Today IBM announced that it has an agreed to acquire Green Hat, a company that provides tools for building virtual environments for software quality assurance and testing. This follows the official launch of IBM’s platform-as-a-service and continues IBM’s developer-centric cloud strategy. Once the acquisition closes, Green Hat will become part of Rational, IBM’s line of ...

Today OpenLogic published its report on open source adoption trends in the enterprise. The company analyzed Google search results, its own OLEX search and download data, its own customer support contracts and its customers’ platform-as-a-service deployments to determine which projects are trending up or down in terms of enterprise adoption in 2011. These obviously aren’t ...

We’ve been running a series of posts on startups to watch in 2012, including open source startups to watch and big data startups to watch. Now here’s a look at five startups that are poised for breakout success or acquisition, but face considerable challenges in their respective markets. These are companies that are underdogs taking ...

Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft will support the ability to create persistent virtual machines on Azure this year. This means that uses will be able to create virtual Linux servers on Azure without losing state. Azure currently has the ability to run VMs, but any time the the server is rebooted it loses state. ...

I suppose this might sound something like “service as a service” since many professional services firms are dedicated to systems integration. But there’s a trend towards data and application integration being done as an automated solution, often delivered through the cloud, rather than as an expensive on-premise project involving dozens of contractors. Look at Talend, ...

This year we picked five startups commercializing open source projects that look especially strong going into 2012. The list is in no particular order. Talend develops an open source data integration platform and offers a number of paid open core enterprise products and services. Talend started as a pure-play vendor offering data integration software. It ...

The term “DevOps” refers to a set of methods for both helping operations and engineering teams work together more efficiently and for helping operations staffs apply some of the methods associated with agile software development to their own work, often with automation tools that make managing infrastructure more similar to programming computers. We’ve been talking ...

This year we picked five startups commercializing open source projects that look especially strong going into 2012. The list is in no particular order. Opscode is the company behind Chef, a configuration automation tool popular among DevOps practicioners. Opscodes offers a hosted version of Chef called Chef Hosted and the on-premise enterprise focused offering Chef ...

This year we picked five startups commercializing open source projects that look especially strong going into 2012. The list is in no particular order. Joyent is an IaaS provider and sponsor of Node.js, the open source server side JavaScript system. It also offers a Node.js platform-as-a-service, its private cloud stack SmartDataCenter and its open source ...

This year we picked five startups commercializing open source projects to which they contribute that are especially strong going into 2012. The list is in no particular order. Revolution Analytics sells a suite of commercial tools for working with the open source statistical programming language R. R is becoming the language of choice among data ...