Robin Wauters

Xenocode, a developer of technologies enabling instant delivery of software across networks and platforms, today announced the immediate availability of the 2010 edition of Xenocode Virtual Application Studio.

Virtual Application Studio allows system administrators and software developers to easily virtualize existing Windows-based applications for instant, one-click deployment on the web, intranets, and USB drives.

Xenocode is an easy-to-use app virtualization and delivery technology that eliminates software installation and conflicts. Xenocode packages applications into self-contained, lightweight virtual machine executables that run instantly on any Windows desktop.

Virtual Application Studio 2010 includes dozens of feature enhancements and upgrades, including:

• Windows 7 compatibility: Xenocode is the first virtualization engine in its class to include full support for all editions of the new Windows 7 operating system.
• Publish to Web: Publish apps to the web with a single click. Once online, apps can be launched with a single click directly within a web browser over 10 times faster than traditional download.
• Software Expiration: Automatically create evaluation or license-restricted versions of existing apps with run time or date-based “timebomb” expiration.
• Multi-platform capabilities: Platform merge allows virtual application behavior to be customized on a per-operating system basis while distributing a single executable.
• Dozens of new application templates: Application templates allow one-click virtualization of most popular software applications, including Office, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Xenocode is a powerful virtualization technology that packages apps into standalone virtual machines that run instantly on any desktop. Unlike traditional hardware virtualization, Xenocode technology exploits the host operating system environment to eliminate the need to emulate hardware or package operating systems with applications. Virtual applications require no setup, configuration, or device drivers, are insulated from conflicts, and run seamlessly across Windows variants and on locked-down desktops.

Xenocode Virtual Application Studio 2010 is available immediately via the web and through authorized Xenocode partners.

Nimsoft today announced that it has added a set of firsts to its Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS).

These new capabilities enable Nimsoft customers to extend real-time monitoring and historical reporting beyond the virtualised datacentre to hosted, cloud- and SaaS-based resources and applications. By extending monitoring from the virtualised datacentre to the cloud, customers will gain complete visibility over their entire IT infrastructure, enabling them to measure and improve service delivery, allocate computing resources for maximum performance, and enforce service level agreements (SLAs).

NMS is based on a scalable and extensible architecture that enables complete visibility and monitoring from a single product, eliminating the need to invest in additional products every time IT infrastructures change or expand. By monitoring all computing resources, Nimsoft customers will be able to make better decisions as they transition to a combination of internal and external environments.

New feature set delivers additional capabilities for monitoring both internal and external environments including:

• Cloud and SaaS Probes: Enable users to gain complete visibility over the performance and availability of Google Apps for Business, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, Salesforce.com, and other services. By understanding status and response time, users can determine if outsourced platforms and applications are meeting their service delivery commitments.

• Nimsoft Unified Monitoring APIs: Allow for easy extensions to NMS. This complete set of documented APIs is available to both customers and third-party developers.

• The Nimsoft Unified Reporter: Delivers more than 100 reports out of the box, and allows users to create their own performance and capacity planning reports. Information from these reports can be used to make decisions on how and where to redistribute workloads, to identify problems in the infrastructure, to benchmark performance metrics, and to prove where SLAs are not being met.

• Virtualisation Probes: Provide users 100 percent visibility over virtualisation platforms including Citrix, Microsoft HyperV, IBM Power-V, VMware, and Sun Solaris Zones. Complete visibility enables users to monitor and optimise the performance of all applications and resources running on virtual servers, and enables the optimisation of compute resources across business services.

• RCA (root cause analysis) and Topology Manager: Presents deep discovery and both virtual and physical topology views of the network. When an outage occurs, knowing where the root cause of the problem is dramatically reduces mean time to repair (MTTR).

In addition to providing Unified Monitoring for the broadest range of IT systems and applications in use today, these new features deliver:

• A scalable and extensible architecture that keeps pace with rapid IT infrastructure growth, monitors all internal and external IT systems, and provides a path to extend Unified Monitoring to new metrics such as power consumption

• A customisable management dashboard that enables IT administrators to get a single view of the overall health, performance and availability of their IT infrastructure and business applications irrespective of where they reside

• The industry’s most rapid deployment and shortest time to value, with a total cost of ownership up to 80 percent less than legacy solutions

AccelOps, datacenter service management innovator, today announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.

The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers.  AccelOps offers a seamlessly integrated datacenter management solution, packaged as a virtual appliance or SaaS for the mid-tier enterprise, which provides end-to-end visibility and IT service intelligence.

To improve service reliability, one must see and manage all aspects of performance, availability and security related to that service.  AccelOps provides transparency and service-relevance to virtual operations.  AccelOps’ virtual appliance links physical and virtual environments to business services and automatically discovers and monitors relationships, configurations, health, trends and metrics to achieve service-levels, expedite root-cause analysis and reconcile resource usage.

AccelOps integrates core datacenter/IT management functions and seamlessly combines state-of-the-art discovery and CMBD, cross-domain correlation, monitoring and alerting, interactive dashboards and topology maps, automated service definition and SLA tracking, identity and location management, enterprise search, case management, and built-in analytics and reports tied to industry best practices.

AccelOps invites VMware partners, prospects and customers to visit the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and learn more about our AccelOps Try and Buy program.

Fortisphere, a Virtual Service Management software company, today announced the availability of Fortisphere Virtual Service Manager (VSM), which proactively manages workloads and allocates virtual resources according to business priorities.

Fortisphere VSM is the only solution to enforce service tiers based on the correlation of uptime, performance, utilization and granular guest-level configuration data giving IT the confidence to maximize density and ROI without compromising service levels. A free, fully functional 14-day trial of VSM is available for download here.

Fortisphere VSM enables IT to make better decisions and move up the maturity curve from maintaining the virtualized infrastructure to managing it. VSM is an easy-to-use, quick-to-install virtual appliance with a thin client interface customized for each stakeholder. Its unique architecture enables VSM to gather the detailed VM configuration information needed to provide full visibility across the entire virtual environment and deliver optimal service to the business.

The free, downloadable trial is complete with all the key features and capabilities of VSM including:

• Configuration Management: Proactively find, triage and notify administrators of the root cause of VM issues before users even open a trouble ticket
• Virtual Service Tiers: Set alerts on different resource levels for each application and correlate performance to VM changes.
• Intelligent Inventory: Isolate and view real-time detailed data on specific VMs, categorize VMs and apply customer business tags.
• Density and Capacity Management: Quickly identify resource-starved VMs and consolidation candidates and accurately estimate infrastructure investments.
• Role-based Dashboards and Reporting: Give application owners and IT executives customized portals to filtered VM data and extensive reports customized to meet their needs.

The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever, as worldwide IT spending is on pace to decline 5.2 percent, according to Gartner.

Worldwide enterprise IT spending will struggle more with IT spending dropping 6.9 percent. The IT industry will return to growth with 2010 IT spending forecast to total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009. While IT spending will increase next year, Gartner cautioned IT leaders to be overly optimistic.

The computing hardware market has struggled more than other segments with worldwide hardware spending forecast to total $317 billion in 2009, a 16.5 percent decline. In 2010, spending on hardware spending will be flat. Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4 percent in 2009 with revenue of nearly $1.9 trillion. In 2010, telecom spending is forecast to grow 3.2 percent. Worldwide IT services spending is expected to total $781 billion in 2009, and it is forecast to grow 4.5 percent in 2010. Worldwide software spending is forecast to decline 2.1 percent in 2009, and the segment is projected to grow 4.8 percent in 2010.

On a regional basis, emerging regions will resume strong growth. “By 2012, the accelerated IT spending and culturally different approach to IT in these economies will directly influence product features, service structures, and the overall IT industry. Silicon Valley will not be in the driver’s seat anymore,” Mr. Sondergaard said.

From a budget perspective, there are three important items that IT leaders must consider in 2010:

1. A Shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure in the IT Budget — Concepts such as cloud services will accelerate this shift. IT costs become scaleable and elastic. CIOs need to model the economic impact of IT on the overall financial performance of an organization. For public companies, they must show how IT improves earnings per share (EPS).
2. Impact of the Increased Age of IT Hardware — With delayed purchases of servers, PCs and printers likely to continue into 2010, organizations must start to assess the impact of increased equipment failure rates, and if current financial write-off periods are still appropriate. Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3 percent of the global installed base. In 2010, it will be at least 2 million. “If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10 percent of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement be 2011,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.”
3. IT Must Learn to Build Compelling Business Cases — 2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.

Mr. Sondergaard said three additional topics that were important in 2009 will continue to dominate IT leaders’ agendas in 2010. These three topics include

• Business Intelligence — Users will continue to expand their investments in this area with the focus moving from “in here” to “out there”
• Virtualization — IT leaders should not just invest in the server and data center environment, but in the entire infrastructure. In 2010, users will create the cornerstone for the cloud infrastructure. They will enable the infrastructure to move from owned to shared.
• Social Media — Organizations are starting to scale their efforts in this space. The technologies are improving and organizations realize this is not only about digital natives. It’s about all client segments including the most significant: the population in the next 10 years, the above 60 year old generations.

While those topics are key to IT agendas today, Mr. Sondergaard highlighted three themes that will become important going forward. They include:

• Context-Aware Computing — This is the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction. Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions.
• Operational Technology (OT) — OT is devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity. The rapid growth of OT is increasing the need for a unified view of information covering business process and control systems. OT will become a mainstream focus for all organizations.
• Pattern-Based Strategy — This is a new model about implementing a framework to proactively seek, model, and adapt to leading indicators, often termed “weak” signals, that form patterns in the marketplace, and to exploit them for competitive advantage. A Pattern-Based Strategy will allow an organization to not only better understand what’s happening now in terms of demand, but also to detect leading indicators of change, and to indentify and quantify risks emerging from new patterns rather than continuing to focus on lagging indicators of performance.