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UPDATE: Microsoft COO: ‘We Are Going To Lead With the Cloud’

cloudtweaks — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:36:03 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)–Cloud computing tops a four-point plan Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has developed for maintaining its position in the business-software market, Kevin Turner, the company’s chief operating officer, said Thursday.

“We are going to lead with the cloud,” Turner said at the Redmond, Wash. software giant’s analyst day. “It helps position Microsoft to sell more on-premise products.”

Microsoft plans to drive sales of its two key franchises, the Windows 7 operating system and the Office 2010 suite of business software, and hopes to improve customer satisfaction and expand market share.

Turner said that Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, part of Hyatt Hotels Corp. (H), are new customer wins for Microsoft’s cloud products.

“Both of those were very competitive bids against Google (GOOG) and IBM (IBM),” Turner said, calling out a slew of cloud competitors including Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM), VMware Inc. (VMW) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN). “Seventy percent of the wins in the cloud that we had in Q4 were new Microsoft customers.”

“Two years ago we were nowhere [in competition with VMware,] Turner added. “What’s Microsoft been able to do in just two years in this space? A 15.2% share gain per [International Data Corp.].”

Officials at VMware weren’t immediately available for comment.

Microsoft’s cloud customers include 13 of the top 20 global telecom firms, the company said, along with 15 of the top 20 global banks and 16 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies.

“The sweet spot we have for this company is right in the heart of providing IT as a service for customers,” Turner said. “Some of the biggest companies in the world are choosing Microsoft.”

A lot is expected from Thursday’s meeting as Microsoft struggles to redefine itself.

In recent months, Microsoft killed a high-profile mobile phone project less than two months after its launch, reorganized its entertainment division and saw its market capitalization slip below that of Apple Inc. (AAPL).

For investors, those events seem to have overshadowed that Microsoft is making lots of money and that Windows 7 has sold well. Turner said the latest iteration of the operating system was selling nearly eight copies every second. The company’s fiscal fourth-quarter profit climbed 48% to $4.5 billion.

But while Windows 7 is a big hit, all of Microsoft’s operating systems, as a group, have lost market share in recent years. According to an April estimate from market-watcher Gartner Inc., non-Windows operating systems, such as Linux and Apple’s Macintosh OS, have grown from 3.3% of the market in 2003 to 5.9% of the market currently.

Microsoft shares have dropped 15% so far this year. In early afternoon trading, Microsoft was up 0.3% at $26.21.

-By Jeanette Borzo, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-765-8230; jeanette.borzo@dowjones.com

Top 10 Cloud Computing Venture Capital Firms To Help Build Your Business

cloudtweaks — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:10:49 +0000

For more than 30 years, NEA has been helping to build great companies. Our committed capital has grown to $11 billion and we’ve funded more than 650 companies in the Information Technology, Energy Technology and Healthcare sectors.

For more than 49 years, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build and grow successful businesses. The firm manages more than $3.7 billion in capital, has funded over 450 companies since inception and has demonstrated an exemplary track record producing premier investment returns during differing capital market environments

U.S. Venture Partners

(USVP) has helped build great companies for three decades. Since its inception in 1981, USVP has invested over $2.7 billion in about 450 companies. Throughout, USVP’s partners have worked diligently and consistently with early-stage companies, many of which have become industry leaders.

Ignition Partners

Ignition is a venture capital firm dedicated to helping the best entrepreneurs seize opportunity.
From turning their early idea into a business, to hiring the right team, providing the right industry and functional insight and connections, to growing the business strategically, globally, financially, to realizing the best ultimate outcome, Ignition is ready to go the distance.
Ignition invests in emerging and future leaders in communications, internet, software, and services across business and consumer targets.

Sequoia

Sequoia Capital in the U.S. caters to the founders and management who have selected us as their business partners. We have learned that the only way to help develop a fabulous company is one step at a time. This only happens if the company makes wonderful products or delivers a service that thrills large numbers of customers. If that occurs then founders, management, and employees of these companies prosper. It is only then that the investor deserves to be rewarded. It has to happen in that order. There are no shortcuts.

First Round Capital

First Round Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm. As seed-stage investors, we often provide a company’s first outside capital – and typically invest alongside angel investors. Our typical initial investment in a company is around $500,000 – but we’ve gone both higher and lower.

We’re not afraid of investing in pre-revenue companies, and we understand the challenges of launching a new product. That’s why we like to take an active role in the companies we invest in.

Mission Ventures

Mission Ventures helps build successful enterprises in Southern California and creates superior returns on investment for its investors. This is accomplished by investing in the most promising early-stage companies in high growth, emerging markets, and providing significant assistance to those companies as they develop.

DAG Ventures

DAG Ventures

Hummer Windblad Venture Partners

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was founded in 1989 as the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies. Through our history, we’ve had the opportunity to invest in the pioneers and leaders of several generations of software applications, architectures, delivery methods and business models. We’ve helped entrepreneurs build companies in desktop software, embedded systems, client-server, distributed network computing, internet, software as a service and cloud computing.

Shasta Ventures

Was formed expressly to help entrepreneurs build great companies, our primary objective is to provide outstanding service to the companies in our portfolio. It means we have the time to work with early-stage companies because we serve on a limited number of boards. And it means we care about the companies we invest in—not only the businesses, but the people as well.

CA Technologies buys its way into cloud fray

cloudtweaks — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:33:56 +0000

By Kevin Kwang, ZDNet Asia

Its 2010 acquisition blitz to date includes Oblicore, Nimsoft and 3Tera and shows no signs of slowing as CA Technologies (CA) continues its buying spree to “plug gaps” and bulk up on technical capabilities, particularly in the cloud environment.

According to Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing at CA, the company has “some money left to spend” on companies that will complement the technologies and capabilities it already has.

“Previously, we have been acquiring companies for revenue stream but with the acquisitions of Nimsoft, 3Tera and others, we are now looking to buy technologies that can solve the problems we see our customers struggling with in the cloud environment [such as vendor lock-in and platform interoperability],” Mann said in an interview with ZDNet Asia.

He noted that with these acquisitions in place, the company’s products are now able to operate atop various data center architectures such as x86, Linux and Unix.

Cloud thrust fueled by customer interest
Elaborating on the company’s move to focus heavily on the cloud, Mann said businesses in the region are showing strong demand for the delivery model.

He pointed to IDC’s cloud computing survey conducted in April this year, which showed that 25 percent of companies surveyed in six Asia-Pacific countries–Australia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, South Korea and India–said they currently use cloud computing.

This is more than double of a similar study conducted in 2009, when only 9 percent of respondents were actively using cloud technology, he said, noting that the increase is indicative of the market’s potential.

To illustrate CA’s cloud strategy, Mann cited the 3Tera acquisition as an example of how the company aims to address the issue of vendor lock-in for applications architected over on-demand infrastructure provided by cloud vendors such as Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

With 3Tera’s AppLogic technology, he explained that companies can now simply “click and drop” applications from existing datacenter systems to virtualized machines, thus, simplifying the architecting and deployment of complex software across various platforms.

The simplicity of the technology also helps alleviate the lack of skilled manpower to move organizations into cloud computing, he added.

According to Chris Morris, IDC’s Asia-Pacific services director, the recent global recession had resulted in a lack of enterprise investment in IT skills and employee training over a 12- to 18-month period. This caused the skills shortage, said Morris, who sat in on the interview.

Expanding on Asian presence
Further elaborating on CA’s cloud strategy, Andy Cooper, its vice president of regional field marketing, said the Nimsoft acquisition will help increase the company’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in the area of providing scalability which is a key feature of cloud computing.

Cooper explained that the number of big organizations in the region is comparably lower than the United States and Europe, but this landscape is set to change. And as Asia-Pacific midsize companies prepare to expand, CA–through its Nimsoft capabilities–is hoping to target this group of customers and provide the scalability they need to grow.

In a statement announcing the acquisition in March, CA said Nimsoft offers “one of the most comprehensive suites of IT monitoring and management solutions”. It will also provide organizations insights into application behaviors and infrastructure health and help ensure the reliability of critical business services and optimize hardware utilization, the company added.

In an earlier report by ZDNet Asia’s sister site, ZDNet, Deutsche Bank analyst Todd Raker said CA, due to its differentiated product lineup, is well-positioned to take advantage of these opportunities in the virtualization and cloud space.

Raker added that the shift in data centers to a hybrid model encompassing physical, virtual and cloud environments creates a huge opportunity for the software vendor, and he believes that the execution of its strategy will determine its success.

Maturing cloud ecosystem
According to IDC’s Morris, cloud deployment among enterprises will move beyond “sandboxing” and into mainstream adoption by mid-2011.

He added that tools built to help companies migrate to the cloud platform are also “maturing” in tandem and many of these will be available in the “next 12 months”.

Article credit: ZDnet

Fujitsu sales suggest the market is turning

cloudtweaks — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:20:03 +0000

News that Fujitsu UK & Ireland has signed £200m in new business with three large customers will be seen as welcome relief to Fujitsu shareholders, among others.

While it will disappoint the companies that lost to Fujitsu, they will nevertheless be encouraged that the private sector is once again spending money. After keeping their hands in their pockets for the past 30 months, customers now seem more open to suggestion.
Fujitsu UK CEO Roger Gilbert detects a new note in discussions these days. IT is a boardroom topic, especially when it comes to mergers and demergers, he says. And where the CEO has plans, IT is beginning to figure prominently in his or her calculations, he says.
Customers are coming back to the market to find a different set of conditions compared to when they last were here. Thirty months is almost two generations of silicon life, so, following Moore’s Law, they are getting about four times more processing power for the same pound.
They are also seeing a tectonic shift towards “cloud computing”, however that is defined. That is putting a greater emphasis on the capacity and reliability o of the networks to bring it all together.
While there are clearly growing capacity issues in the public networks, bandwidth, access and cost are all moving in favour of customers. Many customers think their own internal leased networks will make them immune from such considerations. They are wrong. The rise of social networks and growing willingness of consumers to use networks to interact with companies means that no company can afford to ignore the constraints imposed by congestion in the public networks.
Responsible companies should be adding their voices to the debate over Broadband Britain to ensure that their customers have fast, cheap reliable access to them, wherever they may be.

Source: ComputerWeekly

Vision Solutions Acquires Industry-Leading Double-Take Software

cloudtweaks — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:11:34 +0000

Leading High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solutions for Windows, Linux, Power Systems and Cloud Computing Now Available From a Single Provider

IRVINE, CA, Jul 26, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Today Vision Solutions, Inc. announced that it has completed the acquisition of Double-Take Software, Inc., a leading provider of recovery solutions for the rapidly growing Windows, Linux and Cloud Computing markets. The acquisition significantly expands Vision Solutions’ product offerings and distribution capabilities in the Windows and open systems markets, and strengthens its prominence throughout the information availability marketplace.

“This is an extremely important event for Vision, Double-Take and the clients we serve,” says Vision Solutions’ President and CEO Nicolaas Vlok. “Independently, each company has been a respected industry leader in its own information availability markets. Together, we are a global leader with the capability to serve companies — whatever the size, location or sector — with a competitive portfolio across major IT platforms. Among the many benefits for customers and partners is the ability to cross-pollinate ideas and technologies across our combined development and services teams.”

Backed by private equity investor Thoma Bravo, Vision’s acquisition of Double-Take Software marks its third strategic transaction in the information and high availability marketplace since November, 2006 when it merged with iTera, Inc. Vision later acquired Lakeview Technology in June, 2007.

“We’re excited to partner with Vision Solutions to create the clear industry leader for the IBM Power Systems, Windows and open systems information availability markets. Adding Double-Take’s class-leading range of solutions to Vision’s family of products will create the broadest and most innovative portfolio of information availability technology globally,” says Scott Crabill, managing partner at Thoma Bravo, the private equity company behind Vision Solutions.

Nearly doubling in size, the expanding organization now includes one of the world’s largest development, services and customer support centers for information availability software. These resources, including one of the most established global partner networks, provide unprecedented coverage for customers of all sizes and geographies.

“We’re fortunate to be bringing together some of the best minds and intellectual property in the information availability industry,” says Alan Arnold, chief technology officer and executive vice president of Vision Solutions. “This enables us to consistently bring to market important new enhancements and technologies that address customer needs.”

Vision Solutions’ partners are welcoming the opportunity to expand their businesses with a competitive portfolio of top-tier availability brands for IBM i, AIX, Windows and Linux, and industry analysts have been positive about the growing organization as well. “The coming together of Vision Solutions and Double-Take Software gives Avnet access to a suite of best-in-class information availability products for major platforms which support our VirtualPath(R) and StoragePath(TM) solutions,” said Gavin Miller, vice president of Technology Infrastructure Solutions for Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “This acquisition provides Avnet and its partners with a great opportunity to work with a single vendor and expand our existing relationship.”

“Vision Solutions and Double-Take are expected to see synergies in their combined business, because high availability and data-replication products are increasingly seen as key to disaster recovery — and to planning for it,” said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president of IDC’s Enterprise Platforms Group. “Both types of software are essential ingredients of business continuity, as they allow re-start of applications and access to business data. Importantly, the combined company will also address a broader market than before — with products for scalable servers, as well as for the large deployments of volume x86 servers in today’s virtualized infrastructure.”

“As a Vision Solutions and Double-Take customer, I see this development as a positive,” says Alexander Kazakov, Deputy Head of IT Division, Raiffeisen Bank Russia, a division of the international 1.7 billion euro Raiffeisen Zentralbank. “It is an excellent opportunity for the market to receive complete data integrity solutions and services from one trusted vendor.”

About Vision Solutions Vision Solutions, Inc. is the world’s leading provider of information availability software and services for Windows, Linux, IBM Power Systems and Cloud Computing markets. Vision’s trusted Double-Take(R), MIMIX(R) and iTERA(TM) high availability and disaster recovery brands support business continuity, satisfy compliance requirements and increase productivity. Affordable and easy-to-use, Vision products are backed by certified worldwide 24X7 customer support centers and a global partner network that includes IBM /quotes/comstock/13*!ibm/quotes/nls/ibm (IBM 128.38, 0.00, 0.00%) , HP, Microsoft, VMware and Dell. Privately held by Thoma Bravo, Vision Solutions is headquartered in Irvine, California, USA with offices worldwide. For more information, visit visionsolutions.com, search for VSIChannel on popular social networks or call 1 800.957.4511 (toll-free U.S. and Canada) or 801.799.0300.

About Thoma Bravo, LLC Thoma Bravo is a leading private equity investment firm that has been providing equity and strategic support to experienced management teams building growing companies for more than 29 years. The firm originated the concept of industry consolidation investing, which seeks to create value through the strategic use of acquisitions to accelerate business growth. Thoma Bravo applies its investment strategy across multiple industries with a particular focus on the software and services sectors. In the software industry, Thoma Bravo has completed more than 50 acquisitions across 15 platform companies with total annual earnings in excess of $700 million. For more information on Thoma Bravo, visit www.thomabravo.com

SaaS 101: 7 Simple Lessons From Inside HubSpot

cloudtweaks — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:41:07 +0000

7 Non-Obvious SaaS Startup Lessons From HubSpot

1. You are financing your customers. Most SaaS businesses are subscription-based (there’s usually no big upfront payment when you signup a customer). As a result, sales and marketing costs are front-loaded, but revenue comes in over time. This can create cash-flow issues. The higher your sales growth, the larger the gap in cash-flows. This is why SaaS companies often raise large amounts of capital.

Quick Example: Lets say it costs you about $1,000 to acquire a customer (this covers marketing programs, marketing staff, sales staff, etc.). If customers pay you $100/month for your product and stay (on average) for 30 months, you make $3,000 per customer over their lifetime. That’s a 3:1 ratio of life-time-value to acquisition cost. Not bad. But, here’s the problem. If you sign up 100 customers this month, you will have incurred $100,000 in acquisition costs ($1,000 x 100). You’re going to make $300,000 over the next 30 months on those customers by way of subscriptions. The problem is that you pay the $100,000 today whereas the $300,000 payback will come over time. So, from a cash perspective, you’re down $100,000. If you have the cash to support it, not a big deal. If you don’t, it’s a VERY BIG DEAL. Take that same example, and say you grew your new sales by 100% in 6 months (woo hoo!). Now, you’re depleting your cash at $200,000/month. Basically, in a subscription business, the faster you are growing, the more cash you’re going to need.

2 Retaining customers is critical. In the old enterprise software days, a common model was to have some sort of upfront license fee — and then some ongoing maintenance revenue (15–20%) which covered things like support and upgrades. Sure, the recurring revenue was important (because it added up) but much of the mojo was in those big upfront fees. The holy grail as an enterprise software startup was when you could get these recurring maintenance fees to exceed your operating costs (which meant that in theory, you didn’t have to make a single sale to still keep the lights on). In the SaaS world, everything is usually some sort of recurring revenue. This, in the long-term is a mostly good thing. But, in the short-term, it means you really need to keep those customers that you sell or things are going to get really painful, very quickly. Looking at our example from #1, if you spent $1,000 to acquire a customer, and they quit in 6 months, you lost $400. Also, in the installed-software world, your customers were somewhat likely to have invested in getting your product up and running and customizing it to their needs. As such, switching costs were reasonably high. In SaaS, things are simple by design — and contracts are shorter. The net result is that it is easier for customers to leave.

Quick math: Figure out your total acquisition cost (lets say it’s $1,000) and your monthly subscription revenue (let’s say again say it’s $100). This means that you need a customer to stay at least 10 months in order to “recover” your acquisition cost — otherwise, you’re losing money.

3 It’s Software — But There Are Hard Costs. In the enterprise-installed software business, you shipped disks/CDs/DVDs (or made the software available to download). There were very few infrastructure costs. To deliver software as a service, you need to invest in infrastructure — including people to keep things running. Services like Amazon’s EC2 help a lot (in terms of having flexible scalability and very low up-front costs), but it still doesn’t obviate the need to have people that will manage the infrastructure. And, people still cost money. Oh, and by that way, Amazon’s EC2 is great in terms of low capital expense (i.e. you’re not out of pocket lots of money to buy servers and stuff), but it’s not free. By the time you get a couple of production instances, a QA instance, some S3 storage, perhaps some software load-balancing, and maybe 50% of someone’s time to manage it all (because any one of those things will degrade/fail), you’re talking about real money. Too many non-technical founders hand-wave the infrastructure costs because they think “hey we have cloud computing now, we can scale as we need it.” That’s true, you can scale as you need it, but there are some real dollars just getting the basics up and running.

Quick exercise: Talk to other SaaS companies in your peer group (at your stage), that are willing to share data. Try and figure out what monthly hosting costs you can expect as you grow (and what percentage that is of revenue).

4 It Pays To Know Your Funnel. One of the central drivers in the business will be understanding the shape of your marketing/sales funnel. What channels are driving prospects into your funnel? What’s the conversion rate of a random web visitor to trial? Trial to purchase? Purchase to delighted customer? The better you know your funnel the better decisions you will make as to where to invest your limited resources. If you have a “top of the funnel” problem (i.e. your website is only getting 10 visitors a week), then creating the world’s best landing page and trying to optimize your conversions is unlikely to move the dial much. On the other hand, if only 1 in 10,000 people that visit your website ultimately convert to a lead (or user), growing your web traffic to 100,000 visitors is not going to move the dial either. Understand your funnel, so you can optimize it. The bottleneck (and opportunity for improvement) is always somewhere. Find it, and optimize it — until the bottleneck moves somewhere else. It’s a lot like optimzing your software product. Grab the low-hanging fruit first.

Quick tip: Make sure you have a way to generate the data for your funnel as early in your startup’s history as possible. At a minimum, you need numbers on web visitors, leads/trials generated and customer sign-ups (so you know the percentage conversion at each step).

Read The Rest…

Full Credit to: OnStartUps.com

Novell and Tencent Establish Joint Cloud Computing Laboratory in China

cloudtweaks — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:25:10 +0000

The FINANCIAL — Novell and Tencent on July 22 announced the establishment of a research laboratory in Shenzhen, China to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform.

Tencent, China’s largest Internet service portal with more than 480 million active users, is adopting SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system. As part of the agreement, Tencent will also utilize intelligent workload management solutions from Novell, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create a flexible and easy-to-expand IDC cloud platform that will allow users to build, purchase and run business applications in a faster and more convenient way.

“Tencent has recognized the value of our solutions to its business,” said Dr. Sen Ming Chang, managing director of Novell East Asia. “This cloud computing laboratory will create a powerful IDC cloud platform that will not only promote IDC industry development but also help companies improve productivity and reduce costs. Our collaboration with Tencent further proves Novell’s leadership in cloud computing and the intelligent workload management market. We spare no effort to provide customers with excellent solutions and services, and hope more companies like Tencent will adopt our virtual solutions.”

Typically, IDC vendors lease resources from solution providers and make a profit by then leasing space, bandwidth and other resources to customers. With the rise of Web 2.0 and bandwidth-intensive multi-media sites, as well as increased business usage, demand for the IDC solutions has grown.

Because of this rapid development, the IDC industry and a number of Tencent’s operations have met with considerable challenges. To address these challenges, Tencent built its virtualization and data center engine using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Xen Virtualization and Novell PlateSpin Orchestrate. To date, the engine has achieved significant results including more efficient utilization, operational flexibility, improved productivity, lower costs and greater compatibility and security.

Source: FinChannel

Developers Pick Google and IBM as Top Cloud Vendors, New Cloud Development Survey

cloudtweaks — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:23:24 +0000

Dublin, Jul 22, 2010 (M2 PRESSWIRE via COMTEX) –

Research and Markets(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3b43c9/cloud_development) has announced the addition of the “Cloud Development Survey 2010 v.1″ report to their offering.

The Cloud Development Survey Report examines the concerns, intentions and current adoption of developers regarding deploying to and developing for public or private clouds. The report covers the full range of Cloud Computing issues, including: Private Cloud vs. Public Cloud, Private cloud management and data centers, standards and organizations, security, wireless Cloud Services, tool use, licensing, languages for use in the Cloud, and applications that will move first to the Cloud.

Conducted annually, 500+ developers

Executive Summary:

Google is the perceived leader for setup, infrastructure and application management in a Public Cloud and IBM is the top choice of developers for Private Clouds according to Evans Datas recently released Cloud Development Survey 2010. Over 40% of developers sited Google as the Public cloud leader and almost 30% identified IBM as the top Private Cloud provider, in this survey of over 400 software developers released end of June.

“Most developers expect to be in a hybrid situation going forward with respect to application deployment in the Cloud, said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data. “And these two vendors are perceived of as best filling the two main requirements for either Public or Private clouds; i.e., security and reliability. With no other vendors even close in perceived leadership, its likely that well see IBM and Google dominating the cloudscape for the foreseeable future.

Developers also feel it is very important to be able to move applications between public and private clouds, and it is especially important to be able to move from the Public Cloud to the Private Cloud.

Other highlights from this bi-annual survey include:

- Over 80% feel that it is important for cloud providers to give 100% backward compatibility as the cloud infrastructure matures

- Sixty percent are concerned with government geographical restrictions with Cloud deployments

- Better data encryption is the most wished for security improvement for Public Cloud

Key Topics Covered:

- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

- OVERVIEW

- DEMOGRAPHICS

- MOVING INTO THE CLOUD

- STRUCTURE OF THE CLOUD

- DEVELOPING IN THE CLOUD

- SOA AND CLOUD GOVERNANCE

- PRIVATE CLOUD

- PRIVATE CLOUD DATA CENTERS

- PUBLIC CLOUDS

- DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

- LANGUAGE USE

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3b43c9/cloud_development

CONTACT: Laura Wood, Senior Manager, Research and Markets Fax: +1 646 607 1907 (US) Fax: +353 1 481 1716 (Rest of World) e-mail: press@researchandmarkets.com

((M2 Communications disclaims all liability for information provided within M2 PressWIRE. Data supplied by named party/parties. Further information on M2 PressWIRE can be obtained at http://www.presswire.net on the world wide web. Inquiries to info@m2.com.

For full details on International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) IBM. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has Short Term PowerRatings at TradingMarkets. Details on International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) Short Term PowerRatings is available at This Link.

IBM unveils hybrid mainframe – Cloud Computing

cloudtweaks — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:49:06 +0000

IBM on Thursday will unveil a new hybrid mainframe design that aims to cut data center sprawl and be a bridge to other systems.

All of the hardware giants—IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell and Oracle—are producing magic boxes (or armies of them) to modernize data centers and bridge them to cloud computing. IBM is aiming its hybrid mainframe, which is designed to manage other systems too, at the data center simplification effort.

The lead-in to IBM’s zEnterprise System (right) was interesting as rivals were pooh-poohing the effort before the launch. IBM CFO Mark Loughridge foreshadowed the mainframe launch during the company’s earnings conference call.

What’s the hubbub about? IBM is looking to bridge enterprises that run on mainframes with other industry standard servers. While hardware vendors take shots at each other, the reality is that most data centers have multiple hardware components. The key is to integrate those components, cut down on sprawl and save on energy—all while handling massive computing loads.

The design was developed with $1.5 billion in R&D funding with input from 30 customers and more than 5,000 employees around the world. Will this effort work? Ultimately, the IT buyer will decide, but for now there are multiple moving parts to ponder. In a nutshell:

The zEnterprise 196 is the core server in the package. It contains 96 processors running at 5.2 GHz each. The server can handle 50 billion instructions per second.
IBM is looking to bring central governance and mainframe management tools and extend them to Power7 and System X servers. Think of IBM’s new mainframes as a virtualization hub that manages other workloads in the data center.
The new hybrid machines will offer faster analytics capabilities.
zEnterprise will be up to 60 percent faster than the predecessor System z10 and use the same amount of energy.
The system also rides shotgun with technology called IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension and the IBM Unified Resource Manager to manage workloads across multiple systems.

As for the bottom line, IBM is claiming the zEnterprise System can reduce acquisition costs by 40 percent with total cost of ownership falling 55 percent.

IBM’s move is likely to raise the debate about the mainframe, which has had obituaries written about it for years. Some companies, which are on the scale out with standard servers bandwagon, wouldn’t be caught dead with mainframes. Enterprises that already have mainframes to process a massive amount of transactions—think financial services companies like Citi—will be receptive. Add it up and every big tech company has some spin on converging infrastructure to create efficient, automated computing systems. IBM has the same message with a mainframe twist.

In many respects, IBM is touching on the database and computing consolidation preached by Oracle with its Exadata machine. Here’s an example from IBM’s statement:

Using the zEnterprise System with the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension and IBM zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, a financial services company that is managing credit card transactions on the mainframe and using an IBM blade optimized for analytics, can gain insights from the information in seconds rather than waiting hours for the two disparate systems to integrate their databases. IBM estimates that complex database queries can experience up to a ten-fold performance improvement in this hybrid environment. In addition, with IBM’s new architecture, the financial services company can extend the mainframe’s unique, always-on, ultra-secure and reliable qualities to its customer service applications running on IBM blades.

If successful, folks may be calling for the demise of the mainframe another three decades from now.

Here’s a deeper dive on the moving parts of the zEnterprise launch:

The IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension is designed to allow applications to be run on general purpose blade servers from Big Blue for specific tasks. These blade servers will be managed as if they were mainframes and be integrated with System z. IBM plans to launch blades running IBM’s flavor of Unix, dubbed AIX. IBM next year plans multiple blades running Linux that will extend to the mainframe.
IBM software called Unified Resource Manager will be the firmware that integrates computing resources so zEnterprise can manage it. One system can manage more than 100,000 virtual servers. Unified Resource Manager will also b able to find bottlenecks and failures and fix them.
The zEnterprise 196 server is designed to optimize heavy workloads. IBM claims that the zEnterprise 196 will run Oracle workloads for 74 percent less than x86 systems. The system also has a water cooling system that can connect to standard chilled water systems in data centers. The server also has a bundle of IBM software from Tivoli and can be optimized to work with Cognos and SPSS for analytics. Rational and Lotus are also in the mix.

Separately, BMC Software, a leading mainframe software management company, said it will support IBM’s hybrid mainframe with its Business Service Management tools. BMC sees the hybrid approach as a logical way to bring systems together. “IBM’s mainframe approach brings the cloud opportunity to the forefront,” said Bill Miller, president of BMC’s Mainframe Service Management business unit. “This could be a lot more than a traditional server and with its split personality could offer scalability like nothing else out there.”

At the very least, IBM has another data center stack to evaluate.

Article By Larry Dignan at ZDnet

Cloud Computing Firm VMware Reports Second Quarter 2010 Results Revenue Growth of 48%

cloudtweaks — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:29:50 +0000

PALO ALTO, CA, Jul 20, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — VMware, Inc. (VMW 72.42, -0.93, -1.27%) , the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter to the cloud, 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.”

Recent Highlights & Strategic Announcements

– On July 13, 2010, VMware announced VMware vSphere 4.1, an updated
version of VMware’s flagship virtualization and cloud infrastructure
platform. With VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware once again sets the bar in
virtualization, coupling dramatic scalability and performance
enhancements with new management capabilities to deliver the most
powerful foundation for cloud computing. The announcement included
additions to VMware’s vCenter Family of management products and new
packaging for the SMB market.

– In the second quarter 2010, VMware announced a series of moves to
further its Open Platform-as-a-Service (Open PaaS) offerings and
enable application portability across private and public cloud
environments. The announcements included the acquisition of Gemstone,
which introduces sophisticated data-caching capabilities; a new
partnership with Salesforce.com, whereby Java and Spring framework
developers will be able to deploy new applications into a cloud and
leverage Salesforce.com capabilities; and a partnership with Google,
whereby the Spring framework will be integrated with Google’s App
Engine.

– On June 10, 2010, VMware announced it is positioned by Gartner, Inc.
in the Leaders Quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server
Virtualization Infrastructure. According to the report: “The x86
Server Virtualization Infrastructure market is a foundation for two
extremely important market trends — infrastructure modernization and
cloud computing.”(1)

– On June 9, 2010, VMware and Novell announced an expansion to their
partnership with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement
through which VMware will distribute and support the SUSE(R) Linux
Enterprise Server operating system at no additional cost to vSphere
customers. With this agreement, customers can more easily and
cost-effectively virtualize Linux applications, accelerate their
evolution to a fully virtualized datacenter and simplify portability
of their applications to cloud environments.

VMware plans to host a conference call today to review its second quarter results and to discuss its financial outlook. The call is scheduled to begin at 2:00 p.m. PT/ 5:00 p.m. ET and can be accessed via the Web at http://ir.vmware.com. The webcast will be available live, and a replay will be available following completion of the live broadcast for approximately 30 days.

(1) Gartner, Inc “Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure,” Thomas Bittman et al, May 26, 2010.

About VMware

VMware delivers virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With the industry leading virtualization platform — VMware vSphere(TM) — customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2009 revenues of $2 billion, more than 190,000 customers and 25,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com

VMware and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to VMware’s financial results as determined in accordance with GAAP are included at the end of this press release following the accompanying financial data. For a description of these non-GAAP financial measures, including the reasons management uses each measure, please see the section of the tables entitled “About Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”