CloudHealth Technologies today announced a next-generation policy engine that governs cloud infrastructure in an entirely new way. Through easily enabled and fully customizable best practice policies in the CloudHealth platform, businesses can govern cloud infrastructure more simply than ever before.

Policy-driven methodologies have long proven to be the most efficient, secure way to manage cloud and hybrid environments at scale. However, this approach requires enterprises to rely on software that captures information and drives behavior based on best practices, internal policies and reference architectures. CloudHealth now removes the legwork from cloud governance by defining best practice policies that manage all aspects of services, applications and infrastructure across cost, availability, security, performance and usage. These policies mimic visual programming languages by virtue of their high extensibility at both an object, rule, condition and action level.

Accenture and Pivotal Software, Inc., have formed a new business group to help Fortune Global 500 companies and other large enterprises accelerate their software development and innovate at startup speed.

The Accenture Pivotal Business Group (APBG) will help enterprises migrate legacy applications to the cloud and accelerate cloud-native application development on Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), one of the world’s most powerful cloud-native platforms. Operated and managed by Accenture and powered by Pivotal’s next-generation software development methodology, the APBG will offer clients new capabilities for developing modern cloud-native products and services that leverage artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies in areas such as the internet of things and connected cars and homes.

Accenture and Pivotal will launch two APBG locations, one in Columbus, Ohio, and another in New York City. The joint facilities will be dedicated spaces where APBG will help large enterprises rapidly migrate their businesses onto PCF and prototype innovative products and services. The group has already begun work with companies in the banking and insurance sectors.

Puppet today announced a new collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which includes the launch of AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise, a new, fully-managed Puppet Master. This new solution empowers customers with a complete automation strategy for operating at scale, while providing them with the agility and flexibility of the cloud.

"As enterprises accelerate their migration to the cloud, working with DevOps leaders like Chef is crucial," said Scott Wiltamuth, Vice President of AWS Dev and Management Tools, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Chef is providing valuable on-ramps for enterprise customers who are migrating workloads from on-premises data centers to AWS. We are pleased to see Chef’s compliance-as-code capabilities as part of AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate."

"When AWS launched OpsWorks with Chef Automate we immediately jumped on that," said Eric Schneider, CTO of Verisk. "It is one less component that we had to worry about. The experts at Chef and AWS are worrying about it for us, and that allows us to focus what is important for us and our customers."

VeloCloud Networks, Inc., the Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN company, today announced it is the overwhelming market share leader in the SD-WAN market, according to Frost & Sullivan’s "Analysis of the Software-Defined WAN Market, 2017" report published last month. In addition to a thorough evaluation of SD-WAN market drivers, trends and forecasts, the report published the market share comparisons for 2017 of the leading SD-WAN vendors.

According to Frost & Sullivan, VeloCloud garnered 29.5 percent market share of the global SD-WAN market during 2017 for the overwhelming leadership position. This report included coverage of the leading vendors in the SD-WAN category, and ranked them according to market share results. The closest vendor to VeloCloud trails with only 14.4 percent of the industry’s market share in 2017.

Today, Morpheus Data announced a major software release which brings predictive analytics to cloud management and enables end-to-end app lifecycle management in multi-cloud hybrid IT environments.

Research indicates that total enterprise spending on public cloud services is expected to continue to grow at double digits over the coming years. Much of this growth comes from application teams seeking to mirror best-in-class DevOps organizations where time to deploy is measured in minutes. At the same time, enterprise IT teams are signaling adoption of multi-cloud strategies rather than standardizing on a single provider. Unfortunately, fragmented cloud management has done little to speed deployment and rouge development has led to expensive cloud sprawl.

To address these gaps, Morpheus Data has updated its Unified Ops Orchestration platform with machine learning to lower cloud costs and new 3^rd party integrations to speed application deployments. Unlike tools which only address part of the issue, only Morpheus provides a systematic solution to optimize resources, enable governance, accelerate workflows, and modernize applications. The solution was architected to be 100% infrastructure agnostic across bare metal, VM, and containerized deployments spanning on-premises, hosted, and public clouds.

Aerohive Networks, a Cloud Networking Leader, today announced Cloud-based Comparative Analytics for enterprise access networks. As the capability is built out, customers will be able anonymously and dynamically to compare infrastructure and client metrics to similar-sized deployments and/or industries to help them proactively determine if and where to focus corrective or optimization efforts.

Quantifying and qualifying the operational effectiveness of the access point of an enterprise network has always been problematic because of variable usage and demand by users, compounded by the remoteness from IT resources. Using the power of the Cloud, Aerohive’s new, totally anonymous Comparative Analytics capability will allow IT professionals to accurately compare key infrastructure and client metrics, at first dynamically and within a few months over time. Finally, Aerohive’s Comparative Analytics capability will answer the age-old customer question of how to compare operating effectiveness to others of similar size and similar industries, as well as whether the metrics are getting better or worse over time.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today launched Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform. As application complexity and cloud incompatibility loom, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps IT organizations to build and manage applications that use services from the datacenter to the public cloud. The newest iteration of the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform includes native integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Brokers that enable developers to bind services across AWS and on-premise resources to create modern applications while providing a consistent, open standards-based foundation to drive business evolution.

Cloud-native enterprise applications can consume services from multiple locations, including from the data center and multiple public clouds. Also, according to 451 Research, more than 60 percent of enterprises implementing cloud strategies are using two (or more) different cloud environments — on-premises private clouds, hosted private cloud, and multiple public clouds. Increasingly, modern applications built for digital transformation rely on a mesh of loosely-coupled component and microservices, making consistency across cloud providers a significant challenge, but one that Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps to address.

Digital performance management company, Dynatrace, today announced the availability of Dynatrace within the Microsoft Azure marketplace. This brings its seamless full stack monitoring to Azure’s web apps, cloud services and virtual machines, to meet the complex cloud computing needs of today’s businesses. Microsoft customers will now be able to deploy Dynatrace from the Azure Marketplace, to monitor across all environments and gain granular insight into the performance of modern applications.

"The availability of our solution in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace has prepared us for the new buying patterns and flexible pricing, and provides another mechanism for our customers to deploy with ease. Without any instrumentation at all, our out of box integration now brings AI-driven application monitoring and management capabilities to these Azure environments and .NET Core Apps," explains Steve Tack, SVP, Product Management, Dynatrace.