Industry News Desk

Extending SOA to Cloud Computing

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:45:00 EST

WSO2, the open source SOA company, today announced the launch of the WSO2 Cloud Platform. Available today, the new WSO2 Cloud Platform features a family of WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machines; WSO2 Cloud Connectors for enabling fast, secure cloud services; and the multi-tenant WSO2 Governance-as-a-Service. All WSO2 Cloud Platform services are based on open software standards, and they support all applicable interoperable protocols, as well as relevant open data standards. Additionally, they allow users to take complete control of their data, ensuring that enterprises can protect and preserve their information.

Crystal Reports Founders Aim Cloud Computing

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:45:00 EST

The founders of Crystal Reports and veterans of Microsoft, Symmetrics and Business Objects have launched a start-up out of Vancouver called Indicee that’s developed a cloud-based reporting application meant to give SMBs frustrated with cutting and pasting data into spreadsheets a faster way to mash data and create reports. The company sees itself as bringing reporting and analysis to the masses. The widgetry eliminates manual spreadsheet data manipulation; consolidates data from different systems, reports and spreadsheets; bypasses direct access to information locked up in corporate databases; and processes queries in plain English.

Cloud Expo News: JetBrains TeamCity 5.0 on EC2 Cloud Computing Platform

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:45:00 EST

JetBrains, creators of intelligent, productivity-enhancing development tools, announced the public availability of TeamCity 5.0, the company's distributed build management and continuous integration tool. TeamCity offers easy setup and delivers out-of-the-box continuous unit testing, sophisticated code quality analysis, and early reporting on build problems. It has a gentle learning curve, so you can quickly improve your release management practices by gradually adopting its advanced features and capabilities.

New IBM Innovation Center to Fuel IT Growth in the Philippines

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:30:00 EST

New IT opportunities are being fueled by a $6.8B (US) Philippines Economic Recovery Program investing in infrastructure projects in areas including transportation, tourism, power, water and housing. Additionally, the Philippines is experiencing substantial IT growth backed by an estimated 24 million Filipino Internet users today, a 75 percent increase from 14 million in 2008. The Manila IBM Innovation Center will help support new opportunities by providing technical experts and customized hands-on support to test and validate users' software technologies before they go to market. The center also will offer training and access to open standards-based and emerging technologies such as cloud computing, Web 2.0 technologies, service oriented architecture (SOA), analytics, and computing designs with energy and environmental benefits.

Security Report Predicts Attacks on Cloud-Based Providers in 2010

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:08:00 EST

M86 Security, a leading global provider of Web and messaging security products, released Predictions 2010, a report on its expectations for Web and messaging-based threats for the coming year. The report is based on M86 Security Lab’s extensive research into the current trends in threats over the past year and its views on the major vulnerabilities facing organizations. The report highlights the increasing sophistication of traditional threats such as botnets, scareware, compromised legitimate Web sites and blended threats. However, it also projects what the company sees are new threat vectors coming from open API’s in Web 2.0 applications, the increased use of shortened URLs and the advent of non-Latin based domain names.

Cloud Expo New York Diamond and Platinum Sponsorships Sold Out

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:00:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that the "Diamond" and "Platinum" sponsorship opportunities for the upcoming Cloud Expo New York sold out the same day the "show prospectus" for the 5th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com) was sent to more than 100 sponsors and exhibitors. 5th International Cloud Expo will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors participating in the conference. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held five times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley, Europe, Japan, and Brazil.

Sourcefire Announces 3D System 4.9 and VMware-Based Virtual Appliances

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:00:00 EST

Sourcefire’s innovative Adaptive IPS automates key intrusion prevention functions, such as IPS tuning, impact assessment, user correlation and network discovery. With the 4.9 release, Sourcefire has raised the bar by offering the industry’s first Policy Layering capability, enabling organizations with multiple detection policies to construct them in “building blocks,” making it easy to create and modify policies by geography, site, department, or even by user. Sourcefire has also added a Custom Analysis Widget to its portal-like dashboard affording even greater flexibility, and it has expanded its application detection capabilities by adding new detectors for Oracle, Firefox, Gnutella, Timbuktu, and more. Along with the 3D System 4.9 release, Sourcefire is now shipping its first VMware-based virtual appliances, including the Sourcefire Virtual 3D Sensor and Sourcefire Virtual Defense Center. Compatible with VMware’s ESX and ESXi platforms, the Virtual 3D Sensor offers IPS protection from 5 to 500Mbps and can be monitored and managed by physical or virtual Defense Center management consoles. These new virtual appliances afford enterprises, managed security service providers (MSSPs), and cloud computing providers with the same Snort-based IPS protection as their physical 3D Sensor counterparts.

Veriplace Enables Cloud Location Service for Facebook

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:45:00 EST

WaveMarket's Veriplace Location Aggregation Platform is a cloud-based platform that enables developers of Facebook, Web, mobile Web, SMS, and voice applications to remotely locate tens of millions of feature phones and smartphones via Veriplace's direct connections into multiple Tier One carrier networks. Veriplace already counts nearly 1,000 developer partners building successful location-aware services on the platform as the Veriplace developer community and Veriplace carrier coverage continue to grow rapidly.

Is Monitoring Virtual, Physical and Cloud Assets Easy?

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:45:00 EST

up.time makes it easy, right out-of-the-box: Deep Virtual Server Monitoring: CPU ready, Memory Balloon, Memory Zero, and many more granular Metrics; monitor Physical, Virtual, and Cloud: Services, applications, servers and more. Onsite/remote datacenters, hybrid environments, outsourced infrastructure; real World Cost Savings: Per-Physical-Server Licensing. Reduce costs up to 90%.

Thunderbird Connector for Open-Xchange Now Available

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST

Now, the open source Mozilla Thunderbird client software can be used with Open-Xchange collaboration software. The "Community OXtender for Thunderbird" software connector gives users full access to appointments and contacts stored in the Open-Xchange Server and enables them to use Thunderbird as a rich PIM (Personal Information Management) client to access data online and offline. The software packages and documentation are available at www.open-xchange.com/oxpedia#ThunderbirdOXtender.

Broadcom to Pay $178 Million for ‘Cloud’ Chip

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:15:00 EST

Broadcom is paying $178 million and mostly cash for nine-year-old privately held Israeli-based Dune Networks and its “cloud” chipset, which can connect upwards of 10,000 servers (ports) at bandwidth speeds of 100 Gbps a port. That’s supposed to be Google-scale, which indicates where Broadcom is placing its bets, having failed to secure Emulex this summer. The widgetry is supposed to extend the lifecycle of packet platforms from three years to more than 10.

Morph Labs Announces Private Cloud Trial Kit

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST

Morph Labs, a leading provider of enterprise cloud computing technology, today announced an introductory trial of the Morph CloudServer, an open, standards-based server IT organizations can use to rapidly model and evaluate their cloud implementations. A miniature "Cloud Environment in a Box," the system will include the Morph Cloud Controller, a complete cloud management and provisioning platform that leverages the Amazon AWS API, and a Virtual Machine Server pre-configured with 10 VMs. Evaluators who require a bigger environment can add a VM server, as needed. Morph Labs also offers an option for a fully hosted starter kit trial.

Forrester: Security Concerns Hinder Cloud Computing Adoption

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST

Concerns about the security of cloud computing environments top the list of reasons for firms not being interested in the pay-per-use hosting model of virtual servers, according to the latest Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009, by Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR). Forty-nine percent of survey respondents from enterprises and 51 percent from small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not using cloud computing. The survey of more than 2,200 IT executives and technology decision-makers in Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US is Forrester’s largest annual survey of emerging hardware trends for both enterprises and SMBs. The survey is part of Forrester’s Business Data Services (BDS) series, which provides an extensive data set for B2B Market Research professionals’ go-to-market strategy assessments.

Telecom Service Assembly Standards in the Cloud

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:30:00 EST

Comptel Corporation announced that BT and Progress Software will be participating in the second phase of the Service Model Catalyst, as it explores the creation of new converged services that include cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) components. The collaborative effort brings together business use cases from BT and Qwest as co-sponsors, with BT providing cloud brokering and cloud assurance services on Amazon Web Services' EC2 platform, Comptel providing a consolidated product and service catalog, Network Cadence providing systems integration with a service fabric broker for fulfilment and assurance orchestration, and Progress providing a management tool for the canonical data model.

Broadcom to Expand Its Large Scale Cloud Computing

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:30:00 EST

Dune Networks' Highly Scalable Switch Fabric Technology Expands Broadcom's Product Portfolio for Data Centers and Large Scale Cloud Computing. Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM) announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dune Networks, a privately-held company that develops switch fabric solutions for data center networking equipment. Data centers are scaling to provide significantly more bandwidth to meet the requirements of cloud computing, where computing resources, products and services, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), can be delivered real-time over the Internet. Dune Networks has developed a scalable chipset that supports bandwidth speeds of up to 100Gbps per port and can connect more than ten thousand servers (ports) in a single deployment.

IBM To Build E-Government Cloud for Ho Chi Minh City

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:30:00 EST

IBM says it’s been hired to build an e-government cloud for Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, the one-time capital of South Vietnam. As a first step it’s supposed to consolidate all of the city government’s e-mail systems and web sites. The work will apparently be done in collaboration with something called Quang Trung Software City (QTSC), which let IBM the contract. QTSC will evidently run the new data center.

Cloud Expo Sponsor Secures $10M in Series C Funding

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:00:00 EST

SOASTA, the leader in cloud testing, today announced the successful close of $10 million in Series C funding as it prepares its global expansion. The round was led by UV Partners, and included participation from all existing investors Canaan Partners, Formative Ventures and The Entrepreneurs’ Fund. The company’s growth plan includes the opening of offices in Europe, broadening of the reseller channel and increasing its technology roadmap with product enhancements to address the growing demand for SOASTA’s cloud-based testing service.

How the Enterprise Cloud Affects the Datacenter

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:45:00 EST

There are a variety of applications that support numerous business lines across an enterprise. These applications exhibit a wide range of operational characteristics as they service the diverse business demands. That diversity is the key to business success, but it has consequences. Ask an enterprise application architect about how IT should run a data center and you will find that the range of behaviours exhibited across the portfolio of applications cannot be run on one set of standard platform configurations. Most critical applications have extreme operational requirements that require specialised adjustments to operating environments.

rPath Refines Release Automation Platform

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

rPath today announced enterprise-focused productivity and management enhancements to the rPath release automation platform. The upgrades refine the functionality and user experience of the fully version controlled release automation solution, meeting the needs of each stakeholder in the enterprise release management process. These upgrades are the first product delivery against “Project Javelin,” which extends rPath’s system version controlled management model into the broader data center automation market.

Apparent Networks Updates PathView Cloud Service

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

Apparent Networks today announced that it has released an updated version of PathView Cloud, its hosted network management service. The new version includes unique features for managing end-to-end network performance in virtualized environments. With PathView Cloud’s virtualization-enabled analytics, IT and operations teams can, for the first time, understand network performance from the perspective of applications running on virtual machines. With this extended visibility, PathView Cloud lets IT teams quickly find and fix network performance problems, regardless of whether they occur in physical or virtual infrastructure.

Kindle Breaks Record for Sales in a Single Month During November

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:00:00 EST

Amazon.com today announced that November is already the best sales month ever for Kindle, even before Cyber Monday. Kindle continues to be the most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon. The latest generation Kindle – just released in October – is $259 and available for immediate shipment today at www.amazon.com/kindle.

CloudBench Applications Reports Q3 2009 Results and Business Highlights

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:15:00 EST

CloudBench Applications, Inc. announced its financial results for the three months and nine months ending September 30, 2009. All amounts are stated in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Revenues from BasicGov, the Company's cloud computing solution for local government, grew to $66,649 in the third quarter, a 140% increase from $27,822 in the same quarter of the prior year. The Company's annualized committed recurring revenues, a non-GAAP measure, increased 220% to US$288,000 compared to US$90,000 for the same period last year.

CSC Signs Cloud Computing Agreement With UK Royal Mail Group

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

The new contract is an industry first, with CSC being the first Microsoft partner to lead and win a cloud computing services agreement of this scale. Under terms of the contract, CSC will provide Royal Mail Group's 30,000 employees with access to new IT services using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services. CSC will also provide first line helpdesk support. CSC's cloud services are designed to help businesses easily and securely adopt cloud computing solutions, allowing them to reduce the costs of managing and maintaining business systems while giving them access to the latest Microsoft Online Services including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

GDS International: Global Warming Scam?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Operates in over 170 countries and is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. Richard Tarboton talks for MeettheBoss.TV on his role as Head of Energy & Carbon for BT and what they are doing towards reducing carbon emissions.

CA & BMC To Support Salesforce.com

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

CA is going to put its Agile Planner software on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform in the first half to accelerate development time and give users visibility over their development initiatives to reduce time-to-market. Customers are supposed to be able to accelerate the deployment of Salesforce CRM within their organization. The software will include CA Clarity PPM On Demand, Federation Manager and CA Wily Application Performance Management to monitor and manage cloud-based composite applications. BMC will be putting a new cloud-based service desk offering on Force.com for self-service and inventory management in Q2.

Sun Fields Cloud Desktop for K-12

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Despite its uncertain fate Sun soldiers on. Monday it trotted out a cloud-based multiplatform desktop as a service for K-12 and community colleges that can run Windows, the Mac OS, Linux and Solaris applications to nearly any client device, including its own Sun Ray thin clients. Sun claims it’s the industry’s first full-function, cloud-based desktop as a service. It runs on Sun’s Open Cloud Platform. Its subscription pricing can run as little as $1 a day per concurrent user. Ashbourne Technology Group is apparently taking it to market.

No Real Recovery with Europe Still in the Tank: HP

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST

HP, which pre-announced relatively happy results a couple of weeks ago when it said it was buying 3Com, came in exactly on target with earnings of $2.4 billion, or 99 cents a share, up 14%, on revenues of $30.8 billion, down 8.4% year-over-year from $33.6 billion. And the company reiterated that it should do $29.6 billion to $29.9 billion this quarter and earn 90 to 92 cents a share. Its full-year outlook is for $118 billion-$119 billion and EPS of $4.25-$4.35.

Ulitzer Names The World's 30 Most Influential Virtualization Bloggers

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:45:00 EST

Ulitzer.com announced today "the World's 30 most influential Virtualization bloggers," who collectively generated more than 24 million Ulitzer page views. Ulitzer's annual "most influential Virtualization bloggers" list was announced at Cloud Expo 2009 West, which took place at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California. Cloud Expo 2009 West drew more delegates than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "The world's 50 most influential Cloud bloggers 2010" list will be announced at the Cloud Expo 2010 East, which will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center, in New York City, with more than 5,000 expected to attend.

Azure Gets its First Commercial ERP App

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:15:00 EST

While Microsoft is webifying bits and pieces of its client/server Dynamics ERP solution, it ain't gonna put any full-blown Dynamics ERP on Azure. Too much customization and integration to make a good candidate apparently. Enter Acumatica, a potentially competitive third-party ERP solution that compares itself to NetSuite except NetSuite is wholly SaaS and Acumatica, out only since June but one of the few programs already in production on the still-in-beta Azure, straddles both a client's on-premises site and the Microsoft cloud. The Acumatica software is the same in the cloud as it is on-premise and experimenting with in on site is supposed to make accounts more comfortable with the idea of using it in the cloud.

Adobe Fiddles with its Web Apps

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST

Adobe put out this press release - well, kinda, it was released at 6am Saturday morning and the company didn't bother to tell its staff about it, least of all its sales people. Anyway, it's about how Acrobat.com, Adobe's contribution to the flock of Office-challenging web apps, has hit its first upgrade, adding a bunch of reportedly user-requested features - like a prettier interface - as well as smartphone integration. Since Acrobat.com is based on Flash, guess that's a way to get a hint of Flash on the forbidden iPhone. Maybe Adobe hopes Steve Jobs won't notice.

CSC Signs Record Cloud Deal with Royal Mail

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Britain's hidebound state-owned Royal Mail is getting a cloud. Yup, CSC is supposed to provide 30,000 of its employees with access to newfangled web-based services using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services. CSC will also provide first line helpdesk support. The new contract is described as an industry first: CSC is the first Microsoft service provider to win a cloud deal of this size.

Virtualization Expo Call for Papers Deadline December 15

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:45:00 EST

Delegates will leave Virtualization Expo with a full understanding of the interaction between virtual servers and the rest of the data center infrastructure. Indeed our overall aim is to ensure that all attendees leave the Jacob Javits Convention Center with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging Virtualization in their own corporate datacenter, on the desktop, and elsewhere. If you wish to submit a speaking proposal for the 8th Virtualization Expo, April 19–21, 2010, then you can do so right here

OpenAir Powers Business Systems Consolidation

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

OpenAir, Inc., a NetSuite Inc. company and a provider of cloud computing professional services automation (PSA) and services resource planning (SRP) software announced that BearingPoint, a provider of management and technology consulting, has gone live with OpenAir to streamline services delivery processes and consolidate multiple point solutions into one, unified business system. With OpenAir, BearingPoint is already realizing significant benefits through more accurate and timely visibility of staff utilization and its opportunity pipeline. BearingPoint joins a growing list of OpenAir customers recently added in the Asia-Pacific region, including AIPEX, ClearPoint, Assurity, and Fronde. These customer wins are a testament to OpenAir's global expansion initiative as well as its unparalleled customer support infrastructure. By selecting OpenAir for its professional services automation needs, BearingPoint has reduced its dependency on Microsoft Project and Excel, and replaced its legacy timesheet application.

Merge Healthcare and InSite Use New Archiving Technology

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST

“Our continued innovation in imaging software allows us to change the healthcare information distribution paradigm by the intuitive inclusion of images and radiology reports. We are thrilled to work with InSite One, a long-time partner, to bring this innovative solution to the market,” said Antonia Wells, President of Merge’s OEM division. The new zero-footprint technology provides clinicians and CIOs with a solution that overcomes the challenges associated with the distribution of images over a wide area network. Image distribution solutions typically involve expensive hardware, high IT support/deployment costs, platform compatibility issues and high bandwidth requirements. Using InDex Web, with integrated Cedara WebAccess technology from Merge, physicians are able to obtain patient information via a web browser at the point-of-care through their laptops, tablets and smart phones such as Apple iPhone and Blackberry Bold.

Tecan Integrates SAP R/3 and Salesforce.com

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

With their CRM and ERP data systems integrated, Tecan AG's staff and management will benefit from a real-time view of their corporate and customer information. The iBOLT business integration suite integrates and orchestrates the data between diverse business processes and applications. Featuring a code-free approach, iBOLT enables simple and complex business processes to be designed and implemented easily, without working through pages of hard code.

Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Until today, Monitis was providing monitoring only for Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. With the release of its Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, Monitis can now sync to other Cloud computing providers very quickly - from Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer, and more. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework will automate monitoring in highly dynamic cloud environments, where customers’ servers maybe added and terminated according to the load by management software or manually. Given this dynamism, setting up end-user experience monitoring can become a tedious, resource intensive and error-prone process. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework automates the configuration of external monitoring and server monitoring tools every time a new installation is called for - saving IT managers and system administrators around the world enormous time and hassle.

The Next Sea Change Is Cloud Computing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:30:00 EST

I've been at this 35 years and I've seen sea changes come and go. If you step back for a moment and look from a broad perspective, we've lived through the mainframeclient/server world and the Internet world. And now, the next sea change is cloud computing. The reality is that visionaries talk about sea changes before things change at the enterprise or SMB level. The way we look at the cloud is there's potential for sea change there, centralizing the capacity to lower costs and improved efficiencies. Yes, there will be change there. Is it going to happen overnight; that today we're in a world of data center solutions and tomorrow we're in the cloud? It's not going to work that way.

Cloud Expo New York Call for Papers Deadline December 15

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Cloud computing is a game changer. The cloud is disrupting traditional software and hardware business models by disrupting how IT service gets delivered. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate, so it is no surprise that SYS-CON's industry-leading International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is going from strength to strength.

Cloud Expo New York Show Prospectus Mailed to More Than 100 Exhibitors

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:30:00 EST

SYS-CON Events (http://events.sys-con.com) announced today that the "show prospectus" for the 5th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com) is now shipping. 5th International Cloud Expo will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors participating in the conference. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held five times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley, Europe, Japan, and Brazil. Over 200 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals became part of Cloud Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, founder and CEO of SYS-CON Events. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘software' in two short years, and this event has become the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will participate in the Cloud Expo."

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Bootcamp November 2009 Slides

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:15:00 EST

These are copies of the slides from SYS-CON's Cloud Bootcamp held at Cloud Computing Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA November 2-4, 2009. Tim Crawford: Introduction Glenn Brunette (Sun): Cloud Security Kevin Noonan (Push2Cloud): Google App Engine Jason Christensen (jasonc411): Cloud Computing Mobile