Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dropped the price 10 percent for its M3 instances, designed for media encoding, batch processing, caching, and web serving.

The price drop is effective November 1 and covers all AWS regions. About this time last year, AWS introduced the second-generation instances have up to 50 percent higher absolute CPU performance compared to first-generation instances and are designed for applications such as applications that have high traffic content management systems and apps that are memcached.

According to AWS, there are two second generation Standard instance types, both of which are 64-bit platforms:

• The Extra Large Instance (m3.xlarge) has 15 GB of memory and 13 ECU (EC2 Compute Units) spread across 4 virtual cores, with moderate I/O performance.
• The Double Extra Large Instance (m3.2xlarge) has 30 GB of memory and 26 ECU spread across 8 virtual cores, with high I/O performance.

The introduction last year brought the total instance types to 17, across seven different families.

The price drops are as follows:

News of the price drop comes on the eve of AWS re:Invent, scheduled for next week in Las Vegas. Last year at the event, the company followed the M3 news with dropping the prices of dedicated instances on its EC2 cloud computing platform by up to 80%. Dedicated instances are for single-tenant hardware that is dedicated to a single customer.

More AWS price drops next week? I’d say yes if I were a betting man.

(Feature image via homedit.)

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Rapid-I – a German specialist in analytics tools that wants to become the industry standard for how enterprises predict the future – is today announcing its first round of funding, a rebrand to RapidMiner, and a new HQ in Boston to jump with two feet into growing its business in North America. The Series A of $5 million – the first money ever raised by RapidMiner – is led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Open Ocean, the investment firm backed by the founders of MySQL. To gear up for its next stage of growth, RapidMiner is also adding Yahoo’s former chief data officer, Usama Fayyad, to its board, and is starting to hire in the U.S.

The involvement of Open Ocean is strategically important for RapidMiner, both as a mark of its success so far, and also of how it can develop. “With three million product downloads, RapidMiner has rapidly become one of the leaders in the predictive analytics space,” said Monty Widenius, MySQL founder and partner at Open Ocean Capital, in a statement. “We plan to leverage our experience in building MySQL, and the MySQL community, to help the RapidMiner team advance its technology and grow its user community around the world.”

The explosion in data that has been a by-product of the rise of the Internet and cloud-based services has created a knock-on market for business intelligence and big data solutions for companies to better harness this information to their best advantage.

This is where RapidMiner fits into the equation: the company works across a number of verticals such as entertainment and technology, through to pharmaceuticals, government and academia to provide them with the tools to look at their data and make better guesses about what customers and their own business may do next. Typical areas where RapidMiner’s solutions are implemented include customer segmentation; loyalty and retention analysis; credit ratings; resource planning; and asset maintenance. Sitting on an open stack, RapidMiner incorporates data from some 60 different structured and unstructured sources, including those sitting in SAP and Hadoop-based systems.

It’s a lucrative area but one that is still a work in progress. Gartner estimates that the business intelligence market was worth $57 billion at the end of 2010 but that by 2014 it will grow to $81 billion by 2014. Around one-fifth of the $57 billion, or $10.5 billion, was spent on business intelligence platforms/analytics in 2010, but that is projected to grow to $20 billion by 2014.

Why the increase in proportion? I suspect that as more enterprises start to demonstrate how they can actually gain an edge over competitors by relying on better analysis of the data they already have, the more investment you will see in this area. This is a big switch from where predictive analytics first had its beginnings as an academic pursuit. As a measure of that, before co-founding RapidMiner, CEO Ingo Mierswa started and ran the Artificial Intelligence Division of the University of Dortmund, Germany.

So far, RapidMiner has shown to be a strong leader in the space, with some 3 million total downloads (including documents and products) and some 200,000 users, including the likes of eBay, Intel, PepsiCo and Kraft among its paying customers. The company already claims to be leading the market for predictive data analytics services, against competitors like Revolution Analytics, SAS, SQL Server, StatSoft and IBM. To date, that growth has largely been in Europe – specifically, its user base is 65% Europe, 25% U.S. customers and 10% rest of world; with 50% of the company’s open source users in the U.S.

As with so many startups from this part of the world, now that RapidMiner is ready to scale, the U.S. is its prime target.

Jason Whitmire, the Earlybird partner who led the VC’s investment in RapidMiner, says that the company stood out because it was the “only solution we found that puts the person who has to solve a predictive analytics problem right in the middle of a very broad value proposition.” The global traction was also a boost, he added. “With this footprint, we believe that RapidMiner will stand a good chance become the de-facto industry standard for predictive analytics based on an open stack,” he says.

He also believes that the way that RapidMiner was built on an openstack also lends itself to working as well with large enterprises as much as smaller businesses. “We felt that RapidMiner’s products address the core of this market by fulfilling the spectrum of predictive analytics requirements large and small enterprises – i.e. flexibility of the solution based upon level of skill, complexity and overall sophistication of the customer’s analytics needs,” he adds.

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Last week, Virgin America launched of all things, a safety video that has become a YouTube hit with now more than 4 million views. It’s a musical that makes buckling a seat beat seem like fun. It celebrates the experience of flying with a focus on the fundamentals of safety that only a company like Virgin can pull off.

Virgin America has to show its passengers safe practices for flying. It’s the law but there is no Federal Aviation (FAA) rule that says the damn things have to be something that reminds us of some soulless bureaucracy  Instead, the video has lots of dancing, a kid rapping about an oxygen mask and a misbehaving nun. Here’s what went into making it.

Few companies have the musical roots that Virgin has. It’s that background which gave the company its hook for the video. But it’s also the company’s focus on the customer that gives Virgin an edge. They want the experience to be different for Virgin customers than it is on other airlines.

Of course, a music video is not the only way to connect with customers. But that customer connection never comes when people are viewed as capital or described as a commodity.

Virgin reminds me of companies with a culture that invents new ways of connecting with people. Tesla Motors, for instance, build their own IT so they can make cars in ways other car manufacturers can’t do. What results is a car that people covet. Tesla has a passionate focus on making cars that people love to drive. They are first and foremost, appealing to customers more than anything else.

Consider the world we live in and it’s sometimes astounding how little fun there is in the way the enterprise treats its customers. “Big data” helps feed “human capital management” “solutions.” “Social media” is a cure all and “private clouds” help technology companies sell hardware for what amounts to glorified data centers.

The terms are just meaningless. Maybe it’s time to ditch the mumbo jumbo double speak and just get up and dance.

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Tesla Motors has proven that it can build the most modern cars in the world. And apparently Elon Musk insisted they build their own IT systems and e-commerce platform, too.

Most all of Tesla’s IT is homegrown, said CIO Jay Vijayan, appearing onstage at the Constellation Research Connected Enterprise event today. The reason: the traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems did not cut it, and the company has a vertically integrated operation that required a custom environment.

The speed and agility Tesla needed in an ERP environment could not be found in the market, Vijayan said. SAP’s ERP tech was clearly not working for other car manufacturers and Vijayan knew what it would take to implement and update the SAP environment. “Elon said this is not going to cut it,” Vijayan said.

In four months, Vijayan and his team of more than 250 built the ERP system, which serves as the foundation of the electric carmaker’s operations. Now every department is using the same system without the need for making custom connectors, so different systems can work together.

The company also built a world-class e-commerce system that is designed to help people buy cars as seamlessly as possible.

Tesla needed to build its own IT and its own e-commerce system due to the fundamental difference in its business model. For decades, auto manufacturers have sold their cars through local dealers, a fixture of every town in America. But Tesla sells its cars directly to customers. All the materials, the processes and the features need an operation that is uniquely designed so Tesla can sell its cars online.

Tesla is another example of how much tech is being reinvented by young companies that have to build things themselves for their business models to work.

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Google Cloud SQL now supports native MySQL connections, a move that is intended to make it easier to integrate third-party applications. With the support, native MySQL apps can be plugged into Cloud SQL, allowing the customer to leave system administration and management for Google.

Through MySQL Wire Protocol, the standard connection protocol for MySQL databases, Google maintains that CloudSQL allows for low latency connections from applications running on Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine. Customers can use popular tools such as MySQL Workbench, Toad and the MySQL command-line tool to manage Cloud SQL instances. It also supports standard drivers, such as Connector/J, Connector/ODBC, and Connector/NET.

The native connectivity also means that data can be replicated with control over managing and deploying cloud databases. For example, Google notes in its post that data can be replicated between Cloud SQL and on-premise databases – including Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2.

The support demonstrates how connectors like MySQL Wire Protocol will help create transparency between cloud services and any on-premise application. It’s a service that should attract those looking for the level of managed services that Google provides.

Google is starting to offer features that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had for a few years. While Google launched the core of its CloudSQL service in June, AWS launched its MySQL service in 2009 and in 2012 began offering support for Oracle Database.

Then there is the pricing. According to the InfoQ blog, AWS RDS is “cheaper than corresponding Google Cloud SQL pay-per-hour options, but one needs to consider other costs such as data storage and transfer fees, etc.”

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Salesforce.com is launching the capability for customers to install a private version of AppExchange, the company’s app marketplace. The new “Private AppExchange,” available Friday, gets implemented as an instance on a company’s Salesforce SaaS environment and is designed to integrate with the now generally available Salesforce Identity platform.

Customers may install their own apps and third-party apps on the private AppExchange  Customers may also add their own branding. The AppExchange supports mobile, Web and desktop applications and integrates with Salesforce Chatter

The private AppExchange also offers a dashboard to see page views and other data sources.

Salesforce executives said they timed the service in parallel with the launch of Salesforce Identity, which they are playing as a way to integrate apps behind one authentication service.

Salesforce Identity allows federation with both on-premise applications or cloud based applications entirely from the cloud. Customers may bring their own Identity from existing systems – they can use that or combine it with Salesforce Identity and Private AppExchange, but no software is required to be installed by the customer. Offerings from service such as Okta, the SaaS identity platform, fully integrates a customer’s enterprise identity environments with a private app marketplace.  Okta, at this point, does not integrate with Salesforce private AppExchange.

AppExchange, Bitnami and services such as SnapLogic offer different takes on the private app store. Salesforce has an advantage in how it can integrate with its public AppExchange but the service is still emerging. The private AppExchange does have an identity capability but it still requires companies to install software on their own servers to take advantage of a cloud service.

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Intuit is acquiring FullSlate, an online scheduling company that allows clients to offer their customers the ability to make appointments directly to web sites and Facebook pages. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The service will become part of Intuit demandforce, a marketing platform for small businesses. Demandforce has tools for communications, to help clients keep in touch with their customers through email and SMS messaging. It also has online reputation tools that help clients reach out to their customer base for reviews that then get distributed to top sites. The scheduler from FullSlate will become part of this portfolio, along with its e-commerce platform that allows for payments to be made that are tied to a particular appointment.

The FullSlate service has a host of scheduling services. It allows for customers to use an embed code for the online appointment scheduler that they can place on their web site. The company also offers a Facebook app that allows for scheduling to a Facebook business page so clients and their friends can make appointments without leaving Facebook.

Customers can also create a landing page for a business with a logo, business hours, map and online scheduling. The service works on iOS and Android devices, calendar syncing, a client database and email marketing capabilities.

Intuit has made a number of acquisitions this year with a particular focus on the small business, their bread-and-butter market.

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Cloud management company ServiceMesh has been acquired by CSC, which has in recent years emerged as an IT management outfit that focuses on helping companies move their apps to service providers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ServiceMesh describes itself as an enterprise cloud management company that offers Global 2000 companies what it calls “IT as Service,” that charges on a pay as you go basis. It helps companies extend their data centers to public cloud services with all of the governance requirements that comes with managing an enterprise operation.

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform helps enterprise customers with self-service provisioning and management of standardized and fully governed Infrastructure as a Service, platform as a service and software as a service offerings. The company allows business to go fast, build new applications and manage multiple providers, all in a way that’s compliant.

The company had $15 million in funding from Ignition Partners. Frank Artale, a partner at Ignition, was a member of the ServiceMesh board of directors. It was ServiceMesh’s only round of institutional funding.

In a prepared release, CSC stated that the deal will enable the company to expand the reach of its BizCloud service, as well as allow it to present stronger competition against dominant cloud players like AWS.

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ClearStory Data has launched a data analytics service that the company says is one of the first to offer a core back-end technology that includes rich visuals and sharing capabilities.

On the back-end, ClearStory has a platform for integrating a company’s internal and external data using an in-memory database technology, said CEO Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan in a phone interview this week. This can be relational or NoSQL data, point-of-sale information or demographic statistics from external sources. Its advantage is in the ability to process multiple types of data on the fly and then combine that with a modern user interface.

ClearStory leverages Apache Spark, an open-source clustering system for its in-memory technology. Companies that use Spark include Yahoo!, Autodesk and Groupon. With Spark, ClearStory is able to achieve the sub-second response times that come with in-memory computing.

Customers create stories that displays the data in a dashboard. These stories can then be shared and modified.

ClearStory certainly has a strong foundation. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures have invested $9 million into the company. The experience for the platform was led by Douglas van der Molen, the former Google architect who managed the user experience for Google Analytics, Google AdWords and other Google Ads products. Google Emeritus Shona Brown is a strategic advisor.

To make the experience simple is still a feat for most companies that provide data analytics platforms that process and analyze data by the terabyte. I spoke to one analyst who said Datameer is the closest comparable provider to ClearStory. Still, ClearStory is not drop-dead easy to set up and use. It’s still relatively complex compared to pure social collaboration services in the market.

Too many of today’s data analytics services lack the intuitiveness so important in today’s market. It reminds me of what LovelyHeroku Co-Founder Mario Danic said to me in a recent interview. Ten years ago building the technology was the most challenging feat. Today, the challenge is creating a compelling user experience almost more than anything else.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has updated its Elastic Map Reduce platform with a new version of Hadoop and updated support for its data analytics ecosystem.

Elastic Map Reduce is AWS platform for processing large amounts of data. But unlike many vendors, AWS offers a hosted service. The challenge for AWS is to keep Hadoop and its accompanying ecosystem updated and in pace with the latest open-source platforms.

In this latest update, AWS updated to Hadoop 2.2 and new versions of Hive, Pig, HBase, and Mahout, all accompanying technologies for Hadoop.  In a blog post, AWS states that it cluster startup times have been reduced, the ability to augment data has been augmented and mapper M7 is now supported. MapR M7 is a premium offering for HBase, the NoSQL database built for Hadoop.

The update to Elastic Map Reduce also includes supports for YARN, the next generation Hadoop MapReduce architecture.

This is a major update for AWS. it’s as much about Hadoop as it is about the ecosystem that has come so far in the past few years. Hadoop is a file-based system that need HBase for a database. Pig an analytics platform that is often used for ETL (Extract / Transform / Load) processing and Mahout is a machine-learning library.

AWS has increasing support for its analytics technology. That’s illustrated in the news last week that business intelligence provider Jaspersoft now supports Elastic Map Reduce. The company has a history with AWS, boasting 500 customers that use its service available on the AWS Marketplace.

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