Year: 2014

During its annual TechEd conference in Houston, Microsoft announced a tech preview of a new service allowing customers to run applications from Microsoft Azure called Azure RemoteApp. With this new service, customers can run Windows applications on several devices running a remote desktop client. In order to this to work, Microsoft will release a Microsoft RemoteApp app for Windows, update the Microsoft Remote Desktop apps for iOS and Android and add support for Azure RemoteApp to its clients for Mac, Windows Phone and Windows RT.

Azure RemoteApp was used to be known a codename Mohoro, as reported by cloudcomputing.info in May 2013, for which initially most analysts thought it would become a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution providing Remote Desktop and Remote App provided by Microsoft.

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During its annual Synergy event held in Los Angeles, Citrix announced a new soluiton called Citrix Workspace Services (CWS). CWS offers deployment of virtual workspaces, mobile device management and collaboration tools from a cloud based service. With this announcement Citrix is clearly coming with an answer to VMware’s recent Horizon Suite and Airwatch product announcements offering similar functionality. Citrix also announced a 50 percent discount for customers currently using VMware Horizon and View and willing to switch to this new solution.

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Eucalyptus Systems has announced version 4.0 of its management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds: Eucalyptus.

The company started is business with an open source management console for cloud computing platforms based on KVM that was included in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) Linux distribution maintained by Canonical.

Today Eucalyptus, provided as open source or paid annual subscription license, supports also AWS APIs (EC2, EBS, S3, IAM, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and CloudWatch) and VMware’s Hypervisors running several Windows OS’s and Linux distributions.

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Metacloud, was founded in 2011 in Pasadena, California, and provides an OpenStack-based product called Carbon|OS that, running on existing hardware, allows to run a private cloud “on premises” (as the company says).

In July 2013 Metacloud secured $10 Millions in a Series A round of funding and today announced another $15 million in a Series B round that introduces a new group of investors which comprises Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and UMC Capital, as well as prior investors AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Storm Ventures.

These funds will be used to expand the company team and to accelerate the evolution of its platform.

Amazon has announced that its Desktop-as-a-Service solution Workspaces is now available in the EU (Ireland) region. Workspaces was made generally available in March of this year, being offered at that time from the US East and US West regions.

WorkSpaces offers a fully managed Windows 7 experience running on top of Windows Server 2008.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) is the VMware’s owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, launched in 2013 in the US and extended to Europe in February 2014.

Last week VMware published on its official YouTube channel a video titled vCloud Hybrid Service Demo: Overview & Integration w/ vCloud Connector & vCloud Automation Center where Josh Gwyther, one of the VMware’s vCHS team Cloud Architects, gives an overview of vCHS UI and its integration with other VMware tools.

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Today Canonical announced the new Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS with a press release intriguingly focused on its role as an OpenStack platform.

This release, that will be available on 17th April, will include a new version of Juju and MAAS, the latest container technologies from Docker and LXC, OpenVSwitch, Ceph, the support for IBM Power Systems and IBM’s open architecture called POWER.

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VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) is the VMware’s owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, launched in 2013 in the US and extended to Europe in February 2014.

Today Bill Fathers (Senior VP & General Manager, Hybrid Cloud Services Businss Unit at VMware)  published, simultaneously to the official press release, a post on the VMware Company Blog announcing a new disaster recovery solution called (unsurprisingly) VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery.

Intended for mid-size companies the service promises a seamless integration with vSphere-based infrastructures and the ability to self-manage the replicas of the Virtual Machines between on-premise infrastructures and vCHS Data Centers, starting from a price if $835/month including 1TB of storage and standby cloud capacity.

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Microsoft has announced the release of a preview of Azure Automation. Azure Automation provides an orchestration engine for use within Microsoft Azure. Azure Automation allows you to automate the creation, monitoring, deployment and management of cloud resources in your Microsoft Azure subscription using a highly-available workflow execution engine and works in a similar way as Service Management Automation (SMA) provided by the Windows Azure Pack.

If you have a Microsoft Azure subscription you can activate the preview on the Preview Features page.

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Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica announced to have acquired cloud computing start-up eyeOS, which introduced an open source web desktop solution called eyeOS. The two companies have worked together for the last four years and have signed an agreement back on September 2013 to enhance VDI distribution through HTML5.

The objective of the telecommunication company with this acquisition is to strengthen its offering in future mobile cloud services and encourage the development of open source technology solutions. Telefonica is aiming to take a position among the open source desktop virtualization services (DVS), and together with eyeOS technology they are going to apply desktop virtualization to mobile devices, such as tablets, mobile phones, as well as desktops, leaving all processing of data in the cloud. Using HTML5 and open source technologies eyeOS and Telefonica are going to open the market to all kind of devices, no matter what system they are using, therefore the ability to be able to access any application.

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