Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

owergate, Europe’s largest independently owned insurance intermediary, is undertaking an IT infrastructure transformation across its entire business to address challenges posed by legacy systems and lack of integration and has chosen Accenture (NYSE:ACN) as its strategic service provider.

The transformation programme focuses on four service towers – networks, data centres, end-user computing and service-support. Towergate has chosen to work with Accenture to migrate infrastructure and applications to the public cloud – supporting the data centre and end user computing service towers. Towergate and Accenture have also signed a five-year arrangement for Accenture to manage service support across the whole IT infrastructure estate…

The open source cloud computing project, OpenStack, has come a long way since NASA and Rackspace first launched it in 2010. However, with all of its recent successes, this survey shows there are still questions and debates that surround OpenStack that are worth answering.

Commissioned by Talligent through media firms CloudCow and VMblog, the 2016 State of OpenStack Report surveyed 647 virtualization and cloud IT professionals and executives from across the globe.  The survey found respondents in varying stages of familiarity with the cloud technology ranging from those currently using it to support projects or production workloads (30 percent), evaluating it (32 percent) or familiar with it but not yet implementing the technology (36 percent). But once in place, respondents stated they expect to quickly expand beyond development environments, with lab growth moving from 43 percent to 89 percent and QA/Test to grow from 47 percent to 91 percent, both within the next 12 months.

Grazed from theInquirer. Author: Daniel Robinson.

In an unexpected move, Microsoft has announced that it is prepping a version of SQL Server for Linux systems. The company has provided public preview releases of SQL Server 2016 since May last year, and the release candidate version was last updated at the start of this month. Microsoft will now herald the arrival of SQL Server 2016 with a Data Driven event in New York on 10 March culminating in general availability of the platform later this year.

However, Microsoft has announced that it will also bring SQL Server to Linux, starting with the core relational database capabilities currently available in the private preview release and full availability slated for the middle of 2017. Bringing SQL Server to Linux will enable Microsoft to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premise and cloud, according to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

The part virtual reality (VR) can play in the evolution of the data centre has been mooted as far back as 2013 – but now the future looks good so long as organisations’ infrastructure can stand up to it, according to Aegis Data. Three years ago, writing for Data Center Knowledge, Rich Miller reported on data centre provider IO, whose latest innovation was to provide a 3D visual representation and walkthrough of a customer’s specific environment, with IO describing it as a “gamification of the data centre.”

And according to Greg McCulloch, CEO of Aegis Data, the data centre industry has the potential to be the largest beneficiary of VR – but it will take time. “As a concept, its presence has been felt for a long time but limited computing power combined with slow connectivity speeds means there has always been a cap as to what can be achieved,” said McCulloch…

Grazed from EnterpriseInnovation. Author: Allan Tan.

“As its technologies and processes mature, the cloud is being increasingly relied on as a vehicle for agile, scalable and elastic solutions. To build competitive advantage and cut costs, CIOs and other IT leaders need to constantly adapt their strategies to leverage cloud capabilities.” So says Gartner in its Predicts 2016: Cloud Computing to Drive Digital Business report.

The Cloud terminology has become ingrained in business vocabulary and represents what many businesses see is the next evolution of IT: the ability to source the required IT resources – be it computing resources, storage capacity, network connectivity, mobile application or secured services. However, despite the acceptance of cloud, public or private or hybrid, as an acceptable strategy that delivers on the promise of utility-like services the use of public cloud to host critical business applications at scale remains limited to the puzzlement of cloud service providers…

Grazed from RiverBed. Author: Ian Downard.

Everyone loves talking about the weather but when it comes to taking the temperature of cloud infrastructures too many businesses throw caution to the wind. If your organization only recently started investigating cloud computing, you may not yet understand how much money you can save by provisioning just the right amount of compute power to meet demand.

In this blog, I’ll talk about how cloud computing is creating new opportunities for application performance monitoring (APM). I’ll give you three reasons why APM is something enterprises on the cloud can’t live without and I’ll talk specifically about how Riverbed is providing new APM capabilities for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform with SteelCentral AppInternals…

Grazed from Virtual-Strategy. Author: PR Announcement.

Advanced Clustering Technologies, a leading manufacturer of high performance computing solutions, today announced it has partnered with CD-adapco to offer the company’s industry-leading engineering simulation software solution, STAR-CCM+®, to customers using Advanced Clustering’s on demand HPC cluster in the cloud, ACTnowHPC.

“We’re pleased to announce that our HPC cloud now makes STAR-CCM+® immediately accessible to engineers who purchase the license from CD-adapco,” said Kyle Sheumaker, President of Advanced Clustering Technologies. “With STAR-CCM+®, we’re making it easier than ever for our customers to enhance workflow productivity in order to discover better designs faster.”…

Grazed from MarketWired. Author: PR Announcement.

American Industrial Systems, Inc. (AIS), an innovator, designer and manufacturer of Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs), HMI Touch Panels, Industrial Touch Screens, Displays, Operator Interface Terminals (OITs), Box PCs, Industrial PCs, and Thin Clients, announce their Smart family PC-based HMI Touch Screen Panels and Industrial Panel PCs (IPCs) are designed and engineered to accommodate and support key requirements of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things applications for control, monitoring and automation.

AIS’s Premium, Standard and Compact series of advanced, intelligent HMIs support Open Platform Communications (OPC), Message Quieting Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Representational State Transfer (REST), Internet of Things (IoT) Protocols and Web-based software necessary for IIoT applications…

Grazed from ITBrief. Author: Catherine Knowles.

Government digital transformation is still at its embryonic stage, largely because of shortages of skilled workers and rigid organisational culture, according to a new survey by Gartner. The 2016 CIO Agenda survey shows, analytics, infrastructure and cloud computing continue to be the top three technology priorities for government CIOs, but the skills shortage and unadaptable cultures are among the major barriers to implementing digital priorities.

The 2016 CIO Agenda survey asked 2,944 CIOs worldwide about their top digital business opportunities, threats and strategies, and includes responses from 379 government CIOs. The government survey data indicated that leveraging digital technologies to transform traditional operational and service models has risen to the top of the business agenda for many elected leaders and public officials…

Grazed from i-programmer. Author: Ian Elliot.

Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure. Just about everyone wants a slice of the action that is the Internet of Things (IoT), but few are very clear how to make it happen or what is required – even though they are all 100% sure that they know.

Mozilla had a really good idea with Firefox OS. but the implementation was poor and progress slow. Without a market success it seems that Mozilla lacked the resources to keep working on it. So it decided to stop working on it, see Mozilla Confirms End of Firefox OS For Smartphones. Instead Mozilla has proposed four IoT oriented projects:…