Cloud turning outsourcing ‘upside down’
Rolf Jester, Gartner’s Distinguished Analyst and Asia-Pacific vice president for IT services, pointed out that cloud is not yet a major threat to outsourcing because deals that have been struck or are being negotiated, will remain valid for five to 10 years and are delivering value to businesses.
Certeon Creates New Partner Program
Burlington, Mass.-based Certeon, a software-based, hypervisor-agnostic, WAN optimization solution company, has recently taken steps to further embrace the channel with a restructuring of its partner program. The change is intended to help partners deliver high-performance, cost-effective WAN optimization to the virtualization, disaster recovery, and cloud computing markets.
Sage Beefs Up Services in Sage Act! 2011
Sage has taken a different path than most vendors for software-as-a-service and cloud computing. In keeping with the times, the vendor has chosen to infuse its installed contact management product, Sage Act! (formerly known as Act! by Sage), with Web services.
Salesforce Puts Jigsaw Together with CRM
Just a few months after its $142 million acquisition of Jigsaw, a cloud-based data service, Salesforce.com has rolled out Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM. Priced at $29 per user per month, the Jigsaw service will appear natively within Salesforce CRM and its social networking product Chatter. CRM users can receive real-time updates about their contacts, customers, and prospects thanks to Jigsaw’s crowdsourced data model.
Facebook and Twitter banned by US university
Harrisburg University provost Eric Darr wants to know if his students can live without Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging and other social networks for an entire week. According to a feature on NPR, Darr is blocking access to all social media sites on the campus network this week, not to punish students but to see how they react to losing access to Facebook and Twitter.
Yahoo spins cloud web around competitors
Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview Monday, Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist of audience and cloud computing research at Yahoo, noted that the Internet company has not been involved in "many cloud conversations" today as these revolve around "low-level cloud services", but it is still very much in the game.
Verizon’s On-Demand, Pay-As-You-Go Cloud For SMBs
Verizon Business announced that it has expanded its cloud computing portfolio with a new service for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Computing as a Service (CaaS) SMB provides customers with Internet-based access to virtual machines (VMs) that can be spun up or down as needed, via a pay-as-you-go model. This is in addition to Verizon Business’s Enterprise hybrid cloud service announced at VMworld.
Novell Cloud Manager Offers On-Demand Workload Provisioning
Computer management services specialist Novell announced the availability of Cloud Manager, a solution designed to enable customers to create and securely manage a cloud computing environment as an extension of existing data center resources. Cloud Manager is designed for the heterogeneous reality of most IT environments, which the company said gives users the freedom and flexibility to create and manage private clouds which support all leading hypervisors, operating systems and hardware platforms.
Verizon Takes On Amazon, Rackspace With SMB Cloud Play
Verizon is aiming cloud computing squarely at the SMB market and has Amazon and Rackspace in its crosshairs with the launch of a new, down-market Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering targeted at companies with 20 to 1,000 users.
CaaS SMB, an on-demand pay-as-you-go cloud offering for small and mid-sized businesses, is a scaled back version of Verizon’s standard CaaS offering, said Patrick Sullivan, Verizon director of mid-tier product marketing. The SMB offering operates on Terremark infrastructure, Sullivan said.
The Early Days of Federated Cloud Computing
Slowly but surely, providers of cloud computing platforms are starting to choose up sides.
Today Computer Sciences Corp. is announcing that it has partnered with Skytap to deliver application testing services via the cloud. Skytap is trying to pioneer what it calls an OEM approach to cloud computing under which IT service providers will resell its cloud computing services.