Cloud Industry Topics

The business value of cloud computing – or “cloudonomics” – is taking the world by storm. The changes in the IT landscape are forcing C-level executives to evaluate even the most basic businesses practices that they’ve held sacred.

Phil Vickman is the Marketing Director of Promet Source, which helps startups deploy, maintain and support high-value web and mobile applications through the use of open source technology tools. Promet differentiates itself by providing a superior customer experience throughout all facets of the development process, including design, software engineering, project management and quality assurance.

The patent abuse fight is picking up momentum, and we have new ammunition. Yesterday, the senior Senator from Texas, John Cornyn, introduced the Patent Abuse Reduction Act of 2013 (the “PAR Act”). My home state U.S. Senator has just taken a huge step to solve the patent troll epidemic. This bill is a breath of fresh air in the battle against patent trolls and their brazen abuse of the patent system. The PAR Act is designed to “deter patent litigation abusers without prejudicing the rights of responsible intellectual property holders,” Cornyn said in a statement.

Alan Perkins recently joined Rackspace as Director of Product and Technology, Asia Pacific. In this two-part series, he discusses why he joined Rackspace. In Part I, he highlighted the company and its values.

You can now use Mailgun, the email automation engine we acquired in August, directly within the Cloud Control Panel. That’s right. It’s no fuss, no muss. There’s no separate account to sign up for or manage, and all Rackspace Cloud customers receive 50,000 emails per month absolutely free. If you want to send more than that, just add your credit card in the Mailgun control panel and start sending – it’s simple. And if you have questions about Mailgun, contact your regular Rackspace support team. If we can’t help you, we’ll escalate to the Mailgun team for you, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of two different support teams.

Last week, we released the free Business Email 101 Guide to help you think through the decisions involved in choosing the right business email strategy. When considering your business email, the first decision you need to make is where to run it – on-premise or hosted. Your decision should take into consideration three very broad areas that we’ll eventually bring into focus as we move through the guide. The three areas to consider are:

In a recent episode of Mad Men, Peggy Olson channels her old boss, Don Draper, when she pitches Heinz ketchup. There’s ketchup, Peggy says, and then there’s the cheap and watery imitation—catsup. “They’re selling their watered down, flavorless sauce by pretending that they’re you,” she says, looking straight at the Heinz executive. “It makes you angry, doesn’t it?”  The exec seems intrigued. A beat later, Peggy says, “But I always say, if you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation.” Then she uncovers her concept:

We all wish we could be rock star web designers and developers, but there just isn’t enough time in the day. Wireframing is time-consuming and so is learning HTML5. Instead, you can call on Drifty, a new software studio based out of Madison, Wis. that makes easy-to-use cloud-based tools for developing mobile apps and websites using web technologies. The two apps, Codiqa and Jetstrap, are helping more than 150,000 users combined create apps and sites faster and more efficiently.

Is capacity planning dead? Will one platform satisfy all future IT initiatives? How much does downtime truly cost your company?

Rackspace Cloud Files users now have finer control over how to manage objects and containers with several exciting new API and Control Panel features that we rolled out this week.