It seems every day, a software supplier or service provider offers  new options to use the public cloud for storage and data protection. 
The latest came this week, when Veeam Software released a  connector that will let users of its backup and recovery software use any of 15  public cloud Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) as backup targets. Among them  are Microsoft's Windows Azure, Rackspace's Cloud  Files, HP Cloud and Amazon Web Services' S3 storage and Glacier archiving  services. 
Veeam Backup Cloud Edition addresses data security with support for AES 256-bit encryption and aims to  address network performance via its compression and de-duplication algorithms.  Customers can also boost performance using WAN accelerators, explained Rick  Vanover, Veeam's product strategy specialist. The  company has partnerships with WAN optimization vendor Riverbed and cloud gateway supplier TwinStrata. 
Customers can backup virtual machines, Vanover said. The offering allows enterprise customers to  choose IaaS providers without having to learn their respective APIs. Are  customers really looking to replace traditional tape with the cloud as a backup  target? "People have been asking for this," Vanover said. 
Last week, cloud provider Savvis announced the release of  its Symphony Cloud Storage offering. PJ Farmer, director of Savvis' cloud  storage product management, said  in a blog post that the service offers "automatic protection from  geographic disaster and for easily providing local storage targets for  distributed applications."
Based on EMC's Atmos platform, Symphony Cloud Storage offers  built-in replication and enables organizations that must address data  sovereignty to set policies where data is stored. 
But it's not just the big players that are eying storage and  backup and recovery. I've talked to a number of providers who target small and  medium businesses (SMBs). Cloud storage was a big topic at the Parallels Summit  in Las Vegas last week, where the company launched Parallels Cloud  Storage, a platform that allows SMB-focused cloud and hosting providers to  improve storage capacity and utilization to create self-healing, distributed,  high-performance storage pools.
"It's highly available, self-healing and fully fault-tolerant with auto-recovery," explained Parallels CEO Birger Steen. "It  looks simple. It's hard to do but conceptually it's pretty simple."
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/12/2013 at 12:48 PM0 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider, who helped lead the development and  distribution of the open source KVM hypervisor, on Tuesday launched what they hope  will be an encore performance.  
Their latest venture,  Ravello Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based  company they formed in 2011, has come out of stealth mode. Ravello has developed  what it's calling a "cloud application hypervisor." Coinciding with  the company's launch, Ravello revealed it has raised a sizeable $26 million in  financing from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture  Partners. 
Ravello president and chairman Schnaider said in a statement that the  company's Cloud Application Hypervisor "encapsulates multi-VM applications  along with their entire environment including the VMs, networking, storage, etc.  so that enterprises can run any application in any cloud without making any  changes."
It's designed to make it easier for organizations to employ an approach  to hybrid cloud computing known as "cloudbursting," where apps  running in enterprise datacenters are subject to sudden demands for compute  capacity resulting from unpredictable bursts in workload demands or transaction  activity. Cloudbursting lets organizations obtain that compute from a public  cloud provider. 
Ravello's Cloud Application Hypervisor is designed to "normalize  the application environment across private and public cloud," making it  possible to run, taking into account the infrastructure discrepancies between  the two, noted CEO Tamir. 
Both Tamir and Schnaider are hoping to repeat their earlier success when they founded KVM  distributor Qumranet, which Red Hat acquired in 2008. Tamir went on to become  VP of engineering at Red Hat and Schnaider VP of development. Another Qumranet alumnus, Navin Thadani, who  ran the virtualization business at Red Hat, has joined Ravello as senior VP of  products.
Tuesday's launch includes the release of the public beta of Ravello's service  designed to let developers simulate their existing apps to run in public and private  clouds without changing them.
The company counts Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and HP's  cloud services business as its initial partners.
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/05/2013 at 12:48 PM3 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		IBM has offered SAP consulting, integration and  implementation services for decades so it should come as little surprise that it's  looking to migrate those customers to the cloud. What's surprising is that an  unlikely rival beat Big Blue to the punch -- and I'm not referring to Accenture,  Capgemini or Hewlett-Packard. 
Amazon Web Services and SAP made a big splash together at  re: Invent, AWS's first-ever customer, developer and partner conference held  in late November. AWS has certified  SAP's key offerings to run in EC2, including the SAP Business Suite, HANA One,  Business All-in-One, Business Objects BI solutions, SAP Rapid Deployment  Solutions (RDS) and Afaria.
While more customers by far use Amazon's EC2 to host their  systems and apps than any other cloud service provider, IBM officials aren't  worried about their customers fleeing. Dennis Quan, IBM's VP of SmartCloud  services, argues Amazon can't match IBM's 99.7 percent SLA combined with its  Business Consulting Services and industry-specific SAP expertise. As you may  recall, IBM  back in October launched SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS), a platform  as a service (PaaS) offering for enterprises to run production applications.  This is the first SCAS deliverable and Quan told me on Monday that it goes beyond  just letting customers host SAP instances.
"What we're doing is building on a base of dedicated services  to enterprise clients and coupling that with specific expertise in SAP,"  Quan said. For now, IBM is only offering the SAP Business Suite and Business  Objects BI portfolio as a managed PaaS offering. Asked if  there are plans to support other SAP products, notably HANA, the company's  rapidly growing in-memory database platform, Quan said IBM isn't prepared to  discuss future offerings.
IBM of course has its own database offerings, notably DB2,  and many of its SAP customers already use it. Asked if his company has concerns that customers  will choose HANA over DB2, Quan didn't rule out offering SAP's database. "Our  customers run a variety of workloads," he said. "A lot of then make  use of IBM technologies and a lot use  technology from competitors." 
The SAP service is the first of a number of software as a  service (SaaS) offerings IBM will offer under its SmartCloud umbrella in the coming  year, according to Quan.
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/29/2013 at 12:48 PM0 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		If your shop has groups of Visual Studio developers who use  Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) looking to enable more agile  development and testing processes, a new cloud-based offering aims to automate  the provisioning of these tools. 
The new service is not from Microsoft but rather Skytap, a  boutique provider of cloud-based infrastructure targeted at developers. The Skytap  Automation Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server is designed  to dynamically create development and testing environments by automatically  provisioning TFS, Visual Studio and Microsoft's Testing Manager workflows using  Skytap Cloud. 
Sumit Mehrotra, Skytap's director of product management, explained that developers can use the automation pack in a variety of scenarios, such as those  building .NET client apps and for n-Tier server environments such as SharePoint  Web Parts. The automation pack is  designed to make it easier to define environments and bring them up repeatedly via  the click of a button or an API call, according to Mehrotra. 
"Within a minute you can stand-up a complex SharePoint  Web Part and deploy it to that farm," Mehrotra said. "And you can do  it multiple times and multiple people can do it in parallel. That ease of use  really puts the speed back in agile development."
Though Skytap is an established cloud provider, I asked  Mehrotra why shops would opt to run it on his company's service rather than  Microsoft's Windows Azure. While there's no reason one couldn't do that, he  argued that "it would take a fair bit of effort to set up that environment and  set up the capabilities, so it could be served up as a golden template and  copies of it could be brought up at the click of a button."
The company launched the Skytap Automation Pack for  Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server at the Microsoft ALM 3 Summit,  taking place this week in Redmond.
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/29/2013 at 12:48 PM0 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		Amazon Web Services now wants customers to use its EC2 cloud  infrastructure to perhaps sequence the human genome and perform other  compute-intensive advanced analytics using in-memory databases such  as HANA from its partner SAP. 
		The latest EC2 instance for in-memory computing is aimed at  hosting applications that "have a voracious need for compute power,  memory, and network bandwidth such as in-memory databases, graph databases, and  memory intensive HPC," according to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a  blog post.
		Configured with a total of 88 ECUs (EC2 compute units), it's  based on two Intel E5-2670 processors with NUMA (non-uniform memory access)  support, 244 GB of RAM and two 120 GB solid state drives (SSDs) for instance  storage. It requires hardware virtual machines (HVMs) and supports only Amazon  Elastic Block Storage AMIs. It supports 10 Gbps networking. 
		"You can use it to run applications that are hungry for  lots of memory and that can take advantage of 32 hyper-threaded cores (16 per  processor)," Barr noted, adding that support for Intel's Turbo Boost feature also  adds to the performance boost. "When the operating system requests the  maximum possible processing power, the CPU increases the clock frequency while  monitoring the number of active cores, the total power consumption and the  processor temperature. The processor runs as fast as possible while staying  within its documented temperature envelope."
		Pricing starts at $3.50 per hour  for Linux instances and $3.831 per hour for Windows instances, currently available in Amazon's U.S. East Region in Northern Virginia. Barr noted Amazon plans to make the  instances available in other regions, though he didn't say when.
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/22/2013 at 12:48 PM0 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		Look for Red Hat to step up its portfolio of cloud  management wares now that it has acquired ManageIQ. The company today said it  has closed the $104 million deal announced last month during the holidays. 
Acquiring the New Jersey-based company will let Red Hat  flesh out its CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) management tooling.  Like BMC, CA, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, RightScale and VMware, among others, Red  Hat is looking to offer "single pane of glass management" of public  and private cloud infrastructures.
ManageIQ's EVM suite is built on the company's so-called Adaptive  Management Platform, aimed at providing common monitoring, administration  and view to multiple public and private cloud platforms. It can manage Amazon  Web Services EC2 and infrastructure based on OpenStack, as well as VMware's  vCloud-based services and virtualization environments from VMware,  Microsoft and Red Hat. Furthermore, it has hooks into enterprise management  systems from BMC, CA, HP, Microsoft and ServiceNow, and supports virtual desktop  infrastructures. 
At the core of ManageIQ's EVM is its Virtual Management  Database (VMDB), which it describes as a low-latency but scalable engine that simplifies  the automation of management tasks by "eliminating the need to federate  management databases." The platform provides automated policy management,  orchestration and workflows, while tracking relationships and providing directory-based  classification and role-based access control.
Red Hat officials said on a webcast today outlining its  plans for ManageIQ that the ability to manage multiple clouds, operating  systems and VM infrastructures is critical. "It's going to be very  important for enterprises, as they move towards this new cloud architecture,  that [IT has] the ability to bring in the diversity of infrastructure and the  diversity of resources into the same cloud environment," said Bryan Che,  general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit. "Enterprises don't want  to be setting up 100 new cloud silos and having to manage them with 100 new  different set of management tools, one for every single workload that they want  to stand out."
Che, joined by ManageIQ co-founder and chief products officer  Joseph Fitzgerald, said the goal is to integrate ManageIQ EVM with Red Hat's  CloudForms. In essence, ManageIQ EVM fills holes in CloudForms and vice versa. ManageIQ  offers operational management of the virtualized and cloud infrastructure by  providing monitoring, orchestration, analytics and chargeback, among other  features, Che explained. "These are all capabilities which we have not  built out in CloudForms," he said.
CloudForms has enabled the management of cloud  infrastructure and aggregating capacity and configuring infrastructure, while  offering application lifecycle management capabilities, which were lacking from  ManageIQ, Che said. "We think it's a very good fit in terms of how the  technologies come together," he said. 
Integrating the two should be relatively straightforward, he  argued, because both are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and developed in  Ruby on Rails. Che gave no timeframe for when the company will release the  integrated platform. 
Che also noted that given Red Hat's open source legacy, ManageIQ's technologies  will be made available to developers, though he didn't reveal specifics.
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/22/2013 at 12:48 PM0 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		Hewlett-Packard on Thursday confirmed the departure of the architect of its  public cloud effort, Zorawar "Biri" Singh, who was senior vice  president and general manager.
Singh's departure was first  reported by All Things D. Singh oversaw HP's efforts to build a public Infrastructure  as a Service (IaaS) offering that would compete with the likes of Amazon Web  Services, Rackspace and his former employer IBM. 
I spoke  with Singh last year and he was quite bullish about HP's prospects  in both competing and partnering with Amazon. I'd say it's too early to write  that effort off as a failure, but I've also seen little evidence that it has made  strong inroads. 
CRN raises  the question: Was Singh pushed or did he jump? At this time, it's unclear  whether he was poached by a competitor or left due to a reorganization that led  to the launch of a consolidated Converged Cloud business that combined HP's various  cloud efforts. 
Under that reorg, former CTO of networking Saar Gillai, who  had reported to Singh, was named general manager of the new cross-divisional  organization. Gillai now reports to HP  COO Bill Veghte. HP's VP of technology and customer operations for its Cloud  Services business will run HP Cloud Services in an interim basis. 
Have you bought into HP's public and cloud initiative? I'd  like to hear how you're using its private and public cloud offerings. Drop me a  line at [email protected] or leave a comment below.
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/18/2013 at 12:48 PM7 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		One of the key inhibitors to using cloud infrastructures for  applications that process thousands or even millions of transactions per second  is the latency associated with those architectures. Storage, security and the  network can all impact cloud performance. Another variable is the database,  which is pivotal to modern systems that process real-time data that can range  from the processing of financial transactions to feeds that populate social  media networks. 
Startup NuoDB, financed and operated by veterans of the  database industry, hopes to solve the issue of processing and transacting real-time  data in public, private and hybrid cloud architectures. At a lavish event in  Boston on Tuesday, the company hosted a coming-out party where officials and some  early customers explained how the company hopes to re-invent the database for  the cloud era.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based company claims its Cloud Data  Management System (CDMS) called NuoDB Starlings 1.0 has unique technology (and  patents) that address the issue of scaling out while also supporting  traditional SQL commands and reliable ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation  and Durability) transactions. 
In addition, Starlings runs on commodity hardware, handles  unstructured data and non-SQL models and most importantly is designed for  elastic scale-out and scale-down cloud architectures. It is also designed to  ensure reliability in cloud scenarios where network latency is an issue. 
On Monday I spoke with NuoDB CEO and Co-Founder Barry Morris,  who described Starlings as a single logical relational database management  system that can scale by simply adding multiple servers. Morris argued that traditional SQL DBMSes from the likes of Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP's Sybase  unit can't do that at Web scale (they would beg to differ). He also claimed  Starlings can process 1 million transactions per second on 24 hosts running on  commodity hardware costing about $50,000, according to a Yahoo  Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB).
"All we are doing is right-clicking and adding another  machine. We are not doing any clever partitioning of this data or building of  caching systems or anything," Morris said. "You just add more  machines and it goes faster." 
It's also designed to address the network latency issue  associated with cloud computing. "The network behaviors on these clouds  are highly unpredictable, in terms of latency," Morris said. "If you've got  20 to 30 to 50 machines all taking part in a database and you don't know how  long it will take to send a message across the network in the Amazon cloud,  that's a problem for database systems. Our system is carefully designed so all  those communications are asynchronous, so we are actually quite tolerant of  these cloud systems."
Pointing to a published benchmark of one of the world's  fastest transaction-oriented database architectures, an Oracle Database 11g R2  Enterprise Edition with RAC and partitioning running on SPARC SuperCluster servers  could cost more than $2 million per year to process 500,000 transactions per  second, Morris reasoned. He cited TPC-C  benchmarks (though I must admit I don't give a whole lot of  credence to such comparisons since they are simulations). 
At any rate Morris argued the Starlings database would cost  20 percent of a traditional RDMS topology, though he acknowledged the 1.0  release hasn't been tested in scenarios with petabytes of data. He estimates a  500 gigabyte Starlings database would cost $15,000. It can run on premises or  in public clouds. The company offers up to 4 GB of data running on up to two  hosts free of charge indefinitely. Add two more hosts and 16 GB or more and  pricing starts at $1,200 per year, according to the company's Web  site. NuoDB offers unlimited capacity free of charge to developers. 
About 20 percent of the company's 3,500 early customers are  running Starlings in public clouds, primarily using Amazon Web Services EC2 and  Simple Storage Service (S3), though plans call for testing on other services,  Morris said. Among the customers using Starlings are auto parts retailer  AutoZone, IT service provider NorthPoint Solutions, and food service and  hospitality supplier Compliance Metrix.
Time will tell if NuoDB shakes up the database market as it  claims it will. But given the credentials and brain trust behind the NuoDB  team, the company is certainly worthy of attention. 
The inventor of the NuoDB Emergent Architecture that powers  Starlings is Jim Starkey, who in the late '70s developed Rdb at Digital  Equipment Corp., the core relational database engine that DEC ultimately sold  to Oracle in 1994. Starkey later went on to found Interbase Software, which  provided popular RDMBSes for engineering workstations. In 2000, he founded  Netinfrastructure, where developed a Web-scale relational engine that was later  acquired by MySQL. At the end of last year, his work done at NuoDB, he retired. 
Morris' credentials include CEO stints at Iona Technologies,  a provider of popular transaction-oriented middleware that was acquired by  Progress Software, and later Streambase Systems, a popular supplier of complex  event processing software. 
Also worth noting, as Morris pointed out, is all of the code was developed by the  company. For better or worse, it's not based on open source  code. If you're testing Starlings, drop me a line at [email protected] or share you observations  in the comments section below.
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/15/2013 at 12:48 PM1 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		In a move to accelerate its shift to the cloud, enterprise content management  supplier Alfresco named Silicon Valley veteran Doug Dennerline as its new CEO,  replacing co-founder John Powell.
Dennerline spent much of his career at Cisco, where he ran its  WebEx division. Among his other cloud credentials, Dennerline worked for  Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as executive VP of sales and most recently as president  of SuccessFactors, a software as a service talent management provider that SAP acquired  last year for $3.4 million. 
Alfresco, a London-based software provider that counts the  United States for half its sales, will extend its presence in San Francisco looking to  tap the region's IT sales, marketing and development expertise. The company  made a major move toward enabling its ECM platform to run in the cloud as a service  and target mobile devices a  year ago with the release Alfresco Enterprise 4.
In an interview on Monday, Dennerline said he found Alfresco's  desire to accelerate the company's cloud push, support for mobile devices along  with its steady growth and its open source model appealing. 
"I've been living in the cloud for seven years and  watching what CIOs are doing and being asked to do in terms of making use of the  public cloud, which seems to be pretty well accepted around the world now,"  Dennerline said. "CEOs are going to CIOs and saying, 'You need to lower the  cost of your infrastructure and the applications you're supporting to the end  users, and candidly you need to give them a better experience than they now have  so they can be more productive.'"
The company said it just completed its 24th  consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth with numerous deals valued  at $1 million and higher. Dennerline sounded like he has ambitious plans for  Alfresco, which he admitted he hopes will include an initial public offering.
"That would be on an ideal outcome here," he said.  "We are on trajectory in terms of growth and number of customers and are  growing at a steady pace. If we can accelerate that, that would be something we  would want to do because we will need the public market financing to help us  grow even faster than we already are."
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/15/2013 at 12:48 PM2 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		The growing use of tablets, smart phones and cloud services  is making it more complicated for IT organizations to manage user  authentication and authorization to enterprise resources – as if it wasn’t difficult  enough. 
		Consequently, the market for technology that provides secure  single sign on is heating up. I delved into growing identity management as a  services (IDMaaS) landscape a few months ago (see  Going Cloud: Identity Management as a Service). In recent weeks, a number  of companies have moved to up the IDMaaS ante including Centrify, Microsoft and  Okta. And this week IBM rolled out an upgrade to its Tivoli Security Access  Manager, with the launch of ISAM v. 7.0. 
		There’re a slew of other players including CA, Intel and its  McAfee division, Ping Identity, SailPoint, Simplified, Symantec and VMware,  among others that have furthered their push to advance IDMaaS in 2012 and will  undoubtedly continue to do so in the coming year. 
		Looking at the latest developments alphabetically, Centrify earlier  this month launched DirectControl for SaaS, which authenticates users via their  Active Directory credentials to access software as a service-based solutions. Among  those SaaS offerings Centrify supports include Box, Google Apps, Marketo,  Microsoft’s Office 365, Postini, Salesforce.com, WebEx, Zendesk and Zoho.  
		Centrify designed DirectControl for SaaS to allow single  sign on access to these and other SaaS with a user’s Active Directory  credentials, explained Centrify CEO Tom Kemp. Users can access any resource  tied to Active Directory from traditional mobile PCs as well as Android and  iOS-based smartphones and tablets whether they’re company issued or owned by  employees. 
		Kemp said Centrify’s new offering doesn’t require changes to  Active Directory or to endpoint security systems. “Our cloud offering is in  effect an identity bridge to a customer's Active Directory,” Kemp said.
		IBM’s new Tivoli ISAM v7.0 tackles IDMaaS from a slightly  different perspective. Like Centrify’s offering, Big Blue said it provides  context-aware management for mobile devices. But the new ISAM is helps centrally  manage rights throughout the policy lifecycle from file creation to publishing,  while enforcing compliance requirements. 
		In addition to controlling access to in-house systems, apps  and data, the new ISAM release provides federated single sign on to various  cloud service providers.
		Looking to extend its Active Directory technology to the  cloud, Microsoft is expected to launch Windows Azure Active Directory at some  point next year. While Microsoft hasn’t said when it will be generally  available, the WAAD is now available for beta testing. 
		Active Directory made its move to the cloud in 2011 with the  launch of Office 365, when Microsoft permitted customers to federate their  Active Directory domains to the service. Now users’ Active Directory  credentials can be found in a Microsoft’s other cloud offerings including the  online versions of its Dynamics applications and Windows Intune. 
		The next step for Active Directory’s cloud migration is to  Microsoft’s Windows Azure service. In beta now, Microsoft last  month said it will over access control in Windows Azure Active Directory  (WAAD), free of charge upon release. 
		“If you’re building a service in Windows Azure, you can  create your own tenant in Azure and create users and we let you manage those  users, who can be connected to your cloud services,” Uday Hegde, principal  group program manager for Active Directory at Microsoft told me earlier this  month. Furthermore, Hegde said Windows Server customers running Active  Directory on premise can connect to WAAD and avail all its features.
		Microsoft is betting its large customer base running Active  Directory will propagate it to WAAD. It stands to reason those who move Windows  Server apps to Windows Azure, or build new ones will provide authentication  services through WAAD. 
		Yet there’s a lot of money riding on IDMaaS alternatives.  Okta earlier this month received a cash infusion of $25 million in Series C  funding led by Sequoia Capital, bringing the total amount it has raised to $52  million.
		Okta is using Active Directory and WAAD APIs to enable  single sign on to SaaS and traditional apps. “A CIO wants to have one single identity  system that connects them to these different applications,” said Okta VP Eric  Berg. 
		Indeed I've heard that refrain for many years. We’ll see  if the latest offerings, and a number of others, deliver. 
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/20/2012 at 4:59 PM0 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    
		Citrix wants to  ensure its place in managing employee-owned tablets, PCs and smartphones as well as cloud-based file sharing with the planned acquisition of leading MDM supplier Zenprise. 
Citrix announced the agreement on Tuesday, for undisclosed terms. Citrix plans to integrate the Zenprise MobileManager, Zencloud and Zensuite offerings with its  own MDM solution CloudGateway and the Me@Work portfolio, which includes the respective GoToMeeting and ShareFile cloud-based conferencing and document storage services.
"Consumerization and BYO have given rise to very difficult challenges for businesses in enabling a productive, mobile workforce while still maintaining tight controls over company information," said Sumit Dhawan, Citrix vice president and general manager of mobile solutions. "Zenprise was a clear choice for Citrix, with its leading MDM product, an experienced team, a history of innovation, and a footprint on more than one million devices. With a complete Citrix enterprise mobility solution, customers have all the necessary pieces to manage and secure mobile apps, content and devices."
When Citrix launched CloudGateway last year, it described it as a tool to manage and securely distribute mobile apps in addition to managing PCs, Web and software as a service (SaaS) apps. It remains to be seen how Zenprise tools are integrated with CloudGateway but Zenprise has focused on MDM for nearly a decade and is seen as a leader by analyst firms Forrester and Gartner.
Presumably it means Zenprise will also provide management of Citirix's various cloud offerings including its new ShareFile. But Zenprise's flagship MobileManager software allows IT to control the deployment, configuration, provisioning based on enterprise policies, security (including the blocking of data synchronization with public cloud services such as iCloud), monitoring and decommissioning (wiping) of devices. 
For those that don't want to deploy Zenprise MobileManager on site, the company offers Zencloud, which promsines 100 percent uptime SLAs and is housed in SSAE 16/SOC1, FISMA Moderate compliant facility. 
 
	Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/06/2012 at 4:59 PM5 comments
          
	
 
            
                
                
 
    
    
	
    		Less than seven years ago, Amazon Web Services disrupted  traditional datacenter computing with its cloud-based infrastructure services,  allowing enterprise customers to provision compute and storage and pay based on  usage without having to make capital outlays for hardware or software. Many  who have moved to this model of paying for IT infrastructure as an operational  expense have enjoyed considerable reductions in capital expenditures. 
		Now,  Amazon is looking to similarly upend the way organizations deploy data  warehouses. More
	
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/28/2012 at 4:59 PM0 comments