VMware Acquires IT Benchmarking Firm, Launches Cloud Advisory Services
VMware on Monday unveiled Accelerate Advisory Services, a set of IT benchmarking services designed to help CIOs get the most out of the investments they’re making in virtualization and cloud computing.
In addition to in-house expertise, Accelerate Advisory Services include technology from VMware’s recent acquisition of assets from Info Tech Health Check, a Lynchburg, Va.-based IT analytics vendor. That deal, details of which weren’t disclosed, brought in some 3,500 additional IT performance metrics spanning 20 industries and four geographical regions, according to VMware.
iTHC’s background lies in providing services to Department Of Defense and government agencies, and its team of analysts — who average more than 18 years of experience — provide analysis of costs, staffing, processes, technologies, outsourcing and best practices…
Greenpeace: How Clean (And Green) Is Your Cloud?
Greenpeace released its latest report today asking, "How clean is your cloud?"
The annual report examines the server farms built by the largest Internet companies — including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo — and ranks them according to how efficient their cloud facilities are, and where they get their electricity.
Yahoo — which has struggled to please investors in recent years — was the only major Internet company in the study to get most of its electricity from renewable or clean energy sources, according to the report…
TravelSky Chooses Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution 2.1 to Meet Growing Transaction Volumes for China’s Travel Agencies
Unisys Corporation today announced that TravelSky, the leading provider of information technology solutions for China’s air travel and tourism industry, has renewed its services and technology relationship with Unisys China to further its cloud computing strategy. As a result, TravelSky will implement release 2.1 of the Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution.
The Unisys cloud solution will help TravelSky meet demand spikes in its transaction loads driven by China’s growing aviation sector. TravelSky operates the reservations and departure control systems used by China’s air carriers, and also maintains the global distribution system for China’s travel agencies.
The three-year renewal, signed in December 2011, covers the second phase of a private cloud computing strategy that began in 2010. The contract includes software, services, and provisioning and maintenance for four Unisys ES7000 Model 7600R G3 Enterprise Servers…
Migration to the Cloud: Evolution Without Confusion
The rapid rise of cloud computing has been driven by the benefits it delivers: huge cost savings with low initial investment, ease of adoption, operational efficiency, elasticity and scalability, on-demand resources, and the use of equipment that is largely abstracted from the user and enterprise.
Of course, these cloud computing benefits all come with an array of new challenges and decisions. That’s partly because cloud products and services are being introduced in increasingly varied forms as public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. They also deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions, and come with emerging licensing, pricing and delivery models that raise budgeting, security, compliance and governance implications…
Collaboration in the cloud via Google Apps
Google Apps, which first came on the market in 2006, offers a cloud computing platform devoted entirely to businesses. Google Apps for Business is an ideal cloud network for businesses of all sizes because it guarantees reliability with a 99.9 percent uptime, security with SAS 70 Type II audit, and premier communication and collaboration applications.
All of the features that come standard with Google Apps for Business, like Gmail, Google Documents, and Google Sites, are designed to improve the way your employees communicate with one another and to make working together simpler and more enjoyable. While a simple Google Apps migration to move your business to the Google cloud will provide your employees with these tools, there are steps you can take in order to make sure your business is taking as much advantage of them as possible…
Cloud Office and Collaboration Productivity Applications Market
Worldwide markets are poised to achieve steady growth as mobile devices become the standard for client computing. Cloud office productivity suites feature systems that are online and intuitive to use. They are part of social networking; they represent personalized use of computing. People can start a project without help from anyone, can ask for help if they need it, and can produce a result, a document, analysis, or presentation. Productivity software is becoming easier to use, increasingly inclusive of media, pictures, and video materials.
Collaboration is a big part of cloud based productivity applications. On the cloud, people can get access to integrated information data sources. People are increasingly bringing their own devices to work. Wireless devices promise to take over everything. People can leverage what they know to communicate to a group. Team collaboration changes everything. As a sales manager builds a power point presentation that is customized to a particular customer, he or she may wish to adapt content used by a different member of the team for a different client. The manager may need the slides to be changed by a third team member who specializes in design. In this manner, cloud connectivity is becoming adopted and proving its usefulness…
How cloud storage could catch up with big data
Cloud computing has managed to make the world’s already colossal appetite for data storage even more voracious.
Last year, IDC, an IT market research firm, cited public cloud-based service providers, from Amazon Web Services to YouTube, as the most significant drivers of storage consumption in the past three years. The government sector contributes as well: IDC noted that the private clouds of government and research sites compare in scope and complexity to their public cloud counterparts.
The so-called big data problem has surfaced in the past two years to rank among the primary IT challenges. Technologies such as the Apache Hadoop distributed computing framework and NoSQL databases have emerged to take on the challenge of very large — and unwieldy — datasets…
Mobile and Cloud Computing Converge in the Enterprise
As most mobile computing applications are dependent on services in the cloud, it’s only natural that the applications running across these platforms would start to become almost indistinguishable.
That’s exactly the goal that the folks at Appcelerator, providers of the Titanium integrated development environment (IDE) for building mobile computing applications, have in mind with the launch of Appcelerator Cloud Services, which developers using a new release of the Titanium IDE can now use to host run-time instances of their applications…
Cloud Sprawl Has Midsize Businesses Looking for New Management Tools
The IT landscape is currently dominated by a single albeit misunderstood revolutionary force–cloud computing. Experts agree that cloud solutions are the likely future of the market and that the function of IT professionals will be altered at a fundamental level and their role in crucial business decisions increased as cloud technology becomes more robust. But along with the potential for significant games comes the specter of what is known as "cloud sprawl"–unrestrained growth of a public or private cloud without clear direction or control by the company that owns the data. Now, midsized businesses are looking for ways to stay in charge without sacrificing the agility of cloud solutions.
On the Way Up
According to a recent Techworld article, the number of enterprise and midmarket companies using public cloud infrastructe-as-a-service (IaaS)–to cite just one example of cloud adoption–is on the rise. In a 2011 survey, only 17 percent of respondents said that they were using these services, but that number has now jumped to 27 percent. Twenty-four percent of those asked said they had plans to implement a cloud solution at some point during 2012, but the numbers aren’t all on the upside; while Gartner’s Lydia Leong says, "Public cloud IaaS is rapidly becoming an accepted technology approach to doing business," 28 percent of midsized and enterprise businesses have no plans to head skyward just yet…
Notion Capital raises $100 million for Euro cloud companies
London’s Notion Capital just raised a $100m new fund focused on cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) startups in Europe. The fund is expected to reach $150 million by the time it closes in the next few months.
Investments from Notion’s previous fund included on-demand business services supplier Star and “Skype for invoicing” Tradeshift, which also received seed funding from Paypal. Tradeshift is already valued at $137 million after 2 years in business. A typical investment single investment from the new fund will be in the $1-3 million range, but the fund is prepared to put up to $15 million into a single company over the course of several rounds…