Hewlett-Packard Co. is looking to let customers create hybrid cloud services that extend internal private clouds to public cloud services.
The company today announced what it describes as a "dual bursting" capability that will allow customers to add capacity from outside cloud providers when they have a spike in demand for capacity. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/07/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas today said it has acquired Google solution provider Omnetic for an undisclosed sum.
By acquiring Omnetic, Cloud Sherpas says it will have the largest concentration of Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialists outside of Google. Cloud Sherpas says it has migrated 800,000 users to Google Apps, while Omnetic has moved 100,000. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/02/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
RightScale this week kicked off its MultiCloud Marketplace, aimed at providing a repository for buying and selling cloud management solutions.
The goal is to provide predefined cloud deployments, while offering the ability to customize them, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company said. Some of the solutions will be free, others available to RightScale subscribers and yet others for sale by partners. Enterprises can also create their own walled-off version of the marketplace to share their own pre-defined cloud deployments. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/01/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Office 365 will launch in June but company officials are not confirming that timing.
Office 365 is the successor to Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services offering. It provides hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync along with integration to Office. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/31/2011 at 1:14 PM2 comments
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 05/30/2011 at 1:14 PM0 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 05/24/2011 at 1:14 PM0 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 05/24/2011 at 1:14 PM0 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 05/20/2011 at 1:14 PM1 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 05/19/2011 at 1:14 PM0 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 05/18/2011 at 1:14 PM0 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 05/18/2011 at 1:14 PM0 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 05/17/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments