Grazed from AutoNews. Author: Anita Nussbaum.

Microsoft Corp. agreed to provide cloud-computing services for cars made by the Renault-Nissan Alliance as the two automakers push ahead with developing connected vehicles. Microsoft will build cloud infrastructure for Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co. that can host navigation data and allows drivers to predict gas usage and check on their cars remotely, the software producer said in a statement today.

The U.S. company will also help Renault and Nissan, which are both run by CEO Carlos Ghosn, develop user interfaces for their brands. Vehicles with the new features could reach the market as early as 2018, with more than 10 models with autonomous driving technology to be available two years later…

Read more from the source @ http://www.autonews.com/article/20160926/OEM06/160929878/renault-nissan-will-allow-microsoft-to-plug-cars-into-the-cloud

Grazed from EconomicTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Tech giants Microsoft and Adobe today announced a major partnership to promote the use of each other’s cloud-computing tools among their mutual customers. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, called the deal a "massive mileston," in an appearance here with Shantanu Narayen, his Adobe counterpart.

The deal follows a pact last year that linked some Adobe products to Microsoft’s customer relationship management tools. Cloud-computing, a growing business in which companies increasingly turn to rented, web-based infrastructure to run their software instead of their own back room servers, has a been a showcase of Microsoft’s newfound willingness to partner with erstwhile competitors…

Live from Microsoft Ignite (Booth #645), Metalogix, the market leading provider of solutions to move, manage and protect content within enterprise collaboration platforms, today announced Content.ly, a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that allows businesses to control their content across collaboration platforms including Microsoft Office 365, Slack, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox and Google for Work.  

Content.ly fills a simple, but critical need that every large organization faces – a growing number of dispersed collaboration, storage and file synchronization platforms embedded in business processes with no unified way to manage them all.  

DataCore Software, a leading provider of Hyper-converged Virtual SAN, Software-Defined Storage and Adaptive Parallel I/O Software, announced today that to support the Microsoft Ignite 2016 event and Microsoft Server 2016 announcements, it will offer license keys for its Parallel I/O-powered DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software at no cost to Microsoft MVPs. DataCore powers the ‘world’s fastest hyper-converged solutions’ and the software has been proven to boost Microsoft application performance (e.g. Microsoft SQL server and Microsoft Dynamics) and provide powerful data services to run and support Microsoft server and Azure cloud platforms – the software runs either directly on the root partition on physical servers, with Hyper-V, on a virtual machine or on an Azure VM instance. 

The not-for-resale (NFR) license keys — available for non-production uses such as home labs, course development, training, feature testing and demonstration purposes — are intended to support virtualization consultants, instructors and architects involved in efforts aimed at managing and fully leveraging storage assets.

CloudHealth Technologies, the leader in cloud service management, today announced its support for organizations managing applications, infrastructure and services across multiple public cloud service providers, including Microsoft Azure.

The move reflects a growing trend among the CloudHealth Technologies customer base and, by extension, the broader business world, as relying on a mix of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings – including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform – is becoming the new normal.

Grazed from Trak. Author: Mohul Ghosh.

$493 billion conglomerate General Electric is shedding it’s 124 year old legacy; and embedding a startup culture to solve some of the biggest problems which this world faces. Their Industrial Internet of Things platform: Predix, is actually on it’s way to change the future with it’s advanced cloud based Platform as a Service offering for industrial machines.

Via Predix, GE wants to improve industrial productivity, infuse more efficiency, and give more power to the industry. If Microsoft has built a platform to connect personal computers via Windows; if Google & Apple are scaling a platform to connect all smartphones and tablets; then GE is right now building a platform to connect 50 billion devices which includes heavy industrial appliances as well as some of the complex machines ever invented. Predix is changing the future, and it’s happening right infront of our eyes…

Read more from the source @ http://trak.in/tags/business/2016/09/26/predix-industrial-cloud-os/

Grazed from Sys-Con. Author: PR Announcement.

Comcast today announced it has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the industry-standard multi-cloud platform, as a Silver member. Comcast joins GE, HPE, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, Verizon and more than 60 other technology innovators as a Foundation member. Through its membership, Comcast will be able to contribute ideas to the project while accelerating its own innovation by taking advantage of Cloud Foundry’s continuous delivery approach to developing cloud-native software.

"We’re looking forward to collaborating with Cloud Foundry’s robust, global open source community through our participation in the Cloud Foundry Foundation," said Greg Otto, Executive Director Cloud Services, Comcast Cable. "Cloud Foundry delivers a consistent multi-cloud experience for our developers. This enables our product teams to focus on innovating new customer experiences."…

Read more from the source @ http://news.sys-con.com/node/3919618

If someone asked you to show them proof of a reliable and secure DR plan, would you be able to do so?

Viptela, Inc., the Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) company, today announced that its SD-WAN platform can extend a customer’s Wide Area Network (WAN) into the Microsoft Azure public cloud environment. An Enterprise can now treat their Azure Virtual Network (VNET) resource as a branch and benefit from all the SD-WAN capabilities offered by the Viptela platform. All Viptela elements can also be deployed on a Hyper-V hypervisor.