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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Insight Venture Partners outbids Dell for Quest Software at $25.75 per share in cash

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Quest Software has accepted a sweetened $2.17-billion bid to be acquired by Insight Venture Partners (partnering with Vector Capital).

The buyout group offers stockholders $25.75 per share in cash. This increased purchase price represents a 33-percent premium to Quest’s closing stock price on the day prior to the initial announcement of the Insight Merger Agreement on March 8, 2012. Dell stopped its counter bid at $25.50 last week.

This transaction will be financed through a combination of a $187 million equity commitment from Insight, a $187 million equity commitment from Vector, a rollover of at least 84% of Quest CEO Vinny Smith’s existing shares and approximately $1.2 billion of debt financing commitments from J.P. Morgan Chase Bank N.A., RBC Capital Markets and Barclays Capital.

Quest has been on quite a Virtualization shopping spree itself over the last few years and unexpectedly bought their VKernel competitor in November 2011? Earlier acquisitions to enrich their management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments incluced Invirtus (2007) and Vizioncore (2008).

Below is our latest video interview with Scott Herold, Director, Virtualization Strategy at Quest Software, taken at VMworld Europe 2011. Prior to Quest, Scott was Vice President for Product Engineering at Invirtus and Director of R&D at Vizioncore.

Aqua Connect Sues Code Rebel, Alleging Reverse-Engineering Shenanigans

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Aqua Connect, which provides Remote Desktop Services for Mac OS X, announced today that it has filed suit against Code Rebel.

In its complaint (filed in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, Aqua Connect basically alleges that Code Rebel has misappropriated Aqua Connect trade secrets, software and technologies since January, 2008.

Aqua Connect claims that on or around June of 2009, Code Rebel began distributing a product, iRAPP Terminal Server, which was the result of the reverse engineering of Aqua Connect Terminal Server.

“We have reason to believe that Code Rebel reversed engineered releases of Aqua Connect Terminal Server and packaged this as their own product,” said Renee Mehrian, EVP of Aqua Connect.

“This practice has caused many of our customers confusion, and for a majority of them, compromised the integrity of their servers’ security mechanisms. Our goal is to ensure that customers receive the highest quality version of Aqua Connect’s products as they were intended to be designed and released.”

Virtual Bridges Appoints CFO; Iser Cukierman Joins Executive Team

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Virtual Bridges today announced the appointment of Iser Cukierman to the company’s executive leadership team.

Cukierman will serve as chief financial officer where he will oversee all finance and accounting operations and provide strategic and operational leadership for the company.

Cukierman most recently he served as general manager and chief financial officer at Fiserv where he was responsible for developing and implementing the company’s strategic plan related to revenues, profitability and growth.

Before joining Fiserv, he served as CFO of Strategic Forecasting, a geopolitical analysis and professional services company. Cukierman has also held strategic finance and consulting roles at VirtualCFO, Softbank, Accenture and Ernst & Young.

Cukierman has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas in Austin and is a Certified Public Accountant.

Virtacore Names Phill Lawson-Shanks As CTO

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Virtacore Systems, a provider of hybrid clouds, announced today that Phill Lawson-Shanks has joined the company as Chief Technology Officer.

During his more than 25 year career in technology, Lawson-Shanks has held a variety of strategic and practical positions.

Before joining Virtacore, Lawson-Shanks served as Board Member and Chief Strategy Officer of Nimbus Exchange. He held the position of Chief Strategy Officer at Alcatel-Lucent and was responsible for designing and deploying the company’s cloud strategy.

Whilst at SAVVIS, he led the Managed Hosting Division and was an early architect of systems that became the precursors to today’s cloud computing environment. Additionally, Lawson-Shanks spent many years with Compaq Computer in Europe and the US, managing large organizations and successfully launching numerous products and services.

Red Hat Launches Virtual Storage Appliance For Amazon Web Services

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Red Hat today announced the availability of the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is built on the former Gluster technology that the company acquired in October 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud.

This news comes on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of its Storage Software Appliance in December 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single datacenter or multiple datacenters and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX-compliant, meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud.

VMware Debuts VMware vCloud Integration Manager

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VMware today introduced VMware vCloud Integration Manager, a new solution designed to help service providers automate the delivery and operations of VMware vCloud Director-based clouds.

VMware also announced that nearly 90 service provider partners now offer services that have met VMware criteria as VMware vCloud Powered, an almost 3x increase since Q3 2011.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager software will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager is expected to be available in Q1 2012 and will be priced on a usage-based subscription model familiar to vCloud Service Providers.

Almost 90 service providers have launched vCloud Powered services since VMware introduced the program in February 2011. The VMware vCloud Powered program requires VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) partners to offer services based on VMware vSphere and vCloud Director while exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).