In the growing migration to the cloud, the transition journey varies between each organization. In fact, a Forrester Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey found that 38 percent of enterprises have not adopted any cloud infrastructure, while 23 percent of respondents have adopted one cloud, and 38 percent are using two or more clouds. There is a clear need for an architecture and a management platform that enables customers to manage workloads on the infrastructure they use today, while giving them the ability to migrate to one or more clouds. That’s why Citrix is announcing new offerings at Citrix Summit 2017 in Anaheim, Calif. that provide the solution packages, tools and support to help customers, regardless of where they are in the cloud adoption process.

Citrix is introducing new packages to transition from on-premises licenses to Citrix Cloud for existing customers, services that enable Citrix and Microsoft customers to deploy Windows 10 desktops on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, services to deploy apps directly on Azure, and Smart Tools to simplify the deployment of new workspaces. In addition, Citrix is announcing a new Citrix Ready partner initiative targeting the mid-market along with mobility and network management products and services that complement Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) and provide comprehensive security and value for Citrix and Microsoft customers.

"With these products and services, Citrix and Microsoft are meeting partners and customers wherever they are on their journey to the cloud, whether they continue to keep IT infrastructure on-premises, or they are moving to hybrid cloud or public cloud deployments," said PJ Hough, senior vice president, Product, Citrix. "Whether they are ready to go all-in on the cloud, or they want to deploy a single app in the cloud, we have the management platform and the services they need."

Flexxible IT, provider of turnkey enterprise computing solutions powered by Citrix technology, today announced a new hyperconverged appliance designed to help SMBs simplify the deployment, operations and support of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments and applications, including Microsoft Office 365.

The solution-Flexxible|SMB Cloud-uses Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop and NetScaler as well as Microsoft Windows and Office 365 products in a 2U appliance that enterprises can install in as little as 30 minutes. The Flexxible|SMB Cloud has been verified as Citrix Ready with XenApp, XenDesktop and NetScaler. Flexxible IT is also committed to support the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance program, announced separately by Citrix, in an upcoming release of Flexxible|SMB Cloud.

The announcement was made at Citrix Summit in Anaheim, Calif., today. Flexxible IT is a Platinum Sponsor of the event and is providing live demos in booth 206. Additionally, Flexxible IT CTO Kilian Arjona will present in a session today at 2 p.m. in Platinum Ballroom 3.

UKCloud, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, today announced its tenth round of price reductions, which are phased from 1st January 2017, across two of its most popular services: Cloud Storage and Enterprise Compute Cloud. The result of significant economies of scale and investment in hyper-converged infrastructure, UKCloud’s latest price reductions coincide with price hikes elsewhere in the industry, particularly from US corporations. 

UKCloud’s Cloud Storage provides a cost-effective storage repository for a variety of sensitive data assets, including body worn video and medical data. The company’s investment in innovative hyper-converged infrastructure has completely refreshed the cloud storage platform, which is designed to deliver improved performance and functionality at a greatly reduced cost. Customers with large-scale requirements will pay just 1.5p per GB per month; this is a reduction of 66 percent and makes UKCloud’s offering significantly cheaper than those of the leading US cloud providers. Customers with smaller requirements will see the price of their services fall by almost 80 percent, from 9p per GB per month to 2p per GB per month. 

Grazed from ChannelInsider. Author: Mike Vizard.

With Amazon Web Services now several times larger than rival cloud service providers combined, the presence of AWS across the channel is ubiquitous. In fact, at the recent AWS re:invent 2016 conference, the company revealed that in the last year, it has added more than 10,000 partners. Competition between partners across the AWS cloud ecosystem is already fierce.

AWS is also starting to extend its influence beyond the public cloud, and a new AWS Lambda service can run compute functions locally. At the same time, AWS is recruiting partners interested in moving workloads that previously ran VMware in a local data center environment into AWS. In addition, AWS is targeting workloads running on Oracle databases that can now run on a new Postgres database service that’s compatible with existing Oracle applications…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

New-generation companies aren’t the only ones bringing IT innovation into the marketplace. IBM, the granddaddy of all IT companies that has been in business since before World War I (1911), continues to be quietly inventive and probably doesn’t get enough credit for its own innovations.

Big Blue revealed Jan. 9 that it broke the U.S. corporate patent record in 2016 with 8,088 patents granted to its inventors in a single calendar year. This marks the first time any company or organization has earned more than 8,000 patents in one year, and it is the 24th consecutive year that IBM has been No. 1 on the list…

Actifio, the copy data virtualization company, today announced support of Microsoft Azure with the availability of the Actifio Sky in the Azure Marketplace. Actifio’s copy data virtualization platform helps enterprise customers move faster to the cloud, speeding up hybrid cloud adoption for test data provisioning for application development, backup, disaster recovery, instant recovery, data migration, long-term retention or analytics.

IT leaders are driving initiatives to accelerate business innovation and speed to market via faster software development while driving down costs. Actifio helps enterprise CIOs reduce risk while moving faster to a hybrid cloud, with a data management platform that:

CSC today announced the expansion of its strategic alliance with Microsoft through the advancement of Industrial Machine Learning (IML) solutions that enable data scientists to produce new data-derived enterprise insights, leading to better and more timely business decisions.

Most large, data-rich companies fail to benefit from information on an enterprise-wide scale because they are not equipped to effectively capture and analyze available data sources. A recent survey from PwC and Iron Mountain found that 57 percent of businesses are unable to extract significant value from their information, and 23 percent are unable to derive any real value at all. Regardless of size, geography or sector, businesses are struggling to fully realize value from their information.

CloudCraze, an enterprise digital commerce solution built on the Salesforce platform, has secured $20 million in funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Salesforce Ventures joins Insight as an additional investor. The combined funds will supercharge product development, support continued growth in the United States and EMEA, and expand the company’s team of B2B commerce experts.

CloudCraze is a Platinum Salesforce ISV Partner. Built on the Salesforce platform and leveraging the agility of the cloud, CloudCraze allows businesses to harness the power of digital commerce to generate online revenue fast and easily scale for growth. It provides seamless omnichannel interactions and a holistic view across all customer touchpoints. CloudCraze is focused on solving the complex needs of B2B companies including several iconic brands, such as Coca-Cola, Avid, AB InBev, Barry-Callebaut, Ecolab, GE, Land O’ Lakes, Kellogg’s, and WABCO.

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Chen Wu.

Dynamic resource management for cloud computing is at a critical crossroad. The ultimate objective when provisioning software-defined infrastructure, synchronizing inter-cloud resources, or allocating network bandwidth is allowing applications to successfully execute on demand without concern for capacity. While these approaches are effective in supplying applications with additional capacity on demand, the downside is that application performance may not be optimized in the process.

Cloud applications and services have become so complex that the runtime synchronization of resources required to support them drags down overall performance and leaves capacity unused. To tap this unused capacity, and deliver the performance expected, we need to enhance resource management with something like intelligent resource execution. Let me explain…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

2016 was an interesting year in cloud computing. For the European market, data protection regulation came into force, while many of the major cloud providers began to move their operations into and build data centres in Europe, from AWS, to Microsoft, to IBM. Regarding acquisitions, Oracle bought NetSuite, Microsoft bought LinkedIn and Samsung acquired Joyent, while in terms of trends, DevOps, containers and security continued to be the primary talking points. Here is our short review of the main stories from the more than 400 that went live on CloudTech last year:

2016 in review

AWS celebrates its 10th birthday. On March 14 2006, a press release went out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” Thus AWS was born, and a decade on the company enjoys significant market share leadership in the IaaS space…

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