Category: News

Grazed from SailPoint. Author: PR Announcement.

SailPoint AccessIQ provides single sign-on (SSO) for internal Web applications, including company portals, custom Web applications, collaboration tools like SharePoint, and enterprise applications like SAP and Oracle E-Business suite. Additionally, SailPoint announced the immediate availability of the SailPoint AccessIQ mobile app for iOS and Android devices, providing today’s mobile workforce with secure and greatly simplified access to cloud and Web applications from mobile devices.

With these new capabilities, AccessIQ is the industry’s only solution that can provide business users with a single SSO solution spanning cloud and on-premises Web applications, as well as mobile devices, while enforcing appropriate levels of security policy and controls…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud is now a $1 billion business, according to the software giant’s Q3 2013 earnings statement. For Microsoft, that milestone proves Office 365’s momentum is accelerating. And that’s also a big win for Channel Chief Jon Roskill, who wants partners to back the suite. But there’s more work to be done when it comes to the Office 365 channel partner program. Here’s why. First, the progress. According to Microsoft’s earnings call with analysts today, Office 365 has:

• a $1 billion annual revenue run rate;
• strong increase in net seat adds; up 5 times;
• 1 in 4 enterprise customers now have cloud seats with Microsoft;
• over 75 of Office 465 enterprise seats are running premium (i.e, higher-priced) versions; and
• recent wins include City of Chicago and the International Federation of Red Cross.
• Office 365 Progress and Partner Challenges…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Following Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) announcement of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, RightScale isn’t missing a beat. The cloud management solutions provider is adding Azure to its list of supported cloud platforms. RightScale is making quite the to-do about its Azure support, as well, with a program it’s calling "Get Your App to Azure" (catchy, ain’t it?). With the new program, RightScale is going to help Azure customers accelerate application development on the Microsoft cloud platform with its multicloud management platform.

"RightScale has the experience and the technology to get companies up and running quickly on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, in a prepared statement. "Enterprises want IaaS choice. RightScale enables our customers to provision, configure, and automate individual servers or entire deployments on Windows Azure in minutes."…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Google earlier this month made a significant cloud announcement, opening up its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to customers and removing the beta tag from the service. One catch is that customers who sign up for the service need to buy a "gold-level" support package — which costs $400 per month. But while it may cost a pretty penny to get access to the same hardware that Google uses to power the world’s most popular search engine, it’s at least no longer an invite-only beta service.

Some say that Google is one of the companies that could give Amazon Web Services — seen by many as the market-leading IaaS provider — its biggest competition. There are a variety of opinions on that topic, though. Others believe Azure — the cloud platform Microsoft recently made generally available — could be a fierce competitor to AWS as well. Network World recently sat down with the Brian Goldfarb, the marketing executive in charge of Google’s cloud platform, to get the skinny on the company’s latest plans…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Patrick Burke.

Hewlett-Packard doesn’t shy away from taking a few cheap shots every now and again, and its latest line of servers, called Moonshot, proves it. HP has introduced a new line of servers that could be considered a major game changer in terms of power consumption and the cloud.

HP’s new servers consume 89 percent less power and cost 77 percent less to purchase than comparable HP servers. The new line of servers, called Moonshoot, could help CIOs uncover greater savings from cloud computing, according to an article on PCMag.com…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Meredith Courtemanche.

Savvis, a data center colocation and cloud computing company, launched its enterprise cloud services on VMware virtualization tools and a middleware solution that Savvis developed in-house. In 2012, Savvis switched to vCloud Director, VMware’s cloud middleware.

Jonathan King, VP of cloud solutions at Town & Country, Mo.-based Savvis, a CenturyLink company, describes what vCloud Director added to their cloud capabilities, how enterprises use cloud — including AWS — and what the next step is after enterprises adopt cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

HP’s cloud computing efforts have been the subject of much curiosity — not always in a good way — over the past year, but Hewlett-Packard’s top cloud guy Saar Gillai said the company is putting confusion and concern about its long-term future behind it. “Last year was an interesting one, but in the last six months since, it’s all been positive news,” Gillai said in an interview on Wednesday at the OpenStack Summit.

During that timeframe HP brought its public cloud online and the compute, block store and object store subsystems are all broadly available. This week, it announced new “cloud bursting” capabilities for HP CloudSystem and that it had integrated its 3Par fibre-channel storage with OpenStack…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

Someone at my seminar in Los Angeles last month asked about challenges that the cloud poses for software licensing. That’s such a broad and complex topic that it could warrant an entire seminar of its own. But this column can at least provide an overview of the issues.

The cloud delivery models that present the most software-licensing challenges are infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Software as a service (SaaS) is less likely to cause problems because, as the name suggests, the software is part of the cloud provider’s services. With IaaS and PaaS, though, the customer has shared control over what is run in the cloud environment, including third-party software. In the case of IaaS, the customer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but may have control over operating systems and deployed applications. With PaaS, while the customer typically doesn’t have control over the operating system, it may have control over the deployed applications…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stephanie Mann.

Mobile apps have already taken hold of the enterprise, and experts say their grip is only getting stronger. Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. reported that by 2017, 25% of enterprises will have an enterprise app store. By 2014, Apple will be as accepted by enterprise IT as Microsoft is today, the group added. Couple this with the rapid rise of Software as a Service (SaaS), and you see a striking new trend: more enterprises developing their own mobile apps for SaaS.

"What we’re seeing is that [enterprise software] vendors are finally catching up to really enable enterprises to develop their own mobile apps for SaaS," said Robert DeSisto, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "When you look at the CRM [customer relationship management] stuff, there’s no question that’s where it’s going — fast. Even Salesforce.com is now aggressively trying to meet the needs of the enterprise to build mobile apps."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jessica Scarpati.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers love to crow about how many development languages they support or how feature-rich their platforms are, yet customers have other priorities in mind when deciding which PaaS provider to use. Businesses select their current PaaS providers primarily for their various ecosystems of partners, developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) that build commercial applications on top of their platforms, according to a new TechTarget survey.

"Customers are saying now, ‘I’m not just looking at Salesforce as an app provider, but I’m also looking at them as a platform provider, and I want to use their whole ecosystem.," said Adam Selligman, vice president of developer and partner relations at Salesforce.com, whose PaaS portfolio includes Force.com and Heroku…