Rackspace Hosting is making a push into offering virtual hosted desktops.
The company last week announced it is working with Citrix and the company's joint partners to deliver virtual desktops to users on PCs as well as phones and tablets. Citing Gartner, Rackspace predicted 70 million users will have virtual desktops by 2014. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 30, 20110 comments
Back in February, Amazon Web Services announced it would support Oracle 11G Release 2 databases on its Relational Database Service (RDS). On Tuesday, Amazon said the service is ready.
Amazon is offering two key licensing models for those who want to run Oracle on RDS: "License Included" and "Bring Your Own License." More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 24, 20110 comments
Intel is rolling out what it describes as a hybrid cloud service that will allow small and medium businesses to deploy bundled solutions on their premises that would be administered by a managed service provider.
Think of it as having the benefits of paying for Software as a Service, in that customers pay for usage but have the data and apps on-premises. Still, it is managed by an outside provider. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 24, 20110 comments
Last week's Exchange Online outages provided a healthy reminder that chances are, if you sign on for Microsoft's Office 365, at some point you may be destined to experience service interruptions, if not a full-blown loss of service.
Some angry Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) customers reported they were down for many hours last week. And yesterday, Microsoft confirmed more problems in the form of delays in messages going through (most were by 15 minutes to an hour, All About Microsoft's Mary Jo Foley reported). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 20, 20111 comments
The city of San Francisco plans to migrate from its farms of Lotus Notes and Exchange servers to the cloud with Microsoft's Exchange Online service.
Some 23,000 users across 60 departments and agencies in San Francisco will move to Exchange Online over the next 12 months, Microsoft and the city announced on Wednesday at a press teleconference held in San Francisco. Also considered were Google Apps and LotusLive. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 19, 20110 comments
Autonomy is acquiring pieces of Iron Mountain's digital division including its archiving, eDiscovery and online backup offerings, the company announced this week.
The deal is valued at $380 million in cash, Autonomy said. The acquisition of Iron Mountain's assets will extend Autonomy's own information governance business. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 18, 20110 comments
SAP is looking to make it easier for its solutions to work in the cloud. Toward that end, the company has announced separate pacts with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
The announcements were made at the company's annual Sapphire Now conference, taking place this week in Orlando. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 18, 20110 comments
Tools vendor Quest Software is looking to make it easier to manage applications running in Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service.
The company is at Tech-Ed this week in Atlanta showing three new tools: Cloud Subscription Manager, Cloud Storage Manager and Spotlight on Azure. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 17, 20110 comments
CA Technologies on Tuesday said it will offer its popular ARCserve backup and recovery solution as a service using Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform.
The move makes CA the latest traditional backup and recovery software company to launch its Software as a Service (SaaS). Just last week, CA's key rival in the backup and recovery field, Symantec, said it will offer a version of its popular Backup Exec as a cloud-based offering. The new Symantec service, called Backup Exec.cloud, will allow customers to stream their backups to Symantec datacenters. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 10, 20111 comments
Internap plans to launch a dual-hypervisor compute cloud service giving customers the choice of a VMware-based stack or the open source OpenStack platform.
The move marks the company's first foray into the public cloud. Its current portfolio consists of colocation service, managed hosting (including dedicated private clouds) and a content delivery network (CDN). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 09, 20110 comments
With its beta of Office 365 now out, Microsoft has once again come out swinging against its arch rival Google, this time arguing that the lower cost of Google Apps for Business may be a mirage.
Google Apps for Business costs $50 per year. Microsoft's equivalent offering, the forthcoming Office 365 Plan P1, which includes Exchange Online, calendaring and Office Web Apps, will cost $72 per year. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 05, 20115 comments
More information on Hewlett-Packard's public cloud strategy came to light on Tuesday when The Register's Cade Metz stumbled upon a key HP executive's LinkedIn profile.
The exec, Scott McClellan, chief technologist and interim VP of engineering and cloud services at HP, has since removed the info from his profile. But The Register captured the information, which reveals that McClellan was responsible for helping build a distributed object storage business from scratch, a service that offers compute, networking and block storage, and what appears to be a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that is optimized for Java, Ruby and other open source languages. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 05, 20112 comments