Veeam® Software on Wednesday announced that Chris Moore has been appointed as the company’s Channel Chief of North America.
“As enterprises deepen and expand their use of virtualization, they’re finding they need more powerful data protection for their modern data centers,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam Software. “To keep up with the growing demand for Veeam (especially Veeam Backup & Replication v7), we rely solely on our ProPartners – our success depends on their success. Chris has demonstrated he has the skills and leadership abilities required to further enable and empower our channel partners. He and his team will play a key role in our effort to provide powerful and affordable data protection solutions to SMBs and expand our presence in the enterprise as we continue our mission to achieve $1 billion in revenue within the next five years.”

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The trend of companies adopting recurring revenue surged in 2013, with brand names ranging from Adobe and Amazon to Target and Toyota using new billing and pricing models to grow sales and deepen customer loyalty. This surge will continue this year as more companies adopt recurring revenue models because of their flexibility and convenience for customers. Today, recurring revenue expert Aria Systems issued a projection on the industries poised for further disruption via recurring revenue in 2014 and beyond.
“Businesses large and small, across many sectors, are adopting the flexibility of recurring revenue,” said Tom Dibble, president and CEO, Aria Systems. “It’s not a fad anymore; it’s the new way to do business.”

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TwinStrata on Tuesday announced the general availability of the latest release of its CloudArray software. Customers using the new release gain broader file access capabilities, file sharing across sites, secure bulk ingestion and easy cloud-to-cloud migration.
“Our customers are demanding greater sophistication and control over their cloud storage environments, said Nicos Vekiarides, founder and CEO of TwinStrata. “Just getting them to the cloud is no longer enough – users want to store more data with reduced administration and more robust functionality than their on-premises storage systems.”

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I will be part of a tweetchat on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 4pm EST. The topic will be PaaS. The event is hosted by @IBMCloud, but there is no expectation to talk about IBM, its strategy, or its products. The company is taking the enlightened view that good conversation is good for everybody.

The nominal topic is whether the term PaaS is dying, whether it will soon (or some day) simply be integrated into IaaS.

I generally loathe this sort of metaphysical conversation except late at night in places with dramshop insurance.

That said, it should be fun. Among the panalists will be Judy Hurwitz, who’s been a definitive font of IT knowledge for more years than either she or I care to remember. She’s been on a tear recently, writing innumerable articles and several good books about Cloud Computing in all its forms and the world of XaaS. Judy is always practical.

As I hope to be as well. As I recently wrote, I’m involved with a new datacenter project, which itself is part of an overall strategy for a software start-up. I am looking at PaaS in all its forms – independent, bound to an ecosystem, open-source, and all grey areas to be found.

Our chat will be found on Twitter at #cloudchat.

Please feel free to chime in with comments as the thing unfolds.

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While it is generally recognised that virtualisation is an important step in the move to cloud computing, as it enables efficient use of the underlying hardware and allows for true scalability,  for virtualisation in order to be truly valuable it really needs to understand the workloads that run on it and offer clear visibility of both the virtual and physical worlds.

On its own, virtualisation does not lend itself to creating sufficient visibility about the multiple applications and services running at any one time. For this reason a primitive automation system could cause a number of errors to occur, such as the spinning up of another virtual machine to offset the load on enterprise applications that are presumed to be overloaded.

Well that’s the argument that was presented by Karthikeyan Subramaniam in his Infoworld article last year, and his viewpoint is supported by experts at converged cloud vendor VCE …

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier is to retire after eight years heading up the open cloud provider, with co-founder Graham Weston stepping back into the breach on an interim basis.

Weston, who was chief exec from 1999 to 2006, said in a blog post that “what we build from here, we will build on the shoulders of a giant.”

In a conference call with analysts, Napier noted that “now is as good a time as any” for him to step aside, citing confidence with development of OpenStack and progress of hybrid cloud as the key reasons.

“While there’s still work to do, I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made, the increased capability of our hybrid cloud offering in the way that it qualifies just to compete for much larger opportunities,” Napier said in prepared remarks as reported by Seeking Alpha.

“The transition has been challenging and has taken …

TwinStrata on Tuesday announced the general availability of the latest release of its CloudArray software. Customers using the new release gain broader file access capabilities, file sharing across sites, secure bulk ingestion and easy cloud-to-cloud migration.
“Our customers are demanding greater sophistication and control over their cloud storage environments, said Nicos Vekiarides, founder and CEO of TwinStrata. “Just getting them to the cloud is no longer enough – users want to store more data with reduced administration and more robust functionality than their on-premises storage systems.”

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Want VM agility with near bare metal performance? How about [milli]second provision/stop/start/restart times? Looking to achieve greater VM density on your hardware assets, or provision applications without worry of dependency hell? Look no further than next-gen virtualization with Linux Containers.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Boden Russell, an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM Global Technology Services, will provide a Linux Container technology overview including underpinnings, throttling, monitoring, tooling/commoditization, images, security, use cases, pros/cons and why containers are poised as “the next VM” in our modern cloud era. By the end of this session you will have a firm understanding of the Linux Container landscape in today’s industry and an appreciation for their realization.

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The cloud’s main story so far has been one of horizontal providers, such as salesforce.com, Microsoft and Amazon, offering one-size-fits-all solutions. While these providers had some success in the financial services sector, their products weren’t specialized enough to address the needs of asset managers or bankers.
The advent of vertical SaaS providers was the topic of my latest article, Will 2014 be the Year of Vertical Clouds, written for Wired. Even though they’re a young market today, expect to see a larger number of these vertical cloud providers getting scale and attention, in 2014.
“In the days before the cloud, on-premise software providers that focused on selling into a vertical market were considered second-class citizens to the ‘big guns’ selling into the broader horizontal marketplace. However, with the advent of the SaaS model, the tables have turned,” according to Gordon Ritter of Emergence Capital.

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