a $2.9 billion market by 2016, or more than 2 percent of the $209 billion total cloud market. While small, it’s the second fastest growing “layer” of the cloud and one that cloud-watchers should be paying closer attention to.

What is PaaS?

Like many things dubbed cloud, PaaS is a term that sometimes get lost in technobabble or marketing jargon. So let’s break down what PaaS actually is.

The cloud features four main layers, according to Gartner: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, and Business Process-as-a-Service (IaaS, Paas, SaaS, and BPaaS,).

IaaS companies such as Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and Joyent offer the core infrastructure and virtual servers that host applications and data. This is where the heavy iron sits, such as storage, servers, and so on. The SaaS category, meanwhile, lies on the opposite end: It includes applications that companies deliver exclusively via the web (rather than desktop apps). These include apps such as Google Docs, Salesforce CRM, Workday, Box, Taleo, and NetSuite that enterprise workers rely on. BPaaS includes business process services like advertising or payments.

PaaS sits in-between IaaS and SaaS, providing an environment for developers and companies to host and deploy applications more easily. Simply put, PaaS companies shield developers from the hassle of setting up, configuring, and managing things like servers and databases, so that they don’t have to see the infrastructure side.

What makes PaaS so attractive is that it can improve the speed of developing an app, save you money, and maybe most important, let you focus on innovating your application and business. Major PaaS providers include Salesforce (Heroku), Google (App Engine), and Microsoft (Azure).

In the diagram below, you can see how PaaS fits into the main layers of the cloud:

Boom time

In terms of size, SaaS, IaaS, and BPaaS far outstrip PaaS. In 2012, PaaS revenues ($1.2 billion) will be a tenth of the size of SaaS ($14.4 billion), a fifth of IaaS ($6.2 billion), and just a tiny fraction of BPaaS ($84.1 billion).

However, when it comes to year-over-year growth of the PaaS segment itself, it looks quite nice.

Research firm IDC breaks down the market slightly differently than Gartner and is more bullish on PaaS. It estimates that the worldwide public PaaS market will grow from $2.6 billion in 2011 to $9.8 billion in 2016. That represents 30.9 percent annualized growth.

By 2016, IDC believes public PaaS will account for 8.5 percent of overall app dev and deployment revenue, with “strong growth” occurring in every region of the world. Stephen Hendrick, IDC group vice president for application development and deployment research, calls PaaS’ future “exciting.”

Just this week, Salesforce COO George Hu said at DEMO Fall 2012 that its platform services have surpassed Salesforce’s CRM in terms of API calls per day. “The pace keeps me up at night,” he said. “Things are moving incredibly fast at Salesforce right now.”

Additionally, a recent survey by smaller PaaS provider Engine Yard, which had $28 million in revenue last year, indicates that PaaS adoption is on the rise with medium and large companies. Two out of three survey respondents said they already use or plan to use PaaS in the next two years. “Enterprise is beginning to bite,” Mark Gaydos, the Engine Yard SVP of marketing, told us at the time.

For more on how the market is growing, take a look at some of the biggest players:

Heroku

One of the largest players in the PaaS marketplace is Salesforce with Heroku, which has more than 2.3 million apps currently deployed on it. A year ago it had just 200,000. Heroku customers include Walmart, Macy’s, Activision Blizzard, and GroupMe.

“We see PaaS as a fundamental game changer,” Heroku chief operating officer Oren Teich told VentureBeat. “We’re looking at the base of innovation. We’ve only climbed 100 feet of a 3-mile-high mountain.”

Teich said he expects Heroku to host more than five million apps a year from now. He admits that he’s being cautious with that number and said it could potentially be more akin to six million or seven million apps if momentum really picks up. Salesforce would not reveal the revenue it generates from Heroku.

Google App Engine

Google and its App Engine is one of the earliest players in PaaS, opening its doors in “preview status” in April 2008 and officially leaving preview in November 2011.

Here, too, Google does not break down revenue it gets from App Engine. However, Google’s statistics show that usage of App Engine is growing quickly. At the Google I/O conference this past June, Google announced that it had more than 1 million active apps deployed on GAE and 250,000 active developers building on the platform. In May 2011, Google said it had 200,000 active apps and 100,000 active developers.

Half of the Internet’s IP addresses touch Google App Engine servers each week, a Google spokesperson recently told me. Some two trillion datastore operations are performed on it each month.

Microsoft Windows Azure

Thirdly, we have Microsoft and Windows Azure. Azure turned some heads in June by also starting to offer developers IaaS on top of its already strong PaaS product.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us that Azure has “tens of thousands” of customers and that Azure has doubled the number of its customers over the past 12 months. He said Microsoft has doubled compute capacity for Azure so it can meet demand and that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the world used in 1998.

“We’ve worked hard to keep up with demand the past two years,” Martin told us. “In the long term, PaaS will be most widely used for application development.”

Other players

The PaaS market also encompasses a number of smaller players, such as VMWare’s Cloud Foundry, AppFog, dotCloud, CloudBees, Engine Yard, Red Hat’s OpenShift, and Salesforce’s enterprise-oriented platform, Force.com.

AppFog has more than 60,000 apps hosted, up from 50,000 apps a month ago and 10,000 apps a year ago, according to AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson. AppFog also recently acquired Nodester, a PaaS that supports the popular Node.js programming environment.

Developers take control

The prospects for PaaS weren’t always so exciting. Redmonk analyst Steve O’Grady says that the earliest PaaS implementations — Salesforce’s Force.com, Google App Engine, Microsoft’s Azure — did not sell as well as the market expected.

“From an adoption standpoint, early PaaS largely failed,” O’Grady said. “Did Force.com and Google get users? Yes, but they did not live up to expectations.”

That said, a few barriers were stopping the mass market from buying in. First, many large enterprise companies don’t permit PaaS use. AppFog’s Carlson says that CIOs are often concerned about vendor lock-in and don’t like PaaS providers taking over functions the company could potentially set up on its own.

But developers go around their IT overlords and use PaaS services anyway. Because much of the technology is low-cost or open-source, developers say “screw it” because PaaS greatly improves their productivity and lowers project costs.

O’Grady says what the CIOs want doesn’t matter now that their developers have taken control. “They don’t have a choice,” he said.

The second barrier to Paas adoption? Not enough people know what PaaS can help their company accomplish. Heroku’s Teich said when he talks to developers and enterprises about PaaS, they don’t do much evaluation of their options or even know what the options are. Basically, they are woefully uneducated.

“Developers have a lot of preconceived notions about which PaaS they should use,” Teich said. “It’s another sign that PaaS is something that has a lot of growth potential.”

If you feel like you need a PaaS education, come join us for the CloudBeat 2012 conference on Nov. 28 and 29 in Redwood City, Calif. We look forward to seeing you there.

Clouds photo via Nicholas A. Tonelli/Flickr

Cloud breakdown slide via “Windows Azure Platform: Cloud Development Jump Start” via Microsoft

It’s a potential treasure trove for those who develop for Microsoft, or work in a Microsoft environment, and want to broaden their skills. I’ve included a few of the potentially most interesting below — but be sure to check out the full selection.

Web geeks who want to start building Windows 8 apps might want to check out Programming Windows 8 Apps, which will show you how to use your Javascript, HTML, and CSS skills to program for the desktop in Windows 8.

Or, if you’re a mobile developer and are thinking of possibly throwing an app on the Windows Phone platform, Ligman has listed a few books for you as well that will have you up and running with Silverlight, XAML, and sprites in no time.

IT administrators might find this set of books more helpful: a Microsoft Office 365 handbook for the more adventurous, and Office 2010 for the majority of you who are in corporate environments that stay just slightly off the bleeding edge.

Staying with IT theme, Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions might be useful. Server room jockies will likely find something to learn in Windows Server 2012. And database administrators? There are a least eight different SQL e-books in Ligman’s list — all for free.

None these will be helpful, of course, if you’re not in a Microsoft shop.

But for those who are, take a look at both this list and a secondary list that Ligman posted that includes resources on developing for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud:

Image credit: Vladimir Melnikov/ShutterStock

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The market for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) companies will grow steadily in the next several years because of the potential for operational improvement and cost reduction, according to a just-released survey by Engine Yard.

Engine Yard competes heavily with Salesforce’s Force.com and Microsoft’s Azure to attract developers and companies to its platform-as-a-service. While Engine Yard does have a clear interest to say that the PaaS market will grow swiftly, it also has some authority in being a quickly growing PaaS startup that generated $28 million in revenue last year.

Mark Gaydos, Engine Yard’s SVP of marketing, told us that the biggest change in the market lately is that “enterprise is beginning to bite.” The many medium- and large-sized businesses investing in cloud services create an opening for PaaS companies, which deploy and host applications. (Click here to see what IaaS, PaaS and SaaS companies do.)

“It appears that most companies are looking to engage with the cloud to deploy more innovative customer-facing applications, such as SaaS, mobile, e-commerce, and social across a wide variety of languages,” the company writes in the conclusion of the survey. “While cost savings is a reason to consider using a PaaS, the desire to improve operational readiness and improve application functionality and uptime are more important to individuals responding to the survey.”

Check out the infographic below to see the major take-aways from the survey:

Top photo credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock

In a world full of motion-sensing Kinect technology, iPhones, and smart thermostats, it’s hard to make something like a cloud-computing platform exciting. (VentureBeat’s very own cloud beat reporter Sean Ludwig can attest to this, having tried repeatedly with Azure-related headlines.)

This was undoubtedly the logic behind an Azure-related dance performance at the developer event Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, which was commissioned by a third-party marketing firm for Microsoft. The dance routine was a hokey way to make Azure seem more exciting. It featured a screen that displayed the lyrics of the song that was being performed, with lyrics such as “Tonight we’re gonna party and coding is our drug” and “The words MICRO and SOFT don’t apply to my penis (or vagina).”

As you can guess, this didn’t exactly sit well with the home office. Microsoft head of corporate communication Frank Shaw later tweeted that “this routine had vulgar language, was inappropriate and was just not ok. We apologize to our customers and partners.” Shaw did, however, forget to mention that it was also very bizarre.

While we’re inclined to agree with Shaw’s statement, we’ve taken the liberty of embedding a YouTube video of the performance below so you can make you own judgement.

For those of you who are more interested in cloud computing than inappropriate dance lyrics and half-naked Norwegian women, check out our latest report about Microsoft Azure’s Spring updates.

Source: GeekWire via AllThingsD

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform suffered a serious outage Tuesday evening and many customers are still without full access, according to the Azure Service Dashboard.

Azure is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s own data centers.

According to a circulated statement from Microsoft’s outside PR firm, Microsoft first noticed the issue Tuesday at 5:45 PM PST and did what it could to resolve the issues. “Windows Azure engineering teams developed, validated and deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of our customers,” the statement reads. “Some customers in 3 sub regions – North Central US, South Central US and North Europe – remain affected. Engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

As of this writing, the Azure Service Dashboard indicates that much of the services provided by Azure have been restored. But the biggest glaring problem appears to be the company’s SQL Azure Data Sync feature, which is down in every region of the world it serves. This feature allows developers to sync and backup important database and coding.

Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte, a cloud storage provider for businesses, said in an e-mailed statement that the downtime highlighted a flaw with traditional cloud infrastructure. Egnyte offers a hybrid cloud solution that helps eliminate downtime. Jain writes:

The outage that occurred today with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform can be crippling and cost millions if not billions of dollars, but more importantly highlights the down side of a pure cloud strategy in the enterprise. While we certainly don’t relish these moments, the downtime can be significantly mitigated if organizations were to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. By maintaining a behind the firewall presence and syncing that to the public cloud, companies are creating an insurance policy just for these situations. At the same time they can keep downtime to a minimum and insure their employees are as productive as possible in an emergency situation like this. Hybrid cloud is the smartest path to a productive workforce for today’s enterprise.

Did your Azure service go out? How many features stopped working?

Storm clouds photo: divingrocks/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s iCloud runs on two services from its biggest competitors, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s elastic cloud, reports The Register.

Sources tell the site that both Microsoft and Amazon were instructed to remain mum on the iCloud deal. Amazon’s elastic cloud is already established as a go-to service for any company that wants to offload data and other resources, but the deal serves as a major validation for Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

Writes The Register: “iCloud puts Azure into a different league, given the brand love for Apple and the Apple management’s fanatical attitude to perfection. It is a “huge consumer brand, a great opportunity to get Azure under a very visible workload,” our sources told us.”

Apple is likely aiming to avoid potential iCloud outages by selecting two cloud suppliers. The company has already had the headache of dealing with outages for its MobileMe service, which relied on a single external provider. Apple is also building its own massive data center in North Carolina, which could eventually take over some of the load for iCloud.

The Register notes that iCloud is thought to be running on Microsoft’s full Azure service, which includes the Azure compute and controller features, as well as its SQL storage. Data on iCloud is being striped across both Amazon and Microsoft’s services, a process which allows iCloud to speed up data access since it doesn’t have to rely on a single disk or service. To accomplish this, Apple, perhaps together with Microsoft and Amazon, has come up with some sort of solution for easily identifying and accessing data across both services.