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

GI Partners, Management Buy Out SoftLayer Technologies

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SoftLayer Technologies, the  on-demand data center services provider, earlier this month announced a transaction in which its management team and GI Partners, a private trans-Atlantic investment firm, have acquired all of the equity in SoftLayer.

Since its founding, SoftLayer has revolutionized hosting through its unswerving commitment to innovation and automation. At a pivotal time in the industry, as increased connectivity, virtualization advances, and cloud service innovations dramatically reshape the landscape, SoftLayer is poised to continue playing a significant role in the industry’s transformation.

DH Capital served as exclusive financial advisor to SoftLayer in connection with the transaction.

Cloud Computing Markets Projected To Reach $17 Billion by 2016

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MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of Wintergreen Research’s new report “Cloud Based Office Productivity Software Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2010 to 2016” to their collection of Internet Applications market reports.

Virtualization of software and servers creates ways to generate more effective automated control of personal and team business data. Cloud systems manage personal productivity: word processors, spread sheets, presentation logic, and collaboration tools available online.

Software is needed for management and sales implementations of different productivity tasks in different industries. Group cooperation is supported with the systems.

According to the report, IBM Lotus is positioned to support office productivity beyond the desktop and outside data centers. Businesses are generating 15 petabytes of new information each day. There is a massive increase of connected devices used to work with that data.

Systems are optimized for remarkably diverse workloads managed by businesses, organizations, and governments. IBM offers flexible sourcing options including cloud computing.

Google Apps are considered the premier offering for cloud based office productivity systems. There is a fundamental difference between to personal computer client offerings and the cloud offerings. The cloud offerings are tuned to leverage the flexibility and collaboration achievable from groups working online together. Cloud based systems operate from memory and are designed to be instantly available. Personal client device office productivity software systems provide a more elaborate feature function package funded and supported by a large installed base, reports Wintergreen.

Cloud computing provides support for collaboration. Collaboration is supported by Google Apps and Google Docs. Users can edit documents at the same time, creating a compelling team based system, permitting managers to get all members of the team involved in thinking about and designing project.

Cloud computing strategy is positioned to help organizations make a transition from siloed personal data to a shared virtualized data center in an evolutionary manner. Not every enterprise is ready for a move to cloud computing. IT organizations want to evolve from datacenter architectures to cloud computing. Premise investments are being leveraged.

According to the report, vendors are thinking beyond the desktop and outside data centers to supporting the evolution of business across national boundaries, providing a global reach to marketing departments. Cloud office productivity tools support that strategy.

Office productivity software enables use of computers intuitively. Continuous systems upgrades improve the functions available to users. Businesses are generating 15 petabytes of new information each day. There is a massive increase of connected devices used to work with that data.

As systems are optimized for remarkably diverse workloads managed by businesses, organizations, and governments, office productivity systems play a part in generating useful information sharing. Flexible sourcing options including cloud computing are being used to generate team documents.

The major management objectives for this critical area of office productivity applications implementation include words, numbers, image, and video content management. Cloud based systems are simple to use and collect different types of information in a cohesive manner.

The fundamental aspect of cloud office productivity applications implementation relates to flexibility. The ability to be responsive to changing market conditions is central to the modern IT team collaboration task. The desire for systems that support flexibility is anticipated to spur rapid growth of cloud computing office productivity systems.

Cloud productivity office computing markets at $3.3 billion in 2009 are anticipated to reach $17 billion by 2016.

Former VMware, Sun Microsystems Exec Dane C. Smith Joins ClearEdge Power

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Former VMware and Sun Microsystems executive Dane C. Smith joins Hillsboro-based ClearEdge Power as senior vice president of sales, marketing and business development.

The global leader in microCHP fuel cell design and manufacturing adds Smith as an integral part of the senior management team to leverage his expertise in market development and rapid expansion.

During Smith’s five-year tenure at VMware, as vice president and general manager for the Americas and later as global vice president of systems integration and outsourcing, he helped build one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, according to IDC and Gartner.

In three years, Smith grew business in the Americas from less than $200 million to approximately $1 billion, and he led the teams responsible for closing many of the largest software and services contracts in the company’s history. He was also a key member of the VMware executive team that, in August 2007, produced one of the largest technology IPOs in the history of the New York Stock Exchange – second only to Google.

“I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with some of the nation’s largest energy providers, as well as the US Department of Energy and the US Environmental Protection Agency, while at VMware and Sun,” said Smith. “I look forward to continuing those relationships to further alternative energy solutions in the U.S. and abroad as a leader for the ClearEdge Power team.”

Quest Buys Private Cloud Automation Software Maker Surgient

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Quest Software has announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Surgient, a provider of private cloud automation software.

The Austin, Texas-based company’s Surgient Platform enables organizations to deploy and manage secure cloud infrastructures to gain business agility and reduce costs.

With the Surgient Automation Platform, organizations can create robust and secure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds that may be shared across the organization. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during the third quarter of 2010.

Private cloud computing is emerging as a fundamental requirement for businesses.

According to a recent IDC survey, 73 percent of all organizations are evaluating, planning or have already implemented private cloud strategies. As a leading provider of cloud automation solutions, Surgient provides a patented and proven technology that supports heterogeneous hypervisor environments and diverse customer environments including mid-market, enterprise and managed service providers.

Surgient has more than 60 customers with 160 successful deployments.

Virtual Bridges Releases New VERDE Version

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Virtual Bridges, provider of desktop virtualization solutions and originator of VDI, disconnected and branch-office use, has announced the immediate availability of VERDE 4.2.

In less than three months since the release of VERDE 4, the new-version capabilities underscore the company’s commitment to meet market needs through rapid innovation, including extending the reach of VERDE to iPad and iPhone users to serve growing mobile workforce markets.

New VERDE 4.2 functionality includes:

iVERDE

Built on the open-source iDesktop client, iVERDE allows iPad and iPhone users to access VERDE Windows 7, Windows XP and Linux desktops. iVERDE is fully integrated with the VERDE distributed connection broker and user console, providing a user experience identical to any other VERDE client. iVERDE has been contributed to the open-source community under the GPL license, and is available through Apple’s AppsStore.

Active Directory integration for dynamic desktop sessions

Combines the benefits of VERDE’s unique dynamic gold master provisioning while fully leveraging the IT department’s investment in Active Directory user, group and machine policies and controls. Unlike legacy solutions that employ technologies like linked clones, now once a desktop becomes part of an Active Directory, it becomes a dynamic, yet unique and personalized desktop instance.

Enhanced security with support for two-factor authentication

Offers customers the ability to use industry-standard, two-factor authentication technologies, including RSA SecureID, Safeword and other RADIUS-based solutions to secure virtual desktop sessions.

Customizable VERDE LEAF (Live Environment Access Format):

Customers can personalize the VERDE Off-line VDI Type 1 client side hypervisor, LEAF, with specific branding and custom login scripts. This allows customers to personalize the login experience for end users using the VERDE client-side hypervisor. Virtual Bridges is the only vendor to provide an integrated VDI and Off-line VDI (client side hypervisor) experience that works from the same gold image. VERDE LEAF also features bi-directional data synchronization that users enjoy a consistent environment whether accessing from VDI or Off-Line VDI.

Skytap Introduces Groups, Better Organizational Management Capabilities

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Skytap, provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, recently announced Skytap Groups, a new capability that enables companies to model their organizational structures quickly and easily within Skytap.

With this new capability, managers are empowered to create multiple user groups and assign role-based permissions to each user or user group. As a result, Skytap enables IT managers to gain the highest level of visibility and control over cloud operations.

Most cloud services are designed to support individual users and typically lack functionality to support groups, departments or lines of business with hundreds of users. Skytap Groups breaks the status quo and enables businesses to model their organizational structure in the cloud.

Businesses can now use one cloud platform for multiple user groups such as development, test, training, sales engineering and IT operations — and assign role based permissions to govern cloud usage. By bringing this sophisticated user management capability to the market, Skytap removes a significant barrier to cloud adoption.

Skytap Groups provides a flexible model to organize users based on their specific role in the organization, geographic location, or business unit.

For example, an enterprise IT organization can create multiple groups of users to support a project for a new application launch. Groups of developers, testers, and IT architects can each have their own environment and execute their specific role — developers can build the application; testers can use their cloud environment for functional validation; and IT architects can use their environment to ensure compatibility with the production platform.

Using Skytap, each group can be invited to a project where role-specific templates and assets are organized. Each group’s usage and access policies can be managed easily and quickly with roles at the account level and at the project level, providing a greater degree of visibility and control.

Skytap has also enhanced its user-based permission model to include more granular access limits with the addition of Account Roles and Project Roles. The Account Roles feature allows administrators to define specific access limits. This can range from user managers who can delegate management privileges down to a restricted user that may only have the ability to start or stop virtual machines.

The Project Roles feature allows even more granularity by enabling owners of individual projects to further limit the access at a project level with roles specific to the project.

For example, a development manager can create specific user groups for local developers, a remote testing team and a localization contractor.

The development manager is empowered to create dev/test environments, and then:

  • Delegate Skytap user management privileges to a senior developer
  • Add the testing team to participate in the project with collaboration privileges
  • Set the localization team with restricted user permission to limit their visibility