As new Avaya customers embrace Avaya Midmarket Cloud solutions, three examples offer unique stories that highlight their business models and reasons why full-on or hybrid cloud makes sense for them. From a small, start-up design business, to a youth soccer-focused camp and gear company, to a growing movie and TV studio with ever-changing requirements, Avaya Midmarket Cloud delivers the features, flexibility and cost-effectiveness they need for success, offered by Avaya channel partners.

The Crossing Studios in Burnaby, BC rents over 350,000 square feet of space to Hollywood movie and TV production crews, growing from a single location to eight in record time. Production needs can change frequently, and the number of people needing communications for a single customer can jump from a handful to more than a hundred with only a moment’s notice. Since all eight locations had different communications infrastructure, IT spent inordinate amounts of time re-configuring and adapting systems that had sub-par reliability to begin with.

Capturing 44 percent more deployments and gaining input from 22 percent more organizations than one year ago, the OpenStack Foundation User Survey, published today, reveals growing adoption, increased scale and a more diverse user base, driven by the desire to accelerate innovation and avoid vendor lock-in.

OpenStack’s ninth User Survey demonstrates the open infrastructure platform used for private clouds, public clouds and telecom networks has broad appeal for organizations of all sizes around the world. Thirty-two percent of users have 10,000 employees or more, while 25 percent of organizations have fewer than 100 employees. Sixty-one percent of these users and 74 percent of deployments are physically located outside of the United States.

Bluelock, provider of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for complex environments and sensitive data, is pleased to announce its rating as a leader in Forrester Research’s The Forrester Wave^TM: Disaster-Recovery-As-A-Service Providers, Q2 2017 report.

The report evaluates DRaaS vendors against current offering, strategy and market presence criteria to identify leaders in the space, detailing how each vendor fulfills the selected criteria. Bluelock received the highest score possible in 10 of these criteria, including data security, implementation and support.

Grazed from VCCircle. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon.com Inc’s chief technology officer is working toward a day when people can control almost any piece of software with their voice. The company on Wednesday rolled out the technology powering Alexa, its voice assistant that competes with Apple Inc’s Siri, to developers so they can build chat features into their own apps, CTO Werner Vogels said in an interview.

The service, Amazon Lex, was in a preview phase since late 2016. The move underscores how Amazon is racing to be the top player in voice-controlled computing, after losing out in mobile to Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google. Vogels said that Amazon’s headway in processing how humans write and speak would make conversational assistants or “chatbots” more helpful than the clunky tools they’ve been in the past…

Read more from the source @ https://www.vccircle.com/amazon-launches-chatbot-in-bid-to-lead-voice-controlled-computing/

Grazed from OpenStack.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Mirantis, the managed open cloud company, today announced availability of a commercially-supported distribution of OpenStack and Kubernetes, delivered in a single, integrated package, and with a unique build-operate-transfer delivery model. “Today, infrastructure consumption patterns are defined by the public cloud, where everything is API driven, managed and continuously delivered.

Mirantis OpenStack, which featured Fuel as an installer, was the easiest OpenStack distribution to deploy, but every new version required a forklift upgrade,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO. “Mirantis Cloud Platform departs from the traditional installer-centric architecture and towards an operations-centric architecture, continuously delivered by either Mirantis or the customers’ DevOps team with zero downtime…

Grazed from MarketWired. Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudVelox, a pioneer in cloud automation and orchestration software, today announced it is publishing an e-book to help businesses create a strategy for adopting cloud computing. The e-book, Cloud Migration Best Practices: Understand What (and How) to Move to the Cloud, is available for free download at http://www.cloudvelox.com/lp-cloud-migration-best-practices-cloudvelox

A company’s decision to migrate to the cloud usually is based on the strategic advantages of such a move, including streamlining processes, increasing agility, and lowering CAPEX. Various business triggers and tactics drive this decision, inform the cloud strategy necessary, and provide a general blueprint for moving forward with the process…

Grazed from BlastingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft is all set to stage big spring event on May 2 with most anticipating a new laptop. Most anticipate a new #Microsoft Surface Pro 5 coming though the improvements could disappoint. Except for the possible upgrade to an Intel Kaby Lake chipset, the word out is that the Redmond company has hardly changed most of the components. With the Surface Pro line doing well, critics believe that bumping up the SoC would be enough.

Compared to Apple, Microsoft does not really need hardware sales to keep its business afloat. Rather, the Redmond company has been known to focus on the software side. Hence, the changes that the Microsoft Surface Pro would have to offer could be in the #Windows 10 Cloud…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Zeus Kerravala.

In the early 1600s, one of my favorite historical figures, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, championed the works of one Nicolaus Copernicus and postulated that the universe was heliocentric. The term was named after Helios, the Greek god of the sun, indicating that everything revolved around him.

In the IT world, the cloud has become the center of the universe. And since Zeus is the Greek god of the sky, which includes thunder and cloud, it makes sense that CIOs should adopt a Zeus-centric faith. The cloud has indeed become the center of most organizations’ IT strategy, as it provides the unique combination of on demand scale, elasticity and agility that organizations need to execute on digital initiatives…

In this article, however, we’re going to focus more on how cloud tools and services can be used to help sales. There are some interesting resources and solutions designed specifically to help a business’s sales department become more effective.

Cloud-Based CRM

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is a great platform to use for managing customers. The use of CRM allows corporations to offer more personalized services to each customer through the method of collecting data and the history of interactions within the system. I say "history of interactions" because a good CRM platform can record more than just purchases and invoices.

A10 Networks introduced a new strategic solution that offers multi-cloud, multi-service management that brings to life its ongoing vision of harmonizing application delivery and security.

The new developments center on the A10 Harmony Controller, built on microservices and container technologies, offering a multi-tenant, highly scalable controller architecture that incorporates real-time analytics at a per-app level and central management and orchestration of secure application services across hybrid environments – from physical data centers to public, private and hybrid clouds.

The new A10 Harmony Controller and analytics capabilities fundamentally change the way secure application services are delivered, protected, and managed. Because the A10 Harmony application delivery and security controller uniquely spans traditional data centers and clouds, it is now the industry’s only controller-based platform that can deliver analytics, configuration and orchestration across such hybrid application environments.