For many companies, getting their mobility strategies off the ground and successful is the highest priority project they have in 2013.  The urgency to get their sales and consulting teams equipped with smart phone and tablet-based applications is accelerating.

Pilot projects have shown mobility applications can shorten sales cycles and serve as a better sales training and management platform.

Serving the sales force with these technologies is paying off across a wide spectrum of industries.  It’s also changing corporate cultures, making them more responsive as well.

With these rapid advances going on and the prediction in December, 2012 by Mary Meeker that the installed base of smartphones and tablets will exceed the total PC installed base by the 2nd quarter of this year, market researchers are releasing forecasts more frequently than ever.  I’ve summarized the key forecasts below:

• Google’s Android operating system is dominating mobile operating systems …

In the latest microupdate (#4) for Parallels Plesk Automation 11.0, new much sought-after capabilities have been added to Parallels’ unrivaled multi-server hosting offering.

•  SmarterMail – enables often-requested support for popular and cost-effective Exchange-level email server software
•  Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – in addition to registering existing servers, you can now also automate your SQL Server 2008 installations
• Diagnostic tools – aids administrators in troubleshooting issues with connecting service nodes to the management node.

For details on the update, read the Release Notes.

Jitterbit’s integration solution is designed to be the glue between on-premise, cloud, mobile and social data and applications.
Jitterbit focuses on simple yet powerful integration technologies that can be quickly and easily deployed to create integrated processes and data views. We’ve seen a lot of interest in light-weight, low-coding integration capabilities as more SaaS and cloud services need to be coordinated. This is now becoming even more pertinent to bringing data together from a variety of sources.
Jitterbit 5 aims to raise the level of simplicity even higher with new features that streamline process integration, said the Oakland, CA company. The wizards-based approach allows non-technical users to design integration projects through a graphical, point-and-click interface. I think making more people able to tailor and specify integrations can significantly boost innovation and productivity.

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Are you already behind the curve? Cloud is already in the enterprise – and the federal government. What was important for yesterday’s cloud is table stakes for the future, so what’s next? Learn from one of the world’s leading cloud providers as they share their vision of the market and the future of cloud.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Jim Anthony, Vice President of Sales Engineering at Terremark, takes you inside the state of the enterprise cloud today and show why the future of the cloud is so bright.

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We have a saying here at ‘wichcraft: Make people happy while being proud of what you do.

We’re in the retail food business. Our job is to feed our customers, and our customers are at the core of everything we do. As Director of Technology for a sandwich company spanning 15 locations and three states, it can be easy to forget this simple fact. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the daily grind of maintaining servers and networks just so we can keep our business humming along.

When we made the jump to Office 365 earlier this year, we were able to take our existing on-premise servers and move them to the cloud. As a result, we eliminated layers of complexity, and I no longer needed to spend valuable time and resources administering legacy systems. This has allowed me to shift my focus toward new and exciting ways to better serve our guests, like launching a new loyalty platform and implementing tools to help us engage customers through social media.

In addition to being easy to manage, Office 365 is much more reliable than a traditional on-premise server environment. This was really put to the test when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in late October.

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This is a follow-up companion post to the larger industry trends and perspectives series from eariler today (Part I, Part II and Part III) pertaining to today’s VMAX 10K enhancement and other announcements by EMC, and the industry myth of if large storage arrays or systems are dead.
The enhanced VMAX 10K scales from a couple of dozen up to 1,560 HDDs (or mix of HDD and SSDs). There can be a mix of 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch devices in different drive enclosures (DAE). There can be 25 SAS based 2.5 inch drives (HDD or SSD) in the 2U enclosure (see figure with cover panels removed), or 15 3.5 inch drives (HDD or SSD) in a 3U enclosure. As mentioned, there can be all 2.5 inch (including for vault drives) for up to 1,200 devices, all 3.5 inch drives for up to 960 devices, or a mix of 2.5 inch (2U DAE) and 3.5 inch (3U DAE) for a total of 1,560 drives.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that ServerCentral, an established leader in managed data center services, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
ServerCentral provides highly reliable IT infrastructure in secure facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia. Delivering industry leading service levels on colocation, cloud, IP connectivity and managed services, ServerCentral is a trusted name to a wide range of global companies seeking turnkey data center solutions.

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By Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Solutions, Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Information Management

The big data phenomenon presents a challenge for data management, a complex IT discipline that many organizations still struggle to deal with effectively today, even with their “small” data sets.

As data grows, so too does data uncertainty – and with it lowered quality and trust. IBM is in the process of extending its InfoSphere family of data integration and governance tooling, with a sharp focus on targeting the Hadoop framework.

However, technology is only part of the equation. While the end goal for managing and governing big data should be the same as that for traditional enterprise data – i.e. to provide the business with reliable data – the exact methods vary and continue to gel. IBM (and its customers) is still only a short way along the path of creating best practices …

CohesiveFT, a provider of enterprise application-to-cloud migration and application software defined networking (SDN), today announced the availability of the OS Catalog on their two Server3 SaaS implementations. The OS Catalog is part of an image management system based on CohesiveFT’s Server3 offering, providing cloud users with improved import experience and expanded operating system support.

The OS Catalog is available both in IBM SCE on Smart.ElasticServer.com and AWS EC2 along with many other clouds on beta.ElasticServer.com. Users can choose to build and customize their own VM starting with the available base OS images and add custom software component stacks. Cloud and software providers can offer cloud users improved import experience and expanded operating system support. Currently, cloud users can select images from the CentOS Server family to build and deploy to a cloud of their choice. Additional operating system families will be rolled out over the coming weeks.

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