Should organizations scrap their SharePoint deployments in favor of Office 365 or some other instantiation of Microsoft's collaboration platform that's subscription-based or hosted elsewhere? Microsoft left little doubt about the answer to that question as it showcases SharePoint 2013 and the SharePoint online upgrades to its Office 365 service this week at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas.
"We really recommend moving to the cloud for the best experience overall," said John Tepper, the Microsoft corporate vice president known as the "father of SharePoint," speaking in his opening keynote at the annual SharePoint Conference on Monday. "We understand not everyone is there yet. This will take time. People who want to run their own servers, that's great. We have the best server release we've ever done in SharePoint 2013. The thing you should take away from our cloud focus is all we've learned about optimizing the system and deployment and monitoring, we've put into the server product and put into the deployment guidance."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/15/20120 comments
Microsoft's deal to acquire StorSimple Tuesday for an undisclosed amount fills a key hole in Redmond's effort to offer enterprises its so-called Cloud OS.
StorSimple is a three-year old provider of cloud integrated storage (CIS) appliances that allow those who manage datacenters to add public cloud services to the storage tier of an enterprise network. By using cloud services for data storage, StorSimple argues companies can offer improved disaster recovery, while lowering total cost of storage ownership by 60 to 80 percent.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/18/20126 comments
At this year's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, cloud computing is once again front and center with the launch of new IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings. The company has added new online storage services, cloud-based asynchronous message queuing, cloud-based tools to build sites on social networks and in the Oracle Public Cloud, and a variety of new SaaS-based line of business tools including financial planning and analytics capabilities.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/03/20120 comments
Racskpace is now offering free software that lets anyone build private clouds based on the same platform that runs its cloud hosting service.
Alamo, code-came for the company's Rackspace Private Cloud Software, is now available as a free download. The release, issued this week, marks a key milestone in Rackspace's plan to transition its cloud portfolio from its proprietary infrastructure to OpenStack, the open-source project the company helped launch with NASA two years ago.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/16/20125 comments