hosted services

Nominum is hoping that the second time is the charm in the outsourced DNS market, as the maker of high-end DNS software announces a hosted service.

Amazon is inviting students, educators and researchers to apply for grants that will give them free access to the company's hosted computing services.

Akamai Technologies President and CEO Paul Sagan discusses how Akamai is dealing with the recession and the impact it's having on demand for Internet content and services. He also offers his thoughts on U.S. plans to expand broadband Internet access and network neutrality.

Microsoft's Razorfish has chosen Rackspace as its cloud-hosting platform rather than wait for Microsoft to release Azure.

I've had a series of interesting conversations with people involved in cloud computing who, paradoxically, maintain that cloud computing is -- at least today -- inappropriate for enterprises. I say paradoxically because each of them works for or represents a large technology company's cloud computing efforts, and one would think their role would motivate them to strongly advocate cloud adoption. So why the tepid enthusiasm?

Even as it attempts to battle Google for a share in the online advertising market by offering hosted consumer services, Microsoft is keenly aware that the needs of its business customers are changing. In 2008, Microsoft delivered on a strategy it unveiled several years ago and offered the first hosted versions of key software infrastructure -- Office Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. The company plans to roll out hosted versions of Office Communications Server and Live Meeting in early 2009.

Given the popularity of the .NET platform and Microsoft's vast financial resources, Azure, an application platform offered as a service, is a cloud force to be reckoned with.

Chad Swartz, senior manager of IT operations at the Preferred Hotel Group, spent most of the past year planning disaster recovery and ended up with a big cost-saving strategy for the Chicago-based firm. Preferred, which specializes in group-travel sales, booking conventions, conferences and corporate outings into its network of luxury hotels, is moving its relatively tiny data center into the cloud.

Start-up Nuconomy Tuesday launched a free hosted service that it hopes can expand Web analytics beyond the traditional page view model by automating the slicing and dicing of data and by measuring new types of user activity like blog comments and videos.

Connecting your application into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn't complicated, particularly if you've done Web service programming on other projects.

Since fixing MobileMe flaws is all the rage these days, this week's post tackles the problem of vanishing contact and calendar events synced to your mobile device via Apple's online syncing service. And I'll also turn my attention back to smart flash drives, the subject of last week's post.