API Speed and Performance By @SmartBear | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Speed. Performance. Reliability.
These are the characteristics you strive for when developing, deploying, and maintaining a truly powerful application. These are also the characteristics your customers will use to form their opinions about the performance of that application.
Through testing and monitoring to ensure that it works – and that it works well, consistently, and that any major bugs or glitches are caught early and repaired before the application (or any updates or releases) is deployed into production.

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NTT Data to acquire Dell Services for $3.06 billion

NTT DataJapan’s NTT Data is to acquire Dell’s IT Services business for $3.06 billion, in an effort to bolster its footprint in the North American region.

The announcement confirms speculation over recent months as to the future of the IT Services division, as Dell has been rumoured to be searching for a buyer for the business unit to aid financing of the EMC deal. Dell Services was initially formed through the acquisition of Perot Systems in 2009 for $3.9 billion. The new agreement with NTT Data will see Dell absorb an $800 million loss on the division and could indicate that financing the EMC acquisition is more difficult than initially expected.

In December, BCN reported Dell had been facing challenges in financing one of the biggest financial deals in history. For the $63 billion EMC acquisition to proceed, Dell has had to reduce its levels of debt with the Perot Systems business unit rumoured to be a favourite for sale.

The company will initially remain under the leadership of Suresh Vaswani, current President of Dell Services, who will continue to report to Dell CEO Michael Dell until the completion of the deal. It is believed that as part of the acquisition NTT Data will take on 28,000 Dell employees, though future leadership of the business has not been confirmed.

“NTT Data is pleased with the unique opportunity to acquire such high-calibre talent, and a corporate culture that shares common values with NTT Data, with emphasis on client first, foresight, teamwork and a commitment to innovation,” said Toshio Iwamoto, President and CEO of NTT Data Corporation. “Welcoming Dell Services to NTT DATA is expected to strengthen our leadership position in the IT Services market and initiates an important business relationship with Dell.”

NTT Data’s acquisition of the IT services division is the largest by the company to date and continues to bolster its North American footprint. Revenues for NTT Data in overseas markets has more than doubled since 2011 and in the same period the company has spent more than $600 million on acquisitions. The company has prioritized growth in the North America region, primarily targeting lucrative contracts in the healthcare, banking, financial services and insurance.

Since 2011 NTT Data has been proactive in bolstering its overseas business with a number of acquisitions throughout the world. In Europe it acquired companies including Everis and Value Team, in North America Optimal Solutions Integration and Carlisle & Gallagher were added, whereas iPay88 increased the company’s footprint in Malaysia.

“There are few acquisition targets in our market that provide this type of unique opportunity to increase our competitiveness and the depth of our market offerings,” said John McCain, CEO of NTT Data. “Dell Services is a very well-run business and we believe its employee base, long-standing client relationships, and the mix of long term and project-based work will enhance our portfolio.”

The deal could indicate that financing the EMC agreement has proved to be more difficult than initially expected. Dell Services as a business unit was reportedly to be valued in the region of $5 billion, which could highlight Dell’s urgency in completing the sale. If reports are correct, it would appear NTT Data has negotiated a good deal.

What Is at the Center of Your Digital Architecture? By @TheEbizWizard | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Instead of thinking of the IT environment as being divided into apps, middleware, data, servers, or other IT-centric concepts, the entire enterprise must think about customer journeys and how the various customer interactions (‘moments’ in the vernacular) string together to provide the customer experience each customer desires.
The end result, of course, is maximizing the business key performance indicators, including profitability, revenue per customer, and the lifetime value of each customer. We just arrived at these goals by a different path than we’re used to.

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Why Financial Service Companies Should Care About Application Performance By @SmartBear | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Historically, financial services have always been the early adopters and pioneers of advanced technology.
I am talking about financial services in an all-inclusive sense – which encompasses a broad range of institutions that manage money, including credit unions, banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, accountancy companies, consumer-finance companies, stock brokerages, investment funds, and more.

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What is a Virtual App?

The advent of virtualization technology has brought revolutionary changes to IT procedures. Many IT components, from servers to networks, are now virtualized. With the smartphone dominating the IT world, “virtual app” and “application virtualization” are the latest industry buzzwords. So what is a virtual app? In a traditional IT environment, applications are installed on each […]

The post What is a Virtual App? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Cryptzone Unveils AppGate XDP 2.0 | @CloudExpo @Cryptzone #Cloud

Cryptzone has announced version 2.0 of AppGate XDP, Cryptzone’s dynamic, secure access control platform that dramatically reduces the attack surface for all users across applications and data hosted both on-premises and in the cloud.
Traditional security tools like VPNs, firewalls, and NACs are labor-intensive to manage, and provide all-or-nothing access, giving authenticated users overly broad network access and allowing wide-reaching breaches. AppGate XDP provides a simpler way – establishing secure, encrypted tunnels between users and authorized network resources. Everything else on the network is invisible and unreachable, regardless of where it is hosted, closing the door on attackers. Because AppGate XDP automatically adjusts access decisions based on policy and user context, the business obtains the agility it needs without overloading IT and Security teams.

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Akamai Opens ‘Scrubbing Center’ in Sydney | @CloudExpo @Akamai #Cloud

Akamai Technologies has opened a new, state-of-the-art data center in Sydney, Australia, as part of its global expansion strategy. Fueled by the increasing sophistication of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the company’s latest ‘scrubbing center’ leverages a cloud-based approach to mitigate threats without causing significant business disruption.

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StreamAnalytix from @ImpetusTech Selected for @Hortonworks DataFlow | @BigDataExpo #BigData

Impetus Technologies has announced that StreamAnalytix™ has been selected by Hortonworks® as a complementary solution to provide real-time streaming capabilities for the new version of Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF™).
HDF powered by Apache NiFi is an integrated platform to collect, conduct and curate real-time data, moving it from any source to any destination. StreamAnalytix is the industry’s first open-source based, enterprise-grade, multi-engine platform for rapid and easy development of real-time streaming analytics applications.

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Electric Imp Private Cloud | @CloudExpo @ElectricImp #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings

Electric Imp has expanded its focus to align with evolving commercial and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) opportunities.
”As our platform evolves, it is able to satisfy markets more demanding than the initial consumer segment,” said Hugo Fiennes, CEO and co-founder of Electric Imp. “Delivering over 500,000 units through our consumer device partners helped prove the scalability, reliability and usability of our platform, and now we are targeting our unique architecture at the problems facing the commercial and industrial customer. We see an immense opportunity in these markets and believe our approach enables our customers to quickly realize the benefits of connectivity without compromising on security or reliability.”

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Avi Vantage Platform Launched by @AviNetworks | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Microservices

Avi Networks has launched an integrated solution with Mesosphere to help enterprises build and deploy microservices applications at scale using Docker Containers. Unlike monolithic applications for which static, appliance-based load balancers were sufficient, dynamic microservices architectures require complete application services that match their agility.
The Avi Vantage Platform works with the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) and Docker containers to provide a dynamic service fabric for micro-segmentation, service discovery, graphical application maps, load balancing, and autoscaling capabilities deployed across thousands of DCOS nodes. The solution also provides end-to-end visibility and application performance monitoring based on which it autoscales application instances predictively to adjust for real-time traffic patterns.

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