Office 365 makes huge sense for many organisations, and is growing fast – “the fastest growing business in the history of the company,” according to Corporate VP of Windows Server and System Center Brad Anderson, speaking to the press last week Update on Microsoft’s cloud plans from TechEd

The 451 analysis of Cloudera’s acquisition of Gazzang is up, which I co-authored. Here’s the summary: As more Hadoop projects are moving from proof of concepts into production, companies are looking to better secure the data in those ‘big data’ projects. Cloudera hopes to grease the wheels by acquiring Austin, Texas-based Gazzang, a security vendor that specializes in encryption and key management for databases and big-data workloads. The target’s technology will be folded into Cloudera’s Navigator product, and its Austin office will become the Cloudera Center for Security Excellence, further building out the company’s security capabilities.

As the company scaled, the task of administration became increasingly complex, due to “call-back soup”, a common complaint with Node.js. Call-back soup

My second column at The Channel Register is up, a quick overview of our recent DevOps work at 451. They’ve got a fine strapline: “But you’ve got to untangle deployment wizards from the duct-tape cats” At the moment, there’s some charts missing from it - I’m sure they’ll show up soon. In the meantime, you can see the charts here. You may recall the first one on developers being “a thing.

SAP’s own Business Suite application stack running atop HANA has broken through 1,000 customers and is one of the fastest-growing products in the company’s four decades of operation. Also, some notes in what OSes are used to run SAP, esp. the database portion: UNIX almost never for new deploys. SAP HANA momemtum

In many ways the turnaround at the company is a reflection of trends in the broader Hadoop community, which spent much of last year dealing with the fallout of hyped tech claims and false promises. This year, by contrast, some businesses seem to be finally squeezing some real value out of the tech, bringing a new round of enthusiasm (and cash) into the startups involved with the tech. Hadoop hype update

To some extent Gartner has recognized that managed cloud is in its infancy and has named Rackspace in its 2014 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), a report that focuses on multi-tenant cloud infrastructure providers. At Rackspace, we’re looking forward to seeing the upcoming Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Enabled Managed Hosting, North America, which will focus more on the service layer on top of the infrastructure, rather than the infrastructure itself.