Security, reliability and performance of the network are critical to ensure that businesses can fully benefit from the cloud. This collaboration will give customers a cloud networking experience with increased resilience, low latency and access to their core applications securely.

Through the IBM Cloud Direct Link services, enterprises can now choose Colt’s Dedicated Cloud Access to provide private network connectivity between their own data centers or office locations and the IBM Cloud. The Colt IQ Network includes a 100Gbps optimized, owned network, distributed to more than 850 data centers and more than 26,000 buildings around the world. This provides customers with a superior cloud networking experience when compared to relying on the public internet.

Cloudera, Inc., the modern platform for machine learning and analytics optimized for the cloud, today announced it has won the Microsoft 2018 Global Partner of the Year Open Source Data & AI Award. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

"We empower our customers to extract actionable insights from massive amounts of data to differentiate and compete in today’s data economy," said Philippe Marinier, vice president business development at Cloudera. "With our modern platform, large enterprises can use techniques like machine learning, artificial intelligence, self-serve analytics and stream processing to get maximum value from their data. We are pleased to be recognized by Microsoft as together we help organizations use data to digitally transform their business."

Sandeep Kishore, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Zensar said, "We are excited to be part of the Oracle Cloud Excellence Implementer program within a year of its launch in our biggest market, North America. Oracle Cloud Applications fit perfectly well in Our Return on Digital® strategy, which empowers our global customers to leverage the benefits from its business acceleration capabilities. We look forward to a deeper relationship with Oracle as we focus on deepening our expertise in this area."

VMware, Inc. announced VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US), a forthcoming hybrid cloud service that will enable United States public sector agencies to leverage a common cloud infrastructure on premises and in the public cloud to further increase agility and security. VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US), which is on the path to secure FedRAMP authority to operate, was designed to improve IT efficiency and help lower costs as agencies transition to the cloud by enabling them to deploy and run applications on familiar VMware software-defined data centers on AWS GovCloud (US). To learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US), visit https://cloud.vmware.com/govcloud.

Since 1998, VMware has been a provider of technology solutions for government agencies of all sizes, providing federal, state and local public sector organizations with counsel on security best practices and, in recent years, FedRAMP-authorized solutions. VMware cloud infrastructure software is already widely used by all cabinet-level agencies, all military services, the Department of Defense, the Intelligence community and the Judicial and Legislative branches of government. This announcement marks VMware’s ongoing commitment of support to government agencies that have unique security and compliance requirements for adopting hybrid cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) will be based on these same technologies, providing government organizations with a fast and seamless onramp to the cloud so that they can enhance services virtually immediately, not only for their constituents, but also their employees.

Rackspace announced that it has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to launch the industry’s first Private Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS) powered by VMware, with pay per use infrastructure.  This solution is an expansion of Rackspace’s industry-leading managed private cloud portfolio, designed to create the optimal platform for enterprise applications.  The new offering will provide customers with utility-based services, where the cloud resources are located and managed from wherever they are needed: in the customer’s data center, a colocation facility, or in a data center managed by Rackspace.

According to IDC, 80 percent of IT infrastructure will be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis by 2020.  The need for more economic pricing models and flexible capacity planning is growing rapidly. IT managers are more frequently faced with challenges such as managing unpredictable growth and bursts in workloads. In addition, they must deal with increased pressure from their development team to deploy services faster, all while budgets continue to shrink and they are forced to do more with less. By leveraging a "pay-as-you-go" model for private cloud, customers pay for what they use, allowing them to better handle erratic growth and bursts in workloads without paying for unnecessary fixed capacity or upfront equipment cost.

Zenoss Inc. announced Zenoss Cloud, the intelligent IT operations management platform. The company’s next-generation cloud-native offering enables companies to eliminate IT outages and optimize cloud and on-premises systems as they undergo digital transformation, a business requirement for the survival of most companies across all industries.

Vendors across many segments have long endeavored to help prevent IT service outages and improve overall IT performance. These vendors have taken different approaches, including infrastructure monitoring, artificial intelligence operations (AIOps), log analytics, and more. Some approaches collect performance data from systems directly, some rely on events, some rely on logs, while others rely on data sent from agents. Zenoss Cloud represents the first platform that encompasses all of these approaches.

Key to successfully achieving this strategy was developing the unique ability to collect and analyze all types of structured and unstructured data in the same context – widely considered the holy grail of IT operations management. Zenoss Cloud introduces the first operations data plane that streams and normalizes all machine data, uniquely enabling this emergence of context for preventing IT service disruptions in complex, modern environments.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew 45.5% year over year in the first quarter of 2018 (1Q18), reaching $12.9 billion. IDC also raised its forecast for total spending on cloud IT infrastructure in 2018 to $57.2 billion with year-over-year growth of 21.3%.

Public cloud infrastructure quarterly revenue has more than doubled in the past three years to $9.0 billion in 1Q18, growing 55.8% year over year. Private cloud revenue reached $3.9 billion for an annual increase of 26.5%. The combined public and private cloud revenues now represent 46.1% of the total worldwide IT infrastructure spending, up from 41.8% a year ago. Traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure revenue grew 22.0% from a year ago, although it has been generally declining over the past several years; at $15.1 billion in 1Q18 it still represents 53.9% of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending.

As companies increasingly rely on multiple public cloud platforms to deliver applications or services, ThousandEyes announced Network Intelligence coverage for multi-cloud environments. Now, organizations leveraging any combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have the ability to measure and visualize application and network-layer performance metrics on a cloud-to-cloud, Internet-to-cloud and inter-region basis. Companies gain immediate and comprehensive visibility into every service delivery path in a multi-cloud environment, allowing them to overcome the complex operational challenges of multi-cloud deployments, accelerate cloud adoption and deliver superior digital experiences.

"Multi-cloud is the new enterprise architecture reality. At Equinix, our customers rely on our global platform of interconnection and data center solutions to bring together multiple networks and providers by providing an easy, fast and secure onramp to hybrid multi-cloud and digital ecosystems," said Ryan Mallory, senior vice president of Global Solutions Enablement for Equinix. "ThousandEyes has pioneered a solution that enables both application and internet-aware network visibility into every major cloud platform and their interdependencies, which empowers our customers to see every network like it’s their own, and helps us deliver on our mission of cultivating powerful digital ecosystems on a global scale."

The Microsoft Azure Marketplace describes FastCollect from Archive360 as "a powerful data onboarding platform that is based on a legally compliant data validation engine. Onboard 80+ data types to Azure at high speed while maintaining 100% data fidelity and chain of custody. Meets all required compliance regulations."  

"To be included in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace is indeed a seal of approval for FastCollect of which we are quite proud," said Bill Tolson, Vice President of Marketing, Archive360. "Migrating large data sets from disparate data silos to Office 365 and Azure can be an expensive, time consuming, and complex task. FastCollect takes the risk out of data migration to the Microsoft Cloud by providing 80 plus connectors for migrating a huge variety of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. FastCollect provides for the fast, secure and trouble-free movement of data from on premise and cloud repositories to the Microsoft Cloud in a legally defensible and regulations compliant manner."

Cylance Inc., the company that revolutionized endpoint security by delivering AI-powered threat prevention, today announced the availability of CylanceHYBRID and CylanceON-PREM, two new deployment and management options for CylancePROTECT. Cylance’s flagship endpoint security product now serves any environment: public cloud, private cloud and air-gapped networks. 

Nearly two-thirds of enterprise computing still occurs in on-premises data centers, and 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid strategies by 2020. Organizations with closed networks, private clouds or limited connectivity face the problem of protecting against both outside and inside threats without exposing their infrastructure to outside connections. In fact, over half of technology leaders cite security as the greatest challenge to both private and hybrid clouds. CylanceHYBRID and CylanceON-PREM close this gap by bringing AI-driven predictive threat analysis to restricted or completely isolated infrastructures.