Industry News Desk

Google Brick & Mortar Bound; Amazon Too Reportedly

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST

Aping Apple, Google wants to open a 1,323-square-foot open-to-the-public retail store complete with an eye-catching mezzanine visible from the street at its European headquarters in Dublin, according to a local planning application. It hasn’t explained what it wants to sell there but the mezzanine area is for visiting “business partners and contributors.” Maybe it’ll sell the Android-based, smartphone- or tablet-operated “home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home” that the Wall Street Journal said Thursday it’s developing and means to move under its own brand. The widgetry, which might stream other media, is reportedly due later this year after years of tinkering. The Dublin site is Google’s largest location outside the US, with expectations of housing 3,000 employees.

Apache Hadoop: Now, Next, and Beyond at Cloud Expo New York

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:25:00 EST

In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future. Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have happened recently with the Apache Hadoop project, what is has already accomplished (including real-world examples), and what it is going to make possible in the future.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Mark Hinkle – Citrix Systems

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:45:00 EST

Clustrix Delivers Software-Only Kit to Demo Shard-less MySQL Scaling

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

On Tuesday, Clustrix announced the availability of the free Clustrix Development Kit, allowing users to try out the NewSQL system that it's backers say scales to an "unlimited number of users, transactions or data." There's a lot to like about MySQL databases if you're a start-up, until success comes knocking a bit too fast. When big data demand soars then MySQL can sour on making the transactions needed on time. Sharding the application and data resources has been about the only answer, other than to painfully and expensively cut and run to another data base like NoSQL. This was the problem facing Massive Media when its social networking site Twoo rapidly grew to four million users in six months. By using the Clustrix distributed relational database system, Massive Media gained high scale-out transactional performance and automated fault tolerance, said Clustrix. And that has now made Twoo the poster child for Clustrix, a San Francisco start-up funded by Sequoia and USVP and its co-founder, Paul Mikesell, also co-founded Isilon, which was sold to EMC for $2.25 billion.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Dave Asprey – Trend Micro

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...? We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from Nov 7 through Nov 10 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT?

Virtustream Aims to Shape the Cloud Industry for the Enterprise Client

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

“Combining Enomaly’s cloud exchange, federation and public cloud capabilities with Virtustream’s Micro-VM cloud technology enables customers to efficiently pool data center resources, use hybrid clouds and federate between private, virtual private and public clouds - all assured by SLA guarantees that are models for the industry,” said Bill McNamara, Chief of Corporate Development of Virtustream Inc., as it was announced that Virtustream has completed its previously announced acquisition of Enomaly, Inc., an early innovator in cloud and pioneer in cloud exchanges.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Computing and Healthcare

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

What are the legal implications and consequences of cloud computing in the healthcare and high-tech sectors? What are the potential legal protections and solutions from the point of view of providers, suppliers and consumers? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Paul Rubell, a Partner at Meltzer Lippe, will discuss the federal mandates that will encourage “meaningful use” of EHR technology by 2015, and what those mandates will require executives to understand about cloud computing and solutions for implementing cloud computing across large companies, corporations and not-for-profits in advance of federal mandates.

Big Data: "An Even Bigger Deal than Cloud," Says Expert

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

"The volume of data we're generating now from machines pales in comparison to the volume of data we'll soon generate from our own bodies," says data security expert Dave Asprey. Writing in a Trend Micro blog, Asprey - who is one of the leaders in the emerging Quantified Self movement - explains his vision of a world in which personal biometrical data is shared via the cloud.

ExtraHop Networks Expands Operations into the EMEA Market

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:11:00 EST

ExtraHop Networks, recently named an "APM Innovator" by Gartner Research, announces its entry into the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market. Building on an extensive customer base in the USA including Adobe, Concur, Microsoft and other industry leaders, ExtraHop continues to win EMEA customers and is executing a ground-breaking channel partner programme in the EMEA region to further accelerate growth. ExtraHop Networks offers network-based application performance management (APM) solutions that help IT teams fix problems rapidly as well as optimize the performance of IT infrastructure. Specifically the ExtraHop system provides powerful proactive early warning, triaging and troubleshooting combined with mapping and measuring capabilities that surpass those of traditional APM products, which are largely based on legacy monitoring technology.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Andreas Sundquist – DNAnexus

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:45:00 EST

With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...

Big Data Expo New York Speaker Profile: Eric Baldeschwieler – Hortonworks

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:30:00 EST

Oracle to Spend $1.9 Billion Buying Taleo

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:25:00 EST

Oracle rolled out of bed Thursday morning and said it’s going to buy Taleo and its talent management cloud widgetry for $46 a share or roughly $1.9 billion net of Taleo’s cash and debt. That’s an 18% premium. Not bad for a company that was originally bootstrapped. Taleo (say Ta-LAY-oh) competes with SuccessFactors, which SAP is buying for $3.4 billion, and its stock price fattened up after the SuccessFactors deal was announced in December on speculation it would be taken out by Oracle. Taleo is supposed to handle more SaaS transactions than anybody except Salesforce.com.

EMC Touts Isilon for Hadoop

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST

EMC moved to make Hadoop safe for the Joe Blow big company that wants to figure out what’s in all that unstructured data it’s got. It’s integrated the Hadoop file system into its Isilon scale-out NAS storage and lets the two of them cuddle up with its Hadoop-digesting Greenplum analytics machine. Greenplum also handles structured data so users can run queries across both datasets. EMC says that makes Isilon the very first enterprise-class scale-out NAS system with native Hadoop support, giving Hadoop Big Data enterprise comfortable features like snapshots, replication and backup. The storage Goliath figures it can probably make a packet off the scheme, removing Hadoop’s NameNode single point of failure and making it manageable by mere mortals. The way EMC does things Isilon’s native petabyte-scale OneFS file system actually handles the Big Data, not Hadoop, thanks to Isilon’s native OneFS file system being integrated with Hadoop’s Distributed File System protocol and chewing through the scads of resident in the scale-out repository.

Amazon Trims S3 Prices

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

Amazon has reined in the price of its S3 storage a bit as of February 1. It didn’t give a reason for its largesse other than a vague allusion to economies of scale. Maybe it has something to do with Gartner saying using cloud storage for business intelligence is only cheaper for the first five years. Anyway, under the new schedule 50TB, for instance, will cost 12% less than it did and 500TB will be 13.5% less; headier amounts are unchanged – at least in America. Other regions have their own schedules. AWS GovCloud also has its own pricing. Last week Amazon counted the objects S3 is stored and put the number at 762 billion, up 192% year-over-year.

Cloud Expo New York: The Java EE 7 Platform - Developing for the Cloud

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.

Cloud Expo New York: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications for the Cloud

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for application integration and dependency management technologies to take center stage and accelerate enterprise application workloads into the cloud with single pane-of-glass view and control.

Cloud Computing: PerspecSys Expands, Opens First U.S. Office

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:15:00 EST

“2011 was a groundbreaking year for us, marked by three-fold revenue growth and tremendous traction in the market.," said David Canellos, CEO of PerspecSys, the creator of cloud data control solutions for the enterprise, as the company announced the expansion of its operations by opening its first U.S. office in the Washington, D.C. Metro area and naming industry executives Gerry Grealish, John Emerson, David Stott and Eric Hay to key positions within the company.

Cloud Computing Vital to U.S. Economic Growth and Competitiveness: NSF

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:45:00 EST

The Arlington, Virginia-based National Science Foundation has just released its "Report on Support for Cloud Computing" - in response to the America Competes Reauthorization Act of 2010, Section 524. It is an absolute must-read for all concerned with current and future research projects in Cloud Computing.

ScaleOut Software to Exhibit at Cloud Expo 2012 New York

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:15:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that ScaleOut Software, a leading provider of distributed in-memory data grids and data analysis solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. ScaleOut Software develops and markets distributed in-memory data grid (IMDG) software for storing, managing, and analyzing data in the cloud, on-premise, and mixed environments. Its flagship product, ScaleOut StateServer®, accelerates application performance with linear scalability and enables automatic data migration to and from the cloud. Integrated map/reduce functionality provides intuitive, powerful data analysis.

BBVA Reaches for the Sky with Its Embrace of Cloud Computing

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

If 2010 was the year in which cloud computing made its entry in a big way, then 2011 was the year in which companies took to the concept in an equally strong manner. Hitherto confined to start-ups and SME's which welcomed cloud computing services as a way of reducing their IT spend, the deal between the Spanish Banking giant BBVA and Google raises the pitch for the service. The terms of the deal include covering the entire staff of BBVA worldwide (which runs into a little more than hundred thousand people) to Google's email and shared services platforms like Google Docs and the ever popular Video Conferencing. This is expected to give a fillip to both the parties to the deal. For BBVA, it is one way of jumping on the innovation bandwagon and addressing the increasing mobility of its employees who are dispersed globally and who use mobile computing and work from home as part of their jobs. For Google, the deal could not have come at a better time as the tech giant can now justifiably claim that its cloud computing services are no longer restricted to startups or SME's. Further, the big ticket partnership with BBVA is surely going to enhance the positioning of Google vis-à-vis competitors like Amazon in this market niche.

Cloud Expo New York: The Dark Side of Virtualization

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. Reasons range from technical to legal to IT ops to politics to finances. Attend this session, and hear a true IT insider’s guide to the truth about virtualization.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Security for Regulated Industries – CloudAudit

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

Regulation of consumer and corporate data is increasing in response to the growing movement into cloud service offerings. Coupled with high-profile intrusions by groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, the necessity for a standard way to assess the security of cloud service providers becomes apparent. CloudAudit is an open standard developed by a Cloud Security Alliance working group that provides an open, common, extensible namespace and interface to enable cloud providers and authorized customers to automate audits, assertions, assessments and assurance for their cloud infrastructure, platform or application environments.

EMC to Open Cloud and Big Data R&D Center in Russia

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

EMC on Wednesday announced it plans to establish an R&D center in the Skolkovo Foundation's Innovation Hub in Russia that will focus on development of cloud infrastructure solutions and Big Data analytics technologies for Bioinformatics and Energy Efficiency. EMC also plans to collaborate on research projects in these and other areas with Russian universities, government agencies, and local and multinational companies in the Skolkovo community. The new EMC facility will be located at the Skolkovo Innovation Center and will work in close cooperation with EMC's existing R&D center in St. Petersburg. The agreement was signed today in Moscow by Joel Schwartz, EMC's Senior Vice President, and Viktor Vekselberg, Skolkovo Foundation President. The Skolkovo Foundation is a non-profit organization focused on establishing an innovation hub to stimulate innovative entrepreneurship that will benefit Russia and the global economy. Skolkovo's goal is to leverage Russia's resources in the field of contemporary applied research and create a favorable environment for undertaking scientific developments in five priority areas of technological development: power engineering and energy efficiency, space, bioinformatics, nuclear and computer technologies.

Yahoo Chairman, Three Directors Fall on Their Swords

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:51:00 EST

Yahoo’s long-suffering stockholders are finally getting what they’ve wanted since he stiffened Jerry Yang’s resolve to torpedo Microsoft’s insanely great $47.5 billion $33-a-share offer to buy to company in 2008: the departure of chairman Roy Bostock. Bostock is taking with him three other tainted board members including HP printer exec Vyomesh Joshi, media investor Arthur Kern and ex-Disney exec Gary Wilson. The quartet, all reportedly volunteers, have agreed not to seek re-election this June. Who will replace Bostock is unclear but the beleaguered company has named two brand new directors, former Rovi CEO and one-time IBM higher-up Fred Amoroso and former LiveOps CEO and ex-eBay COO Maynard Webb. It is looking for more recruits. Webb serves on the board of Admob and salesforce.com and Amoroso, a Meta Group alum, knows the online video and video ad business. The exodus will leave Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson, imported from PayPal in January, with a board whose oldest member wasn’t there more than two years ago. Co-founder Jerry Yang departed the premises in mid-January. Bostock, who took credit for the re-composition of the board, made the announcements in a letter to stockholders Tuesday afternoon. He also said that the company has yet to hear an equity investment proposal it fancies to increase Yahoo’s value. It has reportedly entertained offers for a piece of Yahoo from consortia led by private equity firms Silver Lake and TPG Capital. What to do with its handsome stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan is still on the table too. Both Alibaba and Softbank want to buy Yahoo out. Bostock blamed the complexity of the potentially tax-free transactions for the continued delay and offered no reassurance of any final resolution. However, negotiations are reportedly moving along and Yahoo might have a deal next month, the whisperers say. The moves were made against the backdrop of a threatened proxy fight by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point LLC. After-hours after the news broke Yahoo added five cents to its Tuesday close of $15.83.

Cloud Expo New York: Goodbye PaaS 1.0, Hello PaaS 2.0

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to reach its full potential and become the modern day abstraction layer for software delivery, we must enter the PaaS 2.0 phase. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Sinclair Schuller, Co-Founder & CEO of Apprenda, will explain how organizations are currently using PaaS, where PaaS is evolving to, and highlight best practices to maximize the value of existing investments when adopting PaaS today.

Cloud Expo New York: Best Practices for Big Unstructured Data Storage

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

Big Data has become very popular as what can probably best be described as “loosely structured large scale data”, i.e., data sets of relatively small files. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Tom Leyden, Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, will explain what Big Unstructured Data is (lots of large, unstructured files) and how you build scalable storage infrastructures that can handle such volumes of data. The focus will be on Object Storage, which is the future storage paradigm that uses concepts of cloud computing to optimize the back-end storage for cloud applications.

Cloud Expo New York: The Growing Big Data Tools Landscape

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best – and most cost-effective – for their organization. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, David Lucas, Chief Strategy Officer at GCE, will run through what enterprises really need to know about the growing set of big data tools – including those being leveraged by organizations today as well as the new and innovative tools just arriving on the scene. He will also help attendees gain greater insight on how to match the right data center tools to a specific enterprise challenge and what processes need to change to handle big data.

Red Hat Puts Gluster Appliance on Amazon

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

Red Hat is putting its bought-in Gluster scale-out NAS storage technology, acquired in October, on the Amazon cloud. It’s styled Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services and other clouds are supposed to follow in short order.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Architectures Require Scale-out Storage

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, will discuss how Ethernet SAN architectures leverage off-the-shelf hardware, standard Ethernet, and distributed storage processing to enable a building block approach to scalability – no forklift upgrades required. With Ethernet SAN, capacity and performance both scale linearly with user demand without forcing users into a complex tiered storage environment to deal with price-performance tradeoffs. Now the same storage building blocks can be configured for backup or production, virtualization or database, enabling a flexible one-tier-for-all architecture. Learn how organizations today are already leveraging Ethernet SAN as the storage backbone of their dynamic public and private cloud architectures.

The New OpenNebula Self-Service Portal in Action

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel. This screencast demonstrates the new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers. Its aim is to offer a simplified access to shared infrastructure for non-IT end users. The screencast shows how to create a virtual network, how to upload an image, and how to launch virtual machines using them.

SoftLayer Appoints New Chief Financial Officer

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:45:00 EST

SoftLayer Technologies on Monday announced the appointment of Walter Z. Berger as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective in March. A seasoned finance and accounting executive, Mr. Berger will help guide and oversee the company’s continued market leadership and financial growth. He brings more than 30 years of experience to SoftLayer, including extensive operational experience as a CFO with several large, publicly held companies. Lance Crosby, CEO for SoftLayer, notes that Berger’s “proven track record and leadership will be invaluable as we embark on our next phase of growth. We’re delighted to have such a high caliber executive join our team.” Prior to joining SoftLayer Technologies, Mr. Berger was the CFO and executive vice president of Leap Wireless International Inc. From 2006 to 2008, Mr. Berger served in senior management roles at CBS Corporation, including as executive vice president and chief financial officer for CBS Radio, a division of CBS Corporation. Prior to joining CBS Radio, Mr. Berger served as executive vice president and CFO and a director of Emmis Communications from 1999 to 2005. From 1996 to 1997, Mr. Berger served as executive vice president and CFO of LG&E Energy Corporation and in 1997 was promoted to group president of the Energy Marketing Division, where he served until 1999. Early in his career, Mr. Berger held a number of financial and operating management roles in the manufacturing, service and energy fields. Mr. Berger began his career in audit at Arthur Andersen in 1977. Mr. Berger is a certified public accountant and holds a Bachelor of Arts in business administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Actian Releases Vectorwise Workgroup Edition, Big Data Analytics

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:05:00 EST

Actian Corporation (formerly Ingres Corp.), on Tuesday announced that Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is available for download and purchase. Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is specifically packaged to address the growing technology needs of mid-sized businesses as well as Workgroups within larger organizations by providing them with the power and speed of Vectorwise, the industry's fastest data analytics engine, at an affordable cost. Vectorwise Workgroup Edition closes the gap that exists between the analytics needs of mid-market companies or Workgroups within larger organizations, and the options available. Most can't afford expensive solutions from Oracle, IBM or Teradata, and lack the time and expertise to get the most out of legacy technologies in order to satisfy users' needs for performance and agility. Vectorwise Workgroup Edition delivers significant performance improvements over legacy technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server at an affordable price allowing organizations to move from data to insight to actions in a matter of days or hours.

Tilera’s New Server Chips Arrive

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

Tilera, the wannabe many-core Intel server replacement, said Monday that it’s delivering the expected 16- and 36-core versions of its new 64-bit low-power proprietary TILE-GX processors along with evaluation systems it hopes will give Intel something to worry about. The things should be in volume by mid-March. They’re Tilera’s first 64-bit chips capable of using more memory than its original 32-bit widgets – like 512GB or 1TB. They’ve been shipping in limited quantities – alphas – since September. The start-up claims to have 20 design-wins and 80 “deep” engagements for the GX family that it expects will turn into design-wins – probably this year – because they’re do-or-die mission-critical projects. Forty-seven are in the US, 13 in Europe, and 20 in APAC, mostly China.

Salesforce Trots Out Desk.com

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

Cloud doyen Salesforce.com Tuesday fielded Desk.com, a new on-demand social and mobile help desk platform that’s supposed to let businesses deliver personal customer service by unifying support channels including Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, the phone and the web via a Desk.com Agent Desktop. Basic pricing starts at $49 a month per full-time agent for unlimited usage. Flex pricing runs $1 an hour per part-time agent. Users can reportedly respond to cases themselves on the go, re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases and modify customer information associated with cases.

Dell's New Software Division - Great News for Dell

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

Some companies get it. Others wander around in the fog and think that it's a "Cloud". In case you've missed it, 2012 has been the year of some amazing strategic moves by Dell. If you think Dell isn't a software vendor, you're dead wrong. Dell "gets it" - SaaS, Software & Cloud. Dell is making some exciting waves in the "solutions" business. Building on the momentum as a result of the acquisition of Perot Systems some years ago and a buying spree where they acquired a host of best-of-breed software solutions such as Boomi (Cloud-based Integration Platform),Dell has just announced a newly created Software Division and has appointed veteran John Swainson as president, reporting to Michael Dell.

Cloud Expo New York: Big Data, Colocation and the Cloud

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:15:00 EST

As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It would allow organizations to have a cloud at various data centers instead of one cloud at one datacenter. Costs are reduced significantly since one big Internet pipe is not needed.

Andreessen Horowitz Raises New $1.5 Billion Fund

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST

Novice venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, which wouldn’t be near so influential if Netscape survivor Marc Andreessen wasn’t at the helm, has raised another $1.5 billion fund in these days of not-so-scarce money. That means it’ll have $2.7 billion under management. Andreessen, who’s accorded rock star status and gets early access to plum investments, says it’s a “very opportunity-rich environment right now.” Naturally he’s looking for the disruptive start-ups. Andreessen Horowitz started in 2009 with $300 million. It’s in all the chi-chi firms like Zynga and Facebook and sold Skype to Microsoft for a pretty penny, $8.5 billion in fact.

Open Data Center Alliance Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:00:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that The Open Data Center Alliance, an independent organization that gives stakeholders a voice in shaping the future of cloud computing, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. The Open Data Center Alliance was formed in 2010 as a unique consortium of leading global IT organizations. The Alliance is led by a steering committee of senior IT executives from BMW, China Life, China Unicom, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, Terremark, Disney Technology Solutions and Services, and UBS. Intel Corporation serves as the organization’s technical advisor. The Alliance came together to deliver a unified voice for emerging data center and cloud computing requirements. Its mission is to speed the migration to cloud computing by enabling the solution and service ecosystem to address IT requirements with the highest level of interoperability and standards.

CloudPassage and Yubico Partner

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Yubico has announced a partnership with CloudPassage designed to deliver strong, secure authentication and protection of administrative network access in the cloud. Rand Wacker, vice president of product management for CloudPassage, noted that “security is a paramount concern for companies making the move to the cloud, and it’s our job to give our customers confidence that their servers are protected.” CloudPassage required a strong two-factor authentication mechanism for the CloudPassage Halo platform to protect access to servers in public clouds. Halo users needed a fast, effective, and reliable solution that could be deployed as quickly as Halo. After evaluating other authentication solutions, the company chose the YubiKey, Yubico’s unique one-time password (OTP) USB key, as the centerpiece of the Halo GhostPorts two-factor authentication solution.

SoftLayer Introduces Flex Images

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

The lines between physical and virtual IT resources are being erased with the introduction of SoftLayer Flex Images. Flex Images allow users to capture, replicate, and store an image of a cloud or dedicated server, and then deploy the image on either type of computing environment. Capabilities traditionally in the domain of virtual infrastructure, including the ability to quickly clone and reload servers, are extended to dedicated servers, along with cross-platform compatibility and simple migration between physical and virtual environments. “Flex Images provide our customers with unprecedented flexibility and scalability,” said Simon West, Chief Marketing Officer for SoftLayer. “The ability to provision and automate server images seamlessly between cloud and dedicated computing environments empowers users to easily build out their IT environments while being able to quickly meet changing requirements. Our customers can focus on the purpose of their application and then on the right technology solution—with the freedom to move between or integrate technologies as needed.”