Puppet Labs, a leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced that VMware, Inc. has invested $30 million in the company. Coincident with the funding, the companies agreed to a strategic partnership for delivering IT management solutions that will enable customers to fully realize the agility and productivity benefits of virtualization and cloud in heterogeneous, multi-vendor IT environments. Through the funding and partnership, Puppet Labs will be able to accelerate the development of its award-winning products, increase market adoption in new geographies, and work jointly with VMware to deliver, market and sell solutions.

"Puppet Labs is at the forefront of IT automation, and is a catalyst in the DevOps movement — accelerating service delivery and business agility," said Ramin Sayar, Vice President and General Manager, Virtualization & Cloud Management, VMware. "This strategic investment and partnership will further accelerate the software-defined data center, and will allow a more extensive automation and orchestration solution across infrastructure and application elements for VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services."

Grazed from DazeInfo. Author: Abhishek Singh.

IBM Q4 2012 earnings report is now globally available. The company has reported a GAAP net income of $5.8 billion for Q4 2012, up 6% from the same quarter of the previous year. On the other side, its Non-GAAP net income was $6.1 billion in Q4 2012. Last year, the company outstandingly performed in BRIC countries–Brazil, Russia, India and China. Really, Q4 2012 was one of the best quarters for the company over the last couple of years.

IBM Q4 2012 Earnings:
IBM has reported revenues of $29.3 billion in Q4 2012, down 1% from $29.5 billion in Q4, 2011. The company’s earnings per share were $5.39 in Q4 2012, up from $4.71 billion in the last year. Furthermore, the company’s net income for the year, ended December 31, 2012 – was $16.6 billion, increased from $15.9 billion from the prior year. In addition, operating (non-GAAP) net income was $17.6 billion in Q4 2012, up 8% from $16.3 billion in 2011…

Grazed from HOB Software. Author: PR Announcement.

HOB announced today that the Cloud Computing Awards, a program dedicated to celebrating excellence in cloud computing across the U.S. and internationally, has named HOB the winner of the Security Innovation of the Year. The Cloud Computing Awards program recognizes the best web-based cloud computing services from both start-ups and established enterprises. The Security Innovation of the Year is awarded to the company with a genuinely original and inventive approach to cloud security.

HOB is the market leader in pure software-based solutions, specializing in secure connectivity – and mobile worker access. HOB’s core competence is in server-based computing with RDP. HOB provides secure access to remote desktops, virtual desktop infrastructures, legacy systems, data or networks from any device around the world with its most popular security solution, HOB RD VPN. It provides multi-client capability and utilizes reliable SSL-encryption, ensuring a high level of security…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Rick Whiting.

Reaping the benefits of its initiatives in cloud computing, mobile technology and its HANA in-memory database, software giant SAP (NYSE:SAP) Wednesday reported double-digit growth for its fourth-quarter and fiscal 2012 sales. SAP also is undergoing a reorganization and centralization of its sales operations, putting both channel sales and regional direct sales under Rob Enslin, president of global operations.

SAP reported total revenue of 5.0 billion Euros (U.S. $6.7 billion) for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, up 12 percent from 4.5 billion Euros (U.S. $6.0 billion) in the same period one year earlier. After-tax profits, however dropped 8 percent to 1.1 billion Euros (U.S. $1.5 billion) from 1.2 billion Euros (U.S. $1.6 billion) one year earlier…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Intermedia, a provider of cloud services and one of the largest third-party providers of hosted Microsoft Exchange services, is planning to acquire cloud-based communications services providers Telanetix for about $55 million, including the assumption of approximately $13 million in net debt and certain liabilities.

With the pending acquisition, Intermedia plans to expand its Office in the Cloud strategy, which includes an integrated suite of cloud services for small and medium businesses. Telanetix does business under the AccessLine brand, and through that, Intermedia will gain about 100 new staff members with experience in providing hosted voice services…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offerings with the general availability of Windows Azure Media Services, which lets enterprises skip building their own infrastructure for streaming on-demand video. The service, released Tuesday, can be used to deliver training videos to employees; stream video content from a website; or build video-on-demand service similar to Hulu or Netflix, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie said in a blog post.

Like many cloud-based platform-as-a-service offerings, Windows Azure Media Services aims to make it easier, in this case, to roll out video streaming services. Building a media distribution platform that encodes and streams video to various devices and clients is a complex task, which requires hardware and software that has to be connected, configured, and maintained, according to Guthrie. Windows Azure Media Services makes it easier by eliminating the need to provision and manage a custom infrastructure, he said…

Grazed from Serena Software. Author: PR Announcement.

Serena Software, the leader in Orchestrated IT solutions, today announced the results of an annual survey on application development and delivery priorities and initiatives for 2013. The survey, conducted at Gartner’s recent Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit, showed delivering applications faster and aligning IT to business goals as the highest priorities for 2013. These findings underscore the trend that online enterprises have elevated themselves past departmental IT concerns. Instead, the survey results show they are now focusing on the competitive goals of the business itself.

The third survey of its kind, the research uncovered changing IT priorities, as both reducing application costs and moving applications to the cloud were reported much less of a priority in 2013 compared to last year. Both fell multiple spots on the one to ten number scale of priority, the same measurement tool used in last year’s survey as well. A graphic summarizing the survey findings can be found here: http://ser.so/app-dev-infographic…

Grazed from CloudComputing News. Author: James Bourne.

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion piece detailing opposition to the well documented European Union (EU) computing initiative. The EU’s cloud strategy, ‘Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe’, announced in September featured two main takeaways; a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2010, and a net gain of 2.5m jobs.

Sounds good on first glance, but the EESC’s opinion – carried by 158 votes to two in a plenary held on January 16 and 17 – disagrees. It’s not that the EESC is opposed to cloud computing in general – the committee agrees that it is “an opportunity for European growth and competitiveness” – more it suggests an alternative complementary vision to the European Commission’s original plan…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

There’s a growing demand for standards to bring some sanity to the cloud computing market. Both buyers and sellers have their reasons to want common ways to do things such as transfer data from one cloud-based app or infrastructure to another. But the competition to be in control is fierce. "The Internet had the IETF, which wrangled people and protocols," says Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. "But in the cloud, the standardization landscape is so fragmented. There isn’t a central body or forum or place, although lots of people and organizations are trying to be that."

Two main factors drive demand for standards. Cloud vendors want to show they can meet companies’ security requirements, since that’s the biggest roadblock to adoption. IT pros also see value in formalized standards for cloud services, according to the 400 respondents to our InformationWeek Standardization Survey: 89% rate standards for cloud infrastructure vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure or Rackspace as extremely (53%) or somewhat (36%) helpful to their organizations; 85% say the same about software-as-a-service. Why? Would-be cloud customers want to avoid getting locked in to one vendor, so investments in cloud services now don’t end up limiting future flexibility…