Verizon acquires enterprise services provider CloudSwitch

Verizon on Thursday announced it will purchase cloud services firm CloudSwitch with the intent of boosting its enterprise and IT offerings.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Verizon plans to combine CloudSwitch with the Terremark IT services company it already owns. The company hopes the CloudSwitch software, which enables enterprises to easily move applications and workloads into the cloud, will help companies move over to Terremark’s services.

Specifically, CloudSwitch currently provides an interface so customers can port applications to Amazon Web Services, Terremark and Microsoft Windows Azure’s clouds. By owning CloudSwitch and Terremark, Verizon can assure customers of better security and control between CloudSwitch and Terremark. In theory, this could help peel some enterprise customers away from Amazon and Microsoft.

“The cloud market is a rapidly growing opportunity, with very real benefits both for our business customers and the consumers they serve,” said Bob Toohey, president of Verizon’s global enterprise unit, in a statement.

CloudSwitch previously earned $15.4 million in two funding rounds. In January, 2009, CloudSwitch raised $7.4 million in first-round funding from the likes of Atlas Ventures and Matrix Partners. The company then grabbed another $8 million in its second round in June, 2009. The company was reportedly in talks for a third round when Verizon approached it with an acquisition proposal.

Next Story: OpenFeint’s single sign-on for social games to replace Apple’s UDID?(exclusive)
Previous Story: Top 10 Steve Jobs resignation reaction?stories

Tags: Amazon Web Services, cloud services, enterprise services, Microsoft Windows Azure

Companies: Amazon, CloudSwitch, Microsoft, Terremark, Verizon

View the original article here

Reddit begins the holiday shopping season early, acquires Redditgifts.com

News sharing social network Reddit has acquired Redditgifts.com, a popular independent gift exchange site created by Reddit community members, the company announced Tuesday.

Redditgifts is best known for organizing the world’s largest Secret Santa gift exchange and the mid-summer arbitrary gift giving event (appropriately named) Arbitrary Day. More recently, the site has organized specific exchanges for books, crafts and snacks.

For each event, Reddit users voluntarily sign up to participate in the exchange — filling out a profile of what they like and dislike as well as providing a link to their Reddit profile activity. Each participant is then randomly assigned a single Reddit user, who they will purchase a gift for.

The process of using a person’s Reddit activity to determine a thoughtful gift is surprisingly well-tailored for an activity like Secret Santa. (To better illustrate the process, I’ve embedded a photo of the first gift I received from the exchange: A microwave bacon crisper outfitted with images from the classic sci-fi TV show Doctor Who. Oddly enough, I listed only “Doctor Who” and “Bacon” as things I like on my Redditgifts’ profile.)

Since launching in late 2009, over 42,000 people in 106 countries participated in Reddit gift exchanges. Those participants spent nearly $1.5 million on gifts, according to statistics recorded by Redditgifts.

Until recently, the gift exchange site was run exclusively by long-time Reddit users Dan McComas and Jessica Moreno. As part of the acquisition deal, both will join the Reddit staff to work on the site full-time — with McComas becoming the Reddit gift exchange project manager and Moreno assuming the role of community manager.

“It became clear that what had started as a fun project had mutated from a fun nights & weekends project into a demanding 24/7 project. [The] 2011 Secret Santa is on pace to potentially have (over) 30,000 participants, and there’s no way Dan & Jessica could continue to run Redditgifts.com as a volunteer project,” wrote Reddit General Manager Erik Martin in a blog post. “We wanted to see Redditgifts grow, and we wanted Dan & Jessica to be able to invest even more time and energy into making Redditgifts even better. So, we figured out a way to bring them inside the Reddit family proper.”

For now, the two sites will remain separate. If the company does decide to merge Reddit accounts with Redditgifts accounts, users will be given an option to opt-in, according to Martin.

Because Reddit has dedicated house advertisement spots and written official blog posts in the past, it’s easy to understand why the acquisition of Redditgifts is a natural fit for the company. The gift exchange site also fits in nicely with the company’s revenue strategy, which centers around non-traditional advertising/promotion that doesn’t distract or anger its passionate community. Thus far, that strategy is working. In June, Reddit members were responsible for bringing in over 1.2 billion monthly page views.

The acquisition of Redditgifts also shines some light on Condé Nast’s (Reddit’s parent company) decision to purchase 285 Reddit-related domain names, including redditbuy.com, redditbook.com and shopreddit.com.

Next Story: Bunchball gamifies Salesforce.com and launches game?widgets
Previous Story: Druva raises $12M for protecting enterprise?data

Tags: community news sharing site, gift exchange, Reddit, Secret Santa

Companies: Conde Nast, Reddit, Redditgifts

People: Dan McComas, Erik Martin, Jessica Moreno

View the original article here

Engine Yard acquires Orchestra for added PHP power

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)?Engine Yard has just inked a deal to buy Orchestra, a platform for deploying, scaling and managing applications in the PHP programming language.

Engine Yard is a leading PaaS for Ruby on Rails applications. The company supports thousands of customers, including such big names as Groupon, BuyWithMe, the Criterion Collection and more. All those apps on Engine Yard’s platform translate to around 35 million CPU hours every quarter.

With the new alliance in place, Engine Yard will also be equipped to handle PHP apps large and small.

“Engine Yard has powered some of the fastest growing businesses in history. With Orchestra and its team of dedicated PHP contributors joining Engine Yard, we’re extending our platform into an adjacent market to help PHP developers achieve the same success,” said Engine Yard CEO John Dillon in a release.

As part of the acquisition deal, Engine Yard will speed up development of Orchestra’s PHP platform by beefing up investment and adding the Engine Yard team’s expertise to the mix. None of Orchestra’s current offerings, including support for customers or current products, will be discontinued.

Orchestra is built on Amazon Web Services. It integrates with the developer’s workflow, automatically scales up and down and supports third-party add-ons.

The Orchestra team includes highly respected PHP experts, all of whom will be joining Engine Yard, and its list of supported projects includes the development frameworks CakePHP and Lithium, PHP component manager Pyrus, PEAR and PEAR2 library repositories and many others.

The combined team will continue to make substantial investments of time and effort in open-source projects in both the Ruby on Rails and PHP communities.

Here’s a video giving an overview of the acquisition:

Image courtesy of Kore Nordmann.

Next Story: Fuel cell manufacturer ClearEdge raises?$73.5M
Previous Story: King of Code finalist: Sérgio Silva empowers small business owners to go?mobile

Tags: developers, php

Companies: engine yard, orchestra

View the original article here