StratoGen Opens New VMware Datacenter in Asia

VMware hosting provider StratoGen today announced the opening of its highly optimized cloud datacenter in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The datacenter extends StratoGen’s capability to support its global customer base by providing premium VMware hosting facilities in this rapidly expanding region. The datacenter is fully ISO27001 certified with N+1 resilience on all systems.

Designed from the ground up to meet enterprise cloud requirements, the new facility follows the template of StratoGen’s European and US datacenters by providing the highest levels of scalability, performance and security. Network latency to every major market in the Far East is exceptionally low and as with all StratoGen datacenters, the on-site security, power and cooling systems are fully certified to ensure clients mission critical data is always available.

“The entire team at StratoGen are delighted to be bringing our award winning VMware hosting solutions to Asia” commented Karl Robinson, Vice President of Sales. “We have seen strong customer demand for a strategic datacenter in the region to allow our clients to seamlessly build out their infrastructure on a global basis. We are very proud to be one of a select few providers that offer a truly global cloud hosting solution.”

StratoGen are offering their full product portfolio from the datacenter on day 1 to include:

  • Public cloud hosting, allowing clients to cost effectively scale out their hosted VMware infrastructure from a single VM to complex multi-site environments including firewalls, load balancers and much more.
  • Private cloud hosting, offering organizations dedicated, scalable computing resources without the need to buy, configure or maintain the underlying infrastructure.
  • Disaster recovery, helping to eliminate the risk of data loss and business catastrophe using a tried and tested disaster recovery solution built on VMware Site Recovery Manager.

All services include a 100% uptime service level agreement. A free migration service is available.


Turning Identity-as-a-Service Inside Out

Let’s take the notion of a user identity – or to be more precise, the user’s avatar – and consider it to be a Cloud resource. The user, that is, we can provision such avatars as we see fit. And because they’re in the Cloud, they’re location independent. Facebook could use our avatar. Assign it privileges or other properties. Or our bank. Or our employer. But we control it.
The reason PII has such power, of course, is because we give it power. Knowing a username and password gives you the power to access a system. Knowing your Social Security Number and birth date may give you the power to get bank account information from a call center rep. Add a bit more knowledge and you have the power to apply for a loan or a job or a security clearance. The old adage states that knowledge is power, but information only has power if we choose to empower it.

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SHI International Corp. Named “Diamond Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York

SYS-CON Events announced today that SHI International Corp., one of North America’s top 20 largest IT solutions providers, has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of 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.
Founded in 1989, SHI International Corp. is a $4 billion+ global provider of technology products and services. Driven by the industry’s most experienced and stable sales force and backed by software volume licensing experts, hardware procurement specialists, and certified IT services professionals, SHI delivers custom IT solutions to Corporate, Enterprise, Public Sector, and Academic customers. With over 1,900 employees worldwide, SHI is the largest Minority and Woman Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) in the U.S. and is ranked 18th among Everything Channel’s VAR 500 list of North American IT solution providers.

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Cloud Developers Challenged to Build Next Generation xRTML 3.0 Apps

Realtime, creator of the leading global technology framework and applications to power the Realtime web, announced a competition for developers to submit their xRTML 3.0 apps before a distinguished panel of judges, including developer Peter Lubbers of Google and Sam Wierema of TheNextWeb. The latest release of xRTML 3.0, the eXtensible Realtime Multiplatform Language, is transforming the World Wide Web into the Realtime Web.
The new xRTML 3.0 flattens the learning curve for building next-generation apps with bidirectional Realtime communications. Its instantaneous updates employ a fraction of the bandwidth required of traditional request/response and near-real time technologies.

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Apprenda Private PaaS + Azure = One Big Happy Cloud

Apprenda has just launched rev 4.0 of its flagship private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), claiming the new eponymous, uniquely single-language widgetry will be the model for how to modernize existing mission-critical enterprise applications and build new cloud-architected apps and services.
Well, so long as they’re Windows apps and Windows-based cloud environments. Ah, but then let’s remember that 40% of the apps running the enterprise, many of them custom-made, have Windows written all over them.

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Security in the Public Cloud Is a Shared Responsibility

While a public cloud provider, like Amazon, secures the datacenter and network, application owners are still responsible for securing their applications and virtual machines (instances).
When you host applications in the public cloud, you assume partial responsibility for securing the application. The cloud provider, for example Amazon Web Services (AWS), secures the physical data center (with locked badge entry doors, fences, guards etc) in addition to securing the physical network with perimeter firewalls. This is no significant change from how you secure your corporate datacenter.

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NextGen Healthcare, Partners with Aviacode for Medical Coding

NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, LLC., a wholly owned subsidiary of Quality Systems, Inc., announced today it has partnered with Aviacode, a provider of technology-enabled medical coding services, to provide integrated cloud-delivered medical coding services to NextGen Healthcare clients.

Under this agreement, NextGen Healthcare clients can leverage Aviacode’s ProCoder™, a web-based coding system, along with Aviacode’s experienced network of specialty-specific certified coders to help improve the accuracy and efficiency of medical coding – a critical component of the healthcare revenue cycle.

Through this partnership, providers can take advantage of special pricing on Aviacode’s turnkey medical coding services. The NextGen Healthcare and Aviacode platforms are seamlessly integrated with the billing system to ensure the highest degree of data integrity. This provides a more efficient option for medical coding services to help clients optimize revenue while minimizing compliance risk.

“In the healthcare industry, proper reimbursement for healthcare services is crucial to the financial stability of any business. However, fair and complete reimbursement is only realized when services are accurately coded,” noted David Jensen, founder and chief executive officer at Aviacode. “This partnership allows Aviacode to continue its growth with the leading practice management and electronic health record system in the industry.”

“Realizing appropriate payment for services is a challenge for healthcare providers across the board and becoming increasingly difficult. Our goal has been, and continues to be, helping our clients reduce costs while improving the quality of care. Coding can have a major impact on a provider’s ability to manage revenue, insurance denials and compliance risk,” said Monte Sandler, executive vice president for NextGen RCM Services. “Our partnership with Aviacode is just one more example of the solutions and services we offer that afford providers the opportunity to leave their revenue cycle worries to us — the experts — allowing them to focus on clinical competency and patient care.”


Quest Software Adds Monitoring for Windows Azure Apps

Quest Software, Inc., now part of Dell today announced the general availability of Foglight for Windows Azure Applications, as well as beta availability of Foglight for Cloud Cost Management. Both are available immediately via the new Foglight On-Demand platform. This enhanced product offering, together with a new, currently free, cost management tool, enables developers to easily optimize the performance of applications built on the Windows Azure platform.

“The enhanced functionality in Foglight for Windows Azure Applications and the accompanying new and free tools open the door for Quest to provide valuable services at a nominal price to small- and mid-sized organizations that are leveraging Azure today. For large enterprises, these new solutions provide the assurance that when they are ready to leverage cloud platforms, or look to use SaaS-based application performance monitoring (APM), Quest will be there to support them.”


Thunderhead.com Launches ONE for Capital Markets

Thunderhead.com today announced the launch of its ONE for Capital Markets solution for the cloud.

The cloud solution automates trade and relationship documentation processing and all paper transactions throughout the entire trading lifecycle, across all asset classes and product types, to bolster business performance through enhanced compliance, greater control and reduced costs.

Used by 14 of the G15 investment banks and major energy companies, the Thunderhead.com  functionality is now available as a Software as a Service to the broader trading sector, and provides a path to cloud for existing on-premise customers. The solution provides real-time collaboration capabilities to support secure multi-party negotiation based on a single source of the truth, eliminating the time-consuming and error-prone sequential circulation of documents.

In addition, the solution allows trade data in industry-schema based XML to be fed to downstream processes, enabling rapid integration and regulatory reporting.

The SaaS solution has been developed with advisory support from a group of representatives from the G15 investment banks as well as Sapient Capital Markets to ensure market compliance in line with CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) and ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authority) rules.


QuickBooks Mobile Now Optimized for Android Tablets

Intuit reports that design updates to QuickBooks Mobile for Android optimize the app for tablets, and make it easier to navigate and use on any mobile device. The app is available to download for QuickBooks Online subscribers on Google Play at no additional cost. QuickBooks Mobile enables small businesses to access customer information, create, send and review estimates and invoices, and record payments from Apple and Android mobile devices.

QuickBooks Mobile offers Android tablet users the same functionality provided to Android phone users, but with a native tablet experience. The app serves small businesses that want to accomplish more work on mobile devices. Industry analysts say the trend is on the fast track, with Android claiming a significant share:

  • 32.5 percent of small businesses currently own tablets, and 31.6
    percent plan to purchase tablets in the next 12 months, according to
    an IDC report published in October.
  • 31.9 percent of small businesses purchased or planned to purchase
    tablets in 2012 to substitute laptops, according to an iGR study
    released in March.
  • The number of global tablet and smartphone users will surpass the
    number of PC users by July 2013, based on projections from KPCB
    partner Mary Meeker in a November presentation. She also noted that
    Android adoption is growing six times faster than that of iPhones.

“Small business owners want to get more done everyday, so mobile apps afford them a fantastic way to stay organized and productive from either their computers or mobile devices,” said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Financial Management Solutions division. “In the past year, we’ve seen our QuickBooks Mobile users triple, and adoption amongst Android phone users outpace iPhone users.

“With tablets becoming pervasive, we’re creating QuickBooks Mobile experiences that take full advantage of the devices’ unique capabilities to help small businesses save time managing their finances. Today we’re giving customers what they want – a native tablet experience for our fast-growing population of Android users.”


The cloud news categorized.