Monthly Archives: February 2013

Uncategorized

Parallels at Mobile World Congress at IBM Booth from Feb 25th – 28th

by Matt Vasey, Senior Director of System Integrator Alliances

 

Parallels has teamed up with IBM to provide a unique solution that optimizes cloud service delivery using Parallels Automation, APS ecosystem of services, SmartCloud Aggregator and Smart Cloud for Enterprise.  IBM show-cased the joint solution at Parallels Summit which was followed with great interest from PA partners.  IBM and Parallels will demonstrate the Parallels Automation and SmartCloud Aggregator at Mobile World Congress for existing PA partners who couldn’t make it to Summit and potential telco partners. 

 

The IBM SmartCloud Aggregator enables the service provider to become a broker of cloud-based services that are provided from both inside and outside the service provider’s network. The advantages of this approach include the ability to accelerate operations integration with third-parties’ services, predict integration costs and intervals, and respond quickly to market demand for leading applications. The combination of IBM’s SmartCloud Aggregator with the Parallels Automation storefront provides the service provider with an end-to-end solution that simplifies selling cloud-based services and expands their portfolio with selected services from the Parallels and IBM ecosystems. 

 

You can see the full line up of IBM demonstrations at IBM’s MWC microsite.  Be sure to drop by the IBM booth (Booth 3.B86 in Hall 3) at Mobile World Congress February 25th through 28th to learn more how you can participate in this solution.   For more information, please visit: www.parallels.com/ibm or email at mwc@parallels.com

 

8X8, Partnerships, Softbank, Virtualization, Zerigo

8×8 and SoftBank Partner to Offer Virtualized Cloud Data Services

8×8, Inc., provider of cloud-based business communications and computing solutions, and SoftBank Telecom Corp. today announced that they have signed an agreement for SoftBank to license 8×8’s subscription-based “Zerigo” enterprise cloud software.

The agreement calls for 8×8 to license its Zerigo software and to develop some additional related software for Softbank to provide virtual desktop interface (VDI) services to its customers in Japan and throughout the world. The combination of the Zerigo software and the new VDI software will enable SoftBank to offer a full suite of virtualized cloud services to its major enterprise customers using Vblock products from VCE, a leader in converged cloud infrastructure systems.

Initially, SoftBank will deploy these services in Japan, but plans to rapidly extend the roll out of services to the rest of Asia as well as Europe, the United States and other major markets throughout the world. SoftBank counts some of the world’s largest enterprises as customers for its award-winning services and it intends to market these new, innovative virtualized services to those same customers. The agreement provides 8×8 with development and installation fees as well as on-going license fees over an initial 36-month contract.

“8×8 is delighted to partner with SoftBank to deliver these valuable services to their business customers,” said 8×8 Chairman & CEO Bryan Martin. “SoftBank is one of the most agile, successful telecom service providers in the world and the speed at which they move matches 8×8’s similar culture of always leading rather than following the market.”

“SoftBank selected 8×8 after an extensive search of software providers based on 8×8’s clear commitment to quality, scalability and reliability as well as flexibility and cost competitiveness,” said Ken Miyauchi, Director of The Board, SoftBank Telecom Corp. “SoftBank is pleased to partner with such a nimble, Silicon Valley company whose culture mirrors our own and whose experience in delivering cloud services will be invaluable in helping us to rapidly deploy similar services in Japan. We expect our customers will be delighted with these new offerings and we look forward to expanding the available markets in the near future.”

Cloud computing, hybrid cloud, PaaS, Stratos, WSO2

WSO2 Opens Beta for Stratos 2.0 PaaS Offering

Today WSO2 unveiled the beta release of WSO2 Stratos 2.0. Newly re-architected, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is a foundation for implementing a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that combines support for heterogeneous applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform runtimes with native, secure multi-tenancy. WSO2 Stratos 2.0 also adds the capability to run on any cloud infrastructure, including VMware, Eucalyptus, Amazon and OpenStack.

WSO2 previewed the latest release of WSO2 Stratos at WSO2Con 2013, which runs February 13-14 in London. The company also announced that it has begun accepting customers for the WSO2 Stratos 2.0 beta program.

“Increasingly enterprises view the cloud as a platform for innovation. However, until now they’ve had to make trade-offs between using their favorite development tools and middleware or capitalizing on the multi-tenancy of a native cloud environment. With WSO2 Stratos 2.0, these organizations no longer have to compromise,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO.

The Stratos 2.0 approach to multi-tenancy goes beyond other PaaS environments to support multiple levels of virtualization—from standard virtual machines, via Linux Containers to intra-JVM isolation. This choice of sharing resources while providing the correct isolation level for multiple tenants is a significant factor in enabling lower costs, greater flexibility, and easier on-ramping into a private or public cloud environment.

The new tenant-aware elastic load balancer in Stratos 2.0 is a first-of-a-kind capability that allows the environment to provide highly tunable performance to different tenants, ranging from “economy class” for low priority workloads up to “private jet” mode for workloads that require dedicated resources.

At the heart of Version 2.0 is a new cartridge architecture for plugging software into WSO2 Stratos to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities, such as multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, self-service provisioning, metering, billing, and resource pooling, among others. As a result, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is able to run, not only 13 WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware products, but also a choice of frameworks, databases, and other application services.

WSO2 Stratos 2.0 also significantly enhances PaaS deployment through an integration layer that uses the popular jclouds technology to allow it to run on any infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) including OpenStack, VMware, Eucalyptus and CloudStack. Additionally, use of the Puppet open source tool for infrastructure deployment in this release makes it easier than ever to install and configure Stratos in a private or public cloud environment. Like all WSO2 software, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is 100% open source and will be made available under the Apache License 2.0.

Ideal candidates for the WSO2 Stratos 2.0 beta program are enterprise IT professionals who are planning or evaluating ways to deliver new applications and/or migrate existing ones to the cloud. Participants also must be committed to participating and giving feedback. For more information and to contact WSO2 about joining the beta program, please visit the product Web page: http://wso2.com/cloud/stratos.

Uncategorized

Cloud Expo New York: Time to Mission @ the Speed of Cloud

Organizations want extraordinary results from their IT units. Today’s mantra is faster delivery, better quality, cheaper solutions, and safer environments. Many CIOs are implementing cloud computing enterprise architectures to address these challenges with results varying greatly. Why are some organizations seeing only limited results from cloud computing implementations while others are increasing market share, decreasing costs, generating value, and innovating faster? will explore fundamental shifts organizations need to consider to get the most value from cloud computing and deliver “time to mission @ the speed of cloud.”
In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jill Tummler Singer, CIO for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), will explore fundamental shifts organizations need to consider to get the most value from cloud computing and deliver “time to mission @ the speed of cloud.”

read more

Uncategorized

Compuware Announces Cloud Best Practices

Compuware Corporation on Monday announced the publication of its latest Application Performance Management (APM) Best Practices collection, titled: “Optimizing Cloud & Virtualized Applications.” Written by thought leaders from Compuware’s APM Center of Excellence, this new volume provides best practices and techniques that enable senior managers, IT team leaders and practitioners to manage and optimize application performance in cloud environments.
Cloud and virtualization are two of the most transformational technology trends in the IT industry today. Initially, a common concern with the migration to these environments is centered on data integrity and security. As adoption moves from departmental applications and test environments to business-critical applications, managing performance and availability has become a critical issue. This volume examines the business and operational challenges associated with these changes.

read more

Uncategorized

There Is More to PaaS Than You Think

As described in the last week’s post NIST defines three different cloud computing service models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS and SaaS are really easy to grasp but I see people struggling to understand the PaaS model. As a long-time application developer though I find the PaaS model the most compelling one for new applications. Here is why.
I will look at two examples: one enterprise and one from the consumer world.
Let’s start with the enterprise scenario. If you examine any enterprise application portfolio you will find out that almost every development team has implemented it’s own code for handling common functionality like authentication, authorization, database access etc. There are also numerous cases when the same team developed the same functionality over and over in each new project. Even the componentization model doesn’t help in this situation because either developers are often not aware of the existence of the components or there are too many options they can choose from and they cannot find the right fit for their scenario. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the holly grail for this problem but many enterprises are still far from achieving this goal.

read more

cloud brokerage, Cloud computing

Guest Post: Who Controls the Cloud Market – Providers or Consumers?

Guest Post: Ilyas Iyoob, Director, Advanced Analytics and Sr. Research Scientist, PhD at Gravitant

We first went from reserving cloud capacity to securing capacity on-demand, and then we even started to bid for unused capacity in the spot market – all in an effort to decrease cost in the cloud.  Can we take this one step further?  Instead of us bidding for capacity, wouldn’t it be interesting if we can get providers to bid for our demand?

Retail Supply Chain Market Analogy

In fact, this is a common phenomena in the retail supply chain industry.  For example, Walmart has a large amount of freight that needs to be shipped between different cities over the course of the year.  So, every year an auction is conducted in which Walmart lists all their shipments, and carriers such as JB Hunt, Schneider, Yellow etc. bid for the opportunity to carry these shipments using their fleet of trucks.  The reason carriers are bidding for retailer demand is because in general, capacity exceeds demand in the retail industry.

Cloud Computing Market

Keeping this in mind, let us now take a look at the Cloud Computing Market.  Does capacity exceed demand or is it the other way around?  A quick way to find out is by observing spot prices in the cloud market.  In today’s market, Amazon’s Spot Instances are 86% cheaper than their on-demand instances, and Enomaly’s SpotCloud also shows lower spot prices across the board.  This leads us to believe that capacity exceeds demand in the cloud market as well.  A related indicator is the predominance of data center consolidation initiatives in both the commercial and government marketplaces.

Since capacity exceeds demand, consumers have an upper hand and are in control of the cloud market at the moment.  Moreover, they should be able to replicate what is being done in the retail supply chain industry.  In other words, cloud consumers should be able to auction off their demand to the best fit lowest price cloud provider.

So, …

Consumers should seize the opportunity and control the market while the odds are in their favor i.e. Demand < Capacity.  At the same time, Service Integrators and Value Added Resellers can help Enterprise IT consumers in this process by conducting Primary-Market auctions using Cloud Service Brokerage technology.

This post was originally published on Gravitant’s blog.

Uncategorized

Opposition to Dell Buy-Out Mounts

Michael Dell may be facing a stockholders’ revolt.
T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund biggie that held 4.4% of Dell at the end of the third quarter, isn’t prepared to support the company’s leveraged buy-out at the price the Dell board agreed to last week.
T. Rowe Price chairman and chief investment officer Brian Rogers released a statement saying, “We believe the proposed buyout does not reflect the value of Dell and we do not intend to support the offer as put forward.”
His position mirrors that of Southeastern Asset Management, which is understood to hold 8.4% of Dell and faces a loss of nearly $400 million if the deal goes down at the $13.65 or $24.4 billion agreed to. It claims Dell is worth $24 a share, a price it hasn’t fetched in a long time.

read more

Uncategorized

Dimension Data Introduces WAN Optimization Across Its Global Cloud

Dimension Data announced on Tuesday that it has introduced WAN optimization capabilities to its cloud globally. By deploying WAN optimization technology in Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform™ (MCP) cloud data centers, Dimension Data clients are reporting a significant increase in application performance across the entire cloud. Organizations using the cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers have realized the greatest improvement in performance. An enhanced capability, WAN optimization is provided as part of the company’s standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge.
According to Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit, “we are helping our clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services.”

read more