Compuware Corporation on Tuesday announced the availability of Google Chrome browser agent technology within the Compuware Performance Network. This new Chrome support, combined with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox, continues to extend Compuware’s industry-largest global synthetic network with more than 150,000 instrumented IPv4 and IPv6 nodes and end points. The solution is offered on a subscription basis via the SaaS delivery model for fast time-to-value and extremely low ongoing cost to own.
“Our ongoing commitment to our customers is to provide them with the largest, most reliable and most current synthetic monitoring network available on the market,” said Steve Tack, Vice President of Product Management for Compuware’s APM business unit. “Users of our APMaaS platform need to ensure they deliver optimal user satisfaction regardless of browser, device or network and we are happy to provide them with the broadest web and mobile support in the industry.”
Understanding Data Centers of the Future
Data centers are perched upon technology’s advanced battlements. They must be highly scalable and able to support ever-increasing bandwidth each year. Newer data centers look far differently than they did just a decade ago, and strategies for design and style continue to shift under the weight of big data, cloud computing, mobility and other technology trends.
IT professionals must be cross specialty virtuosos in environments of ever-increasing complexity. Service costs have a continuous downward pressure, as economizing infrastructure is a goal for enterprises of all kinds. Examining emerging IT technologies can be a crystal ball for peering into the role of IT and data centers of the future.
Lunarline, Inc., to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Lunarline, Inc., a cyber-security company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
One of the original FedRAMP-accredited 3PAOs, Lunarline helps private sector organizations adapt to evolving federal information security requirements. While Lunarline can’t make security compliance fun, they can make it painless. Kind of. Their services are backed by a suite of industry leading products that streamline compliance and drive continuous improvement in security posture. Lunarline: Solutions Built on Security.
Appcara’s AppStack Expands Cloud Application Automation and Citrix Support
Appcara on Tuesday announced a major upgrade to its AppStack cloud application automation and migration platform that makes it easier to deploy new and existing servers into the cloud. With the process of provisioning enterprise apps still painfully manual and time consuming, Appcara’s repository-based model-driven approach now can assist in migrating a wide range of existing servers into managed cloud environments.
New in the release is the AppStack Onboarding Agent that enables existing external Windows or Linux servers – either physical, virtual or cloud based – to become actively managed from the AppStack portal. With it, users can leverage AppStack’s powerful point-and-click capabilities to install and manage applications on these servers as well as manage lifecycle tasks pertaining to storage, security and monitoring. This enables simplified and centralized management of physical, virtual and cloud servers from a single portal.
From Prototype to Service: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) | Part 2
There is no question that machine-to-machine (M2M) is attracting attention on a global scale. While many might say M2M is a nascent industry sector, the forecast of $10 billion worldwide in 2013 provides proof of the already significant market in key M2M verticals such as utilities, transport and automotive. At the end of 2013, there will be 200 million M2M device connections worldwide across various industry segments. This will increase to 2.2 billion by 2023 representing $88 billion according to the latest research from Analysys Mason.
Future growth will emerge from tailored applications for local markets, large enterprises and SMEs across existing high growth verticals as well as emerging ones. In Part 1 of the M2M series, we focused on the cool applications being developed for the Internet-of-things. For those hopeful entrepreneurs and companies out there who are busy prototyping such devices let me offer a couple of suggestions based on our experience with previous cycles of technology innovation.
Aria Systems Weighs in on Lottery’s Decision to Offer Subscriptions
Aria Systems weighs in on the recent decision by the North Carolina Education Lottery to allow players to purchase tickets by subscription for three select games through its website. Lottery officials said they would allow players with computer access to buy tickets for its popular Powerball, Mega Millions and Carolina Cash 5 games in November.
North Carolina’s Education Lottery joins at least 11 other state lotteries in the United States that already provide some kind of subscription service to lottery players.
“Today, when it comes to generating sales and profits, large enterprises such as the North Carolina Education Lottery are discovering that ‘one size does not fit all.’ Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the state’s Education Lottery is adding subscription sales for a better customer experience, not to mention increased ticket sales,” said Andy Eliopoulos, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Aria Systems.
DreamHost Eases Mobile Website Construction for Users
DreamHost® on Tuesday announced its holistic new mobile blueprint to power its customers’ websites. DreamHost’s new three-pronged approach to supporting mobile websites and apps was created as a direct result of diverse customer feedback among DreamHost’s 375,000 customers.
«Empowering our entrepreneurs and developers to easily create and maintain a great mobile web experience for their customers is essential given over 25% of traffic to sites hosted on DreamHost is mobile,» said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. «We’re all about engineering flexibility into our platform, so offering DudaMobile website optimizer alongside WordPress responsive design themes and best practices tips for custom website development presents a comprehensive set of options for mobile web success.»
Website owners can design a mobile-specific website from the ground up, embrace the relatively recent precepts of responsive design, and consider native mobile applications development. DreamHost has worked hard to ensure all of the needs of mobile-savvy customers are met. The ultimate goal is to enable more website owners to provide the best possible experience to their sites’ mobile visitors, thereby improving conversions and increasing engagement.
AppZero Survey Sizes Industry Concerns Around WS2003 End of Life
AppZero, the fastest way to move enterprise applications to the cloud, has opened up its year-long WS2003 end of life industry survey to the IT public. The previously “by invitation only” survey is measuring preparedness among the IT community for the impending end of life for WS2003 set by Microsoft for July 14, 2015. IT professionals can take the #WS2003 eol survey here.
As Windows Server 2003 fast approaches end of life (EOL), the ability to move to a newer version of the OS (WS 2008 R2 or WS 2012) becomes critical. Enterprises may seek to modernize and move to the cloud at the same time. Early survey results from more than 200 Fortune 1,000 companies reveal that 40% of respondents wish to move to the cloud as part of their EOL remediation efforts and 51% are worried about security, compliance and vulnerability management. All survey participants will receive the final research report at no charge. To participate, take «The #WS2003 EOL Survey» here.
Citrix Unifies and Simplifies Cloud Orchestration
Citrix on Tuesday announced the availability of Citrix CloudPlatform™ 4.2, a single, unified cloud orchestration solution powered by Apache CloudStack, and Citrix CloudPortal™ Business Manager 2.1, a web portal that manages the delivery of cloud services. The latest versions of these cloud solutions from Citrix enable organizations to future-proof their cloud services strategy by efficiently running both traditional enterprise and cloud-native workloads via an application-centric approach, while also simplifying the management aspects of offering IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
Today’s customers are adopting the cloud to increase efficiency, agility and business growth by rapidly innovating and delivering new cloud services. To realize the full potential of the cloud, businesses realize they must expand beyond the initial cloud-native scale-out use cases such as Dev/Test or Big Data to incorporate the vast base of existing scale-up, enterprise workloads such as ERP apps and Windows workloads into a standardized cloud architecture. The challenge customers face is that most cloud architectures are optimized for one or the other workload, but not both. By focusing on optimizing for all applications versus a specific workload, Citrix CloudPlatform and Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager provide a flexible foundation for the journey toward an ITaaS delivery model.
Is cloud computing meeting its expectations?
One issue relative to cloud computing that keeps critics well fed is the degree to which expectations and realities of the technology all too often don’t sync. Add to the mix a large degree of expected hype around buzzy marketing concepts, and what companies expect going into switching to cloud and what they get can feel problematically let-down-ish.
So what does the internet think?
Excerpt from the Facebook Cloud Computing Group
Facebook surprisingly chimed in with some of the most rapid responses.
The NSA scandal made an appearance, as did security in the “failing expectations” corner of the arena.
PRISM aside, security is still a chief concern for many IT departments. However, cloud security is also a nuanced issue, not a catchall concept.
For instance, any industry dealing with client information, proprietary personal information, patient health records, or those who does not want their infrastructure hacked (which should include …