xMatters, inc., a leader in communication-enabled business processes, has received accreditation from the Crown Commercial Service to trade on G-Cloud 7 in the UK’s Digital Marketplace. It can be found under the ‘Software As A Service’ Lot in the procurement framework, which went live on 23 November.

Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, today announced it has acquired Thomas Duryea Consulting, a leader in designing, building and deploying data centre, data management, enterprise information systems, systems management and cloud environments for mid-sized and large enterprises.

With an annual turnover of approximately US$50 million Thomas Duryea employs 125 staff in its data centre and mature cloud services business, with capabilities across EMC, Dell, NetApp, VMware and Microsoft.

StrongBox provides protected nearline and archive storage for unstructured data. By combining flash, disk, and LTFS tape, StrongBox helps businesses protect data on-site, off-site, or in the cloud. StrongBox VM provides all the same features as the original StrongBox and can be deployed in less than an hour using a company’s existing VMWare ESXi servers. This allows customers to quickly create file and object-based shared storage for local and distributed architectures without the requirement of dedicated hardware.

Array Networks Inc., a global leader in application delivery networking, announces today the immediate availability of its vAPV virtual application delivery controller on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

As virtualization and public, private and hybrid clouds continue to expand their footprints within the business landscape, businesses are finding an increased need for solutions that allow applications to scale in the face of a rapidly increasing, and demanding, user base. By proxying and intelligently load balancing traffic across multiple virtual servers, Array’s vAPV virtual ADCs give customers deploying on Microsoft Azure the ability to significantly enhance the availability, performance and security of cloud-based services.

DataCore Software, a leader in Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions, today announced that it has signed Velocity Tech Solutions as a new value-added reseller (VAR) serving the United States. Velocity Tech Solutions primarily resells server and storage hardware offerings from HP and Dell, including EqualLogic.

TARGIT, the company behind the market-leading business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform, TARGIT Decision Suite, today announced availability of its first offering of Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines to allow access to advanced data discovery tools, simple self-service business analytics, comprehensive reporting, and stunning dashboards in the cloud via Azure.

TARGIT’s offering for Azure Virtual Machines delivers TARGIT Decision Suite as a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) software model. This provides the same licensing model as running TARGIT on-premises, with necessary infrastructure licensed as Pay As You Go.

"5nine wants to take full advantage of break-through hyperconverged infrastructure platforms to deliver only the most innovative solutions to our customers," said Symon Perriman, VP of Business Development at 5nine Software. "With Nutanix being a leader among hyperconverged system vendors, this partnership is an important step for both companies, showing our commitment to developing and securing the Microsoft cloud solutions running on Nutanix."

Bat Blue’s patented Network Feature Virtualization (NFV) technology uniquely empowers Cloud/Sec to be both agile and adaptive, with the ability to add features and functions on-demand. These are key virtues for security given today’s threats and business demand for distributed technologies.

Zynstra, the pioneer in enterprise-class hybrid IT for the SMB, today unveiled its new range of cloud managed server appliance products. Using award winning virtualization and cloud management technology, Zynstra’s products are designed for organizations who want a secure, reliable IT infrastructure, without prohibitive management costs. Available immediately, Zynstra’s new product line-up delivers advanced, cloud managed, cloud integrated, secure and reliable IT that can translate to TCO savings of up to 60%. Now, organizations with single or multiple sites can enjoy hyperconverged server technology delivered ‘as a service’ and managed from the cloud, making possible new levels of efficiency in buying, running and maintaining critical on-site IT.

“We wanted to control our costs and deliver a consistent IT experience across our international sites.” said Tim Newton, Information Technology and Systems Manager at Tristel. “The Zynstra solution allows us to deliver the IT our branches need, with centralized control.”

Grazed from SeekingAlpha. Author: Randall Radic.

Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), a major player in the database software arena, recently decided to gird up its loins and muscle its way into cloud computing. Oracle calls its venture Elastic Computing because, ostensibly, it will offer efficient infrastructure (IaaS) capable of handling anything an enterprise might want to build or run. Translation: Oracle is throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services for supremacy.

The problem is that Oracle is late to the party. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) arrived ahead of Oracle. And Amazon is the acknowledged heavyweight champion in cloud computing. Amazon got to the party early and already dominates Infrastructure-as-a-Cloud. In other words, Oracle’s late arrival to a very competitive field may prove difficult…