This week in cloud: Office 365 goes down and Microsoft stocks up Azure store

There was quite a bit of action in several cloud-based servcies this week. The good news: Microsoft launched Office 365 Home Premium edition on Tuesday. The bad news is that Office 365 went down Friday for many users. And, Twitter, which many (guilty here) view as a valuable productivity and communications tool, also had a tough week, with a 40-minute-or-so outage on Thursday.

Folks who think companies should keep applications running on premises will doubtless point to these snafus as proof that running cloud services is a fools errand. But how many people running on-premises e-mail have not had similar issues? Speaking as someone who used to rely both on Lotus Notes and then Exchange Server run by my employers, I can attest that outages happen much more than companies admit. The big difference is those internal email meltdowns don’t get covered by every tech news outlet on the planet.

Now, here’s more cloud news from the week

Amazon’s cloud business grows and grows

logo_AWSSomewhat lost amid the news about Wall Street blithely dismissing Amazon.com’s(a amzn) missed earnings targets was this gem: Revenue from Amazon Web Services (or at least the category of which AWS is a part) rose 68 percent year over year for Amazon’s foutyh quarter. Revenue from the category hit $ 769 million, up from $ 459 million for the year-ago period. As for profitability? That’s anyone’s guess.

Microsoft adds another data analysis option

Microsoft added – SiSense and its Prism data analytics prowess — to the big data analytics options available on its Azure platform-as-a-Service. Prism can run on-premises or in the cloud offering customers mix-and-match deployment options, according to CRN. Prism offers automatic ETL (data extraction, transform, load) capabilities from SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, QuickBase databases and Salesforce.com, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Spreadsheets, Zendesk and QuickBooks applications as well as Hadoop and Hive, according to a SiSense statement.

Azure store This news came days after Microsoft announced an expansion of its Windows Azure Store which is now available in 11 markets worldwide. Microsoft corporate VP Scott Guthrie announced the news along with new services available from the store, in a blog post.

Tier 3 names Schiltz CEO and president

Tier 3 CEO Matthew Schiltz

Tier 3 CEO Matthew Schiltz

Cloud services startup Tier 3 named Matthew Schiltz as its new president and CEO. Schiltz was previously CEO of Symform and before that of DocuSign and CourtLink. That means that Jared Wray, founder and CTO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Tier 3 who had been acting CEO, can get back to the CTO and chief architect roles he relishes.

“Matt was our top CEO target. He brings the key strategic and operational leadership needed to guide Tier 3 as we deliver the most complete enterprise cloud management platform available” Wray said in a statement.

Other cloud news from around the web

Here are some of the stories from other news outlets:

  • Analyst Louis Columbus wraps up the latest cloud forecasts and estimates in Forbes.
  • The Fedora open source project now backs MariaDB database rather than MySQL as its database of choice, according to ZDnet.
  • Rackspace certified three reference architectures designed to accelerate deployment of its OpenStack-based private cloud in enterprise accounts, according to Data Center Knowledge.

 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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  • Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
  • A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
  • Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight


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