RackWare, the leader in enabling comprehensive cloud management for the enterprise, today announced the close of a $10M Series B round of funding led by Signal Peak Ventures, with additional funding from Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Venture Partners. RackWare will utilize the funding to enhance and accelerate product development and to expand sales, marketing, partnerships and customer support teams. 

Guided by CEO Sash Sunkara, a female executive with a proven track record in technology and business development, RackWare has emerged as a mainstay for enterprise IT teams seeking to manage their on-premise, private-cloud and public-cloud applications on one platform. Customers include Blue Cross Blue Shield of CA, Coca-Cola, IBM SoftLayer, HBO, Crayola and Zebra.

"As cybersecurity threats continue to rise, more businesses are left vulnerable to sophisticated attacks such as zero day and targeted attacks," said Ryan Walsh, senior vice president of Partner Solutions. "Solution providers looking to protect their customers’ endpoint devices need advanced, evolved security protections like artificial intelligence from machine learning, generic exploit mitigation, and behavioral-based technologies provided by Symantec. The easy to manage and fast to deploy features along with real-time protection enables solution providers to confidently offer Symantec Endpoint Protection Cloud to their customers."

Citrix quietly announced that it has acquired Norskale, a French-based startup with a proven track record of optimizing workspace performance, accelerating application delivery, and enhancing environment scalability.  The company has operated throughout the European, Asia-Pacific and Americas markets by providing a full-featured workspace and user environment management solution.  With more than 100 customers worldwide and enterprise deployments reaching up to 80,000 seats, Norskale brings a welcomed amount of performance and scalability value to the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop application and desktop virtualization solutions.

Demand for business mobility by end-users is creating far-reaching implications for how mission-critical applications are being delivered.  These businesses are increasingly searching for solutions that help simplify the management of end-users as they move from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones due to the complexity of managing these assets in silos.

But in the last couple of years, Citrix has fallen behind in this area.  The company, which was once a market leader in this space, seemed to find itself playing catch up with competitors like VMware who in February of 2015 acquired Immidio to beat Citrix to the punch by offering its own Workspace Environment Management (WEM) solution.  With that acquisition, VMware gained a strong UEM solution which they have been integrating more and more into their existing product lines.

Veritas, the leader in information management, and Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a collaboration aimed at supporting business critical enterprise applications on OpenStack. Building on their long history of technology collaboration focused on business continuity, storage management and data protection solutions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization, the two companies plan to work together to offer predictable quality of service to OpenStack applications and workloads, regardless of scale.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution that enhances OpenStack with advanced features needed for cloud environments. It is a co-engineered solution that integrates the proven foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a stable, high-performing and production-ready cloud environment. Veritas has selected Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build OpenStack solutions that provide a highly predictable quality of service to meet the requirements of business critical workloads with cost-effective direct-attached storage (DAS) using Veritas storage management technologies. Through the collaboration, Veritas aims to bring the ability to execute data protection tasks through integration with backup software without impacting production operations to Red Hat OpenStack Platform environments.

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The gradual movement of data centres from on-premise services toward hosted services such as colocation, managed hosting and cloud is an important shift in enterprise IT infrastructure, compelling data centre service providers to expand their portfolios to support hybrid environments. With enterprise IT infrastructure currently being a combination of traditional and cloud services, providers need to tailor their solutions to offer management and technical aid for a complex setup.

European Data Centre Services Market, is the new analysis that is part of the IT Services & Applications Growth Partnership Service program, which also includes subjects such as enterprise infrastructure transformation, physical to virtual back-up software, managed security services, mobile device management, software-defined networking and cloud computing…

Read more from the source @ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/european-data-centres-hybrid-support-spanning-traditional-and-cloud-services-will-be-crucial-300326770.html

Grazed from TechScreen. Author: Sharmishtha Mukherjee.

IDC has revealed a new research study on Salesforce, detailing how the CRM company and its ecosystem of customers and partners will drive nearly 1.9 million new jobs and more than $389 billion in new GDP impact worldwide by 2020. According to the research, when Salesforce released its first product in 2000, cloud computing was in its infancy, an unproven computing technique.

In fact, cloud computing didn’t surpass 1% of IT spending until 2009. But despite its small share of the $2 trillion IT market, cloud computing has been a major contributor to growth in IT spending, growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009 and expected to grow at better than 6 times the rate of IT spending from 2015 through 2020…

Read more from the source @ http://techseen.com/2016/09/12/salesforce-idc-study/

Unitrends, a leader in enterprise-level cloud-empowered business continuity solutions, today announced three new business continuity products. Unitrends Boomerang for Microsoft Azure, Unitrends Enterprise Backup for Microsoft Azure, and Unitrends Cloud Backup for Office 365 enable organizations to capitalize on the agility and economics of the cloud, simplify the backup and recovery process, and gain complete confidence in the recovery point to come. The new offerings enable Unitrends customers to benefit from the global scale of Microsoft Azure and backup data residing in Microsoft Office 365, the SaaS applications that millions of enterprises now rely on for collaboration and productivity.

"Business continuity is top of mind for our customers, as they increasingly look to the cloud for either the full solution, or to add that extra layer of protection. Also, as a result of explosive data growth, they need to keep a sharp eye on containing costs," said Cary Warner, CMO at Aperio IT, a Unitrends partner. "Unitrends offers the industry’s broadest range of continuity solutions that enables our company to meet the unique needs of each client."

Rackspace, releases version 13 of Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack to the market. The new version addresses key stability and security requirements for enterprise customers and is based on the Mitaka release.

In today’s market, requirements like stability and security are critical for enterprise customers with an increased need for operational expertise in private clouds. Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack allows customers to focus on IT transformation and application development while consuming their OpenStack private cloud as a managed service.

ZeroStack, pioneering the cloud-managed datacenter delivering agility without complexity, today announced that its Cloud Platform can break industry dependence on VMware ESX by offering one-click workload porting from ESX to ZeroStack. ZeroStack is now the only company to offer bi-directional application portability across hypervisors, and to integrate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware vSphere.

Companies are balking at the idea of single-vendor lock-in for cloud infrastructure, but they have such large investments in ESX and related tools that they feel trapped. ZeroStack unpacks workloads from ESX and migrates them to its Cloud Platform with one click, giving customers access to KVM-based tools as well as OpenStack APIs.

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

At 105 years old, IBM has been through more than a few major technology transformations. Arguably, none is bigger than the current retooling of the company around cloud computing – an effort overseen by Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud. LeBlanc says IT leaders and business executives aren’t caught up in Wall Street’s worries over IBM’s revenue declines or the pace of the cloud transformation.

Instead, they’re focusing on the higher-value capabilities – like Watson cognitive computing or internet of things functions – IBM is layering atop what LeBlanc calls the ‘phase one’ cloud that will help them transform their own businesses. In an interview with Network World Senior Editor Brandon Butler and IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant, LeBlanc talked about how IBM is tailoring its cloud services to specific vertical industries and what Big Blue is doing to enhance its Platform- and Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/3118105/cloud-computing/ibm-cloud-chief-the-next-phase-of-cloud-is-a-race-to-add-value.html