Rackspace inks strategic partnership with AWS

The FortyCloud AMIs are available on the AWS marketplace. The company said the new offering is invited to enable customers to maximize the value of their public cloud investments.

The partnership comes less than three months after Rackspace entered a similar arrangement with Amazon’s closest challenger, Microsoft Azure, at Microsoft’s partner conference. The news is likely to reflect in the company’s stock in the near term, which last closed at over $532.5 on Friday.

Meanwhile, Frost & Sullivan principal analyst Dan Rayburn reports that multiple content companies say that Amazon is “quietly asking them about licensing content for a live streaming service”. The new version of the app transforms AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Amazon CloudWatch, and now Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Flow Logs into easy-to-use dashboards that provide comprehensive security, compliance and operational insights into Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments.

Details about the service are limited; the WSJ notes it will “include a faster method for transferring or copying data to AWS”, and that Amazon will “supply a storage device that customers could send back filled with data” in situations where uploading the data via the Internet would take too long. He also pointed to the overall immaturity of the market, which would effectively make Space Needle the “new 800-pound gorilla in the BI market”.

Both service levels are now available for all United States customers and in beta for non-U.S. customers, across all AWS regions except AWS GovCloud (U.S.) and China (Beijing). It includes a connector for Amazon Aurora and the launch of Tableau Server listings in AWS marketplace.

Large companies like Adobe, Airbnb, NASA, Dow Jones and Netflix are already using AWS, so Amazon could start with a strong client base.

If AWS does unveil an in-memory database it could be a big blow to Oracle which has staked a lot on its Oracle 12c database, and also to SAP, which has admitted to betting its whole company on its own in-memory HANA database. With this fast-growing enterprise trend toward cloud computing, including outsourcing resources to cloud providers like AWS, it is imperative that modern security solutions span across heterogeneous environments.

“It is another demonstration of how we work with industry-leading technologies to make it easy for our customers to manage their IT, so they can concentrate on their core business”, he said. It helps solve for the complexity of hosting, configuring, and operating Experience Manager by providing a managed automation platform on AWS, backed by Rackspace support and expertise.

Informatica capabilities for AWS will be showcased at the Informatica booth #937 at AWS re:Invent, October 6-9, 2015 at The Venetian, Las Vegas, NV.