A New Realism Emerges as Enterprises Move to Cloud
Grazed from Datamation. Author: Jeffrey Kaplan.
Even as enterprise adoption of cloud-based alternatives accelerates, IT and business executives are learning that fully capitalizing on these new ‘on-demand’ resources entails extensive systems integration, staff training and process reengineering. Despite these obstacles, my travels have confirmed that enterprises of all sizes across nearly every industry are moving quickly to take advantage of cloud services to achieve their corporate objectives.
In fact, in most cases they are not expecting to reduce their operating costs by adopting cloud services. They are hoping instead to improve the responsiveness of their business operations, so they can be more agile and competitive. They remain committed to their ‘cloud first’ initiatives because they are convinced that the end results justify a long, multi-stage migration process…
Dell is tying its fortunes in the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market to Citrix with initiatives to support the latter’s XenDesktop 7 under the DVS Enterprise banner. It is launching three deployments to tie in its hardware with the management platform, saying that they can support mobile working and the use of cloud computing.
Evolve IP, The Cloud Services Company, today announced that it has been listed on the Cloud Security Alliance’s (CSA) Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR). As an official STAR member, Evolve IP customers will know that in addition to receiving high availability, mission critical cloud computing services on an award-winning, unified platform they will also gain the highest levels of transparency and controls regarding data security, confidentiality, and integrity available.
Joyent president CEO Henry Wasik keeps a recent news story on the wall of his office "to remind the staff of what we’re up against." The headline reads, "Amazon to Cloud Rivals: Try To Catch Us." Joyent is determined to catch Amazon. Wasik said the Joyent cloud was initially equipped with a basic set of 10 virtual server selections. On Thursday, the company introduced 13 instance types that closely align with Amazon’s most popular virtual server types, from AWS Micro up to Standard Extra Large and Quadruple I/O Extra Large.
Barracuda Networks is continuing the expansion of its cloud data storage initiatives. This time, the company has acquired mobile signing and document storage platform provider SignNow, which recently grew to more than 1 million users and represents more than 100,000 small businesses and half of the Fortune 500. It’s an interesting acquisition, as there’s a bit of a niche here. It may very well be a big niche, but it’s far from a traditional cloud storage offering. According to Barracuda, this acquisition brings significant expansion and expertise that the security and storage vendor will use to boost its own cloud data storage growth.
German business software maker SAP said it was revamping its management to sharpen its focus on cloud computing as demand for the service which saves clients money grows. SAP and rivals such as IBM and OracleBSE -2.65 % are dashing to meet surging demand for cloud computing, which allows clients to ditch bulky and costly servers for network-based software and storage in remote data centres.
Converge Enterprise is a cloud based CRM designed to offer comprehensive complete business solution to small and medium size businesses through simple features and intuitive navigation. It offers a complete set of features including lead management, campaign management, intelligent marketing solutions, sales force automation, customer intelligence and in-depth analytics. Converge offers integration with third party Email services, MS Office, Outlook and Google Apps to help SMBs manage all their business activities from a single platform.
Midmarket backup solutions provider STORServer has released version 5.0 of its Virtual Machine Backup (VMB) software, featuring IBM (IBM) Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments (TSM) and designed to protect VMware (VMW) vSphere backup machines.