Cloud Computing

Tulip Data Center Services is setting up a 900,000 square foot (83,612.7 square meters) data center in Bangalore, the largest in India, to benefit from scale and target growing demand for collocation, cloud, and managed services in India and neighboring countries.

Zoho Writer is an online (with offline and syncing functionality) word processing application that offers a nice amount of functionality, especially given the limitations of the Web as a platform for productivity tools. After creating a free account with Zoho, you can access Zoho Writer. It looks a lot like most word processors, so if you've used any major program in this category, it will take no more than a few minutes of poking around to learn how to do things. This is good, because the "Help" is in the form of a FAQ, not a tutorial or index of functions.

Amazon Web Services has cut the cost of storing data using its Simple Storage Service (S3) -- saving users with 50 TB stored on the service around 12 percent on their monthly bill, the company said on Monday.

Customer support organizations were the earliest of adopters for CRM systems. Thanks to call center software and the need to drive cost reductions and faster service turn-around cycles, the customer support organization developed solid business processes, comprehensive measurement and good discipline. But that's all so last-century.

U.K.-based cash-transport firm G4S is trusting the security of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service to keep safe the application that tracks where the money is as it travels to and from customers and the company's vaults in armored trucks.

One of the most anticipated debuts of a startup company happens today when Nicira, a maker of network virtualization software, comes out of stealth mode.

It's a fact of modern life that archiving data is essential to prevent a data disaster. Still, something like one-third of computers are never backed up, according to 2,257 respondents in a recent Backblaze poll carried out by Harris Interactive. The survey came to the dismal conclusion that a scant 7% of users practice safe computing by archiving their systems on a daily (or nightly) basis.

Serious technical problems that have delayed the rollout of an upgrade to SAP's community portal are persisting, to the point where the company is no longer specifying a launch date.

That there is growing company demand for cloud or software-as-a-service solutions should come as no surprise.

For a while now I've been using Google Music as a kind of cloud-based backup for my music library. Except that it wasn't really a backup, because I couldn't easily retrieve all the songs I'd uploaded. In the event of a system failure, I'd have to download tunes in batches of 100. Bleh.

Dell's formation of a new software group, which was announced Thursday, could be the forerunner to a string of acquisitions by the vendor, with some observers predicting a focus on systems management and cloud services provisioning.