Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Enterprises are still wary of vendor lock-in and perceived security issues, and it’s throttling their ambitions to run more workloads in the cloud. Or it would, if public cloud weren’t so darn convenient and necessary for driving innovation. This is one strong conclusion that emerges from a new MongoDB survey of over 2,500 people.

Given MongoDB’s new school NoSQL approach to data, it’s not surprising that so many of its enterprise users would be increasingly comfortable running in the cloud. What is more surprising is that these same organizations keep talking about lock-in and security, even as they run ever larger percentages of their applications in the cloud…

Asigra Inc. a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider, and Zadara Storage, enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS) provider, have been selected by TIG, provider of cloud, connectivity and transformational managed services in the UK, to enable it to deliver a high-performance file and block storage and comprehensive cloud backup solution to its customers. This is the first time a managed services provider has deployed Asigra and Zadara Storage together. The result is a highly complementary solution that enables Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to offer aggressive, agile services that meet changing customer requirements very quickly, in a pay-as-you-go model for faster revenue realization.

"We selected Asigra Cloud Backup and Zadara Storage because they each offer a powerful solution to meet our customers’ most critical business needs. However, when used together, they have dramatically improved our cloud services business," said George Georgiou, sales director, TIG. "The combined Zadara and Asigra value propositions have elevated our business agility, improved our ability to scale very quickly as customer demands dictate, and enabled us to reach revenue faster – all without large, capital expense investments. The two services are extremely complementary – and the strongest in the marketplace – and will continue to allow us to expand our services, maximize operational efficiencies and provide our customers with the leading storage and backup solutions."

"The superconvergence of network, storage, compute, virtualization, and management in the enterprise datacenter is a $100 billion business opportunity in infrastructure technology today with Cloudistics squarely in the epicenter of this third wave of datacenter innovation," said Najaf Husain, co-founder and CEO of Cloudistics. "Our platform is completely self-contained and businesses can deploy applications and native containers within minutes. Bain Capital Ventures has a very successful track record in the infrastructure software space and we are honored to welcome them as our partner to drive the long-term success of our company."

Skytap, Inc., a popular cloud service for application modernization, is announcing a driver for Docker Machine. The Skytap Driver extends the native functionality of Docker Machine to Skytap Cloud. With this new feature, enterprises can safely modernize traditional on-premises application architectures to container architectures within Skytap Cloud, without impacting any currently in-use environments.

Enterprises are in the evaluation stage of adopting container technologies while concurrently trying to modernize traditional applications. "Some legacy vendors experiment with running their applications in containers. Elsewhere, enterprise software architects increasingly turn their attention to breaking monolithic legacy apps into their constituent parts, each running in scalable, portable containers," wrote Paul Miller, senior analyst serving CIOs at Forrester, in a May 2016 brief titled, "Brief: Why The CIO Must Care About Containers."

Yesterday, Infinio announced the General Availability of version 3.0 of Infinio Accelerator, which helps to bring unprecedented storage performance to VMware environments.  VMblog followers and VMware community members may already be quite familiar with Infinio, but from what I’ve already witnessed in a recent briefing, this 3.0 release is set to further Infinio’s reputation for delivering high performance storage acceleration for VMware environments.  I was amazed at the raw performance improvements coming out of this release.  VMware datacenters will be quite pleased. 

The solution is certified as VMware Ready and operates with VMware Storage Policy-Based Management.  And Accelerator 3.0 will serve the needs of organizations looking to deliver never before seen storage performance for next-generation applications supporting financial, healthcare, and scientific industries; as well as help IT departments with more traditional needs of back-office databases, enterprise applications, and virtual desktops dramatically reduce storage costs.

After the announcement, I reached out to Sheryl Koenigsberg, head of marketing at Infinio, to find out more.

VMware announced a new acquisition of a relatively unknown company, Arkin Net, a provider of software-defined data center security and operations.  Although financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, VMware did say that they expect the transaction to close by the end of June 2016. The deal is expected to help enhance VMware’s ability to build and manage virtual networks tied to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines.

Arkin is an established business partner of VMware, and it was founded in 2013 to bring management enhancements to virtual networks.  This year, Arkin was named by Gartner as one of its "Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking."

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: John Moore.

As the story of cloud computing continues to unfold, channel partners are encountering some interesting and perhaps unexpected plot twists. Recent research suggests organizations continue to push decisively to the cloud. Survey results released last week by Insight Enterprises, a hardware, software, cloud and service provider based in Tempe, Ariz., revealed that more than 80% of organizations plan to invest in cloud services in 2016.

Large and medium-sized organizations are poised to be the biggest adopters, but 72% of small companies are also ready to invest in cloud technology. The Insight-commissioned research is based on a survey of 403 IT professionals. But while adoption continues, many organizations lack a coherent cloud governance model and financial management strategy for successful deployment…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Dan Heilman.

IBM and longtime partner SugarCRM announced today that companies now have the option of running the Sugar customer relationship management (CRM) platform across IBM’s worldwide network of cloud data centers. That arrangement promise security-rich cloud environments, data isolation and performance, SugarCRM said. Based in Cupertino, Calif., SugarCRM produces the Web application Sugar, a CRM system available in both open source and commercial open source applications. A typical end user for Sugar is in a regulated industry such as banking, healthcare or financial services.

Partnership Means New Offerings

By choosing IBM Cloud, Sugar can be deployed across bare metal cloud servers, dedicated off-premises clouds or private cloud environments behind the firewall, according to SugarCRM. IBM Cloud is the only cloud company to offer SugarCRM customers those options. Organizations will also gain access to on-demand, scalable computing power, a global footprint, and a fast, private network via IBM’s 46 cloud data centers worldwide, according to a statement from the companies…

Read more from the source @ http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=032000J3TFLS

Grazed from TheWeek. Author: Jeff Spross.

Microsoft announced on Monday that it’s dropping $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn, the social network geared towards resumes, employment history, and connecting corporate professionals and white-collar workers. It’s a generous offer: The buy per share is 49.5 percent over where LinkedIn’s stock closed on Friday. It may seem quixotic when a tech giant known for its personal computer businesses buys a social network. But if you dig through Microsoft’s history, there’s a pretty clear strategy here.

Microsoft got going as a dual juggernaut in both the world of PCs and the software you run on them. It’s not just individual consumers who buy PCs — it’s also companies, and they buy in bulk. This provided an excellent opportunity for Microsoft to place its PCs, its Windows operating systems, and its software package of Microsoft Office products into one big grab bag for bulk buyers…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Nicole Henderson.

With EMC shareholders ready to vote on the Dell-EMC merger next month, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger was in Toronto meeting with Canadian partners and media last week to provide an update on the company and his vision for the future of cloud computing. Over the hour-long conversation, Talkin’ Cloud came out with 5 key takeaways on the cloud landscape, how channel partners can be successful, and how being wary of change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To read the full interview, go to Talkin’ Cloud sister site The WHIR.

1. Vendors, Partners Must Adapt – or Get Left Behind

The technology landscape is changing at a rapid pace – and vendors, partners, everyone in the ecosystem has to navigate through those changes to be successful. “None is as significant as the period we are in right now,” Gelsinger said. “You have consumer-driven technologies, the shift from on-premise to off-premise, the disruptive effects of mobile and mobile cloud, change of business models from perpetual and capitalized to subscription, all of these are creating such violent shifts that everybody, including us, needs to navigate to the other side of that.”…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/conversation-vmware-ceo-5-key-takeaways