SAP AG has moved to make its CRM applications available to workers using Verizon Communications' Computing as a Service (CaaS) cloud offering.
With the move, announced last week, SAP customers can use SAP CRM from their computers or mobile devices through Verizon's cloud-based managed service offering. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/23/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Many have criticized Hewlett-Packard for being late to the cloud. Looking to undo that perception, CEO Leo Apotheker took his best stab at swaying critics, revealing that HP intends to be a major player in the cloud.
Apotheker made his cloud push at the company's annual analyst meeting, dubbed HP Summit 2011, making his first public statements since he became CEO in November. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/16/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week has begun enabling customers to target its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service directly via the Internet.
Until now, customers using Amazon's EC2 cloud service could provision a separate section of the Amazon cloud called Amazon VPC via a virtual private network (VPN) connection to an existing customer's datacenter. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/16/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Over the past year, Google has added more than 100 new features to its Google Apps Web-based suite of applications. Of course, because they are Web apps, new features are available to users in real-time -- or after they refresh their browsers.
For many enterprises, though, such changes are not always welcome. Recognizing that, Google is now offering two new ways for customers to take advantage of upgrades: scheduled release and rapid release. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/16/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Amazon Web Services' new CloudFormation offering promises to simplify the development and deployment of applications to its cloud service.
Announced last month, CloudFormation provides sample templates that let developers and system administrators describe various AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 Instances, Elastic Load Balancers, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Instances. Amazon refers to the complex combination of resources as "stacks." More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/10/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments
The cloud is having a major impact on how organizations manage their IT organizations, ranging from personnel to vendor management. The latest evidence of that is documented in a study released this week.
According to the report conducted by IDG Research Services and funded by CA Technologies, 60 percent of those surveyed said demand for personnel with cloud computing expertise has risen over the past five years, while 63 percent anticipate demand will continue to grow over the next two years. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/10/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
In a departure from its traditional cloud hosting business, Rackspace today launched a new service that will help those who want to build their own clouds.
The company's new Rackspace Cloud Builders program is a training, certification and deployment offering based on the OpenStack cloud compute and storage platform. As I recently wrote, the open source OpenStack effort is gaining momentum with more than 50 members now supporting it since the project was formed eight months ago. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/08/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
A survey by cloud migration services consultancy White Stratus suggests that nearly 20 percent of enterprises have, to some degree, deployed Google Apps.
It's an interesting finding because the percentage of Google's 3 million enterprises and 30 million customers that are using Google Apps in actual deployments is still an open question. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/07/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments
Count Cisco Systems as the latest major IT provider to launch a cloud partner program.
The networking giant rolled out its Cisco Cloud Partner Program (CPP) at the company's annual Cisco Partner Summit, taking place this week in New Orleans. Cisco has established three tracks for partners: Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider and Cloud Reseller.
"Cloud Computing is transforming the way organizations consume and deploy IT resources. For our channel partners, cloud computing opens up additional market opportunities for them to design and build clouds or offer cloud services to the market," said Ralph Nimergood, vice president of datacenter and cloud for Cisco's Worldwide Partner Organization, in a pre-recorded video statement. "Our program provides a well defined roadmap to assist partners in determining what roles they want to play with Cisco in the cloud market."
Here's a description of the three tracks:
- Cloud Builder: This is for partners who, as the name implies, design and implement private clouds for customers. The partner with the Cloud Builder Badge must hold sales and implementation competencies in cloud infrastructure and cloud management, and it requires a Cloud Professional Services Practice.
- Cloud Provider: These are partners that want to offer public cloud services. "Our program supports these partners by enabling their Cisco-powered cloud service creation with enablement tools and reference architecture support," Nimergood explained. "Both the Cloud Builder and the Cloud Provider tracks offer many benefits, including branding, offer creation support, our Jumpstart financing, market development funding and access to channel partners as a route to market." Cisco's own salesforce will be compensated on the Cisco-powered cloud offerings that its providers sell to encourage engagement with the Cisco's salesforce, he added.
- Cloud Reseller: These are partners who OEM or resell the Cloud Providers' offerings. In concert with the Cloud Provider, Cisco will recruit and train partners and support them in their demand-generation activities, Nimergood said.
 The program will roll out in the summer timeframe, Cisco said.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/03/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Rackspace Hosting on Tuesday launched a new partner program that combined four separate programs into one. The company hopes the revamped program will incent partners to offer a broader range of Rackspace's hosted and cloud offerings.
Once a dedicated sales organization, the company now boasts 4,500 channel partners. CEO Lanham Napier said on the company's most recent earnings call last month that channel-influenced sales have more than doubled in 2010. "We will continue to invest in the channel and think there is a whole lot more performance and upside that we can get there," Napier told investors. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/03/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
When Hewlett-Packard dropped a jaw-dropping $2.4 billion for cloud storage provider 3PAR, it left many scratching their heads.
HP paid so much for 3PAR, a company with about $200 million in revenues, after a protracted and very public bidding war against Dell as the two companies looked to shore up their cloud storage offerings. Now the company is making the 3PAR technology available with HP's new CloudSystem. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/03/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Citrix Systems has acquired EMS-Cortex, a company that provides cloud services provisioning and management software.
It was the first move made by the company's newly formed Cloud App Delivery Group, which is tasked with delivering products and programs for cloud services providers. Citrix said it has 800 cloud services providers certified to use the company's products to offer apps that are delivered from the cloud.
The acquisition of EMS-Cortex gives Citrix the company's Cortex Cloud Control Panel, which "makes it easy for service providers and their customers to set up, provision and maintain a wide variety of hosted services from a single, easy-to-use, self-service interface," wrote Bill Burley, VP and general manager of the new Citrix App Delivery Group, in a blog post this week.
"Using the Cortex Cloud Control Panel, your customers can log in to a Web site and with a few clicks, manage user accounts, assign desktops and add or change the applications or services they receive," he said. "Services are automatically provisioned, and moments later the user can log in and begin working. They can even check usage reports to be sure they are on track."
Service provider admins can instantly create new tenant accounts and delegate management rights to specific users, he continued, adding that leading app hosting providers around the world have already deployed Cortex Cloud Control Panel.
The cloud control panel can be used by service providers and customers "to manage the provisioning and delegation administration of hosted business applications in a cloud environment such as XenApp, Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server and a number of other critical business applications," said Forrester Research analyst John Rakowski in a blog post. "In theory this means that customers and vendors will be able to 'spin up' core business services quickly in a multi-tenant environment."
Citrix will continue to offer the Cortex Cloud Control Panel as a standalone product on a subscription basis for the time being, according to Burley, with the same terms prior to the acquisition.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/24/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments