MineralTree, Inc., maker of the cloud-based, secure payments solution specifically designed for small and medium businesses (SMBs), has received $6.3 million of venture financing. Led by Fidelity Growth Partners India with full participation from initial investor, .406 Ventures, the funding will be used to further enhance the capabilities of the MineralTree platform and to accelerate its partnerships with banks and distribution to their SMB customers.
The MineralTree solution is a secure, cloud-based payment and cash management solution that meets the needs of companies with annual revenue of $500,000 to $50 million. Offered to SMBs as a private labeled solution by MineralTree’s bank partners, the system provides unmatched security, mobility and visibility into the management of B2B (business-to-business) payments, via a secure web browser or iPad application.
Cloud Computing: Salesforce Buys ChoicePass to Shut It Down
Salesforce has bought SMB-focused corporate perks and employee rewards management start-up ChoicePass a year after the outfit drummed up $250,000 in seed money.
Its site will be shut down on June 30 and the team that put the operation together sucked up into Salesforce according to an official blog posting.
It said that “Since launching our Perks product, we’ve found that there is massive demand from businesses for innovative ways to manage employee engagement, rewards and incentives. It has been an amazing experience for us to work with such great companies, partners and of course, people.”
It got as far as fielding an Android app last month and was supposed to turn out an iPhone and iPad app next.
Mainframes to Mobility
Much of the success of the Cloud delivery model is attributed to the implementation of similar concepts through mainframe computing several years back. The concepts of multi-tenancy, workload management, virtualization, and chargeback accounting all are basic tenants of the mainframe.
Over the years mainframes have reinvented themselves to continue to find a place in the enterprise landscape. Recent announcements from IBM on System Z, IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196), IBM zEnterprise 114 (z114) have laid a path for enterprises to adopt Private Clouds using mainframes. The zEnterprise family provides a system designed specifically to address IaaS on a private heterogeneous cloud where the components run on the same architecture, a single hardware or operating system platform. The private cloud can be hosted within the organization or through an external provider.
Cloud Computing: Fujitsu to OEM Eucalyptus Cloud Platform
Fujitsu has cut an OEM deal with Eucalyptus Systems to deliver a private IaaS cloud solution.
Fujitsu Frontech North America Inc is going to use Eucalyptus’ open source private cloud platform to power its pre-packaged NuVola Private Cloud Platform, otherwise consisting of Fujitsu’s x86 Primergy servers, Eternus storage appliances and virtualization software.
Since Eucalyptus is compatible and integrated with Amazon’s public cloud, Fujitsu’s will be too, adding to Amazon’s luster as the de facto cloud standard.
Frontech customers are in manufacturing, retail, healthcare, government, education, financial services, the enterprise and communications.
The NuVola Private Cloud Platform is available immediately.
Medidata Solutions to Show New Clinical Cloud Products, Enhancements at DIA
Medidata Solutions will showcase new products and features that broaden its clinical cloud platform at the upcoming Drug Information Association’s (DIA) Annual Meeting, June 24-28 in Philadelphia, Pa. Addressing new industry regulations, the need for broad safety reporting and improvements to site monitoring processes, these enhancements to Medidata’s comprehensive solutions will offer drug developers new capabilities for overcoming key research challenges.
“Sponsors are under more pressure than ever to cut costs, improve efficiency and adhere to increased regulations, requiring innovation and real-time operational analytics across the clinical research chain from concept to conclusion,” said Glen de Vries, president of Medidata Solutions. “We are continuously broadening our solution set to empower sponsors to improve their research clinical systems at every point in the clinical process, including trial planning, monitoring, site payments and safety.”
From booth #3101, Medidata will be providing demos of key products and new features to enable sponsors to achieve key goals, including:
- Driving a New Monitoring Paradigm
The company’s first
solution for managing site quality and the latest addition to the
Medidata Insights™ family of clinical business analytics offerings, Medidata
Insights SQM™ combines advanced data visualization with seamless
real-time data availability with the rest of Medidata’s platform to
deliver turnkey site quality management – further enabling the
industry’s shift to simplified remote monitoring of site and data
quality resulting from the 2011 FDA clarification on source document
verification (SDV).
- Automating Safety Processes with Electronic Adverse Event Transfer
To
help drug developers meet post-marketing expedited reporting
obligations within the new European pharmacovigilance legislation, Medidata
Rave Safety Gateway™ expanded its capabilities for sites to
electronically transfer non-serious safety case data – in addition to
serious safety case data – to sponsors’ safety systems, eliminating
paper-based manual processes, reducing query cycles between sites and
sponsors’ safety groups and minimizing reconciliation between safety
and clinical databases.
- Ensuring Timely Investigator Payments
Due to the
complexity of triggering investigator payments from sponsor-set
milestones, site payments are often delayed. The out-of-the box
integration of Medidata
CTMS™ and Medidata
Rave® electronic data capture (EDC) improves the
efficiency of clinical operations, streamlining workflows in areas
such as site monitoring and site payments. Now, Medidata Rave EDC data
is pulled into Medidata CTMS™ monitor reports, increasing the accuracy
of reporting and timeliness of payment triggers.
- Assuring Market Value Compliance and Faster Budget Agreements
Designed
for sponsors receiving investigator-sponsored proposals from sites, Medidata
Grants Manager Investigator Initiated™ offers drug developers
clarity and uniformity in judging pricing and conduct of their
submitted funding requests.
- Ensuring the Right Randomization Approach to Meet Study GoalsMedidata
Balance™ now provides the block randomization methodology in
addition to dynamic allocation randomization, extending its use to new
segments of the life science industry by permitting researchers to use
the approach that best suits their study goals.
F5 Announces New IP Intelligence Service
F5 Networks, Inc. today announced a cloud-based service that enables organizations to safeguard their infrastructures by detecting and stopping access from IP addresses associated with malicious activity. By identifying relevant IP addresses and leveraging intelligence from cloud-context security solutions, F5’s new IP Intelligence service combines valuable information on the latest threats with the unified policy enforcement capabilities of the BIG-IP® application delivery platform. The BIG-IP system’s ability to seamlessly combine subscription-based services from F5 with external services provides customers with a compelling new way to enhance overall security.
“Organizations are looking for security solutions that can dynamically synthesize information from a variety of sources to give infrastructures the maximum level of protection against sophisticated cyber attacks,” said Mark Vondemkamp, Sr. Director, Product Management, Security at F5. “At the same time, enterprises must preserve the flexibility to customize their systems and add safeguards as network and access conditions change, and as new types of threats emerge. F5’s IP Intelligence service enables customers to pool disparate threat detection capabilities, block malicious IP addresses, and tailor performance to specific needs by leveraging F5’s powerful BIG-IP Application Security Manager™ and iRules® technologies.”
Companies delivering today’s rich Internet content are exposed to a variety of attacks from rapidly changing IP addresses and other variables. In addition, inbound and outbound botnet traffic and malware activity can penetrate security layers and consume precious resources. Typically, organizations deploy point solutions such as IP reputation services to block malicious activity and sites, but unless these solutions are integrated with an Application Delivery Controller, they are not able to offer comprehensive, dynamic protection. Plus, enterprises can reduce their overall security spend by taking advantage of the BIG-IP solution’s ability to deliver unified services on a single platform.
Leveraging a frequently updated list of threat sources and high-risk IP addresses, F5’s new IP Intelligence service delivers contextual awareness and analysis of IP requests to identify threats from multiple sources across the Internet. The service draws on the expertise of a global threat-sensor network and IP address database to detect malicious activity, and can offer protection throughout the application delivery infrastructure with F5’s unified BIG-IP architecture.
F5’s new IP Intelligence service enables customers to:
By intelligently evaluating the reputation of Internet hosts, F5’s new service can prevent attackers from stealing data, compromising corporate resources, or otherwise disrupting business functions. F5’s new service denies access to IP addresses known to be infected with malware, in contact with malware distribution points, and with low reputations. Active IP addresses offering or distributing malware, shell code, rootkits, worms, or viruses are denied access. In addition, F5 helps organizations guard against many of today’s most prevalent web attacks, such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection, DDoS, and other threats associated with botnets. As an added benefit, this ability to detect and deny access stemming from unwanted requests results in increased infrastructure performance, since IT systems do not need to spend valuable cycles addressing requests from bad sites.
Deployed as part of the BIG-IP system, F5’s IP Intelligence service leverages data from multiple sources to effectively gather real-time IP threat information and block connections with those addresses. The service reveals both inbound and outbound communication with malicious IP addresses to enable granular threat reporting and automated blocking, helping IT teams create more effective security policies to protect their infrastructures. Even when a BIG-IP device is deployed behind a content delivery network (CDN) or other proxies, F5’s IP Intelligence service provides protection by looking at the real client IP addresses as logged within the X-Forwarded-For (XFF) header, helping IT make informed decisions about which IP addresses should be allowed.
F5’s IP Intelligence service alleviates the burden of repetitive, manual configuration tasks for network and security professionals, yielding greater overall efficiency. Global threat data is refreshed in the cloud to update the BIG-IP system as frequently as every five minutes. This provides an evolving database that minimizes the chance of exposure, protecting both the organization and its reputation. The IP Intelligence service’s automatic updates dynamically keep systems protected, and BIG-IP products can be easily configured to receive real-time updates for convenient security management across the application delivery environment. F5’s iRules capability provides a significant complement to this service, as organizations can seamlessly roll out additional commands that direct how BIG-IP systems handle certain types of traffic and specific requests.
The Cloud’s Little Secret
The “cloud” terminology has been around for a while, but it was broadly popularized when Amazon Web Services started offering its S3 storage service and its EC2 compute service. With these services, you could easily store data or run software without owning or managing the physical infrastructure. Quickly, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies like Salesforce.com realized that there were similarities between their offerings (which had been around for almost a decade) and this new “cloud.” So as not to be left out of the hype cycle, they started calling their offerings “cloud.” Fair enough: indeed, with SaaS you don’t have to manage the infrastructure or the software.
Lately, though, it seems that partisans of this model − I am talking specifically about SaaS that is shared-everything, and multi-tenant at the application and database level − are attempting to abscond entirely with the term. I’ve had industry analysts and others tell me that, for all intents and purposes, Cloud means multi-tenant SaaS. When I challenge this point of view by asking whether Amazon EC2 is “cloud,” they mutter something about it being transitional, or mainly for online games, or for high-performance computing. Certainly it’s not where enterprises or ISVs should be, according to this viewpoint.
GridGain Gives Customers Even Bigger Opportunities from Big Data
As increasing numbers of industry leading companies look to new technologies to speed their real-time services and Big Data applications, GridGain Systems, leading developer of scalable, distributed in-memory compute and data grid technologies for real-time data processing, is strongly positioned to serve the demand.
This week, GridGain announced the release of an entirely new suite of solution-focused products built around the company’s leading in-memory and world’s fastest MapReduce technologies, expanded enterprise consulting and other professional services, advanced DevOps management and monitoring capabilities now available with all products, and out-of-box integration with virtually any existing data source, Hadoop-based systems, and Java, C++, .NET, Android and iOS applications.
GridGain Gives Customers Even Bigger Opportunities from Big Data
As increasing numbers of industry leading companies look to new technologies to speed their real-time services and Big Data applications, GridGain Systems, leading developer of scalable, distributed in-memory compute and data grid technologies for real-time data processing, is strongly positioned to serve the demand.
This week, GridGain announced the release of an entirely new suite of solution-focused products built around the company’s leading in-memory and world’s fastest MapReduce technologies, expanded enterprise consulting and other professional services, advanced DevOps management and monitoring capabilities now available with all products, and out-of-box integration with virtually any existing data source, Hadoop-based systems, and Java, C++, .NET, Android and iOS applications.
Industry Analyst Firm Recognizes AccelOps as a “Cool Vendor”
AccelOps, Inc., the pioneer in integrated Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and Performance and Availability Monitoring (PAM) for on-premise and cloud-based data centers, has announced that it has been recognized in Gartner Inc.’s “Cool Vendors in IT Operations Management 2012” report. The report highlights four vendors with innovative technologies in the IT operations management market.
AccelOps has developed unique software that combines next generation SIEM and PAM capabilities that deliver a unified, “single pane of glass” view of the entire IT infrastructure and applications. AccelOps is deployed by large enterprises and service providers to ensure end-to-end availability, performance, and security regardless of whether their infrastructure is physical, virtual, on-premise or in the cloud. Unlike point solutions for PAM, SIEM and analytics, AccelOps provides IT operations management with comprehensive functionality using a unified code base. It is built from the ground up to eliminate silos and deliver a fully integrated and continuously-learning IT management solution that is significantly faster and easier to deploy than point solution alternatives. It dynamically discovers IT resources and adapts to changing conditions in real-time. AccelOps helps security, network, and operations experts be more effective and proactive by automating complex decisions in real-time and providing rich historical analytics.