Year: 2011

Microsoft is working on a management tool which can manage both private- and public clouds, ZDNet reports. The product, which is codenamed "Concero" will be able to manage service across private- and public cloud. Concero will be part of the System Center suite of management products from Microsoft.

Concero will be able to manage the Hyper-V hypervisor and the new version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 for which Microsoft detailed some of its features during its Teched conference in November last year. Concero will also be able to manage Windows Azure and Azure appliances. The tool will be built on Silverlight so it can be accessed through a web browser.

tuCloud has announced a new Desktop as a Service (SaaS) solution called CloudTop. CloudTop provides applications, data and the user profile from the cloud capable of running on top of Apple Macintosh hardware. The offering is currently in beta and is scheduled to be released in Q2 this year. It will be offered for 1$ per day, just as they do with their current DaaS offering for Windows based desktops which leverages the Kaviza VDI platform.

The platform providing the functionality is called DiscCloud, which is a fork of BSD Unix, and designed in such a way that it can run Mac OS X applications. tuCloud states DiscCloud it has an agreement for using the technology with Apple.

Read more

Microsoft announced yesterday that Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business Division (STB) will leave Microsoft this summer. Microsoft announced that it will conduct an internal and external search for a new leader. Muglia is also leader of the Server & Cloud Division (SCD), formed in  December 2009 which is part of STB and is led by Amitabh Srivastava at this moment.

Muglia joined Microsoft in 1988 and he served several positions across all of the company’s business groups, where he led the Developer, Office and Mobile Devices Divisions and key parts of the Windows NT and the Online Services business. Before joining Microsoft Muglia was development manager at ROLM Co.

Amazon has announced two new support plans for its cloud service EC2, called Bronze and Platinum. It also announced that it has reduced the prices for its existing offerings Silver and Gold. Also the maximum initial response time has been lowered overall.

The Bronze plan is aimed at individual developers and costs $49 per month, giving developers the ability to submit troubletickets using the same web-based ticketing system currently in use for the Silver and Gold plans. Also a Platinum plan is introduced which is intended for enterprise customers and is priced at 10% of the EC2 usage with a $15K monthly minimum.

Read more

Symplified, the cloud computing security provider has raised $9M in a series B funding bringing its total funding to $18.8M. The funding was led by existing Symplified investors Granite Ventures and Allegis Capital, and included a strategic investment by Quest Software, businesswire reports. Symplified plans to start a Series C funding later in 2011.

Symplified also reports a revenue growth of 700 percent reaching a multi-million dollar run rate surpassing one million licensed users for its cloud identity and access management service product called SinglePoint and Trust Cloud for the version which provides the same functionality for Amazon EC2. Trust cloud was announced in July last year, to provide Single Sign On for Amazon EC2.

Skytap, a US startup previously known as Illumita entered the virtual lab automation market in April 2008. In March 2009 it secured $7M in a second round of funding enabling the company to transform its virtual lab automation software into a fully featured automation framework for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, introducing several new functions like organizational policy management.

Now the company has announced that it has secured another $10M through a Round C funding which will help the company to scale sales and marketing and accelerate innovation of its Skytap Cloud product.

Read more