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Former Cisco Exec Simon Aspinall Joins Virtustream As CMO

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Virtustream has announced that Simon Aspinall has joined its executive team as chief marketing officer. Aspinall spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems and, at Virtustream, will drive strategic marketing initiatives as the company expands its xStream cloud solution product suite, including the xStream Software Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SIaaS) offering and more.

Aspinall will lead Virtustream’s Silicon Valley Office in San Francisco.

Most recently, Aspinall led Cisco’s global marketing teams for Cloud, Service Provider Data Center and Mobile solutions. During his decade at Cisco, Aspinall has also led both business development and sales teams in Europe, the United States and Asia.

Aspinall’s appointment as chief marketing officer follows a year of strong growth for Virtustream; the company opened four new offices in 2011, and recently acquired cloud software company Enomaly, to enhance its xStream cloud solutions and ecosystem.

Puppet Labs Scores $8.5M In New Funding From Cisco, Google Ventures And VMware

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Puppet Labs, a provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced the closing of $8.5 million in Series C financing. New investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners.

With the $8.5 million investment, Puppet Labs has now raised a total of $15.75 million.

The company now boasts more than 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University.

In January, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open source roots and announced Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet, its IT automation solution for system administrators.

In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its annual user conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 has opened new markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure dramatically easier for system administrators.

New And Refreshed VMware View Apps For iPad, Android And Cius Tablets

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The new VMware View Client for iPad, making it easier and faster than ever to connect to one’s View desktop, is out and offers some useful new features – including a new presentation mode supporting external displays and Apple AirPlay.

With support for VMware View 5, you can get better performance with reduced bandwidth options as well as more resilient connections to your desktop than previous versions. Get it here.

With added support for background multitasking, you can jump from your Windows desktop to another iPad app and then right back into the Windows desktop to where you left off. VMware View Client for iPad 1.2 also works well with iOS 5 and takes advantage of Apple AirPlay and an available AppleTV to use your big screen TV as a display for your View desktop.

You can now also use an external monitor or AirPlay in iOS 5; the iPad display will turn into a trackpad / keyboard while the external screen shows your View desktop.

The latest VMware View client is now available in English, French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean. When working multi-byte Asian languages, the new local input mode enables you to type in full lines of complete multi-byte words and then send them to your View desktop.

VMware also released production Android clients for Android tablets and the Cisco Cius.

The VMware View Client for Android Tablets is the first Android client to support the PCoIP display protocol for best performance with VMware View 4.6 and View 5 users.

The new VMware View Client for Android Tablets is available in Android Market and the VMware View Client for Cius will soon be available in Cisco’s AppHQ.

Cisco, Citrix Join Forces To Deliver Rich Media-Enabled Virtual Desktops

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Cisco and Citrix Systems have announced that they have entered into a strategic alliance to develop and deliver solutions that help customers simplify and accelerate large-scale desktop virtualization deployments.

Through this alliance, Cisco and Citrix will drive innovations that simplify the deployment of high-definition virtual desktops and applications and improve end-user experiences over a Citrix HDX-enabled Cisco network.

The companies will also continue to enhance and build upon their data center solutions and cloud technologies to help accelerate deployment of cloud services.

In addition, the two companies will invest in joint go-to-market activities that will focus on driving primary product and services demand in high growth market areas such as desktop virtualization and cloud markets.

Cisco Solution Brings Unified Voice, Video To Virtual Environments

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Cisco today unveiled the next phase of its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) with a series of offerings.

Utilizing its expertise in Unified Communications, Cisco announced endpoints that enable high-quality voice and video in virtual desktop environments – a development that it says could help redefine collaboration in the virtual workspace.

The announcement comes at a time when desktop virtualization is on the rise in the enterprise. The worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market is expected to reach 70 million units, or 15 percent of enterprise desktops and laptops by 2014.

Cisco is addressing this head-on with VXI, an open, validated virtual workspace solution that integrates products and technologies across Cisco’s network-based architectures – from Collaboration to Borderless Networks to the Data Center as well as from partners — to help deliver a flexible, highly secure infrastructure.

More information is available here.

Former Cisco CTO Alan Conley Joins Zenoss

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Zenoss has announced the appointment of Alan Conley as chief technology officer.

Conley joins Zenoss from Cisco, where for many years he led their IT operations architecture and was most recently CTO of the Network Management Technology Group where he was responsible for Cisco’s cloud and virtualization management offerings.

Conley has extensive experience in the cloud management industry. He was a key driver of Cisco’s strategy and architecture for cloud management, next generation network API, OpenStack, DMTF OVF 2.0, and Open Network Foundation (ONF).

Conley also brings to Zenoss more than 14 years’ experience in IT at Cisco as a distinguished engineer responsible for IT operations and management technology.