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Veeam Reports Strong Q2 2010 Results

July 28, 2010 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software experienced exceptional growth in every area of its business during the second quarter of 2010 and exceeded quota metrics worldwide.

Total bookings revenue grew 166 percent in Q2 of 2010 over the same period in 2009, and new license bookings revenue increased 145 percent over that same period.

In addition, Veeam added roughly 2,330 new customers during Q2.

Highlights:

Customers: More than 750 new customers, on average, were added per month during Q2, bringing the quarterly total to approximately 2,330 new customers and the grand total to more than 12,000 customers worldwide.
Awards: Veeam Software was selected as a finalist for the Microsoft Partner of the Year Award in the Core Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management category. Specifically, Veeam was recognized for the Veeam nworks Management Pack (MP) for VMware, which enables unified monitoring and management of a heterogeneous virtual infrastructure, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Geographic expansion: During the quarter, Veeam opened new offices in Italy, Canada and the Nordic region. Veeam also added specialist sales personnel focused on working with partners in Latin America.
New products:
- Veeam debuted the Veeam nworks PRO Pack for VMware at the Microsoft Management Summit 2010 in April. The new PRO Pack provides enterprises using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager with automated problem resolution for their VMware environments. With out-of-the-box intelligence from Veeam integrated directly into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager, enterprises can improve productivity, maintain service levels and minimize training and support costs—all while leveraging and protecting the investment they have made in Microsoft System Center.
- Veeam Reporter 4.0, formerly known as Veeam Reporter Enterprise, was released in May. With one solution, users can discover and document the virtual environment, manage change and perform capacity planning.
- In June, version 5.5 of the Veeam nworks Management Pack (MP) for VMware was released. In addition to several enhancements that are particularly beneficial to enterprises with mission-critical VMware deployments, version 5.5 features the new PRO Pack. The nworks MP and PRO Pack extend VMware management in Microsoft System Center.
- Also In June, Veeam announced and demonstrated Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in (SPI) for VMware 5.5 at HP Software Universe. It provides distributed monitoring and management of the VMware infrastructure fully integrated into HP Operations Manager. The new version also provides enhanced scalability and performance; improved high availability and load balancing; and includes a new deployment toolkit that includes an online calculator for pre-deployment planning, as well as a built-in wizard for ongoing analysis.

Actifio Raises $8 Million Series A Round To Address Data Management Virtualization

July 21, 2010 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Actifio, the emerging leader in Data Management Virtualization (DMV), today announced $8 million in Series A financing (via TechCrunchIT).

The funds will be used to market Actifio’s patent-pending technology which transforms individual data management application silos into a unified, virtualized, highly efficient solution for data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity.

This financing was led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners.

With the funds, Actifio will expand its sales channel, and invest in marketing to drive market share for its next-generation data management solutions.

Server virtualization technologies from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, along with solutions from Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and others have enabled the transformation of the computing infrastructure into an efficient, dynamic computing resource. However, the storage infrastructure continues to be a major bottleneck in this transformation, with data lifecycle management shackled by point tools that are deployed in silos – creating complexity, inflexibility and at a significant expense.

Purpose-built to radically simplify and deliver unprecedented agility, Actifio’s DMV technology reduces the real cost of managing the application data lifecycle and virtualizes vendor-independent physical or cloud-based storage devices into a private, public or hybrid storage cloud infrastructure.

The newly funded organization has an all-star leadership team with deep-domain expertise in building successful companies and emerging technologies that deliver unprecedented value to customers and partners on a global scale. The Actifio executive team includes:

Ash Ashutosh, president and CEO (formerly vice president & chief technologist of HP’s StorageWorks division and founder, CEO and CTO of AppIQ and Serano Systems)
David Chang, vice president of products (formerly founder and vice president of product management at AppIQ)
Steven Blumenau, vice president of marketing (formerly vice president, digital archive sales at Iron Mountain; senior director of advanced development at EMC, and founder and CEO of Avalere)
Rick Nagengast, vice president of sales (formerly vice president channel and partner development of EMC and GM of Storage Products Division of DEC and Compaq)
James Pownell, customer operations manager (formerly founder and president of Exagrid Systems; founder and vice president of engineering Highground Software and development manager at EMC)

VMware Q2 Revenue Up 48% To $674 Million

July 21, 2010 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced financial results for the second quarter 2010:

Revenues for the second quarter were $674 million, an increase of 48% from the second quarter of 2009.
GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $101 million, an increase of 166% from the second quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $187 million, an increase of 94% from the second quarter of 2009.
GAAP net income for the second quarter was $75 million, or $0.18 per diluted share, compared to $33 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2009.
Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter was $142 million, or $0.34 per diluted share, compared to $80 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2009.
Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments as of June 30, 2010 were $2.8 billion, an increase of 21% compared to a year ago. Total deferred revenues were $1.5 billion, an increase of 58% from the same period a year ago.
For the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2010, operating cash flows were $1.1 billion, an increase of 3% from the same period a year ago. Trailing twelve month free cash flows were $1.0 billion, an increase of 33% from the same period a year ago.

US revenues for the second quarter increased 43% to $334 million from the second quarter of 2009. International revenues for the second quarter grew 53% to $340 million from the second quarter of 2009.

License revenues were $324 million, an increase of 42% from the second quarter of 2009. Services revenues, which include software maintenance and professional services, were $350 million, an increase of 54% from the second quarter of 2009.

“Our strong second quarter results were driven by demand across all products and regions,” said Mark Peek, chief financial officer. “For the third quarter, we expect license revenues to be flat sequentially and total revenues to increase to a range of $680 and $705 million. For our 2010 annual revenues, we are raising our guidance to be in the range of $2.725 and $2.8 billion, an increase of 35% to 38% from 2009.”

“We are gratified that customers continue to recognize the value that VMware provides in modernizing infrastructures and providing a pragmatic path to cloud computing,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer. “As customers continue on this path, they are looking for a strategic partner to help move them forward, and VMware will continue to invest to deliver solutions that enable IT-as-a-service.”

Release: Zenoss Core 3.0

July 20, 2010 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Zenoss, the corporate sponsor of Zenoss Core, today announced the general availability of Zenoss Core 3.0 under the GNU General Public License (V2).

Fueled by the 85,000-member Zenoss community, the newest release features an updated user interface to improve usability giving users a complete view of all IT infrastructure — physical, virtual and cloud computing.

Beyond its new functional capabilities, Zenoss Core has been integrated with multiple open source IT automation projects, providing a framework for improved functionality and enabling better prevention of service failures.

Since the last Zenoss Core release in November 2009, the community has added more than 100 new and updated management extensions to the project (called ZenPacks).

What’s New in Zenoss Core 3.0

Simplified Interface. Based on feedback from thousands of users, Zenoss Core 3.0 includes an easy to navigate interface that allows for a better experience using and configuring Zenoss. Users now can more easily filter network monitoring data and organize their dashboards through a more efficient layout to help surface critical information for managing their physical and virtual infrastructure.
Virtualization Monitoring Framework. The Zenoss Community has developed extensions to expand monitoring for numerous virtualization technologies: VMware ESX, VMware ESXi,Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen, and libvirt.
Deep monitoring for Amazon Web Services (EC2). Zenoss Core can be extended to collect information for these objects monitored through Amazon’s CloudWatch APIs. As a result of the Zenoss in the Clouds community initiative, Zenoss Core can also be extended to monitor Google App Engine, Redis NoSQL databases, Ganglia-managed distributed computing systems and events from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), which is frequently used in enterprise business and cloud environments.
Integration with Configuration Management and Automation Tools. The Zenoss Community has developed integration with popular open source management tools Puppet andCfengine to enable interoperability between tools and provide automated disaster recovery and prevention.
Highlights of new community ZenPacks compatible with Zenoss Core 3.0 include:
- Event Histograms aggregate network errors and provide graphs to visually display where faults and failures are in the network, when alerts are peaking, and what type of errors are being generated.
- HP EVA Monitor provides comprehensive monitoring and a graphical representation of storage, updating graphics based on events.
- MySQL SSH Monitor provides identical monitoring to the Zenoss Core MySQL Monitorwithout requiring remote access.
- Opengear wrote ZenPacks, extending Zenoss open source management tools to monitor performance of its advanced console server solutions and the target equipment attached.
- Additional highlights: Oracle Database, Memcached, Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ), Collector Tool, and Nginx.

The Zenoss 3.0 release can be downloaded from the Zenoss Community website at:http://community.zenoss.org/community/download.

OpenStack – Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform

July 20, 2010 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Rackspace has announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.

Rackspace, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.

Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The next component planned for release is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology.

It is expected to be available later this year. Using these components, organizations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”

Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.

More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.

CA Technologies Touts CA Virtual Portfolio

July 20, 2010 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

CA Technologies has announced the general availability of five products in its CA Virtual portfolio, which offer comprehensive management capabilities designed to help increase business agility by providing a better way to provision, control, assure, secure and optimize virtual environments.

The five products announced today are CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, CA Virtual Configuration, CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, and CA Virtual Privilege Manager. The company also introduced the CA Virtual Foundation Suite, which combines select virtualization management products at a compelling price point.

Today’s offerings from CA Technologies are designed to help eliminate the VM stall faced by many organizations today.

After virtualizing the “low-hanging fruit,” which typically means the conversion of no more than 20 to 30 percent of physical servers to virtual machines, a variety of factors can conspire to stall progress, including: complex application and infrastructure performance issues, security and compliance concerns, concerns regarding uncontrolled VM sprawl, capacity management complexity, staffing and skill levels.

Many organizations in virtualization stall never manage to virtualize their tier 2, tier 1, and mission-critical systems. Stuck at the first stage on the virtualization maturity curve, these organizations are unable to leverage the entry-level benefits of server consolidation into infrastructure optimization, automation and orchestration, and the promise of a dynamic data center and private cloud.

This in turn means that they fail to realize the full scope of benefits from virtualization: not just cost reduction, but also business and IT agility, management efficiency, market responsiveness, service improvements, and staffing benefits.

CA Technologies today broadened its CA Virtual portfolio by adding a new security solution – CA Virtual Privilege Manager.

The use of virtual environments in data centers has grown rapidly and organizations have begun to use virtualization to help streamline their operations and reduce their operating costs. However, regardless of whether it is a physical or virtual environment, the need for security remains.

Leveraging CA Technologies position as a leader in both virtual systems management and security management, CA Virtual Privilege Manager is designed to control privileged access to virtual environments by securing console access to the hypervisor and managing privileged access to all of the virtual images running on the virtualization server as well as the service console.

Key capabilities of the solution include privileged user password management for the virtual machines and service console, fine-grained administrative access controls to the hypervisor service console, service console hardening, and original user activity monitoring in virtual environments.

CA Virtual Foundation Suite is a combined offering of CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, and CA Virtual Configuration.

The suite, which offers a discount on the individual products, is aimed at the significant proportion of organizations that have embarked on virtualization projects without an enterprise-class management foundation, and as a result, are facing a potential firestorm of poor performance, resourcing gaps, and damaged business confidence. CA Virtual Foundation Suite changes the game by offering the virtualization management foundation that can ease adoption and broaden expansion, as well as help drive both immediate and long-term business results.