Blue Medora, a leading innovator in enterprise cloud and data centre management, today announced SelectStar, a new IT operational analytics (ITOA) platform that combines comprehensive database and cloud infrastructure monitoring to help organisations track and optimise critical database performance and availability metrics.

The solution is available as a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that deploys in less than 15 minutes. SelectStar delivers a normalised view of more than 90 percent of production cloud-native or on-premises databases and their underlying cloud or virtualised infrastructure, ideal for multiple database architectures.

Grazed from VMblog.com. Author: David Marshall

Since launching its ground-breaking SaaS-based network traffic analysis platform a year ago, Kentik has been making nice progress in the industry.  The company provides Kentik Detect, a cloud-based network visibility and analytics solution that delivers unprecedented depth of insight into any network.  Kentik processes tens of billions of data records per day, equipping service providers and enterprises network operations teams with actionable insights that enable them to make quick, cost-effective decisions.

The company just announced a Series B round of funding -- a nice sum of $23 million.  To dig in a little deeper into that funding news and to find out what they have planned going forward, I spoke with Kentik's co-founder and CEO, Avi Freedman.  

SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced significant updates to its SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA). With the enhancements, SolarWinds DPA is the only tool available on the market capable of providing Multi-Dimensional Performance Analysis to improve Software as a Service (SaaS) application performance for MySQL- and Linux-only IT organizations, helping them reduce costs and improve overall organizational effectiveness.

Specifically, SolarWinds DPA now supports MySQL database repositories, enabling SaaS companies  running MySQL- and Linux-only infrastructure whether on-premises or in the cloud to fully leverage the award-winning tool, whereas a Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle repository were required previously.

Additional significant new features in the latest release of SolarWinds DPA include visualization and analysis to help DBAs optimize for and resolve blocking, locking and deadlock issues, and support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016.

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froehlich.

When it comes to cloud computing options, enterprise IT departments often focus on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). That's because, in my experience, IT professionals at large organizations think of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as something primarily catering to small- and medium-size organizations.

But SaaS indeed can, and does, offer plenty of potential for enterprise customers, as evidenced by the 10 startups we're exploring here. Our list includes SaaS applications for traditional organizational challenges, such as supply-chain, payroll, sales, recruiting, and company-wide collaboration...

With the launch of Densify.com, Cirba Inc. takes away the effort and time necessary to deliver highly efficient and risk-free cloud infrastructure. At the core of Densify.com is Cirba’s proven predictive analytics engine which is managed for customers by world leading Densification Engineers.

“We recognized that many IT organizations want risk-free efficiency but haven’t the manpower nor the necessary analytics to deliver. The result has been to over-provision, in some cases by a lot,” said Gerry Smith, CEO of Cirba. “With Densify.com, we are offering these IT organizations very simple, fast and risk-free means to maximize infrastructure efficiency.”

Grazed from BiometricUpdate. Author: Stephen Mayhew.

ImageWare Systems, Inc. announced it will offer its biometric authentication service GoVerifyID as a SaaS solution on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. IWS will launch the end-to-end enterprise-ready service with an integration of TransUnion’s IDManager, a fraud detection and authentication identity decisioning solution.

The company said that several of its customers are already in the midst of signing contracts as resellers of the new service. AWS delivers a series of cloud computing services that comprise its on-demand computing platform. Having officially joined the AWS Partner Network in March, ImageWare is a member of the AWS Partner Network’s SaaS Program...

Grazed from Oracle

Oracle today announced that it has expanded its cloud portfolio, releasing new Oracle Cloud services over the past several months to help companies transition to the cloud. The new services enhance the breadth and depth of Oracle's extensive cloud portfolio across all layers of the stack -- SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

With these new advancements, Oracle provides all of the cloud-based services that organizations need to capitalize on key transformative technologies such as big data analytics, social, mobile, and IoT, as well as continue to extend foundational use cases that enable organizations to move enterprise workloads to the cloud. Oracle continues to help organizations drive innovation and business transformation by increasing business agility, lowering costs, and reducing IT complexity. The new PaaS and IaaS services can be deployed wherever an organization chooses -- in the Oracle Cloud or in their own data center via the Oracle Cloud at Customer offering. 

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

IBM has announced the acquisition of Microsoft software as a service (SaaS) specialist Optevia, ramping up its offering for CRM SaaS in the public sector. Optevia’s specialism in Microsoft Dynamics CRM firms makes an interesting avenue for IBM, given how dominant Microsoft is in the public sector. Among Optevia’s more recent customers include Wealden District Council, who announced in October “significantly improved customer services” using Dynamics CRM.

The company announced record financial results in May, and among its current client base are ministries, councils, regulators, transport authorities, and social housing organisations. “By acquiring Optevia, IBM will be able to provide public sector clients and prospects with a range of unique, industry focused CRM based solutions,” said Joanna Davinson, IBM Europe public sector leader in a statement. “This strategic acquisition will help strengthen IBM as a SaaS provider and global software integrator.”...

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/mar/18/ibm-acquires-optevia-public-sector-crm-saas-play/

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Jen Wieczner.

Netflix, which began shifting its billions of hours of film and TV content to Amazon’s cloud in 2008, has finally finished that process. In a post on its blog Thursday, Netflix said it had migrated the last of the data stored in its own facilities to Amazon Web Services—a shift that Netflix credited with its fast speeds and eight-fold membership growth since it began the transition seven years ago.

But Netflix also acknowledged that its reliance on Amazon can come with problems, as illustrated back in September when a glitch in Amazon’s cloud database caused a temporary Netflix streaming outage for some customers. “We have hit some inevitable rough patches in the cloud,” Netflix wrote in its post, referencing an outage on Christmas 2012...

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2016/02/12/netflix-amazon-cloud/