Category: News

Grazed from The Register.  Author: Gavin Clark.

 Microsoft’s second fiscal quarter showed a company at dangerous stage in its transition. It also revealed a firm that is clearly unable to rely on the certainties of old.  Not so long ago, Microsoft relied on three engines of growth to drive its business – Office/personal productivity, server and tools, and Windows client machines.

Grazed from Business-Standard.  Author: Editorial Staff.

 Satya Nadella has put cloud computing at the centre of Microsoft’s strategy. It is a move that looks to be paying off, at least in the eyes of investors.  On Thursday the company said its revenue and profit fell in the last quarter. But it mattered little, as Microsoft made more from cloud computing, and its stock jumped more than five per cent immediately after the numbers were released.

Article written by David Marshall

In an earnings call made earlier this week, VMware reported some bad news, even as the company released some pretty solid financial earnings numbers.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger admitted that last year was, as he called it, a "challenging time" for VMware investors.  And the company’s core compute virtualization products were reaching maturity and would play a decreasing role in the company’s future business.

VMware announced total revenues for the fourth quarter reached $1.87 billion, that’s an increase of 10% from the fourth quarter of 2014, or up 12% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.  And license revenues for the fourth quarter were $825 million, an increase of 6% from the fourth quarter of 2014, or up 11% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.  With the coming Dell acquisition of EMC, Gelsinger said the company would see, over time, a significant revenue upside from up selling VMware’s full portfolio of products and services to Dell’s new equipment sales and from accessing their incredibly strong SMB go-to market engine.

Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider since 1986, today announced that it is delivering Asigra Cloud Backup, an agentless, multi-tenant NIST FIPS 140-2 certified data-protection software solution, with Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance. For managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises seeking a higher financial return on their backup infrastructure investments, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance provides a cost effective solution that delivers exceptional features and performance.

“As the storage world moves from its hardware-focused roots to the current semantic love affair with all things software-defined, Oracle is one of a small group of vendors placing the emphasis for storage on applications, database, and data,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “It’s called Oracle ZFS Engineered Storage. The Oracle ZFS product line offers exceptionally high performance, and is well tuned to today’s market needs in terms of providing a very attractive total cost of ownership (TCO). This storage option for data protection offers service providers a competitive advantage when deployed as the core of their backup infrastructure.”

Appcito, a provider of cloud application delivery solutions, today announced the latest release of the Appcito Application Delivery System (ADS), formerly known as Appcito Cloud Application Front-End (CAFÉ). The new capabilities, available immediately, allow enterprise IT and network infrastructure teams to act as providers and enable application owners and DevOps teams to rollout new applications in minutes with a self-service model, while still being 100% compliant to existing security policies and governance models. This will help accelerate cloud adoption by simplifying operations and reducing risk.

This release of Appcito ADS introduces new service adapters for F5 Big-IP LTM and HAProxy devices. These service adapters offer granular per-application visibility and analytics, ensuring enterprise infrastructure teams can leverage their existing ADC investments without operational disruption.

Article Written by Todd Pavone, Executive Vice President, Product Strategy & Development, VCE  

In 2015 we heard a lot about DevOps, Big Data, containerization, and the Internet of Things (IoT), but what do all of these macro trends mean for the modern data center? What kinds of impact do these massive disruptive forces have in shaping 2016? Most important, in a world of lean teams and flat or shrinking budgets, how can you be prepared? Here are a few predictions from VCE’s point of view on how CIOs can embrace and apply the digital transformation initiatives to drive competitive differentiation and success this coming year. 

Forget the Hype: Hyper-Scale Is For Real

According to the latest research report released by Technavio, the global VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) market is predicted to reach over USD 14 billion by 2020.

This report titled ‘Global VDI 2016-2020‘, provides an in-depth analysis of the market in terms of revenue and emerging trends. This market study also presents up to date analysis and forecasts for various market segments and all geographical regions.

Grazed from NasDaq. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday delivered the largest quarterly profit in its 20-year history, but investors apparently are thirsty for more after subsisting on thin margins for years. The failure to meet outsize expectations underscores the pressure Amazon now faces after teasing Wall Street in recent quarters with tighter costs and black ink. Amazon until recently put nearly every dollar it generated back into the business.

The company was one of the big growth stories among technology stocks in 2015, more than doubling its market value to over $300 billion last year and easily outperforming other tech giants like Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. With its $99-a-year Prime unlimited shipping program, Amazon has become a dominant force in retail and has demonstrated it can quickly gain market share in new businesses as diverse as cloud computing and hot-food delivery…

Grazed from MobileComputingToday. Author: Editorial Staff.

Just like any other area of technological innovation, cloud is a massive industry which has developed in ways few would predict a couple of years ago. As more individuals and enterprises embrace cloud technologies, the security and usability questions become a central focus of many providers. But consumer expectations aren’t the only factor shaping the state of cloud. Here are 10 key cloud trends to watch in 2016.

1) The cloud will figure in Europe’s data legislation

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) recently invalidated the Safe Harbor Principles. This essentially means that any US company wanting to move user data across the Atlantic will need to declare their standards of data privacy. That’s why major cloud providers are bound to get more interested in the subject this year…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Peter Bright.

Microsoft posted revenue of $23.8 billion in the second quarter of its 2016 financial year, down 10 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Operating income was $6.0 billion, a 23 percent drop, and net income was $5.0 billion, a 15 percent fall. Earnings per share were $0.78, representing a 13 percent decline.

Just as it has done for the past few quarters, and mirroring Apple’s earnings release earlier this week, Microsoft attributed a substantial part of the decline to the strong dollar. With prices outside the US being increased to preserve their dollar value, non-US sales are becoming decreasingly valuable to Microsoft. This depressed revenue by an estimated $1.2 billion. The company also reports that there was a further $1.9 billion impact from revenue deferrals related to Windows 10 and bundled software…