Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Partners Support on VMware vCloud Initiative

Attenda
“As ISVs adopt the SaaS model, they are looking to roll out their offerings quickly but with the minimum investment until they have grown their subscriber base,” said Simon Hansford, vice president, products and marketing, Attenda. “Leveraging the VMware vCloud Initiative will allow Attenda new ways of delivering this, whilst allowing our SaaS providers to scale rapidly.
We already find that ISVs adopting SaaS greatly benefit from the increased agility, improved availability and reduce costs that VMware delivers. As a hosting provider leveraging the vCloud initiative, Attenda will be able to offer our ISV clients a far more adaptable resource model that will enable more innovative software products, faster development and the potential for differentiated business models.”

British Telecom
“BT already uses VMware's current ESX technology as a key component of our virtual data centre capability,” said Stefan van Overtveldt, VP Emerging Technology & Innovation, BT Global Services. “It underpins both our internal IT requirements and our external customer journey: Operational Efficiency IT. BT is working closely with VMware on various initiatives to offer our customers across the globe BT's Service Oriented Infrastructure. This next generation of networked IT services will join together the management of network and compute capacity to achieve integrated service levels. BT's Service Oriented Infrastructure strategy and roadmap is aligned with VMware's vCloud initiative.”

CDW
“We currently provide Infrastructure as a Service using VMware,” Clint Harder, sales and product development manager, hosting and managed services, CDW. “Hosted Enterprise Infrastructure is our most in-demand hosted service. The additional of vCloud will let us integrate our Hosted Enterprise Infrastructure into customer VMware infrastructure to provide geographically disperse, high availability application infrastructure. We are very excited about the hosted service opportunities.”

Checkpoint
“The VMware vCloud Initiative will enable customers to have better visibility into how their cloud-based infrastructure is laid out,” said Juliette Sultan, head of global marketing at Check Point Software. “This knowledge will enable them to better deploy security as part of the cloud. As the only company that enables organizations to integrate physical network security and security in the cloud, Check Point sees the opportunity to help customers move into cloud computing securely and more easily.”

Cincinnati Bell
“VMware vCloud has enabled CBTS to build Virtual Data Center our next generation of computing services,” said Dave Heimbach, vice president, product development, Cincinnati Bell. “vCloud enables us to deliver an architecture that brings enterprise class, secure and flexible cloud services, from simple to complex. The vCloud platform allows us to scale our service offerings from providing the virtual infrastructure to run applications to redundant disaster recovery sites.”

Cisco
“Cloud computing is creating new and innovative solutions to meet the demanding computing, storage and IP resource needs of applications,” said Ed Bugnion, vice president and chief technology officer for Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit for Cisco. “Cloud initiatives, like VMware’s vCloud Initiative, supported with the power and intelligence of the Cisco network platform will make it easier for companies to leverage both public and private cloud services, that offer highly secure, cost effective off-load and disaster recovery processing capabilities. This enables rapid deployment of new virtual machines with the appropriate security, network and application policies and more importantly, transfers those policies as virtual machine workloads migrate within private clouds and between clouds.”

DELL
"Dell supports the vCloud Initiative as it makes it easier for enterprises and service providers to implement and provide cloud computing services," said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, of Data Center Solutions at Dell. "Dell helps power the world's clouds by offering customized hardware solutions and management services and we see vCloud as a key to enabling more customers to adopt cloud computing."

Elastra
“The first step, and the first challenge, in building and deploying cloud-based infrastructure has always been the effort involved in consolidating hardware, network, and storage resources,” said Kirill Sheynkman, president & CEO of Elastra Corporation. “The vCloud Initiative from VMware makes these challenges significantly less daunting. Now, ISPs and IT organizations can focus on the architectural challenges of designing application systems instead of scripting their installations and can have a choice of where these systems are easily deployed -- principles that have always been driving Elastra’s technology vision. We look forward to a productive relationship with VMware as our product suite, which already supports VMware ESX deployments, fully embraces and supports the deployment of Elastra Cloud Server designs onto the vCloud platform.”


EMC
“EMC fully supports VMware’s vCloud Initiative as we see virtualization playing a key role in this important and evolving market,” said Jeff Nick, CTO and senior vice president, EMC. “Together with VMware’s technologies, EMC can draw on its broad solutions portfolio and experience in replication, business continuity, virtualization, security and software-as-a-service to enable IT resource mobility, flexibility and end-to-end security in the cloud. These capabilities offer powerful business value for enterprises to provide transparent mobility of information and applications into and out of the cloud back to their own data center when business needs arise.”

EngineYard
"Since 2006, Engine Yard has provided a leading software stack for serving enterprise-level Ruby & Rails applications. By porting our stack to vCloud, we're offering customers a compelling new option for deploying their applications across many different forms of infrastructure."

F5
"vCloud promises a uniquely flexible enabling technology that opens up the door to cloud computing for enterprises of all sizes,” said Erik Giesa, vice president, product management, at F5. “F5 enables vCloud users to transition their application traffic to and from vCloud service providers whenever needed, instantly, seamlessly and without performance impact. F5’s BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) product achieves this by checking the health of the new site before routing any traffic and continuously monitoring performance over time with specific checks for enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Exchange. And, whenever multiple data centers are involved, GTM ensures the best possible performance by directing application traffic from each unique end-user to the most appropriate data center based on geographic proximity, quality of service or business criteria.”

Fujitsu-Siemens
"The VMware vCloud Initiative together with a broad range of our solutions and services enable customers to take advantage of ad hoc services provisioning in a most flexible way and to focus on their business without worrying about capacities or management of these highly complex infrastructures,” said Dr. Joseph Reger, CTO, Fujitsu Siemens Computers “VMware vCloud perfectly fits into our future directions of Dynamic Datacenter.”

Hosting.com
“VMware, through their vCloud Initiative will revolutionize the hosting industry just as the virtual private server did in the early 2000s,” said Darren King, CEO of Hosting.com. “VMware’s Infrastructure allows Hosting.com to provide a secure, scalable utility solution – CloudNine – to provision, support and consult with clients at a level previously unavailable in the hosting industry. VMware and the vCloud ecosystem enable our CloudNine solution to seamlessly provide disaster recovery, shared storage and utility computing to both Enterprise and SMB clients in a cost-effective model.”

INSIGHT
“As the first U.S. VMware aggregator in the enhanced VMware Service Provider Program, Insight can now offer enterprise-ready VMware vCloud services to our hosting clients using VMware market leading technology,” said David Casillo, senior vice president of strategic partnerships & marketing at Insight.

Intel
”For Enterprises IT and Cloud Computing providers who need to bridge the gap between business demands and current capacity, or connect with a broad partner ecosystem to easily integrate cloud computing services into existing IT infrastructures, the Intel VT enabled family of products, combined with VMware VI, is the foundational platform that provides the performance, reliability and scalability that enables the delivery of new virtualization 2.0 based services such as Infrastructure Aggregation, Resource Elasticity, and High Availability,” said Diane Bryant, CIO, Intel Corporation

INX
“As a VSPP partner for many years, INX, Inc. has leveraged not only the VMware Infrastructure virtualization platform to host disaster recovery services, but also offers convenience to customers by delivering virtual appliances on demand,” said Steve Kaplan, vice president, data center virtualization practice, INX, Inc. “We’re excited about how the VMware vCloud Initiative will continue to drive on and off premise application support, while extending our ability to bring new services to our customers.”

Joyent
“At Joyent, we believe the future of cloud computing is enabling customers to maximize their own on-premise clouds while taking advantage of off-premise clouds when needed and as required. This principle of federation is fully supported by Joyent using VMware’s vCloud offerings,” said David Young, founder and CEO of Joyent. “Joyent is now able to offer enterprise customers the future of cloud computing today.”

NEC
“We at NEC welcome the foundation of the VMware vCloud Initiative,” said Takayuki Okada, associate senior vice president, NEC Corporation. “Cloud computing has high expectations as next generation system and service infrastructure. We are sure that the VMware vCloud Initiative will mark a turning point of cloud computing for further disseminating. NEC offers cloud computing environments by delivery of comprehensive products and services from hardware such as servers and storage, middleware and system integration technology for SOA, and service providing infrastructure such as SaaS and PaaS.”

NetApp
"NetApp is a leader in the market today in delivering critical storage capabilities needed to build scalable and cost-effective cloud infrastructures," said Rich Clifton, senior vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Grid Infrastructures Business Units, NetApp. "These include virtual storage volumes, rapid provisioning, deduplication, Ethernet storage fabrics, and scale-out architectures. Additionally, NetApp provides the data protection features to ensure data integrity, recoverability, and isolation within a shared infrastructure. We're excited to partner with VMware in driving the vCloud initiative."

NewLease
"Our Hosting Partners can now offer enterprise-ready cloud services due to VMware,” said Dawn Edmonds, chief operating officer, NewLease Pty Ltd “NewLease is Australia's leading provider of licensing and licensing support for hosters and managed services providers. The addition of VMware to our offerings means that our hosting/managed services partners can deliver highly reliable services to their customers from a centrally managed infrastructure.”

Rackspace
“Rackspace works closely with VMware on many fronts and we believe that VMware’s vCloud framework fits our vision for the next generation of enterprise cloud-based services” said Emil Sayegh, vice president of product group at Rackspace Hosting. “Our current VMware-based offerings will allow corporations to extend the boundaries of their datacenter, and take advantage of external computing resources seamlessly. The combination of Rackspace and VMware can empower users to run their enterprise applications at the location that best meets their business needs.”

Radware
"Our solution for optimizing the virtual environment enables enterprise, service provider, and SMB customers alike to take full advantage of the multiple benefits that VMware’s vCloud offers – specifically, our solution enables transparent migration, without any code change, to an external cloud for mission critical applications as well as SLA assurance for applications deployed in the cloud,” stated Ilan Kinreich, chief operating officer, Radware.

RightScale
"RightScale strongly supports VMware's vCloud Initiative and its capability to provide a common set of cloud infrastructure services from enterprises to public clouds,” said Michael Crandell, CEO, RightScale. “We will continue to work with VMware to leverage vCloud's elastic scalability and dynamic provisioning within RightScale's cloud management platform to deliver scalable, resilient, high-performance cloud applications."

SAVVIS
“Utility computing was the forerunner for what evolved into the enterprise cloud computing solutions we are seeing today,” said Bryan Doerr, CTO, SAVVIS, Inc. SAVVIS pioneered a virtualized IT services delivery platform and now offers VMware-based virtualized services. “As enterprises design new systems they will need to optimize security, performance, and reliability attributes along with the scalability of cloud solutions to meet a range of enterprise requirements.”

Siemens
“Our partnership and leverage of VMware technologies such as vCloud allows us to deliver a global compute platform that offers our internal and external customers access to business services regardless of location or device,” said Michael Kollar, chief architect, Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Inc. “This platform is based on a tiered service model that dynamically scales compute resources to meet customer and business needs.”

SkyTap
“vCloud will give our customers even more control of VMware infrastructure in the Skytap cloud through standard APIs and seamless transition of virtual machines between onsite and cloud environments,” said Scott Roza, CEO, Skytap, Inc. “Utilizing Skytap’s ‘hybrid’ cloud computing model with vCloud has tremendous potential to improve IT’s responsiveness to the business while increasing efficiencies and lowering cost.”

SugarCRM
“SugarCRM is pleased to be working with VMware on its vCloud Initiative,” said Paul Oh, vice president of technology alliances, SugarCRM “The VMware vCloud Initiative advances SugarCRM’s vision of unlocking Customer Relationship Management (CRM) from the chokepoints of proprietary SaaS vendors and moving application services to a shared cloud infrastructure. vCloud is a win for web-based computing, open standards and, most importantly, for customers.”

SunGard
“SunGard is excited to be a part of VMware’s vCloud initiative. New business needs will arise to support end-to-end availability as organizations embrace cloud-based models,” Frank Casey, vice president, product strategy, SunGard Availability Services. “SunGard's expertise and capabilities will enable clients as they leverage cloud solutions while helping to ensure Information Availability.”

Sun Microsystems
"The combination of vCloud and Sun Microsystem's x64 servers creates a powerful, energy-efficient foundation for delivering cloud services," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's x64 systems and software give customers the performance, reliability, flexibility and massive scaling required for a broad range of applications in a cloud computing environment."

Terremark
“Terremark's Enterprise Cloud platform supports the VMware vCloud Initiative to serve customers with the agility, scalability and performance required for their applications and their businesses,” said Randy Rowland, senior vice president of product development, Terremark.

Third Brigade
“Moving ‘into the cloud’ removes physical computing limitations, but it also bypasses the policy protection provided by your network security perimeter,” said Bill McGee, vice president, products and services, Third Brigade. "Third Brigade host intrusion defense enables you to re-establish consistent security policy on internal and external cloud resources. Integrating with VirtualCenter, VMsafe APIs and the new vCloud platform, Third Brigade's cloud-ready security offerings make it possible to apply location-aware security policy to virtual machines."

T-Systems
“As a global provider of converged IT and telecommunication (ICT) services, we at T-Systems continue to leverage industry-leading products and technologies from VMware in order to provide flexible, high-quality utility and cloud computing enterprise application services for our business customers,” said Dr. Gregory O. Smith, vice president technical deal solution design, T-Systems North America.

Verizon Business
“The launch of VMware vCloud will further enable our customers to take advantage of cloud computing,” said Chris Gesell, director of IT Solutions product marketing of Verizon Business. “Through our expansive global IP network, worldwide data center footprint and rich skill set, Verizon Business is uniquely positioned to help customers harness the power of cloud computing, which will make their infrastructure more efficient and agile.”

WorkStream
“Workstream SaaS Talent Management Suite is enabled through the vCloud, providing highly available web services on demand in Workstream's Version 7 SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) across a diverse technology platform,” said Michael Gioja, CIO of WorkStream.
“VMware templates and snapshots enable reliable and consistently provisioned multiple environments for development, client configuration, user acceptance testing and production usage while maintaining the expected R&D advantages such as single code line, multi or single tenant applications.”


source:- vmware.com/

Google Apps tops 1 million businesses

Google is well known as a one-trick pony.

Almost all of the company's revenue comes from its search engine, which last quarter accounted for more than $5 billion. New initiatives, such as the Chrome browser, Google Gears, and Google Friend Connect, are focused on building a mostly open-source Internet operating system out of Google technology in order to funnel more user data and targeted advertising opportunities into the Googleplex financial engine.

It's easy to draw parallels to Microsoft, which gradually built the dominant 20th century operating system and applications platform. Bill Gates and company realized that attracting developers to the Windows platform was key. Google is following that advice with its open-source projects and allowing its mad scientists to try to remake the early 21st century software world and take on Microsoft.

Microsoft has led the way with productivity software, gaining a more than 90 percent share of market with Microsoft Office. Google is hoping to replicate Microsoft's office suite success with Google Apps. It's far less feature-rich than Microsoft Office, but Google Apps Premier edition is far cheaper at $50 per user per year.

For some companies, Google Apps is "good enough," and its cloud-based, collaborative core is an advantage--no Microsoft SharePoint server required. Even with a few enterprise wins, Google Apps is a puny business. According to a Fortune article, Google brought in about $4 million with its Google Apps business in 2007, compared with $12.2 billion for Microsoft Office. Google Apps is a profitable business, according to Matthew Glotzbach, enterprise product management director at Google.

Since early this year Google has been touting 500,000 active business customers, primarily small businesses, using at least one of the Google Apps, and more than 10 million active users. In addition, thousands of universities, with more than one million active users, are using Google Apps, the company said. So far, Google's biggest wins are Valeo, a leading automotive suppliers, with 32,000 users, and the District of Columbia, with 38,000 employees.

However, the vast majority of Google Apps users are not paying customers. The company maintains that "hundreds of thousands" of users are paying the $50 annual fee. The $50 per-user-per-year Premier Edition offers several features lacking in the free Standard Edition, including Postini messaging security, APIs for integrating Google Apps with IT infrastructure, 24x7 support, 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for e-mail, Google Video and 25GB of storage per account.

At this point, Google is underplaying the number of Google Apps business customers. The company has been saying that it is adding 3,000 businesses a day, which amounts to over 1 million per year. The reality today is that Google has more than a million Apps business customers. In addition, the Apps suite continues to fill out, most recently with Google Video.

It took Microsoft years to build a base of applications and developer ecosystem for Windows and Office. Google faces the same uphill climb for Apps and its fledgling Web operating system. The company hopes to ride on the backs of the younger generation that has grown up on the Web and identify with the Google brand. As the Google generation moves into positions of purchase authority within businesses, Google is betting that those decision makers will shun Microsoft, especially as Apps product features improve. Of course, the resilient and relentless Microsoft will respond to Google's challenge when it is more than a $4 million or even $20 million blip.


source:- news.cnet.com/

The Apache Software Foundation

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We consider ourselves not simply a group of projects sharing a server, but rather a community of developers and users.

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ApacheCon US 2008 in New Orleans - Registration Now Open!

ApacheCon US 2008 will be held 3-7 November in New Orleans, Louisiana. The conference schedule has been published and the days for the early bird prices are already counting down. This year's US conference promises to be a special one with a number of new activities and events.

This year ApacheCon features: over a dozen training workshops and over 60 presentations, the new BarCamp Apache, the co-located OFBiz Symposium, Camp Hadoop, the Fast Feather Track, funny Lightning Talks, exiting Keynote sessions, the Hackathon for ASF contributors, and much more.

The Apache Software Foundation welcomes Microsoft as a Platinum Sponsor

At OSCON, Microsoft announced their Sponsorship of The Apache Software Foundation, joining Google and Yahoo! at Platinum level. The generous contributions by Sponsoring organizations and individuals help offset the day-to-day operating expenses to advance the work of The ASF.

The Apache Software Foundation's "Apache Way" continues to gain momentum, recognition and influence on the future of open source technologies

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) – stewards, incubators, and developers of leading Open Source projects – today announced that both the organization's community and its meritocratic process (known as "the Apache Way") continues to gain recognition as one of the most influential, prominent and innovative leaders in Open Source.

A midyear review of the initiatives underway at the all-volunteer Foundation showed that not only does the Apache HTTP Server continue to be the world's most popular Web server software, but numerous ASF Projects lead the way in Open Source technology, and the ASF community is also playing a vital role in championing the collaborative development of consensus-driven, enterprise-grade solutions.

Free Video Streams from ApacheCon Europe 2008

ApacheCon Europe 2008 held in Amsterdam was a great success, and attracted higher than ever attendance figures, with about 500 registered attendees. This figure represents an increase of more than 40% over the previous year, demonstrating the rapidly growing interest in Apache and Open Source software amongst European businesses. If you have not been able to attend ApacheCon Europe, you can still watch videos of all keynotes and select talks online. Keynote sessions and the opening plenary are available free of charge.

source:- apache.org/