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Today was the last day of VMware’s flagship conference VMworld in Las Vegas, an highly controversial edition which left a good chunk of the audience disoriented if not properly disappointed.

The debate started during Day 1 Keynote and then proliferated over Twitter in various strands. Part of the audience commented that the message delivered during the keynote suggests developers and cloud-native applications (delegated to Day 2 Keynote) as second-class citizens in VMware’s world.

Others complained that the announcements of VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services (moreover in technical preview) are too few and too late to amend the One Cloud mantra VMware has drummed for an entire year.

Anyway each of these (legit) comments has been addressed by the vast legion of VMware’s aficionados and you can enjoy the discussion on Twitter with the hashtag #VMworld and form your own opinion.
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Last week Gartner updated its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the year 2016. The Magic Quadrant for the year 2015 was released in May last year just like in 2014 (covered by cloudcomputing.info) while the Magic Quadrant for 2013 was released in August 2013 (covered by cloudcomputing.info). The Magic Quadrant aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. The report details for each company in the Quadrant its strengths and cautions.

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Ansible is one of the four main players in the automation market, younger then the well known Chef and Puppet, has been launched in 2013 in Durham, N.C. and acquired last October by Red Hat.
Ansible itself is especially popular within the developers’ community, thanks to its simplicity and agentless nature while Ansible Tower is its control visual dashboard providing centralisation, role-based access control, job scheduling and graphical inventory management.
At the end of July Ansible launched release 3 of Ansible Tower under the name of Ansible Tower by Red Hat.

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Yesterday IBM announced its results for Q2 2016.

If we compare with the same quarter in 2015 earnings per share, from continuing operations, decreased 22%. Net income, from continuing operations, decreased 24%.
Consolidated diluted earnings per share down 20% YoY and operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings per share, from continuing operations, decreased 21%.
These results reflect the continuous shrinking of IBM’s server hardware and z Systems business but, considering investors’ reaction, emerging business such Cognitive Solutions (aka Watson) and cloud (aka BlueMix/Softlayer) are enough to keep Big Blue an appealing investment.

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Red Hat announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2017.

Total revenue for the first quarter was $568 million, with an increase of 18% from the same quarter last year (in constant currency). Looking at the financial details we can see that total subscription revenue earned for the quarter was $502 million, with an increase of 18% year-over-year (in constant currency). Operating cash flow for first quarter was of $232 million, up 8% year-over-year, total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of May 31, 2016 was $2.12 billion after repurchasing approximately $66 million, or approximately 900 thousand shares, of common stock in the first quarter.
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virtualization.info has been following WhatMatrix since its inception and, after 6 months since the website has been launched, we are happy to report that its community is growing and contributing with a number of new comparisons.

WhatMatrix.com provides a comparison engine that, once populated with datapoints by its community members, offers the audience a tool to make IT purchase decisions, create solution proposals and perform technical product research.
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DockerCon 2016 began yesterday in Seattle with a number of announcements from Docker and key partners.

Here is a quick summary of the day:

• Docker 1.12 with built-in orchestration: starting with version 1.12 Docker added to the core engine a set of new API objects introducing, for example, the ability to describe Services and Nodes and to deploy and manage apps on swarms, aka groups of Docker Engines

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Yesterday, Bellevue (WA) based company WinDocks, released a free edition of its homonymous port of the Docker daemon to Windows called WinDocks Community Edition.

The company, founded by a small group of former Microsoft’s employees, rides Docker’s momentum and promotes DevOps practices in Microsoft’s space.

WinDocks Community Edition adds support for Windows 8 & 10 in addition to Windows Server 2012, extending container support for .NET 2, 3.5, 4.5, SQL Server 2008, 2008r2, 2012, 2014 and Windows applications to Microsoft’s desktop OSes.

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Containers’ security is one of the emerging topics in those companies moving this technology into production. A few small players emerged to compete exclusively in this portion of the market but now is time for larger companies, like Docker, to offer solutions in this space.
On May 10th the company released Docker Security Scanning, a tool able to provide risk and compliance management on docker images stored in private repositories on Docker Cloud and Official Repositories on Docker Hub.

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RightScale is a Santa Barbara, CA based company, provider of a Software as a Service (SaaS) management solution that so far only supported standard Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud infrastructures such Amazon EC2, Microsoft AWS, Google Compute Engine and various distributions of OpenStack, public and on-premises.

Today the company announced the support for Docker based containers through the installation of its RightLink agent on Docker hosts.

RightScale native capabilities easily allow to provision and scale Docker hosts, as well as container management tools such Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Rancher, simply providing appropriate templates for these kind of services.

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