ScaleOut Software, a provider of in-memory data grid (IMDG) solutions, has released ScaleOut StateServer Version 5 with increased scalability and public cloud support. Released in beta earlier this year, StateServer Version 5 also integrates expanded analysis capabilities with property-based parallel query, includes global data integration, and contains other important new features.
Version 5’s new membership architecture significantly advances IMDG scalability. Currently, the use of IMDGs is quickly expanding, and the need for scalability to hundreds of servers has emerged as a requirement to handle increased workloads and to enable the use of IMDGs for real-time data analytics. With Version 5 it is now practical to deploy very large in-memory data grids holding terabytes of data that provide seamless elasticity and have powerful operating characteristics that set a new standard for speed, reliability, and ease of use.
Embotics Gets $8.4 Million for Private Cloud Management
Private cloud management vendor Embotics Corporation today announced that it has closed $8.4 million in equity financing. Bringing Embotics’ total financing-to-date to $18 million, this latest round includes $2.5 million from VentureLink LP and $2.5 million from Covington Fund II Inc. (Covington), with the remainder of the funds coming from other private investors. Embotics will use the funding to accelerate global sales and marketing efforts, as well as to hire more software engineers.
This mix of pragmatic growth, strategic marketing and sales investments will build upon the momentum of the past year’s 300 percent growth in sales to further strengthen Embotics V-Commander’s leadership position in the private cloud management market.
“We continue to support Embotics because of its proven track record of successfully developing products that address the problems in virtual data center environments,” said Phil Reddon, managing partner of Covington. “Our experience investing in the virtualization sector, along with Embotics’ success in assisting companies with private cloud management, automation and self-service provisioning, make for a smart business and investment partnership between our two organizations.”
“We have a strong belief in Embotics and its virtualization and cloud management technology. Due to the market need for its solutions, we are confident that Embotics’ business will continue to grow,” said Jim Whitaker, managing partner of VentureLink LP. “Embotics’ clear differentiation in cloud management made its business and this opportunity very attractive to us.”
This round of financing comes on the heels of Embotics’ most successful year to date. The company has experienced 300 percent growth in sales over the past year and 220 percent year-on-year growth in new customers, which now include Bell, Deloitte, Cisco, CSC, Dutch Ministry of Defence, MITRE and numerous universities and public sector departments. In addition, Embotics has signed new channel partnerships, including one with Magirus in Europe.
“We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Covington and to begin our new relationship with VentureLink because of their proven success when it comes to supporting technology innovation,” said Jay Litkey, CEO of Embotics. “The significant increase in our sales demonstrates the opportunity that exists in the market. This financing will enable us to match that opportunity with clearly defined differentiation, corresponding sales and an increased engineering team to support new and existing customer opportunities.”
Revionics Acquires Retail Optimization, Inc. to Offer End-to-End Merchandise Optimization Solutions
Revionics, Inc. and Retail Optimization, Inc., a provider of cloud-based assortment and micro and macro space optimization solutions, today announced that Revionics has acquired Retail Optimization’s business and related assets. This acquisition extends Revionics’ Life Cycle Price Optimization Solutions with the addition of Retail Optimization’s cloud-based Assortment and Micro and Macro Space Optimization Solutions.
The combination of these two solutions brings all the merchandise planning levers – price, promotion, assortment, space – together to deliver the most powerful End-to-End Merchandise Optimization Solution available in today’s market. Together these solutions help retailers breakdown merchandising organizational siloes and improve demand forecasting to better meet shopper needs and ensure retailers have the RIGHT product, price, promotion, placement and space allocation for optimal financial results and improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Offered on a highly scalable, high performance cloud-based platform, the solutions future-proof retailers from Big Data/Fast Data challenges, while providing speed-to-ROI.
“The key to becoming demand driven lies in the ability to effectively manage the intersection of demand, supply and product,” said Kevin Sterneckert, a Gartner Research Vice President. “Demand-driven retailers gather information at each customer moment of truth, and utilize five interrelated strategies to translate demand insight into effective response and shaping activities, delivering higher return on assets, more inventory turns and greater revenue growth than their peers.”*
The new Revionics products that are now immediately available from the acquisition include:
- Revionics® Assortment Optimization
- Revionics® Macro Space Optimization
- Revionics® Micro Space Optimization
For more information about these new offerings, please visit: www.revionics.com/merchandise-optimization
Retailers are battling intense competition and price-conscious, informed shoppers that rapidly shift their buying behavior. To compete effectively, retailers need to be more responsive to their shoppers’ product needs ensuring their assortments are tailored to the individual store and space, and are on-shelf available. Doubling in the last decade, out-of-stocks have been one of retailers’ largest headaches and profit loss areas, estimated to be a $107B problem in 2012. Studies show that a typical retailer loses 40% of intended purchases when a shopper encounters an out-of-stock, resulting in a 4% yearly revenue loss.**
According to a 2011 RSR Research study, retailers indicated that out-of-stocks remain a top retail challenge. Assortment and space optimization technologies that can effectively provide simultaneous top down/bottom up recommendations are required to enable a shopper-centric merchandising strategy that protects against out-of-stocks while reducing excess inventory and carryings costs. Improving shelf-availability at a lower cost helps to maximize return on inventory and store real estate while improving customer satisfaction.
“This acquisition underscores our commitment to continually innovate with cloud-based solutions focused on addressing retailers’ most critical business challenges,” said Marc Hafner, Revionics’ President and CEO. “Retail Optimization has the same approach we do, which is to incorporate next-generation predictive analytics and demand-based science into our offerings to ensure our customers have best-of-breed solutions that drive a competitive advantage.”
Leveraged and proven by tier one retailers and manufacturers throughout North America, Retail Optimization’s solutions deliver advanced predictive analytics and demand-based science that incorporates macro and micro spatial constraints and tradeoffs into assortment planning and optimization to determine the right product, placement and space allocation at the store/aisle/category/SKU level.
The solutions bring together otherwise separate but critical information in determining an optimal merchandising execution program – shopper demand information, loyalty data, market data, market basket data, store layouts, planograms, business rules and strategy, and financial objectives. Real-time ‘what-if’ scenario planning capabilities allow retailers to compare and contrast the optimized results of different strategies before selecting one for implementation. Using a proprietary simultaneous ‘top down/bottom up’ optimization approach, retailers can now boost productivity of existing shelf space by determining the highest benefit product mix while simultaneously reducing both the out-of-stocks of that product mix and cutting its inventory requirements.
This acquisition is part of Revionics’ master product roadmap and vision to be the first and only vendor that can offer retailers a next-generation, fully integrated end-to-end merchandise optimization solution, which eliminates the remaining siloes in the merchandising organization by infusing price and promotions into the assortment and space decisions. Bringing assortment, space, and pricing together requires two critical integrations – Space-aware Pricing and Price-aware Assortment. Combined with the existing integration available today, Revionics’ integrated end-to-end merchandise optimization will be able to deliver a Coordinated Master Demand Plan.
Cloud Expo: McAfee Extends Its Security Leadership in the Cloud
McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated security technology company continues to extend its security leadership to the Cloud with new enhancements to its security platform for the Cloud. The McAfee Cloud Security Platform provides a framework that allows organizations to extend their security and policy enforcement into the Cloud by securing the three primary channels of traffic – email, web and identity – delivering a secure and trusted bridge between the enterprise and the Cloud.
The challenge for Cloud-adoption in the enterprise is not only to secure data that resides or travels through the Cloud and prevent sensitive data from leaking, but also to protect their organization, their remote offices and their mobile workers from being attacked by cybercriminals who utilize the Cloud and new technologies – mobile apps and Cloud APIs for example – as new in-roads to unleash malware and conduct targeted attacks on organizations.
Actifio Announces PAS 5.0, Radically Simple Copy Data Management
Actifio today launched PAS 5.0, a major platform upgrade that extends the company’s signature capability – the ability to recover any application instantly for up to 90 percent less total cost of ownership (TCO) – to large scale enterprises and cloud service providers. This new version of its Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform – a proven virtualized storage solution with more than 100 users worldwide – addresses more deployment scenarios by delivering new cloud-based services including multi-tenancy, networking optimization and reporting capabilities. It also offers improved workflow to accelerate application development lifecycles, now including Oracle, with efficient self-service database cloning to lower test/development storage costs across large enterprises.
PAS has disrupted the enterprise storage industry by transforming its underlying economics with a purpose-built system optimized for the real driver of today’s data storage explosion: copy data. By focusing on smarter and more efficient copy data management – where it is not unusual for a business to maintain 13-120 redundant copies of production data – Actifio provides faster recovery and more reliable data protection for up to 90 percent less cost than traditional backup and recovery point tools.
“The copy data explosion is creating significant problems for the enterprise and the reason is that a whole slew of traditional, expensive and siloed data backup and recovery applications can’t instantly find, manage and protect ever-increasing data assets,” Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “With PAS 5.0, enterprises can create and maintain a single copy of everything in their production environment, eliminating the need for multiple redundant copies. It also recovers data within seconds, which is more important than ever in mission-critical environments.”
Through Actifio’s radical simplification of the copy data management problem, organizations are freed to reinvest dollars often counted in the millions of annually recurring expenses into more strategic IT initiatives driving growth and innovation. PAS users – including Boston University Medical Campus; Audax Group; NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable Company; City of South Portland; and Jones & Bartlett Learning – are already realizing such savings and putting those resources to better use inside their own organizations.
“Finding ways to extend our current IT investments into new areas can make a good technology decision a great technology decision,” said Erik Dubovik, vice president of IT, Audax Group. “This is exactly the case with PAS 5.0 because it lets me simplify copy data management for more of our environment in addition to lowering test and development storage costs by 95 percent.”
“Our work in the fight against disease is essential but it generates unwieldy ‘Big Data’ that’s hard to store, share and protect using conventional tools,” said Dr. John Meyers, assistant professor of medicine and director of technology for the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. “PAS 5.0 will let us recover anything, physical or virtual, across our entire data center – instantly – with a single solution with 80 percent less dedicated backup storage. For us, that will save time, money and trouble – and allow us to focus on the advancement of science.”
This new release coincides with the accelerating worldwide adoption of PAS, which has been installed by hundreds of customers and sold by more than 120 value added resellers worldwide. This momentum has enabled Actifio to double revenues for seven consecutive quarters and expand in key regions across Europe, Asia/Pacific and the Middle East. It has also resulted in tremendous industry-wide acclaim for Actifio, which was recently chosen as one of Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies1 for 2012.
The new PAS 5.0 supports larger deployments and more diverse enterprises while accelerating the test and development process in Oracle environments. Actifio has significantly bolstered the scalability and performance of PAS 5.0 with these powerful new features:
- 200 percent dedupe capacity increase
- 2x increase in throughput
- 10x bandwidth increase with 10GbE
- 75 percent network bandwidth savings with DeDup Async™ replication
- Faster on-boarding of remote applications via portable storage
- Actifio Enterprise Manager – a new software capability that enables
simple management of large scale PAS deployments
PAS 5.0 gives developers and IT teams copies of production data within minutes to dramatically hasten the arduous testing process. Within Oracle Test and Development environments, PAS 5.0 eliminates more than 95 percent of storage costs by creating multiple copies at a fraction of footprint. Actifio now enables immediate self-service database cloning – taking less than 15 minutes to clone a five terabyte database when it previously took several days using legacy approaches.
For cloud service providers, PAS 5.0 offers a wealth of public and private cloud data management services including backup, remote backup, and test and development. It also provides several new, in-demand features including DeDup Async, secure multi-tenancy and the Actifio Enterprise Reporter.
This new version of PAS now supports a wider variety of environments – including all file system data on Windows and Linux including DAS, NAS and SAN. It provides comprehensive protection and availability for heterogeneous networked and direct-attached server environments, supporting a range of in-band, out-of-band, physical, VMware, structured and unstructured environments.
Additional Multimedia Assets
- [Video] – Solving
the Big Data Problem with Actifio - [Video] – Boston
University: Discovering Effective Big Data Management with Actifio - [Video] – NaviSite:
Delivering the Economic Promise of Cloud Backup with Actifio - [Video] – Accelerated
Oracle App Development, Protection & Delivery with Actifio PAS 5.0
PAS 5.0 will be available the week of June 18. Contact info@actifio.com for more information.
PEER 1 Hosting Launches Powerful, On-demand HPC Cloud
PEER 1 Hosting’s HPC Self Serve Cloud delivers a flexible and cost-effective high performance computing environment by fusing virtual and physical servers with a private net. The result is a seamless, self-serve solution that is fast, secure and available on-demand.
“In today’s competitive market, businesses with intense graphic processing requirements simply can’t wait months or years for improvements to their in-house IT infrastructure,” said Greg Rusu, General Manager of Zunicore, a division of PEER 1 Hosting. “With PEER 1 Hosting’s new HPC Self Serve Cloud, businesses will benefit from maximum performance on-demand – whenever they need it – while managing ever-tightening constraints on business resources and budgets.”
Savvis Floats Canadian Cloud
Savvis, the cloud and hosted IT player that now belongs to CenturyLink, has built out the infrastructure in Toronto that it acquired when it bought Canada-based managed IT and colocation house Fusepoint last year so it can offer its Symphony Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) cloud solutions there.
Symphony VPDC is supposed to be one of the industry’s first enterprise-class virtual private datacenter cloud solutions with multi-tiered security, service and network profiles.
Savvis says the flexible service levels (Essential, Balanced and Premier) it can offer provide a range of features, support levels and performance to suit the broad infrastructure profiles that enterprises demand. It claims industry-leading security elements, quality of service and SLAs for web hosting, test/development, mission-critical and other applications.
Symphony VPDC also can be integrated seamlessly to support hybrid cloud solutions that leverage Savvis’ managed hosting, colocation and network services.
The widgetry will keep regional and multinational customer data in the country.
Bought for $124.5 million cash, Fusepoint brought Savvis three data centers: one in Toronto, one in Montreal and one in Vancouver. Only Toronto, the largest and in Canada’s financial capital, has been fitted out to support a cloud. It helps flesh out Savvis’ global footprint.
Separately, Savvis, which has a network of more than 50 global data centers, representing more than two million square feet of raised floor space, is also driving into the German market and just hired Donald Badoux from euNetworks as managing director of German operations. He will be working out of a new office in Frankfurt, which will also offer Symphony VPDC services. Last month Savvis opened its fourth data center in London. It’s also expanded its clouds in Hong Kong and Japan.
Cloud-based solutions best defence against cyber “DDoS” attacks?
A recent paper on distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks by Neustar concludes that only cloud-based DDoS solutions offer a comprehensive defence against increasing attacks that are expected to surge by as much as 40% in 2012.
“Cloud solutions provide the bandwidth (as measured in Gbps) to absorb today’s massive network layer attacks, plus the technology diversity and processing power to handle application-layer and high packets-per-second strikes,” said Neustar.
Neustar agrees that all on-premise hardware, even at best, has limits. At some point the sheer volume of traffic will clog network connections – before on-premise perimeter equipment even gets involved!
“Network-bandwidth attacks of 10Gbps or more were still 15% of all DDoS incidents Neustar mitigated. More than one out of 10 attacks came with hurricane strength, enough to overwhelm bandwidth and quickly cause an outage.”
Additionally, high packets-per-second (PPS) attacks grew in popularity.
“Instead of exhausting bandwidth, these drain processing …
What IT departments need to do to prepare for cloud adoption
Cloud computing continues to gain acceptance amongst enterprises and as a result, software vendors are working hard to meet the need.
Specifically, enterprise IT has had to address the challenges concerning security, integration with internal applications, performance, and reliability of the cloud.
With the combination of maturing platforms, generational and cultural shifts, and compelling economics, cloud-based solutions are fast becoming the undeniable choice for nearly all future non-core technology purchases. Once adopted, the cloud is inherently scalable and can be up and running within hours, designed specifically for an organisation’s needs.
From our own research and insights into Axway customers, we predict that by 2014 the cloud will be the primary operating model for enterprise IT organisations, bringing unprecedented change to IT and a competitive advantage to early adopters. Put simply, by 2014, cloud computing will ultimately redefine the role of enterprise IT itself.
So, with cloud adoption taking …
SailPoint Announces Integrated Cloud Identity Management Solution for the Enterprise
Recognizing that cloud adoption is making identity management more complex and difficult for the world’s largest companies, SailPoint today announced SailPoint AccessIQ, which integrates cloud access management with rich identity governance and automated provisioning. AccessIQ provides convenient, easy-to-use services such as single sign-on (SSO) and self-service access request, while ensuring that cloud applications are managed within the same identity governance framework used for on-premises applications. Delivered as a cloud service, AccessIQ deploys quickly and allows enterprises to immediately take advantage of convenient cloud access services coupled with improved visibility and oversight over their usage.
“The consumerization of IT has changed business user expectations. They want fast, simple and convenient access to cloud services without being slowed down by IT processes and controls,” said Jackie Gilbert, VP and GM of SailPoint’s Cloud Business Unit. “And, we see a growing trend of ‘bring your own application,’ where workers self-provision cloud applications. Both scenarios make it more difficult to monitor and control when and where users are placing sensitive data in the cloud, which brings a host of security and compliance concerns. IT can’t manage compliance and risk if it doesn’t have visibility into the cloud applications used throughout the enterprise.”
Designed for empowered business users looking for a more flexible and agile way to address business challenges, AccessIQ provides an intuitive, tablet-like interface to deliver services that improve productivity and user satisfaction. AccessIQ includes an intuitive App Launchpad for one-click, single sign-on to cloud applications from any device, step-up authentication options for added security, as well as simple self-service application request capabilities, via an easy-to-use App Store. This empowers business users to safely use cloud applications for business or mixed-use purposes, with approvals and provisioning handled automatically based on organizational roles and security policies.
SailPoint AccessIQ, together with SailPoint IdentityIQTM, offers the richest set of end-to-end controls over cloud applications available today. AccessIQ’s integration with IdentityIQ provides an enterprise-grade governance platform for managing identities and applications in the cloud, with policy, role, and risk models unified with on-premises application identity management. To extend governance to applications outside the control of IT, AccessIQ provides:
- Full visibility of user sign-on activity and account usage, enabling
business unit procured applications and SaaS applications procured by
individuals to be managed as part of an enterprise-wide identity
governance strategy. - A flexible, risk-based approach to cloud application identities so IT
organizations can tailor how they manage and control those
applications without locking down the environment and getting in the
way of the business. - Full audit reporting on application usage and “who has access to what”
to demonstrate compliance and control monthly subscription expenses by
promptly deprovisioning unused or unauthorized cloud application
accounts.
SailPoint AccessIQ is a fully hosted, multi-tenant solution that seamlessly and securely integrates with SailPoint IdentityIQ. It will be generally available in Q3 2012 with per-user subscription-based pricing. For more information, visit: www.sailpoint.com/cloud.
