Amazon bullish on Web services

Amazon.com has deployed a data centre in Singapore to give its customers in Asia, India and Australia faster access to its Web services business, reports Business Week.

Amazon has established a booming business selling cloud computing services, including processing, disk storage, and database software, to what it says are hundreds of thousands of users, at hourly fees based on how much computing power they consume.

Andy Jassy, senior VP in charge of Amazon's cloud computing business, says: "Amazon Web Services can be as big as our retail business, in the fullness of time.”

EMC has extended a licensing agreement with IBM, first signed in 2006, which will continue to enable data centre customers to deploy EMC storage arrays alongside IBM Power Systems servers, says eWeek.

The two tech giants are traditionally competitors, but have signed interoperability agreements to ensure their technology works together as seamlessly as possible for the interest of their customers.

This is the latest in a series of agreements between EMC and IBM as in 2007, the companies extended their licensing agreement for the zSeries attachment architecture; this enables the EMC Symmetrix family of storage systems to interoperate with IBM System z mainframes.

Symantec has signed definitive agreements to acquire PGP Corporation and GuardianEdge Technologies, two privately held companies in the e-mail and data encryption market, states Market Watch.

Under the terms of the agreements, Symantec will acquire PGP Corporation for a purchase price of approximately $300 million in cash, and GuardianEdge for a purchase price of approximately $70 million in cash.

Symantec aims to boost its presence in the data storage protection and encryption market by integrating the technologies from PGP and GuardianEdge into the security giant's portfolio.