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

Robin Wauters

Cloud Computing Expert Scott Bils Joins Everest Group As Partner

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Everest Group, an advisory firm on global services, has appointed Scott Bils as partner.

Prior to joining Everest, Scott was the founding CEO at Conformity, a venture-backed provider of on-demand cloud identity and SaaS management solutions. Bils led and closed multiple seed stage and institutional funding rounds; developed partnerships with leading SaaS and cloud identity ecosystem vendors and created the Enterprise SaaS Working Group.

Bils will play a leading role in developing Everest’s Next Generation IT practice, which will support the needs of service providers, infrastructure vendors, and enterprises as they seek to address the challenges and opportunities of innovative yet disruptive technologies including the cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), virtualization, and mobile computing.

Scott holds a MBA from the University of Chicago and earned an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

SoftLayer Booked $280 Million In Revenue Last Year

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SoftLayer Technologies has announced several key milestones logged in 2010, including:

* $280 million in revenue (40% cloud / 60% dedicated), following a merger with the Planet
* +38% EBITDA
* Growth to more than 26,000 active customers across 110+ countries
* More than 76,000 deployed servers

Also:

* Integration with the Planet is largely complete, with remaining projects on track to be done by 31 March, 2011
* New global corporate headquarters in North Dallas
* Cloud services and options including Build Your Own Cloud, Isilon IQ and Citrix Cloud Solutions
* Network POPs in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Jose, and Seattle
* New datacenter facilities in Dallas, Seattle, Washington D.C., Houston and San Jose (March 2011)
* Launch of Parallels Plesk Panel 10
* Launch of Nimsoft Network Monitoring solution

Cisco Touts 4,000 Customers For Its Unified Computing System, And Other Milestones

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Cisco this morning announced a series of customer and technology milestones across the Unified Fabric, Unified Computing System and Unified Network Services technology portfolios which form the foundation of its Data Center Business Advantage architectural framework.

Cisco announced that it has shipped its one millionth Nexus 10Gb Ethernet port, bringing the total number of Nexus ports in customer production environments to more than 7,000,000.

The company also surpassed 10,000 NX-OS customers and neared 4,000 Unified Computing Systems customers at the end of its fiscal second quarter.

The Nexus and UCS families of products are vital assets in Cisco’s cloud computing portfolio. They provide the building blocks for virtualized data center and private cloud environments, and are already deployed by enterprises for private cloud applications such as desktop virtualization, hosted voice, video, collaboration and security.

UCS and Nexus have been implemented for cloud services at service providers such as AlphaWest, Cincinnati Bell, Navisite, Orange Business Services, PINS, Rackspace, Radiant, Savvis and Terremark.

Cisco announced today that it has reached nearly 4,000 customers for its Unified Computing System, eighteen months since the first generation of the platform shipped. In excess of 1,000 of these customers are said to be repeat purchasers of UCS.

As of Cisco’s fiscal year second quarter 2011, Cisco’s Unified Computing System revenue grew more than 700% year-over-year, bringing the UCS annualized revenue run rate to $650M.

Release: Acronis Backup And Security 2011

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Acronis, a provider of backup and recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today launched Acronis Backup and Security 2011, an updated solution to safeguard critical data and systems from both internal and external threats.

Acronis Backup and Security 2011 provides comprehensive information protection that combines backup and recovery with Internet security, delivering a single alternative to existing point solutions.

This combination of backup and security technologies allows users to back up systems locally for fast recovery of both data and their entire PC, protecting them against user error, disk failures and system failures, and to implement industry-leading firewall, anti-virus, parental controls and other security protections.

Acronis Backup and Security 2011 also provides online backup — an additional layer of protection with remote location data protection in case of theft or physical disaster.

Upgrades include: integration with Windows 7, a new user interface and support for USB 3.0 standards.

The Acronis backup and security product family includes two security packages to give users a choice of protection options:

Acronis Backup and Security 2011 offers local backup and disaster recovery, and online data backup (5 GB available), along with full-featured Internet security. A one-year subscription costs $69.99.

Acronis Backup and Security 2011 Premium, extends the online data backup capabilities to 250 GB on top of the other powerful security and backup benefits. A one-year subscription for the premium option costs $89.99.

These software products offer one-year protection for up to three home PCs, and can be renewed with an annual subscription service.

Industry Vet Frank Artale Joins VC Firm Ignition Ventures As Managing Director

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Ignition Venture Management recently announced that Frank Artale has joined the firm as a general partner. Artale brings more than 26 years of experience to Ignition with a deep expertise in cloud and virtualization software.

At Ignition, Artale will focus on core infrastructure, networking and security investments for Ignition Venture Partners IV, a $400 million fund.

The obvious link: Artale has been an entrepreneur and exec in several Ignition portfolio companies including CEO of Consera (sold to HP) as well as VP of business development and strategic marketing at XenSource (acquired by Citrix Systems).

Artale has also worked alongside Ignition as Chairman of the Board and director of Rendition Networks (sold to Opsware) and as an advisor to Zenprise. He’s currently Chairman of the Board and a director at Open Kernel Labs, a mobile virtualization supplier and a director at DotNetNuke, an open source content management platform.

Salesforce.com Appoints Jeff Lautenbach As SVP Enterprise Commercial Sales, Americas

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Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com has appointed Jeff Lautenbach as senior vice president of enterprise commercial sales, Americas. Lautenbach reports to Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, executive vice president of sales, Salesforce.com.

Lautenbach joins Salesforce.com following a 20-year career at IBM. Most recently, he was responsible for its software business in the Western part of the U.S. where he led an organization of more than 1,000 professionals with software sales, technical, and architecture responsibilities focused on selling to the largest enterprises in the U.S. market.

Lautenbach earned a B.A. in Marketing from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio and a MBA from the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois.