"This was an exciting year for Faction," says Luke Norris, Chief Executive Officer for Faction. "To better convey our identity and our cause — cloud the way you want it — we changed our company name to Faction and expanded our cloud portfolio, all the while delivering the superior engineering expertise that drives value for our customers. Being Faction means our customers are in the driver’s seat. They have full control and deep access into their platforms, as well as highly flexible cloud solutions for their hybrid IT environments. Embracing our cause definitely paid off as shown with our strong growth in 2015. This new round of funding will enable Faction to continue on its rapid growth trajectory, serve a wider customer base and introduce additional, innovative products to the market."

The report reveals which industries have made the most progress in migrating from on-premises to public cloud applications and highlights which of these industries are following security best practices.

2015 Corporate and Product Milestones include:

• Customer Success – In August, Kaseya rolled out a comprehensive, global-wide Customer Success Program designed to enable customers to derive maximum value from their relationship with Kaseya and to help them drive maximum revenue growth and profitability from their Kaseya product investments. The program included an initial investment by Kaseya of over $6M and has received an overwhelmingly positive response.

  Over the past several months, the company’s executive team has met with more than 300 customers, gathering a vast amount of valuable feedback on the changes made thus far and learning what customers want to see from Kaseya in the future.

  The team has also revised and relaunched the company’s former customer advisory group, rebranding it as Kaseya’s Customer Success Council. This group comprised of Kaseya customers gives participant members face-to-face communication with Kaseya executives in order to effectively represent customer wants and needs. The most recent US Customer Success Council was held in Miami in November and an EMEA version of the council will be held in Amsterdam in January of 2016.

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Editorial Staff.

As platforms and processes evolve, IT management has a responsibility to distil user preferences upwards and build an IT stack that is capable of reflecting the way people want to work on the devices that people want to work with. At the same time, corporate users are becoming more tech-savvy and many non-technical workers are even becoming aware of the way cloud computing works.

Once people know more about the back-end elements of IT, it seems reasonable that they will want to do more with the front end on their own devices. Ten years ago, businesspeople didn’t use the term ‘application’ in the same way that they do nowadays – largely thanks to the popularisation of the term ‘app’ which was first used to describe software on tablets and smartphones…

Avanan, the one-click cloud security company, has announced a partnership with Check Point Software Technologies, the largest pure-play security vendor globally, to drive change in enterprise-level cloud app protection. Avanan provides leading security solutions for the cloud, and with this partnership, will now offer cloud-based versions of Check Point’s data protection solutions for malware, data loss and encryption to safeguard Office 365, Box, Google Apps, Salesforce and other enterprise SaaS applications.

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Just months after announcing plans to merge its cloud business with EMC’s Virtustream, VMware said today that it is backing out of the deal. VMware informed investors via a regulatory filing that it will no longer participate in the formation of a Virtustream Cloud Services Business unit, but did not say why.

The move comes as EMC announced over the weekend that is moving forward with plans to be acquired by Dell for $67 billion, having not received any better offers since the record deal was revealed in October. The history between VMware and Virtustream has been murky. EMC, which owns a majority stake in VMware, announced in May that it was buying Virtustream for $1.2 billion…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudyn, the leading provider of hybrid, multi-cloud monitoring and optimization solutions, announced today that it has closed a Series B round of financing in the amount of $11 million. The round was led by Carmel Ventures, a member of the Viola Group, with participation of previous investors, Titanium Investments and RDSeed [a collaboration of Rafael and Elron Electronics (ELRNF)]. The company also announced that Ronen Nir, General Partner at Carmel, will join its Board of Directors.

Cloudyn has tripled its revenue for three consecutive years in addition to doubling personnel. The company’s single pane of glass approach provides clarity and actionable insights for optimal cloud management. Currently monitoring more than 200,000 virtual machines and over 12,000 concurrent applications, Cloudyn will use the proceeds to further its market share and brand, as well as continue advancing first-to-market solutions to ensure customer delight…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Canadian Web Hosting, Canada’s leading web hosting and infrastructure company, announced today that it has acquired datacenter and dedicated server provider eSecureData. eSecureData is based in Vancouver, BC and targets Canadian businesses and IT professionals who are looking for premium datacenter colocation facilities, Canadian dedicated servers, and Canadian Cloud Hosting.

eSecureData is a long standing Canadian Infrastructure as a Service provider that has been delivering managed hosting, dedicated servers, colocation and domains to thousands of customers across Canada since 2007. The company is based in Coquitlam, BC and will be merging with Canadian’s Web Hosting’s industry-best staff and expanding its already impressive datacenter operations…

Cloud Cruiser, a leading provider of software solutions for hybrid cloud analytics, today announced the results of a Dimensional Research survey which found that public cloud usage is growing, specifically in use for business applications.  Nevertheless, while those surveyed have found growing trust in running critical applications in the public cloud, many organizations continue to be "left in the dark" when it comes to providing details on cloud costs and consumption.

According to the survey findings of nearly 350 IT professionals who attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent shows in 2014 and 2015, 85 percent of respondents believe it is valuable to share cloud consumption metrics with the business. Unfortunately, 42 percent continue to find it difficult to properly allocate public cloud usage and costs.