While it is not known how many customers have signed on to Microsoft's Office 365 service since it launched nearly six months ago, Office division president Kurt DelBene last month said 90 percent are small businesses. Gunning for the largest of corporations and government agencies, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard said they will jointly offer Office 365 with the HP Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio.
The two companies announced a four-year partnership in which HP will host at its datacenters Microsoft's Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, as well as resell the subscription-based Office 365. The pact is aimed at organizations with more than 5,000 seats, Patricia Wilkey, HP's global director of marketing for workplace services, told me this week. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 14, 20110 comments
Amazon Web Services edged out 16 cloud storage providers in a 26-month stress test that measured scalability, availability, stability and performance.
The company's Simple Storage Service (S3) was one of only six that made the cut, with Microsoft's Windows Azure coming in second. The tests were conducted by Nasuni, a provider of premises-based network attached storage (NAS) gear that uses cloud storage providers for primary storage backups and/or disaster recovery. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 13, 20110 comments
VMware's open source Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) is getting an unlikely addition: support for Microsoft's .NET Framework.
It's not coming from VMware but from cloud provider Tier 3, which announced it is contributing its own fork of the .NET Framework for Cloud Foundry to the open source community. The framework will allow developers to port their .NET applications to Cloud Foundry.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 13, 20110 comments
Access to data from multiple mobile devices outweighs cost savings when it comes to justifying the reason for deploying cloud-based solutions.
That's the rather curious finding from a study released this week by CSC, the global integrator based in Falls Church, Va. According to CSC's Cloud Usage Index, in a report based on a survey of 3,645 IT decision makers in eight countries, 33 percent cited access to data from mobile devices as the primary reason for adopting cloud computing. Only 17 percent said reducing costs was the most important reason for moving to the cloud. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 07, 20110 comments
Like every IT vendor these days, Cisco Systems has talked up the cloud for some time. But now, it has a new umbrella cloud strategy.
The networking giant on Tuesday outlined its framework aimed at tying together private, hybrid and public clouds using its network gear, datacenter infrastructure and apps and services. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 06, 20110 comments
Over the weekend, SAP announced it has agreed to acquire SuccessFactors, a provider of cloud-based human capital management solutions, for $3.4 billion.
The deal represents a 52 percent premium over SuccessFactors' share price at the close of the equity markets on Friday. By acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP, primarily known for its premises-based line of business and ERP software, is hoping it will propel its push into the cloud. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 05, 20110 comments
According to Cisco's first Global Cloud Index Report released this week, cloud computing traffic will reach 1.6 zettabytes by 2015, a twelvefold increase over last year's traffic, which topped 166 exabytes.
That translates to a 66 percent compounded annual growth rate (CAGR). The cloud today represents 11 percent of datacenter traffic, which Cisco says is growing at a CAGR of 33 percent and is expected to equate to 4.8 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes). By 2015, the cloud will represent 33 percent of datacenter traffic, according to Cisco's forecast. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 30, 20110 comments
Are you frustrated by the high cost of heating your home? With the winter weather arriving in many parts and furnaces kicking into high gear, once again we can look forward to exorbitant bills for oil or natural gas.
If you can't justify the hefty investment in solar panels or other alternative energy sources, would you consider replacing that furnace with a cabinet full of servers, storage and network gear? More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 30, 20112 comments
Cloud provider Skytap is looking to simplify use of its service, particularly as it applies to providing compatibility with in-house datacenters.
Skytap said it is providing support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standard for packaging and distributing virtual machines. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 29, 20110 comments
AT&T has extended its cloud portfolio with a Platform as as Service offering (PaaS) aimed at letting business users, enterprise developers and ISVs build, test and run their apps in the telco's hosted environment.
Launched this week, AT&T Platform as a Service will allow application developers and tech-savvy business people to build and deploy apps using either AT&T-provided tooling or Eclipse-based development tools. Those using AT&T's Web-based tools and templates don't require coding expertise, according to AT&T. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 17, 20110 comments
CA Technologies wants to help enterprises determine what applications may be suited to move to the cloud.
The company launched Cloud 360 at its annual CA World conference, which took place this week in Las Vegas. Cloud 360 is a portfolio of consulting services bundled with CA's software to model and perform cost-benefit and performance analyses of moving apps to the cloud. It also is intended to help customers develop migration plans. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 16, 20110 comments
ScaleXtreme, a company that lets IT administrators and service providers manage public and private clouds, this week updated its service to allow customers to model, configure and launch servers.
The company's new Dynamic Server Assembly lets IT pros who use ScaleXtreme's Web-based Xpress and Xpert services build templates that represent how a machine is built, rather than binding it to a specific cloud provider or virtual machine stack. Administrators can use those templates to manage systems and apps running on multiple public and private clouds. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 16, 20110 comments