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.
A Very Strange Valentine’s Day Anniversary…
Today it is exactly two years since the weirdest Valentine’s Day I have ever experienced, or indeed hope ever to experience again.
February 14, 2011, in short, is etched into my diary and my brain as the day when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
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 …
Professional Hosting
by Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels
Lifestyle hosting is where many of the great hosting companies began. The first few customers, managed from the kitchen table, hosting begins as a hobby to express creativity and business acumen. For many this is also where hosting stays and has the most appeal. A lifestyle choice.
But for some this is just the beginning to life-long growth and the first step into building a business that can feed a family, pay for college, and maybe build a family legacy.
For both the lifestyle hosters and those who want to keep growing, single-server-panel technology is the definitive starting point. It is easy to setup, available on both Linux and Windows, has a simple user interface and management console and in most cases stays up-to-date with latest technology like support for IPV6 and services beyond shared hosting.
For lifestyle hosters this is all that is needed – the ultimate solution. For professional hosters it works well with the first few hundred customers. It then becomes the biggest obstacle to growth and the hoster’s worst enemy.
Key to growing at the ~ 1k user level is personal time. At this stage in the development of the hosting business money is still short and demands on the personal time of an owner become extremely high. Growth requires focus on customer acquisition but this time is simply not available, eaten away by the administrative tasks of managing multiple servers. When you are running a hosting business with 5+ servers, your day is spend on logging and re-logging; managing mail software n-times over; patching OS and apps; restoring data, and managing AV software.
The result is frustration, and slow or no-growth and in some cases the demise of hosting business when owners overreach and overstretch. This should not and need not happen. And the single-server-panel is to blame.
A solution to that problem is a hosting infrastructure that can grow with the needs of a hosting business, scale without creating administrative overhead with each server added, and be open to new services module.
Parallels Plesk Automation is a brand new solution that tackles this problem. It leverages learnings from the early multi-server solutions like Parallels Business Automation Standard, Parallels expand and Parallels H-Sphere products and combines it with the enterprise class architecture of Parallels Automation and the usability of Parallels Plesk Panel technology. The result is a multi-server hosting solution that easily scales from one server to one hundred, reduces administration overhead by providing administration of the complete hosting infrastructure from the single pane of glass, improves security of the system by creating a new level of isolation between the nodes, and drives performance of the system up with node optimization.
For professional hosters this means breaking “the glass ceiling” of single-server hosting. With low administration, the owner of a growing hosting business can devote more time to customer acquisition and will finally break through the 1000 customer barrier. For larger hosters, it means deep optimization of infrastructure and new wave of growth. A consistent code base from the single server Plesk Panel through Plesk Automation all the way to a telco-ready Parallels Automation ensures not only unblocked growth potential but also an opportunity for a smooth exit strategy if the owner chooses to sell and a business needs to be integrated into a larger provider infrastructure.
Rapidly growing consumption of cloud services by small businesses creates plenty of space for a professional hosting business to succeed and grow. With Parallels Plesk Automation, they now have a platform to base that growth on.
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
Eucalyptus Professional Services Is Going "All the Way Open"
This year, Eucalyptus Professional Services is going open. All the way open,” blogged Jason Eden, Senior Director of Professional Services at Eucalyptus Systems, this week as the open source cloud company ushered in changes in the realm of Education, Consulting, and Certification.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.