Industry News Desk

CloudBench Applications Reports Q3 2009 Results and Business Highlights

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:15:00 EST

CloudBench Applications, Inc. announced its financial results for the three months and nine months ending September 30, 2009. All amounts are stated in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Revenues from BasicGov, the Company's cloud computing solution for local government, grew to $66,649 in the third quarter, a 140% increase from $27,822 in the same quarter of the prior year. The Company's annualized committed recurring revenues, a non-GAAP measure, increased 220% to US$288,000 compared to US$90,000 for the same period last year.

CSC Signs Cloud Computing Agreement With UK Royal Mail Group

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

The new contract is an industry first, with CSC being the first Microsoft partner to lead and win a cloud computing services agreement of this scale. Under terms of the contract, CSC will provide Royal Mail Group's 30,000 employees with access to new IT services using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services. CSC will also provide first line helpdesk support. CSC's cloud services are designed to help businesses easily and securely adopt cloud computing solutions, allowing them to reduce the costs of managing and maintaining business systems while giving them access to the latest Microsoft Online Services including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

Centerstance Joins Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to all sizes of organizations. With Google Apps, users have access to applications such as Gmail webmail service, Google Talk instant messaging service, Google Calendar calendaring service, Google Docs program, Google Sites web application, and Google Video for business with their own domain to work together more effectively. Best of all, everything is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain. "It's a natural partnership," stated John Marshall, Director of Technology Services at Centerstance. "Centerstance is the Northwest's premier Cloud Computing consulting company and Google is a major player in both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)."

GDS International: Global Warming Scam?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Operates in over 170 countries and is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. Richard Tarboton talks for MeettheBoss.TV on his role as Head of Energy & Carbon for BT and what they are doing towards reducing carbon emissions.

CA & BMC To Support Salesforce.com

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

CA is going to put its Agile Planner software on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform in the first half to accelerate development time and give users visibility over their development initiatives to reduce time-to-market. Customers are supposed to be able to accelerate the deployment of Salesforce CRM within their organization. The software will include CA Clarity PPM On Demand, Federation Manager and CA Wily Application Performance Management to monitor and manage cloud-based composite applications. BMC will be putting a new cloud-based service desk offering on Force.com for self-service and inventory management in Q2.

Sun Fields Cloud Desktop for K-12

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Despite its uncertain fate Sun soldiers on. Monday it trotted out a cloud-based multiplatform desktop as a service for K-12 and community colleges that can run Windows, the Mac OS, Linux and Solaris applications to nearly any client device, including its own Sun Ray thin clients. Sun claims it’s the industry’s first full-function, cloud-based desktop as a service. It runs on Sun’s Open Cloud Platform. Its subscription pricing can run as little as $1 a day per concurrent user. Ashbourne Technology Group is apparently taking it to market.

No Real Recovery with Europe Still in the Tank: HP

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST

HP, which pre-announced relatively happy results a couple of weeks ago when it said it was buying 3Com, came in exactly on target with earnings of $2.4 billion, or 99 cents a share, up 14%, on revenues of $30.8 billion, down 8.4% year-over-year from $33.6 billion. And the company reiterated that it should do $29.6 billion to $29.9 billion this quarter and earn 90 to 92 cents a share. Its full-year outlook is for $118 billion-$119 billion and EPS of $4.25-$4.35.

Why The Cloud Needs Virtualization

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:00:00 EST

Lots of discussion lately about the need for virtualization in a cloud computing context. On one side you have people saying it's not necessary and adds extra complexity, on the other you have people (vendors) saying that virtualization is inherently a cloud infrastructure. Some even go as far as saying that virtualization and cloud computing are one in the same. I'm here to tell you that neither is true. My position is Virtualization Doesn't Make the Cloud, it makes the cloud better. Sure, you could manage raw servers Google style, but why? For me, it comes down two main aspects of scale, scaling up, and scaling out.

First let's look at scaling out, or to scale horizontally which basically means to add more nodes to a distributed system, such as adding a new servers or storage (which is easier). These could be in the form of physical or virtual servers. An example might be scaling out from one web server system to many dedicated slaves machines. Google has made an art form of scaling out. They have data centers around the globe geared toward this one core task - just in time hardware provisioning, but for most this is a very difficult and costly endeavour. Virtualization makes this sort of instant replication & provisioning of many virtual machines much easier.

Next is scaling up or the ability to scale vertically which means adding resources to a single server in a distributed system. Typically this involves the addition of CPUs or memory to a single virtual server in the form of Virtual CPU and RAM. Unlike a physical server, in a virtual environment you can change your virtual hardware characteristics, a physical server is what it is. You run at it's maximum potential limiting it's ability to easily scale up. If you need more scale you need more hardware or have to manually add more components to the physical server (RAM, CPU, storage, etc), which means downtime while the servers are upgraded. In virtual environment this isn't a limitation and can often be done on the fly.

Vertical scaling of existing systems also enables you to better leverage Virtualization technology because it provides more resources for the hosted Operating system and Applications that can share these resources in a multi-tenant environment. Virtualization also allows for more automated programmatic control of the system resources in correlation to the demands placed on the infrastructure or application being hosted. This is because in a virtual infrastructure you are not managing any actual physical components but instead virtual representations of them.

So it is very true that virtualization isn't a requirement of a cloud infrastructure, it just makes it a heck of lot easier to manage and scale out or up or both.

Move Over BI, Here Comes PI - Performance Intelligence

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:30:00 EST

"As companies such as MySpace continue to expand the richness of their site, the big thing is trying to seek a higher level of customer experience by replicating "beyond capacity" in a test environment, so that a company can see what it is exactly that they will need when traffic surges to peak levels and beyond, so that they know the "risk points" of their own success," Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, told SYS-CON's Jeremy Geelan in an interview with Cloud Computing Journal on the day that SOASTA announced a significant test of the newly launched MySpace Music Videos hub using the Cloud.

Ulitzer Names The World's 30 Most Influential Virtualization Bloggers

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:45:00 EST

Ulitzer.com announced today "the World's 30 most influential Virtualization bloggers," who collectively generated more than 24 million Ulitzer page views. Ulitzer's annual "most influential Virtualization bloggers" list was announced at Cloud Expo 2009 West, which took place at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California. Cloud Expo 2009 West drew more delegates than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "The world's 50 most influential Cloud bloggers 2010" list will be announced at the Cloud Expo 2010 East, which will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center, in New York City, with more than 5,000 expected to attend.

CSC Signs Record Cloud Deal with Royal Mail

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Britain's hidebound state-owned Royal Mail is getting a cloud. Yup, CSC is supposed to provide 30,000 of its employees with access to newfangled web-based services using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services. CSC will also provide first line helpdesk support. The new contract is described as an industry first: CSC is the first Microsoft service provider to win a cloud deal of this size.

Virtualization Expo Call for Papers Deadline December 15

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:45:00 EST

Delegates will leave Virtualization Expo with a full understanding of the interaction between virtual servers and the rest of the data center infrastructure. Indeed our overall aim is to ensure that all attendees leave the Jacob Javits Convention Center with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging Virtualization in their own corporate datacenter, on the desktop, and elsewhere. If you wish to submit a speaking proposal for the 8th Virtualization Expo, April 19–21, 2010, then you can do so right here

OpenAir Powers Business Systems Consolidation

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

OpenAir, Inc., a NetSuite Inc. company and a provider of cloud computing professional services automation (PSA) and services resource planning (SRP) software announced that BearingPoint, a provider of management and technology consulting, has gone live with OpenAir to streamline services delivery processes and consolidate multiple point solutions into one, unified business system. With OpenAir, BearingPoint is already realizing significant benefits through more accurate and timely visibility of staff utilization and its opportunity pipeline. BearingPoint joins a growing list of OpenAir customers recently added in the Asia-Pacific region, including AIPEX, ClearPoint, Assurity, and Fronde. These customer wins are a testament to OpenAir's global expansion initiative as well as its unparalleled customer support infrastructure. By selecting OpenAir for its professional services automation needs, BearingPoint has reduced its dependency on Microsoft Project and Excel, and replaced its legacy timesheet application.

Merge Healthcare and InSite Use New Archiving Technology

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST

“Our continued innovation in imaging software allows us to change the healthcare information distribution paradigm by the intuitive inclusion of images and radiology reports. We are thrilled to work with InSite One, a long-time partner, to bring this innovative solution to the market,” said Antonia Wells, President of Merge’s OEM division. The new zero-footprint technology provides clinicians and CIOs with a solution that overcomes the challenges associated with the distribution of images over a wide area network. Image distribution solutions typically involve expensive hardware, high IT support/deployment costs, platform compatibility issues and high bandwidth requirements. Using InDex Web, with integrated Cedara WebAccess technology from Merge, physicians are able to obtain patient information via a web browser at the point-of-care through their laptops, tablets and smart phones such as Apple iPhone and Blackberry Bold.

Tecan Integrates SAP R/3 and Salesforce.com

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

With their CRM and ERP data systems integrated, Tecan AG's staff and management will benefit from a real-time view of their corporate and customer information. The iBOLT business integration suite integrates and orchestrates the data between diverse business processes and applications. Featuring a code-free approach, iBOLT enables simple and complex business processes to be designed and implemented easily, without working through pages of hard code.

Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Until today, Monitis was providing monitoring only for Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. With the release of its Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, Monitis can now sync to other Cloud computing providers very quickly - from Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer, and more. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework will automate monitoring in highly dynamic cloud environments, where customers’ servers maybe added and terminated according to the load by management software or manually. Given this dynamism, setting up end-user experience monitoring can become a tedious, resource intensive and error-prone process. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework automates the configuration of external monitoring and server monitoring tools every time a new installation is called for - saving IT managers and system administrators around the world enormous time and hassle.

Rackspace Offers Its First-Ever Showcase for Retailers

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

Rackspace Hosting announced a new service to assist its e-commerce customers this holiday season. The Rackspace Holiday Shopping Mall, a promotional area hosted on NoMoreServers.com will offer discounts and coupons to encourage holiday shopping and highlight the benefits of using e-commerce. Rackspace counts more than 2,000 e-commerce stores among its customers. The Rackspace Holiday Shopping Mall is the first of its kind for Rackspace Hosting. The website will feature offers from retailers who are also Rackspace customers, like Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss, and ULTA as well as firms like Bonobos, TeeFury, and ChristmasLightsEtc. A complete list of offers is available at http://nomoreservers.com/mall.

Cloud Expo New York Call for Papers Deadline December 15

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Cloud computing is a game changer. The cloud is disrupting traditional software and hardware business models by disrupting how IT service gets delivered. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate, so it is no surprise that SYS-CON's industry-leading International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is going from strength to strength.

Cloud Expo New York Show Prospectus Mailed to More Than 100 Exhibitors

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:30:00 EST

SYS-CON Events (http://events.sys-con.com) announced today that the "show prospectus" for the 5th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com) is now shipping. 5th International Cloud Expo will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors participating in the conference. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held five times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley, Europe, Japan, and Brazil. Over 200 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals became part of Cloud Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, founder and CEO of SYS-CON Events. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘software' in two short years, and this event has become the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will participate in the Cloud Expo."

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Bootcamp November 2009 Slides

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:15:00 EST

These are copies of the slides from SYS-CON's Cloud Bootcamp held at Cloud Computing Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA November 2-4, 2009. Tim Crawford: Introduction Glenn Brunette (Sun): Cloud Security Kevin Noonan (Push2Cloud): Google App Engine Jason Christensen (jasonc411): Cloud Computing Mobile

Lightweight SOA for Rapid SaaS Deployment

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

As part of its continual push to embrace state-of-the-art technology, EON Reality, the world's leading interactive 3D software provider, is proud to join the ranks of top software architects of the industry at Microsoft's The Architecture Journal (October 2009) with their presentation on "Lightweight SOA for Rapid SaaS Development." In this presentation, EON Reality's Technical Director, Gabriyel Wong from Singapore explains the benefits of delivering 3D software as a service, challenges that his team faced when developing the EON Human community site and their approach to deliver a scalable solution by using a service-oriented architecture within a short turnaround time.

Top500 news: The Rise of the GPU

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

This week, the latest list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers was announced. What I find interesting about it is that at number 5 is a new Chinese design that marries Intel Xeon CPU chips with AMD/ATI graphics chips. There are thousands of clusters that contain a pair of CPUs and GPUs connected via Infiniband switches. And perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that they built this hybrid design by underclocking the GPUs: the frequency of GPU core was decreased from 750MHz to 575MHz and the frequency of GPU’s memory was also decreased from 900MHz to 650MHz. Showing the power of gaming processors even further, six systems use IBMs advanced Sony PlayStation 3 Cell processor with 9 cores in their CPUs.

Cisco Throws More Money at Tandberg

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST

Cisco had to up its bid Monday for Tandberg to overcome stockholder resistance to the $3 billion deal the Norwegian video conferencing equipment maker’s board agreed to. The sweetener for what Cisco calls a “very strategic” asset amounts to roughly another $400 million making the share price 170 Norwegian crowns (~$30.46) rather than 153.50. Cisco, which needs to amass 90% of Tandberg’s stock under Norse law to take it over, has extended its offer till December 1. It said Monday that it had 40%.

Intel Invests in Joyent’s Cloud

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Joyent, whose customers include ABC Disney, CNN, The Gap, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo, developed its own custom OS and data center virtualization technology, which creates a multi-tenant cloud. It’s supposed to deliver more than 70% utilization, which is eight times more than industry averages according to Gartner.

RightScale To Support Azure

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

RightScale, the cloud manager, plans to support Windows Azure and let customers deploy RightScale-managed applications and take advantage of Azure’s particular properties. It said it would support Azure infrastructure-level services through its new Service Management API like it does Amazon and Rackspace and give Azure users access to other cloud platforms. It didn’t say when.

Intel & AMD Called in a Mediator

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

AMD wanted to be paid for its antitrust claims. Intel wanted to be paid to let AMD’s joint venture make x86 chips. Months of negotiation had been futile. Intel’s former CFO, now chief administrative officer Andy Bryant, who was recruited in September to fill in for general counsel Bruce Sewell – who disappeared in the middle of things first to go on sabbatical then to become Apple’s general counsel – reportedly persuaded the negotiators to bring in a mediator.

Infobright & Talend Combine on Free Virtual Data Warehouse

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

They say nobody else can hand you everything you need in minutes. There’s nothing comparable. Still they’re expecting only the usual single-digit percentage upgrades to their paid software. Infobright’s self-managing software is supposed to reduce administrative effort by up to 90%, leverages standard servers, and reportedly needs less storage than rival products because of data compression and the elimination of indexes, data partitioning or data duplication.

No Intel License for Globalfoundries

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

Turns out Intel apparently didn’t give Globalfoundries, the AMD-Arab joint venture now making all of AMD’s processors, an x86 license when Intel and AMD settled their outstanding litigation last week. Nope. What Intel and Globalfoundaries have is an “agreement” that nobody will explain past Intel saying “it protects our IP” because it’s “confidential.”

Egenera Changes CEOs Again

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

Egenera, the very first company to build a blade system meant to handle peaks and valleys, has reportedly had another purge. It’s now on its fourth CEO with CTO and EVP of engineering Pete Manca replacing Mike Thompson and product marketer Ken Oestreich in as its latest marketing VP. A Twitter tweet claims the company is shy a bunch of other folks. It did not return a call. Egenera has been trying to morph from a hardware company into an ISV based on PAN, its infrastructure management and orchestration software, which Dell OEMs for its blade-based Datacenter-in-a-Box and its Pan System.

Nexsan Expands Highly Efficient Storage with 84TB SATABeast

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:27:00 EST

The Nexsan SATABeast is an enterprise-class RAID system designed to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and simplified operation in a very dense storage footprint. With a customer reported system reliability rating of more than 99.9%, the high density SATABeast is the premier option for both primary and secondary storage applications, including content archiving, disaster recovery and disk-based backup. The system's chassis design reduces hard drive stress with unique anti-accumulative rotational vibration and horizontal midplane cooling technology supporting one of the lowest storage system maintenance rates in the industry. As with all of the company's storage systems, the Nexsan SATABeast features AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology for policy-based power management that cuts energy demands up to 70% without impacting storage performance.

Things Get Better; Dell Tanks Anyway

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Dell’s fiscal Q3 profits plunged 54% to $337 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenues of $12.9 billion down 15%, but the company says demand is improving and, if looked at sequentially, revenues were up 1%. Wall Street expected it to show up with at least $13.2 in revenues. HP, by contrast, pre-announced its quarter last week flaunting profits that exceeded all expectations and raising its 2010 forecast.

Intel Ups Dividend

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Fresh from agreeing to pay AMD $1.25 billion in hush money, Intel upped its dividend 12.5% to 63 cents a share annualized, beginning with the first quarter next year. The company said it was a sign of its “confidence in business prospects going forward.”

Chrome Netbooks a Year Off

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST

Google says it’s working with a bunch of unidentified “top OEMs” to create a Chrome notebook based on a Google hardware reference architecture that will hit market around this time next year in time for the holidays. It expects the widgets to change the basic computing model by transferring everything to the cloud. Google accepts that such a device won’t suit all use-cases but it should suit those, particularly youngsters, who spend most of their time on the web, to a “T.”

Cloud Computing Is ...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Techcrunch reports that Google has some implicit suggestions about newspapers, based on the drop-down suggestions it gives when you begin a search with "Newspapers are." It's a nice example of the hive mind at work. But check out the first suggestion Google gives you if you type "Cloud Computing is" into a Google search bar. I won't spoil the surprise here. Interestingly, Google used to give similar suggestions for "SOA is", but the results are now a lot less frank and confrontational than they were a month ago. Does this show a change in general attitude about SOA, or is it just that Google cleaned up the results? hmm.

Vexed with Cisco HP Goes to Voltaire

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Emily Post would probably say Voltaire owes Cisco a bouquet of flowers – about the size Chicago gangsters send to funerals – for steering the two trophy accounts its way, since Cisco may have sacrificed its 77% market share to go adventuring. Voltaire marketing VP Asaf Somekh suggests that the champagne in Cisco’s bathtub could be drained in three-five years. Voltaire was able to nail both IBM and HP quicker than it thought it could.

MindTouch Goes Cloud

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today extended its popular enterprise collaboration platform to the cloud. The new offering makes it easy for business power users with no programming knowledge to mashup data from existing enterprise systems into real time charts, graphs, reports and tabular data. MindTouch Cloud allows companies to replicate the features and functionality of MindTouch 2009 Standard in seconds with the swipe of a credit card and without a call to their IT department.

OK Labs Appoints Atish Gude to Board of Directors

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:15:00 EST

Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) announced the appointment of Atish Gude to the company's Board of Directors. A seasoned mobile broadband executive, Gude brings more than a decade of strategic telecommunications experience to the OK Labs Board. Most recently, Gude served as Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Clearwire Corporation, a leading provider of advanced high-speed Internet services to consumers and businesses. With his strong mobile operator background, Gude's director role reinforces OK Labs' comprehensive, end-to-end vision of the mobile/wireless ecosystem, from handset software to operator services to the end-user experience.

Hyper9 Introduces Second Generation Virtualization Management Solution

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:11:00 EST

The next wave of virtualization is coming, and with it, the virtualization of business-critical applications. Today, Hyper9 announced the release of its Virtual Environment Optimization solution to provide better data, faster diagnosis and more reliable remediation associated with the virtualization of high performance applications. The critical nature of tier-1 business applications puts high demands on IT organizations to maintain predictable service levels and fast response times – standards that can be hard to live up to in a virtualized environment where constant change, blurred boundaries and an inherent state of mobility are the norm.

Pay-as-You-Grow Pricing for Citrix NetScaler

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:15:00 EST

Citrix Systems today announced the groundbreaking new “Pay-as-You-Grow” pricing for its Citrix NetScaler line of application acceleration, load balancing and web security appliances. Most networking systems require expensive hardware replacements to expand capacity and functionality, which often forces customers to over provision and pay for more than they need at any given time. The new Pay-as-You-Grow pricing from Citrix breaks this dependency, enabling customers to buy only what they need today, knowing they can easily scale up their network as demand grows with a simple software license upgrade.

Mezeo Software Launches Cloud Newsletter and New Business Model Toolkit

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

Mezeo Software launched the Cloud Storage Strategy monthly newsletter. Sponsored by Mezeo, the Cloud Storage Strategy newsletter and blog focus on Cloud Storage insights and observations from industry thought leaders. The Business Model Toolkit helps Service Providers assess the benefits and costs of entering the Cloud Storage Market. The Model uses inputs to present a sample business model and calculate potential return on investment from offering a Cloud Storage service. The tool is available at www.cloudstoragestrategy.com/model.