Five9, Inc., a leading provider of cloud contact center software for the digital enterprise, announced today that Five9 President, Dan Burkland will host the Customer Contact Week (CCW) Excellence Awards ceremony on June 19, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The CCW Excellence Awards recognizes teams who have made a commitment to driving superior contact center and customer experience performance. These awards honor those who have demonstrated world-class thinking, creativity and execution in the contact center market. In addition to Dan Burkland hosting, the awards ceremony will include live entertainment by Paul Zerdin, Celebrity Ventriloquist & America’s Got Talent Season 10 Winner. Purchase tickets for the awards ceremony here.

Dropbox, a leading global collaboration platform, announced a new chapter in the evolution of Magic Pocket, its custom-built storage infrastructure. The company is successfully deploying Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drive technology, which will increase overall storage density, reduce the company’s physical data center footprint, and provide significant cost savings-without sacrificing performance or reliability. Dropbox will be the first company to test and deploy SMR technology at this scale.

Dropbox anticipates approximately a quarter of its Magic Pocket infrastructure will be on SMR drive capacity by 2019. In the coming months, the company also plans to open source the test software it created in the process, which will let other companies qualify SMR technology for their own enterprise storage environments.

ClearSky Data, provider of on-demand primary storage with built-in offsite backup and DR as a service, today announced the results of its recent survey on the state of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The findings reflect the experiences of more than 500 senior-level IT leaders. While respondents were enthusiastic about the potential for DRaaS to improve data protection strategies under limited budgets, the majority have no plans to move to a cloud-only approach, making a strong case for hybrid DR.

ClearSky’s survey asked leaders in a range of industries where they store their data, how often they test their DR strategies, what level of data growth they expect this year and more. The findings confirm data protection remains a critical concern for enterprise IT leaders, who want efficient ways to protect all their data and remain operational in the event of disasters. However, despite cloud advances, 51 percent of respondents said they have no plans to move to cloud-only approaches. About the same number reported they are deployed in hybrid models today.

Managed OpenStack is a product that oversees your deployment, operations, cloud strategy, security, and change management. It proactively resolves issues before you experience them-all around the clock. You can focus on your business by allowing AURO to focus on your cloud infrastructure for you.

Virtuozzo, a provider of integrated container, virtual machine, and software-defined storage technology, today announced a partnership with Rebel.com that demonstrates how companies can improve economies of scale while delivering more value to customers by adding Virtuozzo 7 to their Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) environments.

Rebel.com, an Ottawa, Canada-based hosting solutions provider, migrated its infrastructure to Amazon EC2 several years ago. But as the company’s business grew, it needed a way to increase the size of its Amazon EC2 instances without impacting their performance. By leveraging Virtuozzo 7 on top of them, the company was able to improve server performance by 4X.

IGEL, a world leader in endpoint management software for the secure enterprise, today announced that it is building on its relationship with AMD by upgrading the IGEL UD3 software-defined thin clients to the second-generation AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-a-chip (SoC), the GX-424.

"AMD continues to be one of our top strategic partners," said Simon Clephan, Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances, IGEL. "We are proud to be teaming with them to disrupt the end-user computing experience by providing our customers with a powerful, rich multimedia computing experience and security that goes well beyond what they would typically expect from their endpoints."

New research released today by WinMagic shows that 87% of ITDMs limit their use of the cloud because of the complexity of managing regulatory compliance. A quarter (24%) said, it meant as a result, they only work with a single cloud vendor in their infrastructure, rather than exploit the benefits of a multi-cloud environment, such as cost effectiveness, flexibility, reliability, security and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Hands tied by management tools

The survey, which spoke to ITDMs in Germany, India, the UK and US, also noted that 63% felt the need to use multiple infrastructure management tools was also a hugely restricting factor in their use of multiple cloud vendors.

Looking specifically at managing security compliance across the enterprise, over a quarter (28%) stated they would "not be completely confident" IT systems met all the required processes and standards if an audit was called "today". 7% went as far as to say there was "a high risk of them failing."

Rackspace announced the launch of Rackspace Colocation, a new service that allows customers to deploy their own hardware in Rackspace data centers. Leveraging resilient critical infrastructure, network and on-ground support services, Rackspace is focused on delivering true transformation as a service across applications, data, security and infrastructure. The new Rackspace Colocation offering enables organizations to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO), while improving scalability, strengthening disaster recovery capabilities, reducing application latency and helping IT meet stringent security and compliance requirements.

According to 451 Research, the colocation market will grow at a 12 percent compound annual growth rate through 2020. Enterprises are using colocation to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their TCO as they seek to optimize their IT portfolio across public and private clouds. Beyond the financial implications, businesses are also adopting colocation solutions to achieve geographic diversity, forge strategic low latency connections with cloud services providers, augment disaster recovery strategies and to ensure their workloads are running in facilities that meet specific security and compliance mandates.

Embotics, the hybrid cloud automation and orchestration company, today unveiled the new version of its award-winning vCommander platform. In its new release, Embotics vCommander v7 delivers next-generation hybrid cloud management software built for automation, orchestration and governance of both traditional and new microservice-based applications while facilitating DevOps.

Research from the Ponemon Institute released today identifies a gap between decision-makers’ views that DevOps and microservice enablement are important and their confidence in their organizations’ ability to deliver them today – a gap that is costing the average enterprise $34 million each year. With so many enterprises struggling to deliver microservices-based applications and enable DevOps methodology (74 percent and 67 percent, respectively), the report also identifies a gap between the capabilities of current Cloud Management Platforms (CMP 1.0) and what organizations turning to cloud native applications need.

VMware, Inc. announced VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0, the next generation of the company’s production-proven network functions virtualization (NFV) platform for communications service providers (CSPs). With this new version of vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition, which will include VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition 5.0, VMware will be able to deliver breakthrough improvements in network performance, new carrier-grade networking capabilities, and intent-based service assurance to help improve the total economics of software-defined, open standards-based 5G and multi-cloud telco networks.

"VMware’s NFV solution is deployed in more than 50 CSPs globally supporting a wide variety of use cases and more than 300 million mobile subscribers. And with the imminent arrival of 5G, a new approach to the telco network and cloud is required to solve for the hyper distribution of virtual network functions, applications and data," said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco NFV Group, VMware. "With VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack 3.0, service providers will be able to build software-defined, programmable, highly-distributed Telco Distributed Clouds based on open standards to deliver new advanced services to consumers, and quality-of-service-based network slices to serve the application needs for a wide variety of industries."