This webinar is for anyone interested in, or responsible for moving enterprise applications to or from datacenters and clouds. It will be of particular interest to Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and Managed Service Providers (MSP) looking to increase their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) by giving their customers a solution that easily migrates applications to their cloud.
When Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) chose to move its datacenter to Rackspace, applications quickly took center stage. One of the challenges was how to effectively move highly modified, but largely undocumented, production apps. PBR’s consultant Virtessential addressed that challenge using appzero’s zapp migration to automate identification, extraction, and migration of their Windows server apps to the cloud.
Monthly Archives: September 2012
8×8 Gets New Contact/Call Center Patent
8×8, Inc. today announced that it has been awarded a new patent related to its contact/call center technologies. On September 25, 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued United States Patent number 8,275,116, entitled “Networked Contact Center.”
The patent relates to, among other things, a networked contact center that includes multiple platforms to host multiple tenants. Example embodiments of the invention include receiving a message associated with one of the tenants and identifying one or more of the platforms associated with the message. The invention also enables the networked contact center platform to access a data location that is both associated with the tenant and shared by two or more of the multiple tenants.
Since its establishment in 1987, 8×8 has been awarded eighty-three (83) United States patents covering a variety of voice and video communications, signaling, processing and storage technologies.
Bursting the Cloudbursting Bubble
Any on-premise or Private Cloud-based app that is subject to spikes in demand that existing infrastructure can’t handle should be able to benefit, so the argument goes. Unfortunately, however, Cloudbursting has a number of problems, making it challenging for even the most suitable scenarios—and furthermore, such scenarios are rarer than you think.
Mimecast Gets $62 Million for Email Archiving
Mimecast, a provider of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, has today announced that it has secured $62.15 million in Series C funding led by Global Private Equity Firm Insight Venture Partners, with existing investors Dawn Capital also participating. Mimecast plans to use the funding to accelerate the development and deployment of new technology, and to support plans for rapid expansion in the U.S. market.
Founded in the U.K. in 2003 by Peter Bauer (CEO) and Neil Murray (CTO), Mimecast has grown rapidly, with over 50 percent year on year revenue growth recorded in six of the past nine years. Today, the Company has over 6,000 customers globally – including 70 percent of the U.K.’s top 100 law firms – and over 1.5 million users worldwide.
In addition to growing its existing business within the European, American and South African markets, Mimecast intends to use the investment to drive innovations in corporate email. The Company’s technology has already played an instrumental role in changing the way businesses deploy email; leading the transition from fragmented LAN-based infrastructures to a single platform cloud solution, Unified Email Management (UEM). Mimecast will now focus on continuing this evolution, using its Software-as-a-Service technology to create an Information Banking platform that allows businesses to unlock the inherent value stored within corporate email.
“Today’s businesses are as dependent on email as ever but, increasingly, email struggles to keep up as the way we create, store and share information changes,” Peter Bauer, CEO and co-founder, Mimecast. “At Mimecast, we believe email needs to be rewired if it is to continue to deliver real value to businesses. Building on our history of innovation, we are working to make email more collaborative and more interactive to realize the true value of the vast amount of unstructured data in email stores. We believe that the future is a more interactive archiving model, where IT folk and end users alike can derive more value in real time, on a day-to-day basis on any technology platform they choose to use. The cloud has the potential to democratize information management and deliver these kinds of powerful productivity tools to businesses of all sizes, rather than just being the preserve of the largest enterprises.”
“Email is the most important means of business communication and, better than anyone else, Mimecast delivers a true integrated solution for secure and accessible email,” said Jeff Lieberman, managing director, Insight Venture Partners. “Mimecast has already achieved strong success and with their product superiority, the industry’s move towards cloud solutions and a very large market opportunity, we believe that Mimecast is poised to achieve high growth and become the global leader in unified email management. Insight is delighted to share in this journey with management and existing shareholders.”
Cloud Computing: Stuck in the Mire Getting Java Apps to the Cloud?
Java players Azul and CumuLogic have teamed up to create what they say is the first integrated, truly elastic PaaS-enablement platform by combining CumuLogic’s Java-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with Azul’s memory-elastic Zing runtime (i.e., Java Virtual Machine).
The move is supposed to make life more worth living for Java developers trying to get to the cloud who find PaaS environments a hassle or whose mission-critical apps wind up TCO-challenged SLA defects despite JVM tuning and complex provisioning schemes. (Sound familiar?)
Send PaaS to CAMP
OASIS, the XML open standards body, is quickly establishing a very powerful leadership role in the Cloud standards arena as well.
This includes standards like TOSCA, for Cloud orchestration and therefore a foundation for Cloud Service Brokering, KMIP for unifying enterprise encryption Key Management across these multiple Cloud providers, and SAML for federated Cloud Identity, also for joining up disparate Clouds.
Also new to this mix is ‘CAMP‘ – Cloud Application Management for Platforms, which will focus on developing standards at the PaaS layer.
Cloudy data sovereignty in Europe (part one)
When considering cloud, the inevitable security questions arise: where are your data centres? What happens to my data? How can I ensure the decision I am making does not expose us to risk?
Blatantly ignoring cloud in today’s competitive environment is not a viable option and nor should it be.
There are a multitude of security areas that encroach on cloud solutions, varying based on whether you adopt a public, private or hybrid cloud approach and whether you use SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
In this two-part article we shall focus on the most common public platform in use, Software as a Service (SaaS), expected to be worth 11bn Euros in the next year according to Gartner (compared to expectations of 4.7bn Euros for IaaS and 923m Euros for PaaS).
Security in the cloud should be approached …
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Speaker Profile: Rich Wolski – Eucalyptus Systems
With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in under six weeks’ time at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, let’s introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the West Coast conference…
We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing & Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud and/or Big Data solutions that are transforming the world of Enterprise IT?
A SciQuest Perspective on SaaS
Recently I had the opportunity to meet Max Leisten, market director at SciQuest via email. So I fired a few questions his way about SaaS and thought I would share his answers. I don’t typically publish interviews, but I think SaaS is a very hot trend looking forward into the accelerated evolution of cloud computing
The Cloud Makes Its Way Across Industries
More than ever before, we are seeing cloud-based software and storage slowly becoming the benchmark. It simply cannot be ignored any longer; the concept is here to stay. Companies and certain growing industries that want to expand while also staying safe are turning to the cloud for convenient services and reliability. Modern businesses need dependable and secure options for storing their information and providing web-based applications. So it’s no surprise that in direct relation to this need, we are seeing a trend emerge; throughout all facets of industry, the benefits of the cloud are being embraced and companies are continually looking for ways to save money, streamline processes, and create a better experience for their consumers.