It’s hard to put a dollar value on good customer service. But bad customer service will send a once-loyal customer to the competition, undermine a company’s reputation, and generally irritate and alienate people. But for those companies willing to take on the challenge, good support carries its own set of rewards: Apple’s AppleCare warranties are ...

There’s this idea out there that OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform project started by Rackspace Hosting and NASA and since taken up by over 150 other companies, is out to erode the market positions of proprietary-powered pioneers Amazon Web Services and VMware. But here at the OpenStack conference, I’m hearing that there’s a ...

The social enterprise continues to dominate the business services discussion, as evidenced by this week’s launch of HP Social Enterprise Services, a portfolio designed to help customers deploy and benefit from big data analytics-driven CRM solutions. In fact, HP will even handle your social media presence for you. These new offerings are a natural extension ...

VMware is the latest major technology market player to get into the cloud consultancy game with this week’s formation of VMware Accelerate Advisory Services, a new business group of former IT executives that aims to lend their expertise to CIOs seeking to make cloud moves. The company boasts that Accelerate brings metric-driven customization for customer cloud deployments. ...

Skybox Imaging, a fledgling services startup that’s building a business around applying big data analytics to satellite imagery and video, has raised $70 million in Series C funding from Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its overall funding to $91 million. But wait until you hear where the money’s actually going. Skybox seeks to put no fewer ...

Dell and Rackspace Hosting  made announcements today that make partners a key part of their OpenStack and big data market plays. Dell’s announcement is the more far-reaching. The Dell Emerging Solutions Ecosystem is a partnership program designed to integrate hardware, software and services from Dell and its partners as it seeks to bolster its Dell Apache Hadoop Solution ...

As we gear up for this week’s OpenStack Conference, Rackspace is betting its business on the OpenStack project with today’s announcement that the hosting provider is moving its flagship Cloud Servers offering onto a platform powered by the jewel of the open source cloud movement. And it doesn’t stop there: Rackspace is bringing OpenStack to ...

Rumors are starting to surface that Google may be de-emphasizing its Google Apps enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) play for a renewed focus on its core search/advertising business, and a reallocation of resources and expertise towards social networking. If that’s true, “disruptive” is an understatement for the potential implications. Yes, Google Apps seems to be in a ...

After today’s EMC VSPEX launch event, Avnet VP and GM Scott Look, along with Al Chin, VP of Sales and Marketing for Avnet reseller partner Dasher, sat down with Wikibon founder Dave Vellante in theCube to discuss how the channel actually helps a customer reap the benefits of converged infrastructure. Avnet’s Look explains the rising importance ...

In a move to build buzz ahead of next week’s OpenStack Conference here in San Francisco, eighteen major technology companies have announced their intent to become paying members of the OpenStack Foundation, the open source cloud platform’s governing body. AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, and SUSE will become Platinum members once the foundation ...