Cloud Computing is finally changing the sound of conference calls. As hard as Skype and Skype alternatives tried, none of the peer-to-peer solutions has kicked the archaic audio bridges in the dust. The quality is just not good enough for important business conversations. Newcomer Voxeet wants to change that with their cloud computing architecture. Already out as kick-butt web app Voxeet is now available on iPhone and Android app stores.
Anyone who’s been on a conference call-of which there are more than 100 billion minutes worth each year-knows firsthand how awful they can be. Voice quality can be muffled and choppy. Background noise can be distracting. If more than one person is speaking at the same time, it can be impossible to tell who is whom, or even worse, the sound can cut out entirely. Voxeet’s Natural Conferencing technology eliminates all of these problems, and more.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Innovation Guru Jeremy Gutsche, Small Business Expert Tim Harmon and VMware President Tod Nielsen to Deliver Keynote Speeches at Parallels Summit 2013
Register for Parallels Summit by Dec. 31 and receive the opportunity to attend a Parallels Certified Training Course for free. That’s a $2,000 savings! Plus, when you use the code ATGNB89Z, you’ll receive $100 off of your Parallels Summit registration! Don’t miss this amazing opportunity to grow your business. Register today at http://www.parallels.com/summit/2013/.
We’re thrilled to announce an exciting roster keynote speakers for Parallels Summit 2013, the leading global annual gathering of the cloud industry, scheduled from February 4-6, 2013, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada. Parallels featured keynote speakers include Jeremy Gutsche, an innovation expert, award-winning author of Exploiting Chaos, and founder of TrendHunter.com; Tim Harmon who as Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. serves technology marketing professionals in developing SMB go-to-market channels; and Tod Nielsen, Co-President of Application Platform, VMware. Each are industry experts whose collective insight is highly sought-after for creating strategies to market IT services to small and medium businesses (SMBs).
Members of Parallels’ leadership team will also deliver keynote speeches – including Birger Steen, CEO; Serguei Beloussov, Executive Chairman of the Board & Chief Architect; and Jack Zubarev, President, Marketing and Alliances. These hosting industry authorities will share what Parallels has been developing in the last year including the latest innovations in Parallels software, offering attendees deep insight into their customers, and access to the broadest ecosystem of partners – all to make it easy for you to sell cloud services to SMBs.
Parallels Summit will feature rich sessions with integrated in-depth content arranged in three distinct tracks:
- Business track will feature innovative ways to understand and more deeply analyze customers behaviors
- Technical track is focused on how to make the best use of the latest innovations from Parallels R&D
- Developer track is for those who want to build and integrate rich services using the Application Packaging Standard (APS) in a way that was never possible before
In addition to the keynotes and training sessions, conference attendees will receive a detailed overview of Parallels product roadmap in advance of public announcements. Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ research will be updated with all new analysis for US, Global, Mexico, and Brazil exploring what services SMBs say they want to buy from cloud service providers.
“I am looking forward to Parallels Summit 2013. Gathering the brightest and most innovative minds in the industry, Parallels Summit creates moments for attendees to make important connections,” said Birger Steen, CEO, Parallels. “Attendees will discover the latest solutions, gain insight from industry experts, network with their peers and move their business forward. All this in just a couple of days because the entire ecosystem will be there.”
Parallels invites you to register now and join the more than 1,500 industry influencers, leading technology analysts, media editors and reporters and online influentials from across the globe. From cloud service providers and developers, hosting companies, communication service providers (CSPs) to value-added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs), Parallels Summit 2013 is an unrivaled opportunity to build relationships with the leading players in the cloud space.
Attend Parallels Summit and you can also meet and interact with other leading players in the hosting industry, including key executives and technical staff from Platinum and Gold event sponsors IBM, Symantec, Microsoft, Enom, LuxCloud and OpenXchange among the over 50 event sponsors from across the entire hosting ecosystem.
Register today at http://www.parallels.com/summit/2013/.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Performance in the Cloud
“We’ve been at this business for 13 years now, and the types of clients we have been serving want high quality, always-available infrastructure that really outperforms anything else that’s out there” explained Peter Berg, VP of Sales and Marketing at ServerCentral, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ProjectSpeaker Aims to Streamline Speaker Management, Engagement
ProjectSpeaker Inc., a cloud-based technology company, has launched its speaker management platform to save conference and meeting planners’ time and resources. Planners can search a speaker database of complete profiles, manage events and sessions and engage directly with speakers and/or their representatives through an internal communication channel.
With over 300 speaker bureaus and over 2,000,000 “professional speaker” search results on Google, the process of locating the ideal speaker and managing the engagement process is daunting. With ProjectSpeaker, planners are now able to create unlimited events and sessions, assign and review speakers and engage them directly to streamline the entire process.
ProjectSpeaker is free for both planners and speakers. It features an innovative business model in which we partner with conference industry suppliers to bid on their services in response to planners’ requests. ProjectSpeaker shares in the revenue generated.
Unitrends Updates Backup and Recovery Suite
Unitrends today announced Unitrends Release 7.0, the next generation of software powering its physical and virtual backup and recovery appliances. Unitrends 7.0 bolsters data protection in virtualized and cloud environments, while providing an expanded range of platform and enterprise application support
Unitrends’ portfolio of physical (Recovery Series) and virtual (Unitrends Enterprise Backup™) appliances provide unified data protection across heterogeneous environments. Powered by Unitrends 7.0, these solutions now give companies unprecedented flexibility for optimizing backup and recovery in virtualized and cloud environments, with new capabilities including:
- Hot-hot replication and retention – Simplifies disaster recovery by eliminating cumbersome and expensive two-step disaster recovery operations. This capability keeps disaster recovery sites active, online and continuously updated – expediting disaster recovery processes and preventing data loss due to backup windows.
- Private virtual machine spin-up – Enables companies to instantly spin up a virtual machine in the cloud to add another layer of redundancy to their disaster recovery infrastructure. This capability can keep businesses running and data accessible even when on-premise locations experience total outages.
- VMware® SAN direct backup and recovery – Reduces backup windows, recovery time objectives (RTOs) and local area network traffic by performing fabric-based backup and recovery of virtual machines residing on SAN storage.
- Application-aware VMware backups – Enables increased application-aware integration for VMware host operating system (HOS)-based backups and ensures application consistency during and after the backup.
- Private one–click recovery – Enables instant recovery for VMware on the replication target and direct bare metal recovery and system recovery at the off-site premise location.
- Cloud-sourced deduplication – Increases cloud storage capacity and improves data retention by extending deduplication functionality to data in the cloud.
In addition to enhanced data protection in virtualized and cloud environments, Unitrends 7.0 also includes expanded enterprise application and platform support. In addition to SQL Server® and Microsoft® Exchange support, Unitrends now offers Oracle and Microsoft Office SharePoint support for native application protection – extending its robust, feature-rich data backup and recovery functionality to even more enterprise-level applications. Unitrends 7.0 also includes agent push simplification, which deploys install and upgrade Windows® agents from the backup appliance – decreasing total cost of ownership and lowering time-to-value.
“Having the ability to protect data across physical, virtual and cloud environments is essential to companies today, and our mission has always been to enable our customers to do this easily and affordably,” said Dr. Mark Campbell, chief strategy and technology officer at Unitrends. “Unitrends 7.0 extends our legacy by providing a broad range of capabilities that make it easy for companies to expedite backup and disaster recovery processes, ensure continuous access to data and maintain business operations regardless of what is happening around them.”
For more information on Unitrends and its enterprise-class data protection solutions for heterogeneous environments, see www.unitrends.com.
MokiMobility Releases Updated iPad Kiosk App
MokiMobility has released a new version of their MokiManage iPad kiosk management app.
In this video Ty Allen, President and co-founder, introduces the new release.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: The Open Hybrid Cloud
“Open is what Red Hat’s DNA is going back to the early days of Linux, and we feel that open is even more fundamental with cloud,” stated Gordon Haff, Cloud Evangelist at Red Hat, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The Limits of Cloud: NICS and Nets
You might have noticed that in general, enterprise-grade networking solutions aren’t always available for general deployment in public cloud environments.
You might also have noticed that when you provision a compute instance in a public cloud environment you get one public (and usually one private) IP address.
I’ll stop for a moment and let you consider the relationship between these two facts.
Many mature enterprise-grade networking solutions require at least two network interfaces – one for traffic (data plane) and one for management (control plane) and often suggest a third for optimal, best-practice deployment. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen mature networking solutions that don’t employ segregated management networks. Those solutions that sit inline and that are in the line of fire, as you will, from concentrated network and application-layer attacks, absolutely need segregated management as a means to control the solution and mitigate an in-progress attack or sudden spike in utilization that might be overwhelming the primary network.
2012 Cloud Data Trends – Year in Review
It was nearly a year ago that I authored a post predicting ten hot trends in cloud data for 2012. While there’s a strong temptation to cast old predictions into ancient history and dive into ten predictions for 2013, I felt it more appropriate to first glance back and reflect on how those past predictions fared.
After all, much can transpire over the course of 12 months — hot technologies cool off, fads pass, buzzwords vanish — and, of course, some technologies really stick. So let’s take this opportunity to revel in our success or eat our humble pie. Without much ado, here are the predicted 2012 trends and how they fared:
The Top 10, Top 10 2013 Predictions
Like last year, everyone has their Technology predictions with their annual lists for the coming year. Instead of coming up with my own, I figured I’d simply regurgitate what many others are expecting to happen.
Cloud computing in 2013: Two warnings: @DavidLinthicum has his two tragic cloud computing predictions for 2013 (price wars & skills shortage). Nice to see some realism mixed with all the ‘this is the greatest.’
10 Cloud Predictions for 2013: CIO has an interesting slide show covering things like Hybrid Cloud, Management, Brokers, SDN, Outages and a few other critical components.
RSA’s Art Coviello: 8 Computer Security Predictions For 2013: Attacks grow, Hackers grow, business’s not prepared grows along with investment, analysis and intelligence to mitigate threats.
Security Predictions 2013-2014: Emerging Trends in IT and Security: SANS gets some input from various industry folks on what they think. Areas like authentication, mobile devices, Windows 8, geo-forensics, gamification and others are highlighted