Oracle Sets Sights on Amazon With New PaaS Cloud Offerings

Today’s topics include Oracle’s latest effort to become the top platform-as-a-service provider, NetApp’s new high-end flash storage arrays, new IoT offerings from Freescale Semiconductor and how Taylor Swift helped change Apple’s plans for launching its new streaming music service.

Oracle wants to be the undisputed leader in the platform-as-a-service business. To achieve that goal, the database and enterprise application giant announced June 22 that it will offer a set of 24 cloud service packages in six IT categories.

These include mobile, application development, business analytics, data management, content and collaboration, and data integration. In introducing these packages, Oracle has set its sights on supplanting Amazon Web Services as the top competitor in this field.

NetApp announced June 23 that it is bringing high-end flash capabilities into storage systems aimed at midsize and smaller IT systems.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based storage and data protection provider launched four all-flash AFF8000 series arrays that on demand can move data from flash to disk to the cloud. The system ships with NetApp Data ONTAP FlashEssentials, which was designed specifically to increase flash performance and efficiency.

Freescale Semiconductor has unveiled a number of offerings designed for the rapidly growing Internet of things and the tens of billions of devices that will be connected to it.

Among the new products was the i.MX 7 series of highly power-efficient application processors that officials said will help power a wide variety of end products for IoT and wearable computing.

The processors, which incorporate both the ARM Cortex-A7 and Cortex-M4 cores, are about three times more power-efficient than their predecessors, due in large part to such technologies as a new battery-savings mode

Apple Music now says it will pay musicians for their work during free customer trials of the upcoming Apple Music streaming service after megastar musician Taylor Swift posted an open letter about the unfairness of the company’s position.

Apple originally said it would offer the free 90-day trials to customers on June 30 when Apple Music launches, but wouldn’t pay royalties to the musicians whose works are featured during that time.

That didn’t go well with lots of musicians and critics who vented their feelings online and in media interviews, but it apparently was Swift’s June 21 post on Tumblr that swayed Apple to change its mind.