Monthly Archives: November 2012

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VMware begins a new phase in its evolution

By Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, IT Software

VMware has been the force behind many of the server infrastructure virtualisation transformations that have taken place in the data centre over the last decade.

The infrastructure virtualization market is now reaching maturity, with about 50% of x86 data centres now virtualised, and VMware needed to extend its solutions to expand beyond server virtualization.

At VMWorld 2012 Europe, more than 8,000 delegates witnessed the shift in emphasis as VMware’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, announced the company’s move to become a heterogeneous data centre and cloud management vendor.

The other key announcement, following on from VMWorld US where VMware released the tools needed to build the software-defined data center (SDDC), was the move to provide the management tools needed to operationalize the SDDC. VMware also signaled a change in approach to end-user computing, focusing on the management and governance of applications …

Human Resources, Northgate Information Solutions, Partnerships, Payroll, SuccessFactors

SuccessFactors, NorthgateArinso Partner for Integrated Cloud HCM, Payroll Services

NorthgateArinso (NGA), a human resources services provider, and SuccessFactors today announced a partnership that will enable SuccessFactors Employee Central customers to take advantage of NGA’s global payroll services.

The partnership will provide Employee Central customers with a pre-built integration to euHReka, NGA’s global HR & payroll platform, which offers cloud-based payroll services in more than 100 countries.

For customers that wish to manage payroll in-house, SuccessFactors launched its own cloud-based payroll solution for Employee Central customers in July 2012. This offering will now be complemented with a range of BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) payroll options from NorthgateArinso, via its euHReka Inclusion Framework and supported by its global service centers. This allows Employee Central customers to choose between various options for global payroll, depending on their business requirements and service delivery preferences in various geographies.

As a result of the partnership, Employee Central customers will be able to outsource payroll to an additional specialist provider, and rapidly deploy managed payroll services globally, leveraging a fully localized and preconfigured payroll platform. NGA’s global payroll solution will seamlessly integrate with SuccessFactors using an out-of-the-box payroll solution. The connector will be generally available in early 2013.


Mobile, Mobile application development, SOASTA, Tools

SOASTA Launches Mobile Services Division

Cloud and mobile testing provider SOASTA today announced the launch of its Mobile Services Division (MSD) to help companies deliver  quality user experience for their mobile and web apps. SOASTA’s MSD, headed by mobile testing and big-data industry veteran Mahesh Gidwani, focuses on helping its customers build and manage mobile test labs by combining SOASTA’s best practices and proven test methodologies to ensure successful mobile application delivery using the company’s CloudTest, TouchTest, and mPulse products.

In addition to SOASTA’s own MSD, SOASTA is also introducing a Mobile Test Automation Network made up of mobile test professionals from around the world that will be accredited to deliver SOASTA’s mobile test methodologies. Joining this network today are partners focused on Mobile Test Automation including ProtoTest, Total Performance Consulting and Utopia Solutions, that extend SOASTA’s services reach to clients across geographies and industry verticals.

“The explosion of mobile development has created a capability gap in the services market that SOASTA uniquely fills with our elite team of experts and partners who have pioneered mobile test automation and cloud testing,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. “We launched the SOASTA Mobile Services Division after our customers told us that they often lacked the expertise to implement and execute effective mobile and cloud-based testing strategies.”

“As enterprises struggle to match the pace of consumer demand via mobile and web properties, they are finding it hard to adapt their quality processes,” said Tom Murphy, Gartner Research Director. “Gartner sees the growth and expansion of specialized professional services as a natural response to the market need.”

The new Mobile Services offered by SOASTA span strategy, methodology, accreditation, implementation and ad-hoc services focused on:

  • Mobile Test Automation Architects (On-Demand, On-Premise)
  • Mobile Test Automation Experts (On-Demand, On-Premise)
  • Mobile Performance Engineers (On-Demand, On-Premise)
  • Continuous Integration Test Methodologies
  • Building and Management Services for Internal and External Mobile
    Application Test Labs
  • Mobile App Testing Accreditation

“The demand for mobile testing expertise, coupled with the compression of delivery cycles, drives growth for our specialized services,” said Lee Barnes, the founder and CTO of Utopia Solutions. “With this expansion, joint SOASTA and Utopia customers will experience rapid return and expert guidance of seasoned mobile testing experts resulting in the highest quality mobile apps to their end-users.”

“I’m excited to be leading the charge into mobile test services for SOASTA,” said Mahesh Gidwani, SOASTA’s new VP, Professional Services. “SOASTA is excited match our product innovations with equally innovative services that help our customers with mobile automation.”


Carahsoft Technology Corp, Government, Partnerships, Splunk

Carahsoft to Resell Splunk to Government Customers

SSplunk Inc. and Carahsoft Technology Corp. today announced an alliance under which Carahsoft will market, sell and distribute Splunk software to federal, state and local government agencies and the Splunk reseller partner ecosystem.

“Splunk software will enable Carahsoft and our reseller network to better equip agencies with big data management and security solutions needed for highly sensitive, mission critical environments,” said Craig P. Abod, Carahsoft president. “Splunk’s ability to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable makes it a core technology in our big data portfolio and a critical solution for our customers.”

With Splunk software, government entities can index, monitor, analyze and visualize massive volumes of valuable machine data generated by complex physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. Splunk helps agencies create real-time visibility across all agency servers and network devices by enabling agencies to create a single viewpoint to help investigate security incidents and address critical operations and application management functions.

“The government faces a paradox today with massive streams of data, real-time mission requirements and shrinking budgets,” said Bill Cull, vice president of public sector, Splunk. “Splunk software helps agencies to effectively analyze machine-generated big data, meet security and compliance standards and drastically cut operational costs. Our strategic alliance with Carahsoft will give agencies easier access to our products, allowing them to uncover data and improve operational intelligence to achieve mission success.”

For more information on Splunk, visit the intelligence solutions section of Carahsoft’s website or join Carahsoft and Splunk at the FedCyber.com Cyber Security Summit on Thursday, November 15, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Go to Splunk’s website to learn how Splunk works with government agencies and click here to download a free version of Splunk Enterprise.


Desktone, Desktop virtualization, Managed services, Partnerships, Total Cost of Ownership, Virtual desktop, Virtualization

Quest, Pivotal Technologies Partner to Deliver Desktops as a Cloud Service

Desktone, Inc., today announced a partnership between Quest, a cloud service provider, and Pivotal Technologies Group, a managed service provider. Based on the relationship, Pivotal will now offer Desktone-powered hosted Windows desktops provided by Quest as a managed service to businesses. The relationship represents an effective new way for service providers of all sizes to benefit from increasing demand for desktops as a cloud service. By providing the Desktone-powered DaaS offering to channel partners, Quest is able to expand their market opportunity while enabling managed service providers such as Pivotal the ability to offer virtual desktops without having to invest in costly infrastructure.

“We built the Desktone Platform from day one for service providers like Quest and Pivotal that are tasked with helping end user organizations increase IT efficiencies while keeping their budgets in check,” said David Grant, Vice President of Strategy, Desktone. “We have seen an explosion of interest from managed service providers (MSPs) that want to deliver DaaS but cannot build their own data centers. With DaaS, Quest is able to host and deploy virtual desktops from their data centers, making it easy for Pivotal to provision new desktops for end users whenever they’re needed without investing in costly hardware and software.”

“Quest is committed to its partners to capitalize on cloud computing opportunities like DaaS that are in the greatest demand among customers today,” said Adam Burke, Director of Quest’s Technology Partner Program. “Our partnership with Pivotal is a testament to the unique value proposition that Quest delivers as a partner of choice to accelerate their time to market and provide the greatest value of cloud services to their end customers.”

Small and mid-sized service providers often don’t have the capacity for hosted offerings. By leveraging Desktone’s multi-tenant DaaS solution, Quest can provide MSPs like Pivotal a simple, affordable way to offer virtual desktops to end user organizations. The multi-tenant architecture makes it easy to deliver secure, scalable virtual desktops as a cloud service without the expense and hassle of infrastructure integration and maintenance.

“Our customers look to Pivotal to solve their IT pain points. One of the biggest challenges we see is organizations looking to support mobile and remote workers,” said Jim Law, President, Pivotal Technologies Group. “We previously offered our customers desktops from a traditional VDI provider but found the service expensive and difficult to manage because of issues with speed and availability. By transitioning to the Quest DaaS model powered by Desktone we are able to streamline desktop management and improve reliability while reducing the price per desktop by half.”


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Cloud Computing Aided Resiliency in Wake of Sandy

Hurricane Sandy brought with it a heavy dose of disaster, but utilizing the cloud helped mitigate what could have been even more difficulties faced by businesses.
“Overall, I think cloud does help,” said Stephanie Balaouras, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Tier one cloud and SaaS providers such as Google and Amazon operate their cloud services from multiple data centers and can simply shift workloads to other locations as needed. They are also able to deliver a level of availability that many organizations could never achieve themselves. This includes the resiliency of the data center infrastructure itself to the resources that they invest in high availability and disaster recovery capabilities,” Balaouras said, according to an article on SearchCloudSecurity.com.
“Cloud computing can absolutely help in BC/DR operations,” said Kevin O’Shea, information security practice lead at engineering, construction and technical services firm URS Corporation. “For example, we saw several large webhost providers switch to alternate locations when their primary data centers went offline in New York City. However, businesses must be organized in such a way as to be able to offload critical applications and data to a cloud provider,” he said.

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Cloud Computing: From Business Process Outsourcing to BpaaS

Over the last decade, Business Process Outsourcing has become an enterprise standard way of delegating the non-core processes to third-party service providers, which resulted in cost controls and business efficiency. This BPO industry has further matured by providing innovation to the outsourcing enterprise because specialized BPO providers with subject matter expertise on clients’ business vertical and business processes have ultimately enabled the enterprises to achieve their business goals beyond cost-cutting.
Cloud-based BPM is the provision of Business Process Management tools as a SaaS/PaaS over the network. These services provide the ability to orchestrate many low level of business services (again available as SaaS Services or by other On premise applications) coupled with human processes into a realization of complete Business Process As A Service (BpaaS).

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Caringo Brings Object Storage to Apache CloudStack

Caringo, the object storage software folks, has announced the seamless integration of their CAStor core technology as an enterprise-ready object store for Apache CloudStack 4.0, the OpenStack-competitive project now in incubation with the Apache Software Foundation.
The integration means CAStor can provide secure multi-tenant storage that scales from terabytes to petabytes with a robust customizable level of some nines data durability without backup or RAID.
The integration has been submitted to Apache as part of the CloudStack 4.0 release and is available for immediate download.
Citrix’ CloudPlatform, powered by CloudStack, provides an open source platform for highly scalable and reliable cloud computing environments and is supposed to be deployed in some of the world’s largest enterprises.

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Open Call to VMware – Commercialize Cloud Foundry Software!

After spending time at VMware and Cloud Expo last week, I believe that VMware’s lack of full backing for Cloud Foundry software is holding back the entire PaaS market in the enterprise.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of momentum in PaaS despite how very immature the market is. But this momentum is in pockets and largely outside of the core of software development in the enterprise. CloudFoundry.com might be moving along, but most enterprises don’t want to run the bulk of their applications in a public cloud. Only through the Cloud Foundry software layer will enterprises really be able to invest. And invest they will.
PaaS-based applications running in the enterprise data center are going to replace (or envelope) traditional app server-based approaches. It is just a matter of time due to productivity and support for cloud models. Cloud Foundry has the opportunity to be one of the winners but it won’t happen if VMware fails to put their weight behind it.

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Japan is most cloud ready Asia Pacific nation, ACCA says

A week after VMware released its Asia Pacific Cloud Index Survey, another report has come up from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) claiming Japan is the most ‘cloud ready’ nation in the Asia Pacific region.

Japan’s ranking is unchanged from last year at number one, with South Korea leapfrogging Hong Kong and Singapore into second place.

Hong Kong and Singapore, according to the VMware survey, were the most cloud-knowledgeable Asia Pacific nations, with nine out of ten IT professionals in Hong Kong claiming to have a strong knowledge of virtualisation and 82% of respondents in Singapore having a strong cloud knowledge.

Elsewhere, Australia slipped three places to 7th position overall out of 14 nations, mainly due to its poor international connectivity score. Australia only beat New Zealand in connectivity, scoring a meagre 2.7. For comparison Japan scored a maximum 10.0 in this category.

Perhaps surprisingly …