Xerox to Build Health Insurance Marketplace for Florida Health Choices

Florida Health Choices, a corporation established by the state to improve access to health care, has selected Xerox to administer its Insurance Marketplace, a program designed to give small business and eligible individuals more flexibility in finding affordable health insurance and other services. The nine-year contract is valued at $68 million.

With partner CHOICE Administrators Exchange Solutions, Xerox will provide a cloud-based Web portal and online plan selection tool to give consumers and employers more information when making health insurance selections. The solution preserves the benefits of employer-sponsored insurance and eases the administrative burden for small businesses.

“We’re designing and supporting programs that increase access to health coverage for consumers,” said Will Saunders, group president, Government Healthcare Solutions, Xerox. “The solution we create in Florida will serve citizens and small business owners and help position the state as a leader in establishing a competitive and voluntary health insurance marketplace for small employers.”

Xerox will also provide eligibility determination and enrollment management services for the program, and operate a customer contact center to share information on marketplace offerings. These services will help Florida Health Choices handle the massive amounts of information involved with the marketplace quickly, efficiently and securely.

“We need a partner who can get a fully functional marketplace setup that is designed to serve Floridians now and into the future – delivering on both our short and long-term goals,” said Aaron Bean, chairman, board of directors, Florida Health Choices. “We’re confident Xerox will support us in establishing our marketplace quickly, while helping us to increase healthcare access to small business employees – one of our key priorities.”

Xerox has more than 40 years of experience working with government health agencies to enhance the efficiency of health programs and help ensure the health of citizens.


Cloud Computing: The Next Cloud You See May Be Google’s Version of EC2

Apparently the world is standing by waiting for Google to copy Amazon and wheel out an EC2 imitator this week at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco.
Google already has the platform-as-a-service App Engine and the S3-like Google Cloud Storage but the money is in IaaS. It’s said Amazon Web Services may do $2 billion this year.
Microsoft remade Windows Azure into a Linux-toting hybrid-supporting infrastructure-as-a-service vehicle a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft is tight with enterprise developers and both Amazon and Google want them. That’s why Amazon tied up with Eucalyptus and its private clouds.

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DataCore Software Announces Pay-as-You-Serve Cloud Service Provider Program for Hosted IT Services

DataCore Software today announced that providers of hosted IT services may now rent DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor through the company’s Cloud Service Provider Program. Under the program, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) pay for the use of the software monthly based on the amount of storage they serve versus having to purchase it outright. This allows participating providers to reduce capital expenditure and better align costs to revenue.

DataCore’s storage hypervisor software manages and protects hosted IT environments, providing a high performance, highly scalable, automatically tiered storage infrastructure upon which providers can confidently build and offer their hosted IT services.

The DataCore Cloud Service Provider Program goes a step further in the direction of “on demand” infrastructure with its “Pay-as-You-Serve” proposition to hosted IT service providers—they pay for the software as they use it, based upon the storage they serve to their subscribers.

“In order to offer the most competitive pricing for their services, CSPs and other hosting companies seek to lower capital expenditures and keep expenses and their timing aligned to revenue-producing activities,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development, DataCore Software. “The DataCore storage hypervisor ‘software advantage’ gives us the unique ability to offer the kind of service provider program that other leading software companies, like VMware, have developed, but apply it to the storage-side of the infrastructure. Ideally tailored for the flexibility, efficiency and predictable expenses they seek.”

New cutting edge technologies will also be of interest to CSPs. These innovations designed to satisfy large scale, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) requirements crucial to building robust cloud storage infrastructures are packaged in the company’s newest product, SANsymphony-V R9.0, aptly described as “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud.”

The storage hypervisor’s powerful storage management capabilities and interchangeable hardware design empowers hosters with great cost-savings flexibility, new levels of automation for increased resource productivity and a storage infrastructure that easily incorporates the industry’s latest innovations.

“The new DataCore CSP pricing model reduces our upfront costs – thereby enhancing our margins,” comments Philippe Merckel, CEO, MERCKEL SAS. “DataCore understands that as data centers move to the cloud in the form of virtual, private data centers, cloud platforms need the storage virtualization functionality that DataCore brings to the table with its storage hypervisor. The key, however, for CSPs lies in making the adoption of this technology cost-effective. That is what this Cloud Service Provider Program does. It makes it far easier for us to standardize on DataCore for storage virtualization because we pay as we go rather than paying for everything upfront. It fundamentally suits our own business model whereby our own clients lease our cloud platform.

The DataCore Cloud Service Provider Program is currently open only to providers of hosted IT services located in Europe; the program will be expanded to include North America and additional geographies over the next 90 days. For more up-to-date information about program eligibility and the program itself, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/Partners/cloud-service-providers/CSP-Program.aspx.


Eucalyptus Launches Authorized Education and Consulting Partner Programs

Eucalyptus Systems on Tuesday launched the Eucalyptus Authorized Education Partner (EAEP) and Authorized Consulting Partner (EACP) Programs. The EAEP Program enables Eucalyptus partners to deliver Eucalyptus authorized training courses using Eucalyptus Certified Instructors (ECI), while the EACP Program recognizes Eucalyptus partners who have developed a high level of competency in designing and implementing Eucalyptus cloud solutions.
“These new programs enable our partners to provide value-added consulting and training services for Eucalyptus,” said Andy Knosp, vice president of professional services at Eucalyptus Systems. “Customers are rapidly embracing Eucalyptus’ open approach to cloud computing as demonstrated by our enablement of 25,000 cloud starts annually. Eucalyptus partners can leverage these new partner programs to expand their portfolio of offerings and drive incremental revenue opportunities.”

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Drama in the Cloud: Coming to a Security Theatre Near You

The conflicting messages are the result of security colliding with productivity, which is probably a lot like security colliding with performance. In other words, we know who all too often wins that confrontation, whether we like it or not. The problem is that many are approaching the conflict with an either/or perspective. They’re trying to answer the question with an allow or deny policy based on the end-point, but ignoring the other end of the equation: the application or resource.
Like the two halves of drama, comedy and tragedy, the client and the resource (whether application or file or otherwise), go together. Settling on a BYOD strategy should necessarily not be based solely on the answer to “do we allow X on the network” but on the answer to “do we allow X to access this resource”. For example, in the case of many SaaS-styled applications, i.e. data is always stored in the database or on the server and never on the client, is there some other reason to deny an iPad or other mobile device access over any network?

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Cloud Computing: Compuware Launches SpeedoftheWeb

Compuware Corporation on Tuesday launched SpeedoftheWeb.org, a new free online cloud service that helps web application and site owners increase the speed of their most important web properties. This cloud service enables organizations to compare the speed of their website’s performance against leading competitor sites.
SpeedoftheWeb is available here.
As modern application delivery continues to add complexity at the edge of the Internet, speed is one of the most important factors for improving end-user experience on the web. Studies have shown that improving website performance can lead to increased revenues and reduced operating costs.

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Subscribe to Enterprise Storage via the Cloud

About a dozen years ago, the storage utility model was a novel concept. The idea was that businesses could literally plug applications into enterprise storage, enabling them to outsource administration and begin paying on a monthly usage basis. While the concept was attractive, unfortunately, many of the storage service providers (SSPs) who sprouted back then couldn’t quite perfect the model. Fast forward to today. Over the past 5 years, cloud storage providers (CSPs) have successfully made the delivery of on-demand data storage to the premises a reality, with a pay-as-go model backed by huge economies of scale.

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2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey Exposes Hottest Trends in Cloud

North Bridge Venture Partners has announced the results of its second annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. Supported by 39 industry collaborators spanning established leaders, emerging, fast-growth companies, and startups – the 2012 survey captures current industry perceptions, sentiments and emerging trends in cloud computing. This year’s collaborators include companies such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, and Glasshouse. A total of 785 respondents spanning industry experts, users and vendors participated in the survey. Respondents were asked about a wide range of key issues impacting cloud computing, including drivers for cloud computing, inhibitors, best practices, sourcing, total cost of ownership (TCO), cloud’s impact on multiple business sectors, and emerging cloud technologies. The survey provides many insights into the adoption of cloud computing, including the cloud configurations and applications that are forming around specific business needs including Big Data, business continuity, collaboration and storage.

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CDH: The Standard for Hadoop in the Enterprise Just Got Better

In June Cloudera announced the general availability of CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4. These releases are significant milestones for the Big Data community, and are also important to any organization which has yet to being their Big Data journey. CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 make it far easier to begin projects the right way.
Both CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 are full of new features. CDH4 has more security features. Cloudera Manager makes it easy to manage and audit clusters of systems doing Big Data work.
Here is a more technical restatement of that: CDH4 includes high availability for the filesystem, an ability to support multiple namespaces, HBase table and column level security, improved performance, HBase replication, and greatly improved usability and browser support for the web interface (Hue). Cloudera Manager 4 includes new abilities to manage multiple clusters and multiple versions, automation for high availability and MapReduce2, multi-namespace support, cluster-wide heatmaps, host monitoring and automated client configurations. There are many other features which will enhance capabilities for those seeking to built applications on top of CDH, which is important for the large and growing community of applications developers leveraging Hadoop for solutions.

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Quest’s Mystery Bidder Plops Down $2.32 Billion

The money in play for Quest Software jumped from $2.17 billion to $2.32 billion Monday morning.
The mystery bidder, believed to be Dell, that looked trumped a few days ago is back in the game after topping the $25.75-a-share offer made by Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital, two private equity outfits, with a bid of $27.50 a share cash, a sharp increase.
The sum approaches the $28 a share or $2.36 billion JPMorgan claimed the company was worth weeks ago. Insight on its own started with $23 a share in March and had to call in reinforcements last week to go to $25.75.
The unnamed strategic bidder is going to have to pay a $25 million termination fee to make the Insight-Vector alliance go away. Insight-Vector could also re-up but they’re already working on borrowed capital. There’s no financing in the mystery bid. The Insight-Vector combine has three business days to decide whether to match or improve on the “Dell” bid. Wall Street seems to think the deal could get a mite sweeter. Quest’s stock opened at $27.74 then lost a little ground.

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The cloud news categorized.