Grazed from CorpNews.  Author: Tonya May.

 While revenue in the "Intelligent Cloud" segment grew 5 percent from the previous year to $6.3 billion. This figure was down two percent on the same period past year, but up three percent in "constant currency" figures when currency fluctuations are taken into account, Microsoft said.

Grazed from ChannelInsider.  Author: Gina Roos.

Moving to cloud-based services doesn’t mean increased security risks and threats if the right policies are in place, concludes a new survey from Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), sponsored by Skyhigh Networks. "The Cloud Balancing Act for IT" survey report indicates that IT and security professionals across the globe are growing more confident in their cloud security measures and are moving more systems of record to the cloud.

This translates into a change in the role of IT and its relationship with line of businesses, said CSA. Chief information security officers (CISOs) play an important role in security, added CSA, with 60.8 percent of the companies surveyed having a CISO in place…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Janakiram.

 VMware is facing an uphill battle in driving vCloud Air’s adoption among enterprise customers. Launched with much fanfare in 2013 as vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS), the platform failed to take off. It’s quickly turning into a liability for VMware. The recent developments in the company clearly indicate that all is not well with the vCloud Air business.  The first sign came in the form of departures of vCloud Air’s top executives. Some of the well-known faces that championed VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy are no more with the company.

 Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure services market, achieving a worldwide market share of over 31% in the quarter. Microsoft and Google have by far the highest growth rates among the market leaders but are making little impact on AWS, which continues to grow strongly and to increase its market share. IBM meanwhile continues to lead within the private and hybrid services segment.

IBM today announced a broad expansion of its Cloud Data Services portfolio with more than 25 services now available on the IBM Cloud. They are designed to help developers build, deploy and manage web and mobile applications and enable data scientists to discover hidden trends using data and analytics in the cloud. The hybrid cloud services can be deployed across multiple cloud providers and are based on open source technologies, open ecosystems that include company and third-party data, and open architectures that allows data to easily flow amongst the different services.

In addition to self-service capabilities for everything from data preparation, migration, and integration, to tools for advanced data exploration and modeling, IBM introduced the following new cloud data services today:

To meet growing demand for Microsoft Azure on its proven cloud delivery platform, CloudBolt Software is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Customers can quickly deploy CloudBolt with Microsoft Azure from the Azure Marketplace portal to manage servers, applications, and environments across a wide range of virtualization and cloud providers.

As enterprise use of cloud computing grows, there is increasing demand for vendor-agnostic multi-cloud management. CloudBolt delivers IT automation and end-user self-service through a simply powerful console. Administrators can control their virtualization environments, private clouds, and public clouds all from a single interface, and they can present services and applications to end users through an intuitive user portal.

"We are pleased to offer the market a significant new version of our network virtualization technology," said Pino de Candia, CTO of Midokura. "Operational tools are generally geared towards configurations, monitoring in OpenStack, but they offer no visibility into encapsulated traffic. From Midokura’s own experience as an operator, and by working with operators ourselves, we’ve seen firsthand the dire need for analytic and end-to-end operational tools for management of network infrastructure. Midokura Enterprise MidoNet 5.0 builds upon our popular technology to meet this need, making OpenStack far simpler to manage, operate and also troubleshoot."

Container World takes place February 16-18, 2016 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California.  Container World is the only two day event to host full ecosystem discussions around application and OS containers.  Recognizing the appetite for market knowledge and insight into the nascent container market, this event has developed two content rich conference tracks which focus on the business and technical opportunities, and answers questions surrounding container adoption.

Showcasing the current benefits and future impact of container technology on application and infrastructure teams, and the cloud market, Container World brings together 750+ attendees from across the technology ecosystem.