Category: News

Today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) announced that it is investing up to $15 million in new ecosystem sales collaboration and continued technology integration with Microsoft Corp. to accelerate the adoption of enterprise cloud deployments.

The NetApp Partner Program complements existing offerings in the Microsoft Cloud OS Accelerate program, which provides funds to help customers offset the services cost of deploying Microsoft private and hybrid cloud solutions, accelerates deals, and drives competitive wins. The NetApp Partner Program includes a range of offerings, such as sales enablement, training, and incentives for NetApp reselling partners who are assisting customers with their cloud transition. Through the combination of NetApp^® storage, data management, and converged infrastructure solutions with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012, customers can reduce costs, increase agility, and improve efficiency.

Box today announced new product advancements that transform the way customers collaborate and access business critical content in the cloud. Box Embed, a robust HTML5 framework that makes it easy to embed the entire Box experience anywhere people work, is now supported in Salesforce, the industry’s #1 CRM platform.

"Customer companies turn to the AppExchange as the world’s leading business apps marketplace to stay innovative and transform the way their organizations connect with customers, partners and employees," said Ron Huddleston, senior vice president, ISV and Channel, salesforce.com. "As a part of our partner ecosystem, Box is leveraging the power of the Salesforce Platform to help customers be more connected, collaborative and productive."

Idera, a leading provider of application and server management solutions, announced today the acquisition of CopperEgg, a provider of cloud monitoring for applications, websites, and servers. This acquisition expands the company’s application performance management offerings.

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud vendor, Giva, today announced a significant new standalone cloud product release for ITIL change management for Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) compliance for IT service management.

With all of the demands imposed by SOX compliance and other industry specific compliance policies such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), there is a very high demand for IT change management software in the cloud. Giva is the only vendor that provides standalone cloud IT change management software. Many vendors provide IT change management software, but they are highly integrated with IT service desk incident and problem management modules. The problem is that many organizations already have such systems in place and only need the functionality of IT change management. Also, these integrated systems are expensive, difficult to customize and very complex to use…

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced a joint initiative with Microsoft and select channel and systems integrator partners to transform the data center and accelerate hybrid and private cloud adoption by offering substantial incentives for customers who deploy new Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Select for Microsoft Private Cloud. This new program runs from July 1, 2013 to July 1, 2014, and aligns with Microsoft’s Cloud OS Accelerate program, which provides funds to help customers offset the services cost of deploying Microsoft private and hybrid cloud solutions, accelerates deals, and helps drive competitive wins.

As announced earlier this year at MMS 2013, Hitachi UCP Select for Microsoft Private Cloud solutions have been validated for Microsoft’s Private Cloud Fast Track architecture, version 3. The Hitachi converged infrastructure for Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track, version 3, ships pre-configured from Hitachi distribution centers and is architected for Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 SP1 and the associated monitoring packs – PowerShell cmdlets (pronounced “command-lets”) and Orchestration integrations. The Hitachi converged infrastructure combines Hitachi compute and Hitachi storage with industry-leading virtualization capabilities and best-of-breed networking.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

At its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2013 here, Microsoft announced a series of new programs and services designed to help its partners and customers embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing and big data.

Both onstage during a keynote address and in a blog post, Satya Nadella, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft described the new programs, including Cloud OS Accelerate, which is a program in which Microsoft and key partners such as Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and Dell will invest more than $100 million to help put thousands of new private and hybrid cloud solutions into the hands of customers, Nadella said…

"As enterprise organizations deploy applications in more complicated Hybrid environments, tracking transactions across the data center and the cloud is critical to maintaining appropriate performance and availability levels," said Chris Neal, BlueStripe CEO and co-founder. "BlueStripe FactFinder breaks through the barriers between the systems operating in the on-site data center and those running in an Azure cloud, whether Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service."

Parallels, a leading hosting and cloud services enablement provider, today unveiled support for a Microsoft Azure Pack for Hosting Providers and updates to a collection of cloud service delivery solutions for Microsoft partners at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. The solution, developed in collaboration with Microsoft’s server and tools business group, is in addition to the new support of Microsoft Azure Pack for Hosting. Parallels has also updated its support for Microsoft Lync 2013 Hosting Pack, Microsoft Exchange 2013 and Microsoft Office 365. The new product and updated features help make Parallels, a Microsoft Global ISV and Gold Certified Partner, a leading company in enabling Microsoft Cloud solutions via cloud distribution channels.

To help address small and medium businesses’ growing need for robust cloud solutions, Parallels has been collaborating with Microsoft since 2007 to enable the delivery of cloud services for telecom companies, domain hosting providers, distributors, managed service providers and VARs. This has helped Parallels develop services with value-added support to help its service provider partners drive more revenue faster by offering essential solutions for specific SMB workloads. These solutions include:

Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company, today announced that IT industry veteran Rick Jackson has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Jackson will lead Rackspace’s global marketing strategy and execution as the company works to strengthen its leadership position around hybrid cloud.

Jackson officially joined Rackspace on July 1 and today brings with him over 25 years of IT industry experience. Most recently, Jackson served as CMO at VMware, where he was responsible for leading the company’s global marketing strategy since early 2009.