PaaS on the Rise, webOS Dumped on LG: This Week in the Cloud
This past week Rackspace announced two major updates, Continuuity intrudes the market with new software, and Hewlett-Packard finally got rid of webOS.
Rackspace lowered its storage rates by 33 percent and promised to roll out tiered pricing for its OpenStack services. Wikibon’s Dave Vellante believes that the cloud host is “trying to turn the crank” on Amazon by striking its Achilles’ heel: AWS is known for its complicated pricing and high bandwidth costs. The discount will hurt Rackspace’s margins, but may have a very positive effect on its customer base.
Also this week, Rackspace acquired a NoSQL startup called ObjectRocket. The Boston-based firm sells a subscription-based cloud platform for running MongoDB, 10gen’s popular open-source database. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we know that the service will be moved to Rackspace’s datacenters within a few months.
Continuuity launched a set of development tools on the same day Rackspace announced the acquistion. The bundle includes an SDK and a sandbox environment that users can leverage to test their big data apps before rolling them out to a production environment.
The latter offering blankets the underlying infrastructure with a software abstraction layer that lets developers focus their efforts on perfecting the data science that makes their software tick, rather than on sorting out the plumbing.
Over in the personal cloud space, LG announced that it has acquired webOS from HP. The South Korean manufacturer will embed the mobile platform in its upcoming smart TVs.
Hewlett-Packard paid $1.2 billion for Palm, the original developer of webOS. After several unsuccessful attempts to monetize the operating system, it finally decided to let go and sell it for peanuts to someone that may be able to make something of it.
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