Cloud Computing Articles
SnapLogic, a provider of enterprise cloud integration tools, announced new enterprise platform features intended to help lower the effort to integrate with traditional data sources. Meeting the needs of enterprise IT architects, the latest release of the SnapLogic Integration Platform provides high availability and rollback support, smarter server shutdown options, and a more intuitive interface for administrative tasks. "This release, like most other SnapLogic releases, is for both private and public clouds," Zeb Mahmood, principal of product management for SnapLogic, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 15, 2012
Technology performance company Compuware announced two new solutions aimed at reducing complexity in the data center and the cloud. Compuware APM for Mainframe provides transaction management capabilities, intended to help administrators more rapidly resolve performance problems, reduce MIPS costs, postpone hardware upgrades and accelerate time-to-market for new applications. In addition, a second new solution, Outage Analyzer, tracks cloud and third-party web service outages with instant notification of cause and impact. Outage Analyzer is available now as a free service.
Posted October 10, 2012
CA Technologies launched a new book called "Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated" at Oracle OpenWorld. Co-authored by CA CTO John Michelsen and CA LISA director of product marketing Jason English, the book explains how deploying service virtualization to simulate the behavior, responsiveness and data of dependent systems can help remove constraints in the existing software environment, and help increase the speed, performance, and agility for the development of enterprise application software.
Posted October 10, 2012
SAP AG announced the general availability of the SAP Enterprise Performance Management OnDemand solution. With mobile-ready applications powered by the SAP HANA application cloud, the solution enables business users to gain real-time insight into what is happening and adapt on-the-fly. "Built on the SAP HANA application cloud, SAP EPM OnDemand offers our customers another deployment option for extreme performance applications powered by SAP HANA. It's also complementary to — and extends the value of — the 10.0 version of SAP solutions for EPM with focused applications that are designed to be up and running quickly and help a broad set of users overcome particular business challenges," says John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP.
Posted September 26, 2012
MicroStrategy, a provider of business intelligence (BI) software, has introduced a new release of the company's core platform. MicroStrategy 9.3 includes new capabilities and improvements to MicroStrategy's data discovery software, Visual Insight; increased support for advanced analytics from 'R' - the open source language for predictive analysis; and improved connectivity to Hadoop. In addition, MicroStrategy 9.3 delivers a high speed "Google-like" search experience and introduces an innovative, new administration product, MicroStrategy System Manager, for automating manual, multi-step processes.
Posted September 25, 2012
Business analytics provider Birst Inc. has released a free cloud-based analytics edition of Birst available to business users, called Birst Express. Users can connect directly to Salesforce.com for sales analytics that span Salesforce.com and their own data sources, as well as visualize data and deliver analysis in a cloud-based environment. Users can then share their analyses and access their insights anywhere, on their desktop or mobile device.
Posted September 25, 2012
Oracle announced this week that it has entered into an agreement to acquire SelectMinds, a provider of cloud-based social talent sourcing and corporate alumni management applications. SelectMinds' applications enable recruiters, hiring managers and employees to leverage social connections to distribute job opportunities, source higher quality referrals, market their employment brand and manage corporate alumni relationships.
Posted September 19, 2012
In recent years, the networks of developers, integrators, consultants, and manufacturers committed to supporting database systems have morphed from one-on-one partnerships into huge ecosystems in which they have become interdependent on one another, and are subject to cross-winds of trends and shifts that are shaping their networks. Nowhere is this more apparent than the huge ecosystem that has developed around Oracle. With Oracle's never-ending string of acquisitions, new functionality, and widespread adoption by enterprises, trends that shape this ecosystem are certain to have far-reaching effects on the rest of the IT world. Concerns that percolate through the ecosystem reflect — and influence — broad business concerns. New paradigms — from cloud computing to big data to competing on analytics — are taking root within the Oracle ecosystem long before anywhere else.
Posted September 19, 2012
Serena Software announced advancements to its "Orchestrated IT" solution set, now designed to help enterprises take full advantage of mobile, social and cloud technologies. Serena's solutions are designed to help IT stakeholders to automate the continuous delivery of applications on-premise and to the cloud, as well as enable users to view release activity, analytics and key metrics from mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets.
Posted September 17, 2012
Splunk Inc., a provider of operational intelligence software, has released a cloud service offering for organizations that develop and run applications in the public cloud using services such as Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Google App Engine, Rackspace, and others. Splunk Storm enables users to diagnose and troubleshoot application problems instantly, attain rapid insight into cloud-based applications, as well as monitor vital business metrics to achieve more effective operational intelligence.
Posted September 11, 2012
Attunity CloudBeam, Attunity's recently introduced SaaS platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS), has expanded its services to provide a new data replication-as-a-service solution for AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3). Currently available for testing, the service provides replication and synchronization of big data stored in S3 across AWS cloud regions to enable business-critical initiatives, including disaster recovery, backup and data distribution. "Amazon Web Services has a replication capability but it is far less efficient and performant than ours and this is one of the reasons that AWS is so happy to have this capability," Matt Benati, vice president of global marketing, Attunity, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 10, 2012
Enterprise PaaS company rPath has unveiled a new adoption model for enterprise IT and managed service providers to help decrease risk in cloud projects and assure better business outcomes. The framework, which offers insight into the sequence and implications of each successive investment in cloud maturity with a focus on starting points, traps, and destinations, is founded on the principle that an effective cloud must standardize and automate both infrastructure and application platforms. The primary target with the framework is large enterprises with their own private clouds and secondarily, service providers, Shawn Edmondson, vice president of product strategy at rPath, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 06, 2012
Enterprise Linux distribution provider SUSE has released SUSE Cloud, an OpenStack-based private cloud solution. This automated cloud management platform enables the rapid deployment and management of an infrastructure as-as-service (IaaS) private cloud, improving resource utilization and delivery of services by managing and provisioning workloads across a secure and compliant cloud environment. SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager are also included, allowing users to easily build and manage cloud-based applications.
Posted September 04, 2012
LogicMonitor, provider of SaaS-based IT infrastructure monitoring for physical, cloud, and hybrid environments, has partnered with cloud management vendor RightScale Inc. to provide a comprehensive, automated monitoring solution for managed public, private, and multi-cloud/hybrid cloud deployments, spanning their premises-based infrastructure.
Posted September 04, 2012
IBM announced an updated mainframe server configured to meet the heightened performance demands of cloud computing, as well as providing enhanced security. The zEnterprise EC12 mainframe server also offers support for operational analytics that can help clients sift through large volumes of raw data and transform it to gain knowledge that can be used for competitive advantage. The EC12 is the result of an investment of over $1 billion in IBM R&D, and the work of more than 2,500 development engineers across 18 labs worldwide, says Rod Adkins, senior VP of IBM's Systems and Technology Group.
Posted September 04, 2012
Luminex Software, a virtual tape solutions vendor, and Nirvanix, a provider of cloud storage, have teamed up to provide a new cloud-based tape vaulting solution designed specifically for mainframe environments. As a result, the companies say, mainframe customers are no longer limited to open or distributed systems, and can securely store mainframe tape volumes in the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network and access them globally.
Posted September 04, 2012
Neebula Systems, a provider of service modeling and management solutions, has unveiled a preview of its latest cloud management solution, the Neebula ServiceWatch solution in the cloud. The offering is intended to provide IT managers access to a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based product to discover and map IT resources - hardware and software - that make up a specific business service. This eliminates the long, labor-intensive process of installing on-premise software and then manually discovering and mapping IT resources, the vendor says.
Posted September 04, 2012
Informatica, Talend, Jaspersoft, and Pervasive Software Inc. have joined the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program as Technology Partners. To help customers get the most out of its cloud platform products, explains Eric Morse, head of Sales and Business Development, for Google's Cloud Platform, Google work closely with technology companies that provide powerful complementary solutions integrated with the platform.
Posted August 23, 2012
Oracle has announced Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0. According to Oracle, customers in 43 countries across 22 industries have already adopted Oracle Exalogic, and it is the fastest growing Oracle engineered system with 3x Y/Y sales bookings based on the last two quarters of FY 2012. The second generation of Exalogic is raising the bar even further, with a single integrated system that addresses the key business goals of application owners - to seize market opportunities, lower business risk and reduce cost and complexity, noted Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president for product development at Oracle, who spoke during a webcast presentation to launch the new release.
Posted August 23, 2012
VMware, Inc., a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, says it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nicira, Inc., a network virtualization vendor. VMware will acquire Nicira for approximately $1.05 billion in cash plus approximately $210 million of assumed unvested equity awards. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The parties expect the acquisition to close during the second half of 2012, according to VMware. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both VMware and Nicira and the stockholders of Nicira.
Posted August 20, 2012
Cloud operating system provider Nimbula has unveiled its elastic Hadoop solution with MapR Technologies, allowing users to run their Hadoop clusters on private clouds. The elasticity and multi-tenancy of Nimbula Director paired with the dependability and security of MapR Hadoop Distribution allows for a fully-functional and highly-available Hadoop cluster on a single pool of infrastructure. "What we're trying to achieve is have the power of Hadoop on top of a private cloud and bringing the best of each world to the customer," Reza Malekzadeh, Nimbula's vice president of marketing & sales, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Customers can run Hadoop and non-Hadoop workloads on the same shared infrastructure.
Posted August 14, 2012
SQL database vendor Clustrix has announced high-performance SQL database offerings with new cloud economics, including a new database-as-a-service (DBaaS) and Clustrix Version 4.0. The products will address the real-time needs of customers developing applications with big data and in the cloud.
Posted August 14, 2012
Northgate now offers Database-as-a-Service (DbaaS) in the cloud. According to Northgate, the fully-managed DbaaS takes care of scalability and high availability of customers' Reality databases in the cloud. The initial offering is for U.S.-based companies.
Posted August 09, 2012
Data integration software vendor Informatica has announced Informatica Cloud Summer 2012, the latest release of its cloud-based data integration service, which seeks to build out the cloud integration platform and make it easier to use. New features such as Cloud Integration Templates, productivity assets on the Cloud Integration Developer site, increased native cloud connectors, and expanded support for Informatica Cloud Data Loader Service make cloud integration more consumable and manageable than before.
Posted August 07, 2012
Compuware Corporation has launched a free online cloud service enabling organizations to compare the speed of their website's performance against leading competitor sites. SpeedoftheWeb.org provides a series of industry-relevant indexes with categorized collections of 1,000 of the world's most trafficked websites - as ranked by Alexa and Compuware Gomez benchmarks. As end-user expectations become greater, the cost of poor website performance also grows, both in terms of lost revenues and brand loyalty. In addition, end users are showing less patience for slow-performing websites, according to Compuware. In response to these heightening requirements, organizations need to ensure performance along every spot in the web application delivery chain, Alois Reitbauer, Compuware APM's Web 2.0 and Mobile Performance Expert and author of Java Enterprise Performance, tells DBTA.
Posted July 25, 2012
SAP AG has announced the general availability of the on-demand edition of SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere. For independent software vendors (ISVs) adding software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to their product portfolio or building new SaaS applications, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere, on-demand edition, is a data management solution that enables ISVs to build, deploy and manage cloud applications as demanded by their application and customers without having to compromise. The new product allows users to take advantage of the cloud's economies of scale while providing them with the tools they require to help ensure they can still treat each of their customers individually.
Posted July 25, 2012
Websites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have brought social networking and the concept of online community to a huge cross-section of our society. Penetration and usage of these platforms may vary depending on demographic (age and geography, in particular), but no one can debate the impact of Facebook and Twitter on both everyday life and on society in general.
Posted July 25, 2012
Liaison Technologies, a global provider of secure cloud-based integration and data management services and solutions, announced its support for a broad range of cloud services and on-premises applications within its Data Aware Cloud Services Brokerage, an on-demand, any-to-any integration platform as a service (iPaaS). "There are two obstacles to companies that want to use SaaS and DaaS offerings along with their on-premises applications: connecting and data integration," says Christopher Hale, Liaison's vice president for global product marketing.
Posted July 24, 2012
Kognitio, provider of big data analytics and analytics in the cloud, has announced the general availability of its in-memory analytical platform via Amazon Web Services (AWS). This expansion of Kognitio Cloud provides customers with the industry's widest range of cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings for companies seeking to leverage their big data. Kognitio clients can cut costs by choosing how they want to perform data analytics and where they want to store that data.
Posted July 19, 2012
HiT Software, a provider of data replication and change data capture (CDC) solutions for heterogeneous database environments, has announced the release of DBMoto Cloud Edition, the first product in a family of data replication and CDC software designed to support cloud data traffic. DBMoto Cloud Edition has been designed to deliver rapid, secure data updates between disconnected databases. Data changes are captured and passed through the cloud using web services, providing reliable CDC for satellite enterprise databases that have no direct connection to corporate IT systems.
Posted July 16, 2012
Angie's List, the consumer review website, has adopted Oracle's customer experience suite, RightNow CX Cloud Service, to allow it to reach its core technology goals of combining email and chat into a single platform to help reduce agent inefficiencies and increase customer engagement and cost savings.
Posted July 05, 2012
Dell and Quest Software announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Quest, an IT management software provider offering a broad selection of solutions that solve the most common and most challenging IT problems. Under terms of the agreement, approved by the boards of directors of both companies, Dell will pay $28 per share in cash for each share of Quest for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.4 billion, net of Quest's cash and debt. The transaction is expected to close in Dell's third fiscal quarter, subject to approval by Quest's shareholders and customary conditions.
Posted July 02, 2012
In a live presentation that was also made available on the web, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle's cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a new enterprise social platform offering. "We made a decision to rebuild all of our applications for the cloud almost 7 years ago. We called that project ‘Fusion,'" he told the audience. While joking that, at the time, some competitors called it "con-fusion," Ellison also recounted the years of work, input from thousands of people, and billions of dollars that were required to enable Oracle to make the transition from being an on-premise application provider to being a cloud application provider - as well as an on-premise application provider - and to rewrite and modernize all of its applications.
Posted June 28, 2012
Lucid Imagination, a developer of search, discovery and analytics software based on Apache Lucene and Apache Solr technology, has unveiled LucidWorks Big Data, a fully integrated development stack that combines advantages of multiple open source projects including Hadoop, Mahout, R and Lucene/Solr to provide search, machine learning, recommendation engines and analytics for structured and unstructured content in one solution available in the cloud. "With more and more companies being challenged by the explosive growth of information, as has been widely reported, the vast majority of that content is unstructured or semi structured text, and traditional business intelligence or traditional analytics methodologies don't come close to addressing the vast percentage of content," Paul Doscher, CEO of Lucid Imagination, tells DBTA.
Posted June 28, 2012
SAP AG and Ariba, Inc. announced that SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has entered into an agreement to acquire Ariba, a cloud-based business commerce network, for $45 per share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $4.3 billion. The acquisition is intended to combine Ariba's buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP's customer base and business process expertise to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of calendar year 2012, subject to Ariba stockholder approval, clearances by relevant regulatory authorities and other customary closing conditions.
Posted June 27, 2012
Companies are scrambling to learn all the various ways they can slice, dice, and mine big data coming in from across the enterprise and across the web. But with the rise of big data — hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data — comes the challenge of where and how all of this information will be stored. For many organizations, current storage systems — disks, tapes, virtual tapes, clouds, inmemory systems — are not ready for the onslaught, industry experts say. There are new methodologies and technologies coming on the scene that may help address this challenge. But one thing is certain: Whether organizations manage their data in their internal data centers, or in the cloud, a lot more storage is going to be needed. As Jared Rosoff, director of customer engagement with 10gen, puts it: "Big data means we need ‘big storage.'"
Posted June 13, 2012
To help customers optimize the value of their technology investments, Oracle has announced Oracle Platinum Services. The Oracle Platinum Services are available at no charge as part of a standard support contract to customers with either Oracle Exadata X2-2 and X2-8, Oracle Exalogic X2-2, and SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 Servers with Exadata storage, Sun ZFS Storage or Oracle's Pillar Axiom 600 Storage. To access Oracle Platinum Services, customers install a patented, secure monitoring gateway that will allow Oracle to deploy quarterly updates on their behalf. With the new services, Oracle is delivering what it thinks is the highest level of service in the industry, says Larry Abramson, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services.
Posted June 13, 2012
Closely following its announcement of plans to acquire Vitrue, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform, Oracle says it has also entered into an agreement to acquire Collective Intellect, a provider of cloud-based social intelligence solutions. The Collective Intellect transaction is expected to close in the second half of the year; and the Vitrue acquisition, which was announced on May 23, is expected to close in the summer of 2012.
Posted June 06, 2012
Kapow Software, a provider of social media, cloud, and big data solutions, has announced a strategic partnership with Informatica Corporation to deliver Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst. This solution harnesses the power of the web, cloud applications and social media, allowing IT and line-of-business users alike to access and extract relevant information from disparate data sources in real time. The solution will be integrated into Informatica 9.5, which is scheduled to be released at the end of June.
Posted May 29, 2012