A Round of Applause for Adobe’s Creative Cloud
Grazed from PCMag. Author: John C. Dvorak.
Anyone who reads me regularly knows that I am not a huge fan of cloud computing and its implications. I’m even less enamored by the idea of paying a monthly fee to use my word processor.
That said, I must admit that Adobe may have found the sweet spot. I actually like what the company is doing with its new Creative Cloud. Less cloud computing than other architectures, it’s designed to fast-track people into the newest products rather than having them spend about the same amount of money to ride the Adobe roller coaster.
Ride the Adobe roller coaster? It’s when you buy Adobe Creative Suite 2, skip CS3, and get CS4. Or, skip CS4 also and spring for CS5. Now, you have so many new features that you wind up behind the curve. With Creative Cloud, for $49.99 a month, you’re always up-to-date. The system was unveiled in April and since then, new components have been added. Everything is included in the $2,599 master collection, plus free websites and other cloud-only services including Muse, a fascinating Web development tool…
Rackspace has released its Private Cloud software distribution as a free, installable ISO file. Enterprises can sign up for commercial support for a starting fee of $2,500 and a monthly charge of $100 per node. Private Cloud includes Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server operating system; a KVM hypervisor; Opscode Chef, which automates the installation; and OpenStack Essex’s Compute, Image Service, Identity Service and Dashboard modules. The only thing missing is OpenStack Storage, which Rackspace says will be available in the next release.
Pure Storage netted $40 million in Series D funding and will use it to build out European operations and staff up its sales, marketing and engineering teams. The new round, led by Index Ventures with contributions from current backers Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, brings total capital raised to a healthy $95 million.
Callidus Software Inc. (NASDAQ: CALD), the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that it won three Stevie® awards in the 2012 International Business Awards (IBAs). CallidusCloud® was awarded Gold in the ‘Computer Software’ category, Silver in the ‘Company of the Year — Computer Software’ category and another Gold for its Sales Effectiveness Suite in the ‘Best New Product or Service of the Year’ category.
Vox Telecom’s Cloud Server Dashboard public cloud service has achieved VMware vCloud Powered status, a move that will allow the company’s customers to enjoy all the advantages of third party cloud services, while maintaining full control over their IT environments.
Fresh on the heels of a $10.7 million venture capital round, startup PLUMgrid is staffing up, naming a long-time networking technologist Lele Nardin as VP of engineering. Nardin most recently was SVP of engineering at Ericsson Silicon Valley and before that spent 15 years at Cisco where, at various times, he led development of Cisco’s popular 7200 router and the Cisco PXF and Quantum Flow processors. Most recently he headed the company’s IOS software organization.
HP has announced virtualization solutions aimed at enhancing the movement of virtual machines (VMs) and data in cloud environments. One of them, the HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance (VSA) is an enhanced and rebranded version of an old LeftHand product. The others — HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect and HP Multitenant Device Context, are important firmware upgrades to HP’s FlexFabric core 12500 data center switch.
Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., has been Assigned a patent (8,244,559) developed by four co-inventors for a "cloud computing resource broker." The co-inventors are Eric J. Horvitz, Kirkland, Wash., Harold L. Cochrane, Redmond, Wash., Rene A. Vega, Kirkland, Wash., and Angel S. Calvo, Seattle.
Colo5, LLC, a leading independent data center operator headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, announced it is now providing cloud computing services.