Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Virtual Bridges, Inc. today announced VERDE 7 is now available worldwide, ideal for managed service providers (MSPs) who are looking for an alternative to Desktone, which was acquired by VMware today. “We invite all MSPs that are interested in exploring other options to contact us today for a free evaluation of VERDE 7. We’re confident we can offer the most robust features while allowing MSPs to get the ROI they desire.”

“With the news of VMware’s acquisition of Desktone today, many MSPs are rightfully concerned about their DaaS offerings, including potential price increases that impact margins; integration challenges that are consistent with VMware; and an overall lack of focus on DaaS now that Desktone is being absorbed into the network virtualization giant,” said Jon Senger, chief strategy officer at Virtual Bridges. “We invite all MSPs that are interested in exploring other options to contact us today for a free evaluation of VERDE 7. We’re confident we can offer the most robust features while allowing MSPs to get the ROI they desire.”…

Grazed from BizTechMagazine. Author: Steve Zurier.

About three years ago, Purdue Pharma L.P., a pharmaceutical company in Stamford, Conn., was at a crossroads. It was out of data center space, out of power and needed to improve disaster recovery. Purdue Pharma also wanted to deploy an IT infrastructure that would make the company more agile and able to quickly respond to the needs of its researchers, says Stephen Rayda, chief technology officer.

The pharmaceutical maker reached this point just as VMware, Cisco Systems and EMC formed the VCE unified computing solution. For Rayda, opting for VCE was a safer bet than it may have appeared. “When we looked at it, the VMware hypervisor had been out for close to a decade, Cisco was a proven networking company, and EMC storage products had been in use for many years as well, so we weren’t taking a leap of faith into an untested architecture,” Rayda says…

Grazed from FierceGovernmentIT. Author: Molly Bernhart Walker.

As cloud computing technology continues to become more pervasive, the application of the Fifth Amendment to protecting a suspect’s encrypted data is likely to become a more prevalent issue in litigation, finds a paper by J. Adam Engel, vice president of Lycurgus Group published in the Whittier Law Review.

Until now, suspects have infrequently invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when the government has sought to compel suspects and defendants to provide passwords and encryption keys to access digital assets, he writes. That’s due in part to the fact that the right is limited to testimonial evidence–evidence that explicitly or implicitly, provides or discloses information–and that the "foregone conclusion" doctrine usually applies, says Engle…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: Louis Columbus.

The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community. Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform. And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community.

The last four years I’ve made a point at every Salesforce Dreamforce event to spend the majority of my time in the developer area. Watching mini hacks going on in the DevZone, mini workshops, the Salesforce Platform and Developer keynotes over the last few years has been a great learning experience. An added plus: developers are often skeptical and want to see new enhancements help streamline their code, extend its functionality, and push the limits of the Force.com platform…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today at VMworld Europe 2013, Dell announced a host of new and enhanced technologies for desktop virtualisation with VMware Horizon View(TM). Hot on the heels of its recent Cloud Client Computing developments, Dell, a market leader in thin and zero clients, extended the capability of its PowerEdge VRTX with VMware Horizon View(TM) and VMware vSphere converged VDI solution by integrating the powerful new Ivy Bridge Processor from Intel. This solution is capable of providing vastly increased user density in a converged VDI solution while significantly lowering the total cost of ownership. Other developments include enhanced graphics performance for demanding applications; support unified communications, introduce unique client functionality; and simplifying the adoption of Desktop as a Service.

"Customers are in the driving seat when it comes to procuring cloud and virtualization solutions and Dell is on target with its new offerings as the company is both innovating and partnering to give customers the solutions that will best fit their business needs," explained David Angwin, Director for Global Field and Channel Marketing with Dell Cloud Client Computing. "Dell is continuing to drive down the cost for desktop virtualization making it a compelling solution for more and more customers…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Migrating to the cloud is an exciting transition, but IT professionals must be prepared. There is a lot to manage to ensure that the migration is a success. New research has examined what the top priorities are for midsize firms seeking cloud computing solutions, and it is not cost.

What Is Important

CWCS Managed Hosting commissioned a study featured in CloudTweaks that polled the opinions of senior IT managers at firms with more than 100 employees. More than half of the respondents thought reliability and uptime were the most important part of a hosting solution. Twenty-two percent felt security and flexibility were the most important, and scalability came in third at 15 percent. The cost of a hosting solution was least important, with only about eight percent of respondents considering it a top priority…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Darko Androcec.

Provider lock-in is well known obstacle of cloud computing business model. It is characterized by the inability or limited ability to connect to resources that are not part of the selected cloud offer. Migration of application and corresponding data to alternative cloud services may be expensive and time-consuming, and the user depends on a vendor’s technology. If we want to circumvent the mentioned obstacle, we must find a way to achieve cloud computing interoperability.

Everyone has their own API

Currently, each cloud provider prefers some specific technological solutions and their own design of available remote methods (SOAP and REST APIs). For example, Google App Engine, Oracle PaaS Platform, Salesforce, and Microsoft Azure offer very different APIs. Some vendors even try to invent new programming languages (for example, Salesforce and its proprietary Apex language). In addition, models of data storage can range from NoSQL to the relational databases, providers use their own query languages, and they support different data types…

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Graeme Rowe.

It’s important to examine the current ‘state of play’ for cloud delivered solutions based on a couple of key dimensions, namely: what is being deployed in the cloud and who is providing the IT service from the cloud? The image conjured up by the term "cloud" is that of companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft delivering large-scale computing infrastructure that eliminates the need for on-premise IT equipment and software. Since these cloud providers build their own infrastructure rather than buying from product manufacturers, it could be argued they are shrinking the market share.

The opportunity is larger than the threat
However, there are a number of other categories of service providers that balance, more than offset, the reduced spend and create an opportunity:

• Consumer SaaS providers aggregate consumer-spend into centralised shared enterprise infrastructure. Consumer applications that traditionally consumed end user equipment are moving to the cloud triggering a need for enterprise infrastructure. While some of these service providers build their own infrastructure others leverage product manufacturers…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

Client/server computing was a technology ahead of its time—and more importantly ahead of the enterprise network infrastructure capabilities of the time. While vendors and users largely agreed on the value of the model and on the best methods to implement the model, hardware and software vendors’ desire to lock users into their product lines as well as the stirrings of the Internet and World Wide Web standards all made for an interesting time in the technology reporting business.

The client/server emerged during the boom years of the PC industry. Client/server computing also helped fuel the adoption of Novell Netware as a means to harness the increasing power of distributed personal computers, combined with the central servers that delivered the application management, data and storage while trying to bring some adult CPU supervision to the unbridled demands for PC access to data center resources…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Chris Mellor.

IBM is pitching new software and server gear for use in public, private and public-private hybrid cloud computing environments. The tech titan has announced PureSystem updates plus stuff about Power, System x and technical computing.

Big Blue thinks mutant clouds will pick up in popularity; it quotes Gartner as saying that "hybrid cloud computing is at the same place today that private cloud was three years ago; actual deployments are low, aspirations are high, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017."…