In The Know: Top 5 Must-Read Cloud Stories, Feb. 19

Talkin’ Cloud at the end of each day pulls out five must-read cloud computing stories from the news cycle for its readers to review in the morning. Today’s column features Corvisa, Axcient and Altiscale.

Some of these stories have been gathered from Talkin’ Cloud’s article database, while others have been collected from elsewhere. If we missed something, feel free to leave a comment below. We might just add it into the mix.

Here’s today’s list of must-read cloud computing stories.

Top 10 Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) In The Southeast. Which CSPs, aggregators and brokers on the 2014 Talkin’ Cloud 100 call the Southeast home? Here’s a closer look at the top 10 Talkin’ Cloud 100 companies that are based out of the Southeast region of the United States. (Registration required.)

Corvisa Introduces Channel Partner Program. Corvisa has launched a channel partner program that could help the Milwaukee-based cloud communications solutions provider expand globally. Under its channel partner program, Corvisa is offering participants its contact center suite, phone system and Summit Platform as a complete solution or à la carte to partners and their customers.

Click here for Talkin’ Cloud’s Top 100 CSP list

Axcient Compensates Partners Up Front For Cloud Sales. For far too many channel partners making the transition to the cloud requires major changes to their existing business models that winds up dampening their enthusiasm for actually selling cloud services. Moving to address that issue head on, Axcient, a Mountain View, California-based provider of a recovery-as-a-service offering in the cloud, on Wednesday launched a SaaS:FLO channel program under which it will compensate partners upfront for sales of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

Altiscale Pushes Apache Spark Into The Cloud. With the number of application scenarios for Hadoop rapidly expanding to include in-memory applications based on the Apache Spark framework, adoption of Hadoop in the cloud is rapidly expanding. To address demand for access to Spark, Altiscale today at the Strata + Hadoop World 2015 conference announced that it now supports Apache Spark on the Altiscale Data Cloud.

Amazon leads way in cloud computing. A new report taps AWS as the leader in cloud computing services. Fifty-seven percent reported using AWS. Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, Azure, was a distant second at 12 percent. Will Microsoft have what it takes to snag the lead from AWS?

Follow CJ Arlotta on Twitter @cjarlotta and Google+ for further updates on the story above — or if you just want to say hello.