Compuware on Monday announced a PHP deep transaction management solution. With Deep Transaction Management for PHP, Compuware APM now provides a solution that fully combines user experience management (UEM), web-server visibility, deep-dive into PHP, database access and external calls. For the 39 percent of websites using PHP, the solution cuts through complexity and provides full application visibility from a browser-click to the database and back, for all transactions, in real-time 24×7.
Compuware APM provides out-of-the-box advanced support for popular PHP frameworks including Zend and visibility into MySQL databases. It provides the broadest coverage to include other backend systems such as Java, .NET, C/C++, Big Data, MQ, Message Broker and the mainframe. Out-of-the-box dashboards instantly tell users if something is amiss. Advanced automation with one-click to root cause provides rapid time-to-value. All the application lifecycle stakeholders – business, operations, QA and development – can ensure that their business-critical, revenue-generating applications are responsive and provide a superior end-user experience.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
Book Excerpt | The New World of Work: From the Cube to the Cloud – Part 2
It may be terrifying for those caught in the vortex between the old and the new way of work. Most professionals earned the right degrees, responded to the demands of their professions, learned the intricacies of their industries and were rewarded under the old system. It feels like a massive betrayal that an entire system is falling away.
The truth is that the cube was moved in part by a new breed of professional. They are skilled and passionate global workers who want the freedom to choose the type of work, rather than choosing a job based on its proximity to their homes. Rather than being hindered by location, they are able to compete based on talent and passion. While most of us were sleeping, they unknowingly leveraged cloud and mobile technology and created the New World of Work. And it was their passion for work, rather than some indiscreet evil force, that caused work to seep across boundaries and find its way to this new breed of talent.
Let this chapter be a call to action for those most affected by the New World of Work. Professionals need to reinvent themselves in order to compete in the New World of Work. Conversely, companies need to wake up to the reality that competing for the best talent locally will soon be a thing of the past. The best person for a job no longer lives within a fifty-mile radius of your corporation.
Cloud Expo New York: Five Secrets to Cloud Cost Control
There are five essential tools and processes required to manage costs in the cloud.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Greg Arnette, Founder & CTO of Sonian, will show how by using these tools, the cloud can be more cost-effective and reliable than traditional co-located services – but only if the right upfront planning and long-term strategies are cemented at the beginning of the project.
Greg Arnette is Founder & CTO of the cloud archiving company, Sonian. He has been a messaging, collaboration, Internet, and networking expert for over 15 years and blogs at: www.gregarnette.com. He also founded two previous technology companies.
Webalo Adds Mobile Analytics to Support Real Time Operational Intelligence
Webalo, Inc. announced today the general availability of a new version of its cloud-based enterprise mobility service. The product upgrade delivers Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to any smartphone or tablet so that mobile users can monitor, analyze, and act on real-time operational intelligence (RtOI) – the type of information that reflects how well the business is running.
This upgrade builds on Webalo`s ability to simultaneously monitor multiple backend applications and data sources from numerous vendors, including a range of BI platforms and ERP systems from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, in-house custom-built applications, or any other enterprise application vendor. With Webalo, users can receive sophisticated analytics on their smartphones or tablets, that provide real-time panoramic views of the enterprise, allowing them to determine what`s happening and, if anything needs to be done, take action directly from their device.”
Webalo can be easily configured to display dashboards on users` home screens so they can view KPIs in real time and, when there are deviations from normal, click on an icon to drilldown for more detail about the cause of particular problems so they can take immediate action – from their smartphone or tablet – to correct it.
“As the sole plant supplier to more than 150 Home Depot Inc. garden centers across seven states, we rely on Webalo to equip hundreds of our employees with the tools they need to optimize daily replenishment in all of our store locations,” said Joe Perret, Vice President, Systems and Technology of Bell Nursery, one of the nation’s largest greenhouse growers with growing operations in Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio. “Webalo`s mobility solution not only helps us track inventory levels and trends, but also enables our store employees to perform real-time transactions, ensuring accurate replenishment that meets customer demand. A comprehensive mobility solution is critical to the success of our business, and we are delighted to partner with Webalo.”
Deploying Change and Release Management Successfully
Over the last few years, increased reliance on IT systems has meant that Change and Release Management has made its way to the forefront of major organizations. However, as far as the end-user base goes, Change and Release can sink into the subconscious as a simple-to-use to-do list, which often conceals the complex processes performed by IT staff. Unfortunately, good Change and Release Management isn’t that simple and most projects that support it can only be implemented with difficulty. If business users knew the reality of what goes on when they report a computer error, their perception may be very different. Their opinion also could help make processes better in the future and seeing how the technology works may alter perceptions of Change and Release Management being a walk in the park.
Enterprise mobility was an omnipresent theme at #MWC2013
Richard Absalom, Analyst, Consumer Impact Technology, Ovum
At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the topic of enterprise mobility was everywhere – literally, the stands exhibiting all the vendors operating in the space were spread throughout the eight vast halls of Fira Gran Via. Everywhere you looked there were vendors showing off their approaches to enterprise mobility management (EMM), highlighting the importance of mobility for businesses right now: the size of the demand is so big, and there are so many different approaches to EMM, that you could not possibly fit them all under one single (no matter how huge) roof.
A few key themes emerged from the chaos. Significant announcements made by Samsung and AirWatch highlighted the seriousness with which investors and manufacturers are treating the presence of consumer devices in the enterprise. The general trend toward enterprise app provision and management continued to manifest, and most vendors …
What’s the Buzz? Recap of VMware Partner Exchange
I am just returning from the VMware Partner Exchange conference (PEX) that was held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. While this was a partner vs. customer focused event, there were a few tidbits I felt made sense to share you so here we go….
Awards:
GreenPages was given the Virtualization of Business Critical Applications (VBCA) award for the Americas this year, which was a great achievement. For those of you not aware, the VBCA program inside of VMware is focused on virtualizing the ‘big boy’ mission critical applications such as Oracle, SQL, SAP, Exchange, etc. that have historically been both technically and politically difficult to virtualize. In addition, GreenPages was given the same award on a Global scale which was very exciting as it marks the first time that GreenPages has won a global award from any vendor partner! This also marks the 4th consecutive year that GreenPages has won an award from VMware (2010 – Desktop Virtualization, 2011 – Rainmaker, 2012 – Partner of the Year, and 2013 – Global VBCA). The primary reason we won the VBCA this year was due to several projects which included the virtualization of large applications including a 5500 seat Exchange environment and production databases at a major professional sporting league.
End User Computing Updates:
Horizon Suite v1 will be GA by end of Q1 and will include Workspace, Mirage, and VIEW.
The Workspace product is a combination of what was formally Horizon App Manager and Horizon Data (code name Octopus). For those that do not know, the App Manager side is meant to be an Enterprise App Store which includes SAML integration to various SaaS applications in addition to being able to launch ThinApp apps and VIEW desktops. Support for launching XenApp published apps will come shortly after the GA date, figure April/May timeframe. If you are familiar with Citrix Storefront, this is a very similar concept. The Data (Octopus) side is one of the ‘dropbox for the enterprise’ apps.
Mirage will be updated to version 4.0 at GA time. The key feature in this release is individual application layering. For this, think Unidesk as the concept is very similar but this solution is really meant for physical devices vs. virtual or VDI, at least for now. There is no real VIEW integration with Mirage yet, but that is coming. The hold-up is mainly due to performance issues with running Mirage based workloads in a shared VDI environment. One more interesting tidbit on Mirage is that the license now also includes Fusion Pro. The purpose behind this is to lay down a Mirage based image to a Mac for corporate use and being able to maintain control/management of that image in a BYOD environment.
VIEW will be upgraded to v5.2 and key features here are 3D graphics enhancements including compatibility with some of the new Nvidia server based cards to offload hefty graphics and improve performance. Additionally, HTML5 rendering of the desktops will come with this release. This is the AppBlast piece that was shown at VMWorld back in 2011. Keep in mind that HTML5 has some pretty major limitations so in most cases you’ll still want to deploy the full VIEW client, but in a pinch if you are on some kiosk type machine where installing a client is not possible, then you’ll still be able to get to your desktop and perform basic tasks. Lastly, scalability is enhanced and will continue to expand with future releases.
VMware also announced official Radware and Riverbed Stingray support and reference architectures for load balancing within a Horizon/VIEW environment. F5 support has been around for some time already.
vCloud Suite Updates:
This one, I was very disappointed in as I had expected to hear some pretty significant changes to the way the suite is packaged, however this didn’t happen and seems to have been tabled for some reason so nothing to announce here 
.
Cloud Credits:
Some of you may have heard of these already, but they are basically ‘chips’ that a customer purchases through GreenPages which can then be redeemed at any one of VMware’s vCloud VSPP service provider partners for public cloud IaaS services.
Virsto Acquisition:
Not much was said about this at the event other than the initial focus and use case will be on VDI acceleration. Stay tuned for more detail here as I find it.
BC/DR:
Big topic here was vSphere Data Protection Advanced Edition (VDP-A). Like regular VDP, this is based on the EMC Avamar engine but is more scalable to support larger environments. It is missing some key features currently such as replication, but VMware is diligently working to add these features throughout this calendar year.
Integration Engineering Meeting:
I had the pleasure of meeting with some folks from this internal VMware team. I will simply say this single meeting made the entire trip worthwhile. I learned quite a bit about the team and how it works so I’ll give you an overview. First off, in order to be a member of this team you must have a minimum of 10yrs employment by VMware. Given that VMware has only been around since the late 90s, that requirement greatly shrinks the potential team members, but trust me when I say the guys on this team know their s**t. Their primary charter is take the point of view of an external customer along with going out and meeting with actual customers and providing very candid feedback to the various product management teams inside VMW. I love this team because they are a no bull$hit group of people. If something sucks, they will say it, likewise if something is stellar they will say that as well. Unfortunately I cannot share details of what we discussed as the majority of it was future/NDA type material but I think it is awesome that this team exists inside of VMware because they really do help make the products better. As an example, some of you may be aware of the tool recently made available to make the process of applying SSL Certificates to the various VMware architecture components much easier and it was this team that pushed for the tool and helped get it green lighted.
Ok, that’s it for now… Back to work!
To learn more about how GreenPages can help you with your VMware environment, fill out this form!
CloudBerry Adds SFTP to Explorer 3.8
CloudBerry Lab, a provider of backup and management solutions for public cloud storage services, has added secure ftp to the newest release of Cloudberry Explorer version 3.8, an application that allows accessing, moving and managing data in remote locations such as FTP servers and public cloud storage services including Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Windows Azure, OpenStack and others.
In the new version of CloudBerry Explorer SFTP server is supported as one of the remote location options. Now users can perform file access, file transfer and file management operations across SFTP server and local storage.
Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) also known as SSH File Transfer Protocol is an extension of the SSH-2 protocol that provides a secure file transfer capability. This protocol assumes that it is run over a secure channel, such as SSH, that the server has already authenticated the client, and that the identity of the client user is available to the protocol.
Cloud Expo New York: Building the Case for a Cloud-Based Government
The US Government, as well as governments around the world, is looking to invest heavily in cloud computing. The cloud promises a lot of efficiencies and cost savings but it also presents a new revolutionary way to approach citizen services.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Majed Saadi, Director of the Cloud Computing Practice at SRA International, will offers insight into how cloud computing coupled with other technical advancements in mobility and security are changing government IT organizations. He will also provide general guidance and best practices for developing practical and pragmatic cloud strategies.
A Love Story: Devices and Cloud – Perfect Together
We’ve heard about Google Glasses. And we’ve heard about Apple iWatch. And yes, we’ve heard about people embedding cellphones into shoes [1]. Once again, the term “wearable computing” is becoming a hot topic in news and literatures. Some have even announced that the age of wearable technology is here [2]. The world is surely changing fast. Aren’t we still debating who makes the best smartphones and the best tablets? What’s going on here?
The foreseeable booming of wearable computing is just another chapter of the unstoppable fusion process between cyber space and reality. Eventually, machine computing will become ubiquitous, and the boundary between human bodies and devices will fade away. This is a vision shared by many scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs and Hollywood writers. It’s becoming a reality faster than we might have expected. Devices will no longer be just peripheral augmentations, but be inextricably intertwined with human lives.