Private clouds considered a detour on the road to public cloud
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.
The value of building a true private cloud is murky at best, and five years from now, the push to build private clouds may be remembered as a detour along the road to the ultimate destination: widespread use of the public cloud. In a panel discussion entitled, Building a Private Cloud: Is It Worth It?, at the Modern Infrastructure Decisions conference here last week, IT professionals with and without private clouds discussed the security, cost and management implications of building and operating a private cloud.
Implementing the private cloud on top of an existing VMware Inc. vSphere environment is a way to free up staff from doing low-level tasks, such as spinning up new servers, according to Bob Plankers, a virtualization and cloud architect for a major Midwestern university, and who runs VMware vCloud. "The cloud is about a lot of non-technical things," Plankers said. "I look at staff time spent. Are we able to take advantage of what the humans are good at?"…
IBM reported $23.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter of the year, down more than 5 percent year over year, and $3.03 billion in net income, down 1.1 percent. Analysts had been expecting more than $24 billion in revenue. The company said cloud-computing revenue was up more than 70 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2013, following an 80 percent revenue gain in the previous quarter.
SailPoint AccessIQ provides single sign-on (SSO) for internal Web applications, including company portals, custom Web applications, collaboration tools like SharePoint, and enterprise applications like SAP and Oracle E-Business suite. Additionally, SailPoint announced the immediate availability of the SailPoint AccessIQ mobile app for iOS and Android devices, providing today’s mobile workforce with secure and greatly simplified access to cloud and Web applications from mobile devices.
Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud is now a $1 billion business, according to the software giant’s Q3 2013 earnings statement. For Microsoft, that milestone proves Office 365’s momentum is accelerating. And that’s also a big win for Channel Chief Jon Roskill, who wants partners to back the suite. But there’s more work to be done when it comes to the Office 365 channel partner program. Here’s why. First, the progress. According to Microsoft’s earnings call with analysts today, Office 365 has:
Following Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) announcement of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, RightScale isn’t missing a beat. The cloud management solutions provider is adding Azure to its list of supported cloud platforms. RightScale is making quite the to-do about its Azure support, as well, with a program it’s calling "Get Your App to Azure" (catchy, ain’t it?). With the new program, RightScale is going to help Azure customers accelerate application development on the Microsoft cloud platform with its multicloud management platform.
Google earlier this month made a significant cloud announcement, opening up its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to customers and removing the beta tag from the service. One catch is that customers who sign up for the service need to buy a "gold-level" support package — which costs $400 per month. But while it may cost a pretty penny to get access to the same hardware that Google uses to power the world’s most popular search engine, it’s at least no longer an invite-only beta service.
Hewlett-Packard doesn’t shy away from taking a few cheap shots every now and again, and its latest line of servers, called Moonshot, proves it. HP has introduced a new line of servers that could be considered a major game changer in terms of power consumption and the cloud.
Savvis, a data center colocation and cloud computing company, launched its enterprise cloud services on VMware virtualization tools and a middleware solution that Savvis developed in-house. In 2012, Savvis switched to vCloud Director, VMware’s cloud middleware.