Disruptors

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

New Relic last week released the results of a study it conducted on 1 billion Web pages across the globe this month--and the data suggest Web page success can come down to a matter of seconds.

Using its new end-user technology, the application performance management company monitored actual page loads on Web sites across a variety of browsers and operating systems, including mobile, for the span of one week.

It takes an average of six seconds for a Web page to fully load, according to the research. That might not seem like a long time to the untrained observer, but … Read more

After nearly 25 years of relative consistency and market dominance by the likes of EMC and NetApp, there's been a recent flurry of activity in the storage industry. In the past few weeks, Fusion-io was valued at nearly $1.95 billion after its first day of public trading and next-generation storage start-ups Pure Storage and Tintri each closed sizable new funding rounds ($28 million for Pure Storage, $18 million for Tintri).

Spurred by the rise of technological innovations like cloud computing and virtualization, storage is undergoing a major transition--the likes of which it hasn't experienced since the rise … Read more

The Amazon Web Services outage in April created uncertainty about the reliability of the cloud. And while the outage may have cast doubt about its ability to handle mission-critical applications, Xeround CEO Razi Sharir, whose MySQL cloud database-as-a-service goes into general availability today, sees the event as an opportunity to better understand the unique characteristics of the cloud environment--namely availability and elasticity.

Via an e-mail interview, Sharir maintained that high availability in the cloud is different from maintaining availability in a traditional data center because there is limited control over the cloud infrastructure. He notes that in the cloud, high … Read more

New Relic is one of those unusual companies where an entrepreneur who helped create an entire product category--application performance management (APM), a billion-dollar industry--comes back for a do-over that aims to put his first company, Wily, out of business.

New Relic CEO and founder Lew Cirne (the company name "New Relic" is an anagram of his name), spawned the first SaaS-based APM start-up in 2008 as an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. Today, New Relic is announcing what it says is the first Real User Monitoring solution from a SaaS vendor.

Cirne compares real user monitoring with … Read more

The open-source Scala programming language is getting a big boost today in form of venture-funding for a new start-up.

Typesafe is launching the first commercial entity behind Scala, founded by Scala creator Martin Odersky and flush with $3 million from Greylock Partners.

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages and reduces code size in comparison to Java.

Greylock also funded Red Hat and Cloudera so it's no surprise that Typesafe will be taking a page from those companies … Read more

Private company research firm CB Insights is set to release a new report today on the state of venture capital financing for the first quarter of 2011. The short version: things are looking good, if a bit frothy, with Q1 registering $7.5 billion of venture capital funding invested in 738 deals.

In relation to the last quarter of 2010, there were only three more deals in Q1 of 2011, and both quarters included roughly half of Groupon's $1 billion funding, which doesn't quite explain how Q1 saw roughly $1 billion more in financing for roughly the same … Read more

The Hadoop open-source project for distributed compute processing continues to be one of the most interesting projects for managing the vast amount of data being analyzed and collected in a wide variety of scenarios.

Today, Cloudera, a provider of Hadoop data management software and services, is set to release a major release of its open source software distribution--Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH), including Apache Hadoop v3.

Cloudera's CDH3 distribution is an integrated set of components and functions that interoperate through standard APIs and manage required component versions and dependencies.

CDH3 is an integrated stack that includes not just software … Read more

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Linux Operating System, the nonprofit Linux Foundation has produced an infographic and video that reminds us how much of an impact the open source operating system has had on the world.

In case you've been living under a rock for the last two decades, Linux is part of pretty much every technology ecosystem--mobile (Android), Web (Google), consumer (TiVo), and powers a huge amount of the Internet itself. And it continues to grow, both as an enabler of new services in the cloud and as the operating system that powers huge corporate … Read more