Often noted for moving slow to the cloud, SAP used its annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas to pick up the pace.
The move comes just two weeks after its key rival Oracle extended its cloud services and applications portfolio at its annual OpenWorld conference. While SAP has moved to offer more of its applications as a service and has made some key acquisitions to extend those offerings such as its $3.4 billion deal to buy SuccessFactors, now the company is adding some key platform services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/18/20120 comments
IBM and AT&T today said they are getting together to offer their shared customers cloud services that use Big Blue's compute and storage infrastructure and network connectivity provided by the telecommunications carrier.
Both companies will jointly sell the combined offering to their respective enterprise customers -- it's targeted at giants in the Fortune 1000 – as an alternative to traditional infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud services which often use standard Internet connections.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/09/20120 comments
Box.com has made new pacts that will address security and compliance issues that are often associated with cloud storage offerings. The company announced the offerings at its BoxWorks conference in San Francisco this week.
On the compliance side, it has released a new reporting API that will enable third-party business intelligence partners, such as GoodData, to create dashboards that will let administrators detect unusual activity such as an individual downloading an excessive number of files.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/09/20120 comments
At this year's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, cloud computing is once again front and center with the launch of new IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings. The company has added new online storage services, cloud-based asynchronous message queuing, cloud-based tools to build sites on social networks and in the Oracle Public Cloud, and a variety of new SaaS-based line of business tools including financial planning and analytics capabilities.
The continued emphasis on cloud follows last year's OpenWorld, when the company made its big cloud push with the launch of Oracle Public Cloud and the release of a slew of SaaS applications. As with Microsoft, HP, IBM, Dell and others, cloud computing is the focus of everything Oracle is talking about now.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/03/20120 comments
Nasdaq today said it's launching a cloud-based system hosted by Amazon Web Services aimed at letting broker-dealers store critical records in order to meet compliance requirements.
While it's not the first stock market exchange to turn to the cloud -- the New York Stock Exchange last year launched a community cloud -- the move by Nasdaq will test the limits of using a major public cloud service to host sensitive data.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/25/20120 comments
It was a long time coming but OpenStack, the open-source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) project founded by NASA and Rackspace two years ago, is no longer the property of Rackspace. In keeping with its long-stated plan, Rackspace handed off OpenStack to an independent foundation with its own governance body.
The new OpenStack Foundation kicks off with $10 million in funding committed by its member companies over the next three years. That should be ample enough to cover its operating requirements, said Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace Private Cloud and a member of the newly-formed OpenStack Board of Directors.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/21/20120 comments
Looking to dispel the notion that his company is a one-trick pony, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is looking to offer its software as a service applications well beyond customer relationship management, the foundation of its business.
At its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Benioff told 90,000 attendees and thousands more tuned into his live keynotes broadcast via a Facebook feed, that Salesforce.com is moving into new areas such as document sharing, marketing automation and human resources.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/20/20120 comments
Acronis, a provider of backup and recovery software, said it has acquired GroupLogic for an undisclosed amount. GroupLogic is a 22-year old company currently known for its file synchronization software that provides the enterprise equivalent of cloud-based storage and file-sharing services such as Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive or Google Drive without the risk associated with using such services.
Dmitri Joukovski, Acronis VP of product management said the acquisition of GroupLogic file synchronization software fits well with its portfolio of disaster recovery and data protection solutions, which are designed for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Joukovski said Acronis had sought out a software vendor that would let it add file sync software for some time.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/14/20120 comments
Racemi, a company that offers software to move Windows and Linux images from one bare-metal server to another, this week added cloud migrations to its portfolio. The company's new Cloud Path is a software as a service (SaaS) offering that lets administrators move server images to public cloud services.
IT pros can use Cloud Path from a Web browser to migrate physical and virtual servers to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud providers. Atlanta-based Racemi claims migrations will cost on average $800 less than performing manual re-imaging of data.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/06/20120 comments
Attunity plans to offer a service that will let organizations synchronize and replicate data from their in-house servers to Amazon Web Services' S3 storage service. The offering, called Attunity CloudBeam, will also tie data from one AWS datacenter to another.
Best known for its database connectivity software, Attunity expanded its focus into Big Data replication with last year's acquisition RepliWeb, which developed the data transfer engine powering CloudBeam. Attunity announced a partnership with AWS in July and released for beta testing the CloudBeam service last week.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/06/20120 comments
Microsoft this week launched Windows Server 2012, describing it as a cloud OS. Company officials illuminated the cloud characteristics of its new server operating system during a carefully scripted, pre-recorded Webcast Tuesday.
Marketing hype aside, the release of Windows Server 2012 culminates a four-year engineering effort to build a common architecture for IT to develop and deploy applications on private, hybrid and public clouds. Microsoft has talked up the combination of Windows Server and System Center as a platform for private and hybrid clouds for some time.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/05/20122 comments
Security concerns might be the number one inhibitor to using public cloud services yet the horses may have already left the barn.
A global survey of 4,000 IT managers and executives found nearly half, or 49 percent, already use cloud services to store sensitive or confidential information and another 33 percent plan to do so over the next two years. Only 19 percent said they don't, according to the survey, conducted by security and privacy research consultancy the Ponemon Institute and commissioned by Thales, an IT security and encryption software and services firm.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/28/20120 comments