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

CloudBees Appoints XenSource/Citrix Vet To VP of Business Development

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CloudBees, provider of a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, has named John Vigeant, a 10-year server and open source software vet from Citrix Systems and XenSource, to Vice President of Business Development.

Vigeant was one of five key founding team members of the XenClient project. In this role, he was responsible for business plan development functions that ranged from funding all the way to executing commercial license/OEM agreements with all the major notebook manufacturers.

Vigeant came to Citrix through its 2007 acquisition of XenSource, where he oversaw the company’s most strategic business development and OEM relationships with companies like HP, Dell and Citrix. Prior to XenSource, Vigeant was at Ximian, the Linux desktop and software management startup acquired by Novell.

In his new role, he is responsible for expanding the CloudBees ecosystem and establishing partnerships with IT companies looking to extend into the PaaS market. Vigeant’s appointment further grows the company’s U.S. headquarters in Boston, where CloudBees will be building out its sales and marketing team.

Also recently joined CloudBees:Ben Walding, CTO and long-serving operations manager of Codehaus; Paul Sandoz, formerly of Sun Microsystems, a member of the GlassFish team and co-specification lead of JAX-RS and Jersey; and Stephen Connolly, one of the original committers on Jenkins/Hudson, an avid contributor on Codehaus and an Apache Maven PMC member.

The CloudBees Platform currently serves more than 4,500 customers, the company says.

Hadapt Raised Funding For “Innovations For Big Data and Big Analytics in the Cloud”

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Hadapt has announced initial financing and “patent-pending innovations” for analytics across structured and unstructured data in private and public cloud environments.

Founded by Justin Borgman, Daniel Abadi PhD and Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, the company has raised initial funding to commercialize inventions around analytical database research in virtualized environments.

Co-founders Abadi and Bajda-Pawlikowski led the original research team at Yale University where a prototype was developed and tested. They take on the roles of Chief Scientist and Chief Software Architect, respectively, while Borgman assumes the role of CEO.

The financing enables the company to complete software development for general release later this year.

The company’s product approach is a full integration of the open source parallel data processing framework, Hadoop. Hadapt is adapting and expanding the Hadoop architecture to bring a more complete SQL interface, a patent-pending Adaptive Query Execution capability, and a hybrid storage engine to handle structured as well as unstructured data in a single platform.

Adaptive Query Execution dynamically load balances queries in virtualized environments and allows analytical workloads to be automatically split between relational database engines and Hadoop to get the best possible performance out of the system.

Brocade Joins Open Networking Foundation To Boost OpenFlow Adoption

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Brocade has announced that it has become an initial member of the non-profit Open Networking Foundation to help define standards to enable scalability and manageability in hyper-scale cloud infrastructures.

ONF is dedicated to promoting a new approach to networking called Software-Defined Networking (SDN).

SDN involves several components, one of the most important being standard-based OpenFlow, an emerging standard delivering service providers granular control of their network infrastructures.

Brocade will leverage its work in developing OpenFlow across its service provider portfolio to enable customers to build high-value applications across their networks with greater efficiency and unparalleled simplicity.

Brocade plans to make additional OpenFlow strategy and product announcements later this year.

Queplix Debuts New BladeShare Exchange Program

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Data virtualization company Queplix yesterday announced its new BladeShare Exchange Program, which enables partners or customers to build custom Application Software Blades for new third party and custom applications, and make them available to the worldwide Queplix customer community.

Queplix’s intelligent Application Software Blades perform automatic connections to target applications, reducing the time required to integrate applications by up to 75 percent or more.

The BladeShare Exchange Program aims to enable participants to develop new apps that can easily connect and virtualize into a Queplix configuration by enabling them with products like VirtualETL, CloudETL and Virtual Data Manager.

As a result, companies have a greater opportunity to leverage Queplix advanced data virtualization and NoSQL integration capabilities and dramatically speed up and reduce the cost of their integration projects.

Queplix Application Software Blades identify and extract key data and associated security information from many different target applications such as Salesforce, Google and others. The blades move physical data from the abstraction layer of the source application, to the Queplix persistent metadata catalog where the data is automatically harmonized with other systems.

Target: We Run Applications For Our 1,755 Stores On Microsoft Virtualization Technologies

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Microsoft and Target have announced that the latter is running business-critical workloads for all its retail stores on 15,000 virtual machines using Microsoft virtualization and management technologies.

The second-largest discount retailer in the US, Target has virtualized inventory, point-of-sale, supply-chain management, asset protection, in-store digital media and more on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.

Earlier this year, Target scaled its deployment of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to every US store in its chain.

Applications, ranging from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1, SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 to third-party, line-of-business software, can now be deployed and managed more quickly, with 8,650 fewer physical servers to maintain, power and refresh.

The retail giant has also implemented the Microsoft System Center management platform to manage and patch more than 300,000 endpoints, ranging from servers and PCs to mobile inventory devices and point-of-sale registers.

Former Salesforce.com Executive Peter Stern Joins OpSource

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Enterprise cloud and managed hosting company OpSource has expanded its management team, adding technology sales veteran Peter Stern as senior vice president, sales.

Previously vice president of enterprise corporate sales for Salesforce.com, Stern will focus on domestic and international sales initiatives, equipping his team to scale and grow the company.

Stern brings 14 years of technology sales and leadership experience to his position at OpSource. Stern assumes his role of senior VP, sales as incumbent Jon Beck shifts his focus solely to the indirect channel, assuming the role of senior VP, worldwide channels and alliances.

In his previous position at Salesforce, Stern was responsible for the west coast development and growth of the company’s new direct sales division.

Previously, Stern was regional manager of ISVs North America at Oracle where he was responsible for the management of a North American field sales organization evangelizing Oracle’s embedded infrastructure technology within the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) community.

OpSource provides the integration, engineering, marketing and sales support required to launch and scale cloud-based solutions. In 2009, the company introduced OpSource Cloud Hosting, a public cloud IaaS service offering pay-as-you-go flexibility, 100 percent availability as well as increased security, control and support for integration.