Quali, a leading provider of on-demand, self-service environments for Cloud and DevOps and a Silver level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that its CloudShell automation and orchestration software is now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace offering added value to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers. CloudShell sandbox automation platform provides the ability to certify with confidence any enterprise application deployed on the Oracle Cloud while minimizing the cost of infrastructure consumption for the customer.

The Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a one-stop shop for Oracle customers seeking trusted business applications and service providers offering unique business solutions, including ones that extend Oracle Cloud Applications. Oracle Cloud is the industry’s broadest and most complete public cloud, delivering enterprise-grade services at every level of the cloud technology stack including software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Billing becomes more complex as consumption-based models grow and customer choice reigns.  The increase in highly-tailored services and products — like the "per-second" service pricing introduced by AWS last year — will make the billing process more intricate than ever. New regulations in Europe and other countries will add new privacy rules into billing, further complicating workflows. End-customers will still demand ease-of-use and an intuitive experience, so billing models need to adapt to meet these expectations while handling increased complexity on the back end.

Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of a family of open source projects including Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime and Cloud Foundry BOSH, today announced the initial schedule, including keynote speakers, for the North American Cloud Foundry Summit, April 18-20, 2018 at the Boston Convention Center. With standard pricing ending February 9, registration will increase $200 to $845.

The keynote line-up includes:

• Matt Curry, Director, Director of Cloud Engineering, Allstate Insurance Co.
• Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation
• Chip Childers, CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation
• Subbu Allamaraju, Vice President, Cloud, Expedia Inc.
• Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate, Google
• Gabe Monroy, Lead Principal Program Manager, Containers, and Carolyn van Slyck, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft
• Demos from the Pivotal software engineering team
• Andy Rosequist, Director of IT Operations, ZipCar

Pivot3 today announced it experienced accelerated growth in 2017, including significant traction among multi-workload environments in data centers and smart city and safe city initiatives. In 2017, Pivot3’s sales increased by more than 65 percent from the first half to the second half of the year, reflecting the increased market demand for high-performance products like Pivot3’s Acuity platform and purpose-built appliances for streaming media.

"We saw incredible sales acceleration this past quarter, with Pivot3 emerging as the only private technology company capable of taking on the large, public IT companies with a platform that can support the most demanding applications," said Ron Nash, CEO, Pivot3. "We built our HCI platform for the future, with deeply-embedded intelligence and simplicity for the evolving datacenter — a capability that is resonating with major enterprises looking to manage multiple applications on one HCI platform, as well as governments embarking on large-scale smart city and safe city initiatives. The message is clear: when customers have a demanding IT initiative, they turn to Pivot3."

ViewSonic Corp. announced a major platform update to its SC-T25 Citrix Ready workspace hub (previously known as Citrix HDX Ready Pi). Effective March 31, 2018, ViewSonic will be offering the Citrix Ready workspace hub update as a technical preview available for download on ViewSonic.com. Added workspace hub features include: beacon-based session roaming, QR code login, and Citrix Casting. Citrix Casting will enable seamless and secure session roaming from a mobile device to any display connected to the workspace hub. For the first time, with these additional tools, a wide variety of new uses are supported in the healthcare, finance, and enterprise markets.

The new Citrix Ready workspace hub update means the already popular and high- performing SC-T25 will deliver even more compelling enterprise capabilities. Using secure login credentials presented in a phone or mobile device, users can seamlessly connect to their virtual workspace, simply based on proximity to an available ViewSonic SC-T25 workspace hub device. This will eliminate the need for manual login and network authentication, providing tremendous time-saving and productivity advantages for healthcare clinicians, financial analysts, and general knowledge workers in the enterprise space.

Current awareness

A rather fancy term which essentially involves keeping up to date with news and developments that are relevant to business and your particular niche. The reason it’s so important is that without knowing what’s happening and which new technologies are currently in development, you risk being left behind by the early implementers, and losing both the opportunity to win new business and information that could improve your productivity.

Zadara Storage, a global provider of enterprise-class Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) based in Irvine, Calif., and MEGAZONE Corporation, a Korean cloud-specialized IT company, today announced a strategic alliance. The collaboration between the two companies was designed to meet customers’ needs for sophisticated, high-performance, high-capacity enterprise-class cloud storage solutions. Zadara is an award-winning, worldwide vendor of enterprise STaaS, providing high performance, highly available block, file and object storage with predictable Quality of Service (QoS). Zadara is an Advanced Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), and MEGAZONE is an APN Premier Consulting Partner.

The Zadara Storage Cloud and software-defined VPSA Storage Arrays deliver elastic, multi-tenant enterprise SAN, NAS and object storage technology for peta-scale primary and secondary storage. With isolated resources, exceptional data security, management control and predictable performance, VPSA Storage Arrays meet the most stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs), even in cloud deployments. Providing a flexible and cost-effective storage infrastructure for enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses and start-ups, VPSAs also are available as fully-managed On-Premises as-a-Service (OPaaS).

Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, today announced Veritas CloudPoint 2.0, the second release of the company’s snapshot-based data protection technology, now certified by Veritas for the Google Cloud Platform.

Veritas CloudPoint 2.0 adds enhanced data protection to Google Cloud’s native snapshot capabilities, providing joint customers with increased simplicity, improved search capabilities and enhanced protection of new workloads and applications in multi-cloud environments.

A year ago, as part of a global strategic partnership, Veritas announced a number of technology integrations to advance data management capabilities for Google Cloud Platform customers. Today, as more enterprise customers choose Google Cloud for its core infrastructure, data analytics and machine learning capabilities, they also understand the need for an equally advanced and cloud-native way to ensure their data is protected and easily recoverable within Google Cloud.