Category: News

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today Bitium announced a $2.4M seed round for the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) operating system. The round was led by Mike Hirshland of Resolute VC and features an all-star list of investors including Alex Bard (Desk.com); Michael Lazerow (Buddy Media); former SVP of Strategy for Microsoft, Hank Vigil; Rob Glaser (Real Networks); seasoned SaaS entrepreneurs Hiten Shah (KISSmetrics) and Sean Ellis (Qualaroo); and Southern California funds Double M Partners, Social Leverage and Karlin Ventures.

In today’s era of cloud computing, software is developed for Web browsers instead of desktops. SaaS apps exist in independent silos and don’t function together like they do in Microsoft Windows or Mac OSX. Furthermore, employee adoption of Web apps is on the rise and a challenge for companies to manage. Consider the statistics; according to Gartner Research, worldwide SaaS revenue will reach $22.1 billion by 2015…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ActiveState(R), whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud, today announced it has been named a Gartner Research "Cool Vendor in PaaS" for 2013. In its "Cools Vendors in PaaS, 2013" report released yesterday, the global research firm profiles ActiveState and its flagship cloud middleware technology Stackato(R), the private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for the agile enterprise.

"It’s great to be recognized as a cool vendor in PaaS," says ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland. "This acknowledgement validates our approach, and highlights just some of Stackato’s innovative features. But what’s really cool is how enterprise customers like ExactTarget, Mozilla, and HP use Stackato to transform cloud deployment to get products to market faster, manage applications more securely, and save money in the process."…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Midokura, a global startup focused on network virtualization, today announced the general availability of MidoNet. MidoNet virtualizes the network stack for cloud platforms, such as OpenStack. First introduced last Fall to the U.S. market, this solution has been in development for three years. MidoNet is a distributed, decentralized, multi-layer software-defined virtual network solution specifically designed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Midokura’s approach not only adds automation that significantly reduces the human cost (OPEX) of managing the network, but also impacts the overall economics of cloud computing (CAPEX) by simplifying network requirements.

"We are excited to disrupt the market and offer the industry general access to our MidoNet network virtualization technology," said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, co-founder and CEO of Midokura. "Unlike other solutions out there, MidoNet pushes intelligence to the edge of the network, as it takes an overlay-based approach to network virtualization and sits on top of any IP-connected network. Given this, MidoNet makes it easier for enterprises to build fully featured, secure and scalable clouds."…

Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Nichole Johnson.

The Defense Information Systems Agency is one step closer to standing up cloud broker services for the Defense Department. As DoD’s cloud broker, DISA will manage the use, performance and delivery of cloud services and negotiate contracts between cloud service providers and DoD consumers.

DISA announced Tuesday that it has developed a process for gathering and assessing DoD’s cloud computing requirements, evaluating vendors’ cloud offerings against contract requirements and has created a catalog for cloud services. In a June 2012 memo, DoD Chief Information Officer Teri Takai said all DoD components must acquire government or industry-provided cloud services using DISA, or obtain a waiver…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

The OpenStack Summit is "going enterprise" according to the opening keynote session that featured cloud user case studies from Comcast, Bloomberg, Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and Hubspot. Rackspace (NYSE:RAX) Senior VP Jim Curry said this is "the year of the user" for OpenStack. Next up is a Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) keynote. The overall big theme: OpenStack is more than a developer movement; it’s also ready to help enterprises and cloud services providers (CSPs) that want to make money, according to keynote speakers. Here’s a keynote recap.

Jonathan Bryce, leader of the OpenStack Foundation

• Foundation started in Sept. 2012
• The foundation also launched the Gnome Outreach Program for Women, which has helped women to get involved with OpenStack
• The foundation will have an open house on Thursday to solicit more ideas on where the foundation can go next.
• "Six months ago we had a peaceful transition of power over to the foundation."…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Rahul Manekari.

The latest news in the cloud computing sector comes from none other than Microsoft. It has been reported that Microsoft has tied up with Cloud Cruiser, maker of the chargeback and billing analytic system, to give Windows Server 2012 and the System Center Management system its own billing and chargeback capabilities which will enable it to be used on Microsoft Azure’s Cloud services.

This will enable enterprises and hosting service providers to gain greater cost efficiencies by delivering holistic cost visibility, cost analytics, chargeback, and billing across Microsoft hybrid cloud environments…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Matthew Finnie.

The promise of cloud computing as a way to reduce costs, manage expansion and make the creation of new services easier is very real, but we’re still in the early days of adoption. Organisations and governments are still largely digesting what they’ve heard, sifting through the benefits, and weighing up the “fear, uncertainty and doubt” concerning its impact on businesses and services.

What is true and very real is the impact it’s having on how services are being created and how seriously corporate IT is taking it. For those wanting to build the next Facebook it’s a no-brainer. Pinterest, the fanatically followed online pin board is the fastest growing site in history, (17m users in just 9 months), and to date it’s pure cloud…

Grazed from CentriLogic. Author: PR Announcement.

CentriLogic, a trusted provider of international hybrid hosting and data center solutions, today announced its enhanced International multi-zone Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud offering. The improved cloud service provides organizations with elastic and on-demand computing infrastructure featuring multiple cross-border availability zones provisioned from CentriLogic’s owned and operated data centers in Canada and the United States.

The new cloud offering is an evolution of CentriLogic’s Canadian-based distributed cloud computing service that was launched in early 2010. CentriLogic’s new International IaaS cloud will support organizations with enterprise-class workloads while also addressing cross-border regulatory and compliance concerns arising from legislation including PIPEDA and the US Patriot Act…

CopperEgg Corp., a leading cloud monitoring and analytics company, today announced a new Cloud Sizing Tool that accurately benchmarks enterprise and cloud servers to help customers choose the proper Amazon EC2 instance types, pricing, and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) configurations from over 200 possible Amazon Web Services (AWS) combinations. Businesses can save money and ensure application performance by using the Cloud Sizing Tool to rightsize instances during cloud migrations, resize existing EC2 instances, and avoid over- or under-provisioned cloud resources. CopperEgg will demonstrate the Cloud Sizing Tool at the AWS Summit 2013 in New York City on April 18 and at the Opscode #ChefConf 2013 in San Francisco.

“The cloud sizing report gives us a better way to measure server usage,” said Jonathan Marbutt, Vice President of WayCool Software. “By changing cloud providers and switching to AWS, we were able to reduce cost by at least 30 percent, plus gain more powerful servers in the process. Our app response time has also improved.”

Grazed from FierceTelecom. Author: Sean Buckley.

AT&T and Verizon, according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report on managed hosting providers in North America, have established themselves as key players in the segment. Having built a broad presence in the U.S. and international markets with its set of private IaaS and colocation services, AT&T provides cloud and managed services out of 23 data centers in North America in addition to facilities in Europe and Asia.

The telco’s depth and experience in providing managed hosting services continues to be a selling point for its large multinational corporation (MNC) customers that have complex enterprise application and hosting needs. "AT&T is able to use its network as a differentiator for use cases where network access is a heavily weighted criterion, or where end-to-end service management with SLAs is required," Gartner wrote…