GigaOM’s Derreck Harris asks whether Facebook might be the next big enterprise software vendor. Why isn’t it crazy? Well, look at Amazon.com. Amazon.com is and was an e-commerce giant. But in 2006, it decided to capitalize on its computing infrastructure. Now it’s become practically synonymous with the cloud. Leading websites like Reddit run on it, ...

IBM’s been working on its WebSphere based platform-as-a-service for years now. GigaOM first reported a public beta of the service way back in 2009. This week IBM gave its SmartCloud portfolio of service a big push, including a general availability version of the PaaS. It enables developers to create Java applications that can be hosted ...

Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie wasn’t as famous as Steve Jobs, but his contributions to technology are at least as mammoth. Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs confirmed today that Ritchie died October 8th. He was best known as the co-creator of Unix and creator of the C programming language, both at Bell Labs. He was also the ...

I’ve been saying in recent weeks that file syncing is hot. Dropbox reportedly declined a $600 million acquisition offer from Apple, and Box is rumored to have declined an offer of over $500 million. Dropbox is now considered the 6th most valuable startup and Box is still raising gobs of capital. Meanwhile, other companies like ...

Today a Google developer named Steve Yegge made waves by accidentally publishing a long rant publicly on Google Plus instead of sharing it only internally. The jist of the post is that Google just doesn’t get “platforms” and unless it does, Google Plus will be a failure. Yegge makes the case that products with platforms ...

Today TechCrunch reported that former Salesforce.com CTO Craig Weissman is joining Benchmark Capital as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Meanwhile, Yammer announced that former Salesforce.com VP of Vertical Sales David Obrand is joining Yammer as VP of Global Sales. Obrand is a big score for Yammer, which is trying to sell into companies of all sizes and Obrand ...

Last week Google followed Oracle’s Public Cloud announcement with its own Cloud SQL announcement. Today, Google made an enterprise cloud announcement that includes a new Cloud Storage service along with an SLA update for App Engine and the move of the Prediction API from Labs to general availability. Google’s storage announcement follows a big partnership ...

Today Cloudant, the sponsor company behind the Apache CouchDB-based open source BigCouch project, announced a new customer acquisition: the controversial agriculture company Monsanto. Monsanto is using BigCouch to manage its genome sequencing data analysis, a commonly cited big data problem. Monsanto isn’t going all out and using Cloudant’s hosted CouchDB service, but the company is ...

Today Box officially announced its new $81 million round of funding, taking the company’s total raised this year to $164 million. Following its BoxWorks event last month and rumors it turned down an acquisition bid over $500 million, Box is shaping up to be one of the Valley’s hottest companies. But Box has some serious ...

Google has acquired SocialGrapple, a social graph analytics company founded by Andrey Petrov. Petrov issued a statement saying that SocialGrapple is being shut down as part of the acquisition. Google confirmed to Dain Binder that Petrov is joining Google, making this is a talent acquisition. Here’s Petrov’s statement found on the SocialGrapple website: I am ...