Dimension Data Buys Tel...

Telecom expense management (TEM) solutions company Xigo , which Greg likened to a Billshrink for large companies , has been acquired by one of its partners, IT services and solutions provider Dimension Data for an undisclosed sum. Dimension Data says the acquisition of Xigo, formerly known as Invoice Insight, will enable them to offer enterprise customers an integrated cost optimization solution for spend analysis, sourcing, provisioning and invoice processing. The company adds that it will focus on increasing Xigo’s market share in the United States and roll out the services to other countries “over time”. Dave Spofford, CEO of Xigo, will continue to lead the Xigo team and report to Dimension Data’s Americas CEO Jere Brown.

Paying To Serve: Micros...

The perks of getting into a top startup accelerator just got a little better. Microsoft is now offering startups in its new BizSpark Plus program $60,000 worth of costs for using its Azure cloud computing program. This includes any company that’s a part of TechStars  or its affiliated Global Accelerator Network , as well as Seedcamp , Dogpatch Labs , and a list of others. Let’s say your hot new startup has just launched to the public, gotten TechCrunched, and is dealing with its big first wave of traffic. This deal will let you quickly scale up to meet the demand without blowing your seed funding on emergency virtual machines. An open cloud services platform , Azure works with major development languages including node.js, java, php and Microsoft’s own . net, among others — the point, from Microsoft’s perspective, is to get in with the next batch of companies before they get hooked on offerings from rivals like Amazon. Or let’s say you’re working on an enterprise app, that also needs to get in front of lots of potential clients. Beyond the broad technical options available in Azure, there’s another selling point. Microsoft will work to connect Plus startups with its many enterprise and mid-market customers, corporate vice president Dan’L Lewin tells me. BizSpark has already been around for a few years, with the general goal of supporting startups while introducing them to .net and other Microsoft-backed languages and resources. The Plus branch of the program, which is officially launching today, is planning on offering other services in addition to Azure. But, per the asterisk in the headline, you should note that the $60,000 doesn’t last forever — according to the Plus web site, the first year is free and the second year is half off the retail price. TechStars, which is headlining the Azure announcement today, has previously worked together with Microsoft on a variety of other projects, including an incubator focused on its hit Kinect devices . The deal, generally, is another example of accelerators upping the benefits they can provide startups. TechStars began offering $100,000 convertible notes to each of its accepted companies last fall, on top of its initial seed funding. Y Combinator partnered with Yuri Milner, SV Angels and Andreessen Horowitz last summer to provide $150,000 notes .

DreamHost’s Unhappy Jan...

DreamHost has been having a rough couple weeks. The low-cost hosting provider and domain name registrar found some unauthorized activity in its databases back on January 20th, which they later admitted were a series of attacks that may have led to the theft of some of their customers’ FTP passwords. The company required mandatory password resets for all their Shell/FTP accounts — you can read our coverage here . DreamHost’s bad dream continued today, as they’ve been reporting outage problems, as Web, SSH, and FTP services were down for many of the company’s virtual private servers, shared, and dedicated machines. The outage was first reported at 4am PST on Sunday, and has continued throughout the course of the day, with the company offering updates on its blog . In the company’s initial blog post, the team said that “the apache (web), SSH, and FTP services on a subset of our VPS and dedicated servers are currently down. FTP services on some shared servers are also experiencing downtime. Our system administration and data center operation teams are currently on the case and we are attempting to restore services as soon as possible.” Furthermore, the post said that the outage only affected web VPS/dedicated and shared web server FTP services, while other services or servers, i.e. mail were unaffected. They also, unfortunately, did not specify which “subset” was affected in particular. Yeesh. And, judging from the parade of comments and subsequent updates, users were apparently experiencing problems with MySQL and webmail services as well. The majority of the large problems seem to have been addressed as of DreamHost’s last posting at 6:30 pm on Sunday, although there’s been no final word. DreamHost plays host to thousands of small websites and personal blogs across the Web, and for many of them, it was a surprise to find their sites offline for most of the day. By now, most of the sites are back up, but from what these site owners have learned from DreamHost, the VPS server was damaged by new software they were installing this morning, leading to a sizable outage with ripple effects across their services. Even though the outage lasted nearly 24 hours for some, many could not even access files to move to another host. Unsurprisingly, the outage caused a flurry of DreamHost users to flock to Twitter to express their chagrin, with some saying that it might cause others to consider moving to other services. Veteran tech journalist Dan Frommer and his SplatF were among them: Props to @swein for his reaction. Clearly, other hosting providers may be seeing some new clients in the near future. Though as of now, it remains unclear whether the software installation this morning had anything to do with the database breach on January 20th. As far as I can tell, they were unrelated. More here from DreamHost . Will update should we hear any updates.

Amazon Web Services Int...

Amazon just added a new cloud computing service to its suite of Amazon Web Services, a distributed database called DynamoDB . Web applications can spike suddenly in demand or grow so big that they tax traditional databases, or even clusters of traditional databases, which are hard to maintain, especially for smaller companies. With DynamoDB, Amazon offers and on-demand web-scale distrubted database to the tens of thousands of customers who already use other cloud computing services from Amazon. DynamoDB is a “a fully managed NoSQL database” that can be scaled up or down according to demand. Amazon takes care of all the provisioning and management of the database. The whole service takes advantage of solid-state drives, greatly speeding up the transfer of data from the database (which is often a bottleneck). Three years ago, Amazon Web Services launched a much simpler database, SimpleDB. With DynamoDB, Amazon is moving up the stack and competing more directly with traditional databases from Oracle and IBM. Here is a video explaining the basic concept:

Google Maps Ready for 2...

Sometimes you need to just sit back and be entertained regarding all of the options available in the Internet space. Whether you are on or off the Google bandwagon you can’t deny that they have at least figured out how to make some good videos about their services. This one about maps is pretty neat. Google is busy doing a lot more than just upsetting everyone. I like to concentrate on the good work and very useful products that I can use. I’ll leave the pissing and moaning to the “experts”. Your thoughts?