New Year’s week tends to be sleepy in tech land but there was actually plenty of action this year with Amazon using the occasion to spiff up its AWS Management Console with some usability enhancements and its first mobile app. Meanwhile, folks hoping that the Hewlett-Packard saga would somehow just go away, are out of luck.
Amazon mobilizes cloud management
On Friday, Amazon disclosed improvements to AWS Management Console, as well as a new Android app to give customers mobile access to their cloud status reports. For now iPhone users are out of luck — there was no mention of an analogous iOS app. It’s tough to know how many AWS users are on android devices, but Newvem, a company that monitors customers’ Amazon workloads, said 90 percent of its mobile users tap have iOS devices compared to just 6 percent on Android.
CloudWatch alarms by state or time. They can also view service charges and toggle between AWS accounts and regions, according to the post.
Amazon also added support for endless scrolling on its page to enable easy swipe navigation.
The app can be downloaded here. As Amazon’s added more of its services to the console (21 are now included) it also saw the need to redesign the page to allow easier navigation.
HP re-opens door to business unit sell off
A December 27 Hewlett-Packard 10-K SEC filing reopened the prospect of the IT giant selling off pieces of its business in the new year. Where have we heard that before?
According to the document, HP will:
” … continue to evaluate the potential disposition of assets and businesses that may no longer help us meet our objectives. When we decide to sell assets or a business, we may encounter difficulty in finding buyers or alternative exit strategies on acceptable terms in a timely manner, which could delay the achievement of our strategic objectives. We may also dispose of a business at a price or on terms that are less desirable than we had anticipated. In addition, we may experience greater dis-synergies than expected, and the impact of the divestiture on our revenue growth may be larger than projected.”
HP CEO Meg Whitman has repeatedly asked shareholders and analysts for patience in what she said will be a multi-year turnaround effort. Two years ago, her predecessor Leo Apotheker, was dispatched partially because word leaked that he was considering a sale of HP’s $ 40 billion PC business. Whitman subsequently shelved that plan with a renewed “better together” push, but many analysts still feel that HP has too many product lines and constituencies to allow it to execute well on any of them.
Dell pushes back OpenStack cloud
As it hinted last month, Dell is pushing off its OpenStack cloud until late this year, according to this ITworld post. Previously, Dell had said it hoped to have its OpenStack cloud ready this year.
Like rival HP and other legacy enterprise IT players, Dell is struggling to come to terms with the transition to cloud computing. And, like HP it hopes to differentiate its offering with service level agreements (SLAs) and support that enterprise customers have come to expect. These companies are banking they can woo business customers still leery of trusting important workloads to Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure.
But Nnamdi Orakwue, VP for Dell Cloud, said it makes more sense for Dell to wait for OpenStack to mature further before forging ahead. OpenStack is “not where it needs to be,” Orakwue told ITworld.
That may be but HP, Rackspace, Internap, Red Hat and others already offer their take on the OpenStack open-source cloud. In fact, the only major tech vendors that aren’t part of the OpenStack effort are Microsoft and Amazon — as well as Citrix, which was an early OpenStack proponent but by virtue of its Cloud.com acquisition now back the CloudStack open-source cloud.
To Dell’s point, however, it’s still very early in the public cloud game and many companies are just barely testing out the model. More are investigating private cloud implementations which they feel gives them more control. Thus, Dell is focusing more on private cloud for now, according to ITworld.
 |
 |