Looking to extend the reach of its customer support and service platform, Salesforce.com last week said it has acquired Assistly for $50 million.
The company said it will integrate Assistly, a provider of online customer service help-desk apps for small and medium businesses that run in the cloud, into the Salesforce.com Service Cloud offering. Assistly is targeted at SMBs and startups with its $49 per month, per user subscription fee. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/27/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Cloud infrastructure software vendor Nimbula has released an upgrade of its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform.
Nimbula Director 1.5 now supports a geographically distributed cloud and can manage the multi-site cloud from a single management interface. It also features policy-based automation for compute and storage, aimed at simplifying the request of resources; persistent block store, which provides self-service interfaces to cloud storage; and a customizable installer for operating system, drivers and management software. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/27/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
The OpenStack consortium on Thursday released the fourth version of its open source cloud operating system.
Dubbed Diablo, the new release gains improved compute scalability, storage and networking. And OpenStack is introducing identity management features and a new Web-based management interface slated for the next release of the platform. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/22/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Wondering what caused the outage that brought down some of Microsoft's cloud services two weeks ago? While Microsoft attributed it to a DNS error, that was all the company was saying at the time.
The three-hour outage occurred on the evening of Sept. 8 and affected Windows Live services such as SkyDrive, MSN and Hotmail for three hours. Also affected was Microsoft's Office 365 service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/21/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Joyent has launched a new public cloud service that it says is faster and cheaper than Amazon Web Services' popular Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), as well as other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.
The San Francisco-based company's upgraded Joyent Cloud service is built on a new platform, called SmartDataCenter 6, which Joyent claimed offers improved performance, management and security. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/20/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Gartner has endorsed Google's Gmail service as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Exchange Online for enterprises with more than 5,000 employees.
The IT market researcher last week released a report called "Google Gmail Emerges as a Significant Threat to Microsoft in the Enterprise." The conclusions are noteworthy given the IT market researcher's clout with CIOs and the cutthroat rivalry between Microsoft and Google to win large enterprise cloud e-mail contracts. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/20/2011 at 1:14 PM7 comments
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has picked up another security accreditation from the federal government, which should allow it to further penetrate the public sector with its popular infrastructure services, as well as give it more credibility with businesses.
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) last week gave Amazon the green light with its Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate level authorization and accreditation. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/19/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
The world got to see the next version of Windows this week, and while its new Metro user interface promises to change how users interact with their PCs, it also will leverage the cloud in new ways.
Not that that should be a surprise. With Microsoft's marching orders that it is "all in" the cloud, one would expect Windows to lead the charge. At its Build conference in Anaheim, Calif. this week, Microsoft gave the first in-depth public demos of Windows 8 and Windows Server 8, the code names for the next Windows releases. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/15/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments
Rackspace plans to deploy the OpenStack open source cloud platform across its entire infrastructure.
OpenStack was originally developed by Rackspace and NASA, which built the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Platform. The year-old OpenStack Project now has more than 90 members, with a community of developers collaborating on the open source cloud operating system. The OpenStack code is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/14/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
New backup and recovery software from CA Technologies is designed to support a number of cloud services.
The company's ARCserve r16, released last week, provides a common cloud connection for all forms of data protection, including core file backup, disk imaging, replication and high availability. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/14/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
While chaos seems to be reigning at Hewlett-Packard Co., one area where it doesn't appear to be making any strategic shifts is in its push into cloud computing. On Wednesday, the company revealed plans for its public cloud services, making them available to select beta testers. And at last week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas, HP launched a number of products aimed at helping both enterprises and service providers build cloud-based infrastructures.
Perhaps most noteworthy was HP's new VirtualSystem platform consisting of converged servers, storage and networking, controlled by the company's Insight management software. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/08/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Dell this week launched its first public and hybrid cloud offerings, following on its announcement earlier this year that it would invest $1 billion to deliver cloud computing infrastructure and services. The company also introduced cloud-based application services for small and medium businesses.
On Monday at the annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Dell and VMware jointly released Dell Cloud, which is built upon vCloud Datacenter Services. The two companies said they will jointly offer the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform to enterprises, hosting and outsourcing providers, systems integrators, and service providers. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/01/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments