IBM has announced a broad set of global initiatives to better position clients to take advantage of cloud opportunities. This effort is aimed at further expanding IBM’s cloud ecosystem, enabling organizations to develop solutions and services on IBM SmartCloud and PureSystems, built on open standards. As more clients embrace cloud computing, they are looking to local technology providers known as Managed Service Providers (MSP) to help them quickly develop cloud based services in a more simplistic, secure and economical way.
Managed service providers deliver a defined set of technology solutions or services to clients with a pay-as-you-go model. MSPs are largely leveraged by customers which want to take advantage of cloud technologies but lack the internal IT skills, resources and time. For example, smaller hospitals are still challenged with adopting electronic medical records. Many healthcare providers are turning to the MSP model, where an MSP can quickly help the small healthcare provider to build and manage a cloud service to process patient data and make that information available securely in the cloud, freeing up the healthcare provider to focus more on the patient.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: A Checklist for Cloud Service Providers
In this jointly presented session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, James Tyler, Director of MarCom, TelecityGroup, and a TelecityGroup customer will deal with how Cloud service providers can expand into Europe and exploit new revenue opportunities. They will cover best practice considerations when selecting a data center partner that leads to success.
James Tyler is Director of Marketing & Communications at TelecityGroup. He is responsible for marketing and communication strategy, Group business development and CSR. He has over 15 years’ experience in senior communications and marketing roles, 12 of which have been in the technology and communications sectors. Prior to TelecityGroup he worked in senior marketing and communications roles in London and Italy for, among others, Level 3 Communications and Baltimore Technologies. Tyler started his career in Porter Novelli, a leading global communications agency.
Managing Data in Unified Storage
Consolidating data in an organized and highly accessible yet secure fashion is one concept many organizations are finding is helping increase productivity throughout the company. Unified storage, which is also referred to network unified storage (NUS), is a concept that the principles of cloud architecture are built upon – the idea of a single area to pool resources for data storage and application virtualization. The effects this will have on organizations will vary depending on several factors from hardware utilized, knowledge of staff and adherence to the IT service management practices.
Sometimes the need to consolidate a business’s information systems is because of an organic internal growth that has occurred over time. Other times, business mergers have patched together dissonant systems into one messy but functional infrastructure. Either practice often yields the same result – a system that mostly conforms to meet business needs but is not completely optimized because of hardware and software relationship nuances. Often, a good IT staff can fit these pieces together with solid scripting and tightening of access protocols but such practice will require consistent maintenance as time goes on.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Empowering Your Software Ecosystem
Cloud providers are increasingly looking at application marketplaces as the best way of enabling customers to onboard software to their cloud. However, providers often lack the deep pockets or extensive manpower required to populate the marketplace; they must engage and empower an ISV ecosystem to populate it on their behalf. As such, providers must offer ISVs an easy way to publish and maintain their software in the store, as well as make money from it.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, James Weir, CTO and co-founder of UShareSoft, will outline why an application marketplace can drive cloud services revenue for providers, their ISV and channel partners; and how providers can quickly implement a marketplace with today’s turnkey solutions.
Avira Launches 2013 Antivirus Security Software Line; Extends Protection from Computers to Consumers
Avira today announced the Avira 2013 product line, which includes Avira Free Antivirus, Avira Antivirus Premium 2013, Avira Internet Security 2013, and Avira Internet Security Plus.
The 2013 version of Avira’s Free Antivirus software adds 6 new security features making it the most comprehensive free antivirus products on the market. Avira’s premium products have 8 new features. These new features give consumers a more secure browsing experience by protecting them from Internet scams and threats, in addition to keeping their computers free of viruses and malware.
“With over 100 million users worldwide, our goal with Avira 2013 was to offer protection to people no matter what device they use, and we did that by adding many user oriented features to this release, making it the most feature-rich solution we’ve ever made,” said Sorin Mustaca, product manager and data security expert at Avira. “We’ve also kept the resources footprint small, so users will not notice any slowdown in computer performance.”
The following new features added to the Avira 2013 family of products are all designed to protect not just computer devices, but also computer users — wherever they are and whatever device they’re using:
- Avira Protection Cloud – Avira’s leading cloud technology
identifies malware faster by uploading suspicious files for instant
analysis. (Available for paid users) - Browser Tracking Blocker – Gives users control over their
privacy while browsing the internet by blocking trackers that gather
data about your browsing activity. - Website Safety Advisor – Protects users from scams, phishing
and suspicious sites by displaying safe, low-risk or high-risk icons
on the search results and any webpage they visit. - Social Network Protection – Notifies parents and children of
suspicious or worrisome activity on social networks (such as predators
or your child being bullied online) so they can take appropriate
action. - Android Security – Safeguards users’ Android phones and the
valuable data it holds. Users can locate it when lost, lock it and
even wipe the data remotely. - More Frequent Updates for Free Users – Avira Free Antivirus now
updates every 6 hours instead of every 24 hours, giving users more
current protection. - Network Folder Scanning – Shared folders like Dropbox and
network folders are becoming more common, and with it comes the
increased risk of spreading malware. Avira now scans network folders
in addition local folders to keep computers free of infection.
(Available for paid users) - No Advertising Pop-ups for Avira Free Antivirus Users – Users
who install Avira’s SearchFree toolbar will no longer have pop-up ads
displayed to them. The SearchFree toolbar includes Browser Tracking
Blocker and Website Safety. As always Avira’s paid products are
without advertising, independent of toolbar installation.
PBR Moves Enterprise Apps with appzero from Datacenter to Rackspace Cloud
This webinar is for anyone interested in, or responsible for moving enterprise applications to or from datacenters and clouds. It will be of particular interest to Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and Managed Service Providers (MSP) looking to increase their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) by giving their customers a solution that easily migrates applications to their cloud.
When Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) chose to move its datacenter to Rackspace, applications quickly took center stage. One of the challenges was how to effectively move highly modified, but largely undocumented, production apps. PBR’s consultant Virtessential addressed that challenge using appzero’s zapp migration to automate identification, extraction, and migration of their Windows server apps to the cloud.
8×8 Gets New Contact/Call Center Patent
8×8, Inc. today announced that it has been awarded a new patent related to its contact/call center technologies. On September 25, 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued United States Patent number 8,275,116, entitled “Networked Contact Center.”
The patent relates to, among other things, a networked contact center that includes multiple platforms to host multiple tenants. Example embodiments of the invention include receiving a message associated with one of the tenants and identifying one or more of the platforms associated with the message. The invention also enables the networked contact center platform to access a data location that is both associated with the tenant and shared by two or more of the multiple tenants.
Since its establishment in 1987, 8×8 has been awarded eighty-three (83) United States patents covering a variety of voice and video communications, signaling, processing and storage technologies.
Bursting the Cloudbursting Bubble
Any on-premise or Private Cloud-based app that is subject to spikes in demand that existing infrastructure can’t handle should be able to benefit, so the argument goes. Unfortunately, however, Cloudbursting has a number of problems, making it challenging for even the most suitable scenarios—and furthermore, such scenarios are rarer than you think.
Mimecast Gets $62 Million for Email Archiving
Mimecast, a provider of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, has today announced that it has secured $62.15 million in Series C funding led by Global Private Equity Firm Insight Venture Partners, with existing investors Dawn Capital also participating. Mimecast plans to use the funding to accelerate the development and deployment of new technology, and to support plans for rapid expansion in the U.S. market.
Founded in the U.K. in 2003 by Peter Bauer (CEO) and Neil Murray (CTO), Mimecast has grown rapidly, with over 50 percent year on year revenue growth recorded in six of the past nine years. Today, the Company has over 6,000 customers globally – including 70 percent of the U.K.’s top 100 law firms – and over 1.5 million users worldwide.
In addition to growing its existing business within the European, American and South African markets, Mimecast intends to use the investment to drive innovations in corporate email. The Company’s technology has already played an instrumental role in changing the way businesses deploy email; leading the transition from fragmented LAN-based infrastructures to a single platform cloud solution, Unified Email Management (UEM). Mimecast will now focus on continuing this evolution, using its Software-as-a-Service technology to create an Information Banking platform that allows businesses to unlock the inherent value stored within corporate email.
“Today’s businesses are as dependent on email as ever but, increasingly, email struggles to keep up as the way we create, store and share information changes,” Peter Bauer, CEO and co-founder, Mimecast. “At Mimecast, we believe email needs to be rewired if it is to continue to deliver real value to businesses. Building on our history of innovation, we are working to make email more collaborative and more interactive to realize the true value of the vast amount of unstructured data in email stores. We believe that the future is a more interactive archiving model, where IT folk and end users alike can derive more value in real time, on a day-to-day basis on any technology platform they choose to use. The cloud has the potential to democratize information management and deliver these kinds of powerful productivity tools to businesses of all sizes, rather than just being the preserve of the largest enterprises.”
“Email is the most important means of business communication and, better than anyone else, Mimecast delivers a true integrated solution for secure and accessible email,” said Jeff Lieberman, managing director, Insight Venture Partners. “Mimecast has already achieved strong success and with their product superiority, the industry’s move towards cloud solutions and a very large market opportunity, we believe that Mimecast is poised to achieve high growth and become the global leader in unified email management. Insight is delighted to share in this journey with management and existing shareholders.”
Cloud Computing: Stuck in the Mire Getting Java Apps to the Cloud?
Java players Azul and CumuLogic have teamed up to create what they say is the first integrated, truly elastic PaaS-enablement platform by combining CumuLogic’s Java-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with Azul’s memory-elastic Zing runtime (i.e., Java Virtual Machine).
The move is supposed to make life more worth living for Java developers trying to get to the cloud who find PaaS environments a hassle or whose mission-critical apps wind up TCO-challenged SLA defects despite JVM tuning and complex provisioning schemes. (Sound familiar?)