Cloud News: Amazon, Accenture, Microsoft, Joyent

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

Amazon launches CloudSearch.  Amazon (AMZN) announced CloudSearch, a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. Launching from the US East region, billing is based on the number of running search instances. There are three search instance sizes (Small, Large, and Extra Large) at prices ranging from $0.12 to $0.68 per hour. CloudSearch supports a rich set of features including free text search, faceted search, customizable relevance ranking, configurable search fields, text processing options, and near real-time indexing.

Accenture, Microsoft provide end-to-end cloud solution.  Accenture and Micosoft (MSFT) have signed an agreement that enables Accenture to provide clients with an end-to-end public cloud solution on the Windows Azure platform, marking the first time clients can contract for design, delivery and ongoing management services of applications hosted in the cloud on Windows Azure from a single global technology services provider. Accenture will expand its infrastructure outsourcing options to include Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services (and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as it becomes available) from Windows Azure. The agreement extends to Avanade, a provider of business technology solutions and managed services, and enables both Accenture and Avanade to sell, host and deliver Windows Azure services to clients.  Avanade is a majority-owned subsidiary of Accenture. “As our clients are increasingly looking to generate the business benefits of moving into the cloud, we can offer the capabilities, flexibility and innovation to help them on their journey, and this agreement adds a cost-effective, enterprise-ready cloud-based hosting option that is ready-to-deploy,” said Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect and global cloud services lead for Accenture.  “By combining the strengths of Microsoft, Accenture and Avanade and the power of Windows Azure, we can increase support for our clients’ cloud strategies and continue to help them achieve high performance.”

Joyent and Cloudant partner.  Joyent and Cloudant, provider of a scalable Data Layer as a Service for data-driven web and mobile applications, announced a partnership to provide developers with the ability to store, analyze and distribute application data across a global network of secure, high-performance data centers. By using Cloudant, Joyent customers can scale their application data layer up or down on demand through a simple management interface. “Making the Cloudant data layer available on Joyent Cloud helps ensure that our customers’ applications run flawlessly at any scale,” said Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle. “This is particularly important for the data-intensive, real-time applications that many Cloudant and Joyent Cloud customers run.”