Microsoft Buys StorSimple, Pursues Hybrid Cloud Storage Strategy

Coming just a day before the announcement of its financial results for the first quarter, Microsoft has announced that it has bought cloud-storage provider StorSimple for an undisclosed sum.

Cloud Storage Market

There may not be any significance in the fact that this deal comes so close to the earnings announcement — except that IBM announced its third quarter results last night, and they weren’t good.

In fact, Mark Loughbridge, IBM’s CFO, said in the earnings call after the results were released that IBM would be looking at analytics, its Smarter Planet initiative (which is closely connected to Big Data) and cloud computing to add US$ 20 billion to its books by 2015.

Microsoft has come under some fire in the past about its cloud ambitions and functionality, but it has done a lot of running in the past year. With this buy, the company will be able to increase its ability send data into the Azure cloud, not to mention Google and Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft, StorSimple

And that’s the real functionality value of this deal. StorSimple was created nearly four years ago to provide cloud-integrated storage solutions and has worked with Microsoft in the past. In 2010, it optimized its products to work with Microsoft applications. This made it a sure target for Microsoft as it clawed back ground it lost to other cloud providers because it wasn't quick enough off the mark.

Microsoft is not saying how much it paid for StorSimple, but we have found in the past that this usually means that, relatively speaking, they haven’t paid a whole lot.

But strategically, when StorSimple is added into the Microsoft mix, it should produce a really heady brew — and that’s where Microsoft is going with this. Microsoft says that the addition of cloud-integrated storage systems will “advance Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision."

It may also be important to note here that StorSimple already works with Microsoft SharePoint (cloud storage is a great way to improve the performance of SharePoint).

Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud Storage Strategy

In practical terms, what this means is that Microsoft is going into the hybrid cloud market in a big way. Combining primary storage, backup, archiving and disaster recovery with cloud integration, this will enable users decide to where their data should be stored.

Customers faced with explosive growth in data are looking to the cloud to help them store, manage and archive that data. But, to be effective, cloud storage needs to integrate with IT's current investments … StorSimple's approach helps customers seamlessly integrate on-premises storage with cloud storage through intelligent automation and management," said Michael Park, Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Division for Microsoft.

StorSimple solutions combine the data management functions of primary storage, backup, archive and disaster recovery with cloud integration, enabling customers to optimize storage costs, data protection and service agility.

With it, enterprises will be able to protect and restore production data using public clouds. Using encryption, cloud providers will be able to send data over the web securely, using compression technologies and de-duplication technologies to eliminate multiple copies of data.

StorSimple appliances currently have storage capacities ranging from 2TB to 20 TBs with prices starting at around US$ 40,000.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Gearing up for Salesforce #Dreamforce 2012, Chatterbox Details to Come

Salesforce will host the Dreamforce 2012 conference Sept. 18-21, but CEO Mark Benioff has already announced the cloud storage system Chatterbox at another tech conference.

Chatterbox will be Dropbox for the enterprise, Benioff said, but it's just the start of a busy week for anyone who's thinking of adding to their Salesforce package or looking for new vendors altogether.

The focus at Dreamforce this year is social enterprise, and keynote speakers are divided up among the sales, customer service, marketing, collaboration and small to medium business categories. Additionally, entrepreneurs like Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, strategist Anthony Robbins and, of course, Benioff himself will be addressing the crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center. 

General Colin Powell (Ret.) will also be speaking because he is now a limited partner in the powerful venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Tuesday night's opening gala will feature the musical stylings of funk-rock pioneers The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Keynotes to Note

Among the various segments at this huge conference, the Data segment features keynotes from companies like Pandora and CareerBuilder on how Data.com helps their companies. Furthermore, for SMBs, executives from Square and Yelp will be giving keynotes about their Salesforce experiences.

For those who are curious about specific products like Chatter, there are good sessions to attend on all four days of the conference. On Tuesday, there is a session right after lunch called 'Chatter: Best Practices for Chatter - The Engine of the Social Enterprise' that could be helpful.

On Wednesday there is 'Chatter: Finding the Right Talent, and Empowering Employees' in the early afternoon. Thursday, check out 'Chatter: ENGAGE - The 6 Steps to Success with Chatter' right after the Chatter keynote.

CMSWire at Dreamforce

CMSWire is attending Dreamforce this year, and we'll be covering new products like Chatterbox in particular. Salesforce has promised other new products, and those will be our main focus as well. Look for me there and say hi!

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

EMC's Syncplicity Gears Up to Disrupt

Syncplicity wants to be the place that enterprise users go to sync, share, access and protect their files. The SaaS start-up that storage giant EMC acquired in May has been working in overdrive to achieve its mission.

In just a few short months they have built a new release (featuring true Mobile Sync for iOS and Android devices) that not only further liberates knowledge workers from being tethered to their desks, but that also syncs automatically, thereby freeing them from the burden of manually selecting, pushing and pulling information between their mobile devices, computers, file servers, business applications and the cloud. 

The majority of other solutions in this space work by downloading a file while connected, marking it for viewing later, uploading changed files and so on.

“The challenge you have with most of the players in this market is the degree of forethought required by the user,” says Jeetu Patel, Syncplicity’s newly appointed Chief Executive.

With Syncplicity, users are notified when changes are made and file and folder organization remains consistent.

Your Content at Your Fingertips, All of the Time - No Forethought Required

Work on a document in Salesforce. Visit a client and access it from your iPad. Get a call from your boss while you are on your evening run demanding that you look over changes “right now.” Review, edit and/or approve from your iPhone (no download or upload needed), then continue your run. Your boss has what he needs so you can take time out for an extra mile and a well-deserved ice cream. Access the most recent version of the document via your laptop (or any other device) later.

Imagine your work-life being this simple. Being able to access your content where it lives. No need for check-ins or check-outs, no dragging or dropping, no wrestling with and organizing content and document versions.

And if you’re collaborating on a project, like a presentation, with co-workers you can set read-only or read-and-write permissions to content. This might save you from getting up before a crowd with a stack of PowerPoint slides that looked different than when you last saw them.

That’s Great for the End User - How about IT?

Ask IT managers in regulated industries what they think about popular cloud hosting services like Dropbox and you’ll hear nothing but qualified praise. “Great for individual, personal, consumer use, but we don’t let people access it, or Box, from the office,” an IT Director at an insurance firm told me. “We have compliance, governance and security concerns when our files are not in our control.”

Is his company’s policy an anomaly? It doesn’t seem to be with companies that are regulated. We called three people at Life Sciences companies and three at Investment Banks and asked them to see if they could access Dropbox, Box or SugarSync. Their answers? “Blocked. Blocked. Blocked.” And this does not seem uncommon.

It’s not fair to ask the same question about Syncplicity because a good number of IT managers have never even heard of it and therefore have not come to any conclusions about it.

This may, or may not be, and advantage.

Will Syncplicity Win IT Managers Over?

If Syncplicity can get in front of IT Managers before curious, would-be early adopters do, the service might be more easily accepted. After all, EMC has a significant, trusted footprint in the enterprise world.

Add to that, that Syncplicity says it provides 99.999999999% data resiliency; that it stores documents and encryption keys in different data centers; that it provides remote wipe data from lost or stolen devices; that it enforces legal, regulatory and security compliance and much, much more.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Cloud Pricing and Ultrabooks Herald A Slow Death For Optical Storage

As Sony quits the optical storage device market, and cloud storage costs become ever lower, how long will it be before we struggle to find devices to access those DVD archives or Blu-ray backup discs?

How Do You Backup Your Data?

In the old PC days, life was simple. You copied your files to a few floppy diskettes, kept one set on the desk, one in a safe and one at home, and voila, a business-class archive storage solution was born. Hard disk storage on those voluminous Winchester drives made things a little simpler, until files became too big for floppies. 

So, over the years, we had tape, then optical, portable HDD and now cloud storage, all offering ways to keep your data safe and secure. Enterprises probably use a mix of all kinds, but smaller businesses will likely be indoctrinated with the good old regular DVD-R back-up. Those companies won't be in danger any time soon, but like the floppy before it, the DVD and Blu-ray drive are soon to become endangered species. 

In the news this week, the big blow to DVD's future was Sony is closing down its optical drive manufacturing unit. In the wider PC world, we see a majority of svelte upcoming Windows 8 devices that won't be seen dead lugging a bulky optical drive, and Amazon's offer of cheap Glacier cloud-based archival storage putting more data online, 

Shiny Trinkets

On the positive side, there are plenty of drive makers still in business, but optical drives and discs will become a reducing commodity, like floppies, ZiP drives and other formats, which are still in use around the world, but in ever-fewer numbers. 

Most of us will adapt and overcome, gradually moving our DVD archives back to portable hard drives, or as online storage becomes cheaper, to the cloud. The general reliability of DVD drives means investing in a couple of internal units for a tower PC (remember them) or an external unit for your notebook will be an easy way to ensure some degree of future compatibility.

As long as you look after them, the storage media too is pretty reliable, so there will be no great panic. Internet-savvy companies are probably using their remaining DVDs for target shooting. Still, there are tens of millions of users and smaller businesses who will need to start looking ahead now and planning to ensure historical data, digital documents, official photos and family backups are all accessible for that that time when you dig out a DVD and suddenly realise there is nothing in the office or home to play it on. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Dropmyemail File Manager Lets Users Browse Through Backed-Up Email Attachments, Share Big Files

Backing up emails can be a very important part of your online routine. Considering how a single hacking incident could wipe out your entire digital life, having a safe and secure storage for your precious data should be in the mind of any enterprise, big or small. Singapore-based startup Dropmyemail offers email backups and more.

Email Backups Made Simple

Dropmyemail launched earlier this year with the goal of providing quick email backup solutions to small to medium enterprises. The startup's cloud-based offering takes snapshots of your email account — which can be in Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Exchange or other hosted setups — on a regular basis.

When necessary, users can then easily restore a snapshot and essentially revert the email account to a previous state.

But not everyone needs to do such a radical move, right? Sometimes, you might just want to clear your inbox of big files and messages so that you don't get those nasty quota notifications. Yes, I often get those on my free Gmail account, even with the perpetually increasing storage.

Dropmyemail offers free storage up to 2 GB, and charges starting from US$ 9.99 for 5 GB storage up to US$ 69.99 for 50 GB. Bigger storage needs are possible with special arrangements.

With the recently launched File Manager feature, users can essentailly use Dropmyemail as a cloud-based filesystem of sorts. File Manager lets users browse through attachments, and also offers a file-sharing system.

Sharing vs. Searching

Dropmyemail CEO and founder John Fearon highlighted the need for collaborative groups to share and manage large files through the cloud. "We recognize the need of individuals and enterprises to facilitate large file transfers. I believe that our file and attachment sharing function will fulfill that need," he said in a statement.

Dropmyemail's File Manager has two basic functions.

• Share Attachment allows users to see, search and share all existing attachments in backed up emails in one convenient tab.
• Share Files allows users to upload files to be shared. Custom links will be generated for these files which can then be shared via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email and more.

The service has a free version, which users can use to share files up to 250 MB in size. Paid users only have their account storage as their file size limit. Users can get more space by deleting older files or upgrading accounts.

Hailed by e27 as the "fastest growing startup in Asia" at the 2012 Echelon conference, the startup has recently acquired U.S.-based OrbitFiles, and is opening a North American sales and business office in Dallas, TX, the company's third business office after Mumbai and Buenos Aires.

Dropmyemail can compete directly with other cloud storage and big file-sharing service, although the advantage is its basic functionality of cloud-to-cloud email backup, which reduces the need for a user to consume bandwidth and space while backing up messages and files.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Google Apps Makes Big Push for International Markets with ccTLD & Arabizi Support

Google Apps has made a big splash in the enterprise market, with businesses moving their apps to the web. But even as emails, calendars, IM and online storage have increasingly gone cloud-bound, the service has been limited by the languages and domains supported. In its latest update, Google Apps has opened its domain registration to country-based top-level domains (ccTLD), and is offering support for new Arabic input tools.

Country-based Domains

In an official announcement last week, Google says new domains based on ccTLDs will come with the same Google Apps goodness. "Now, businesses that wish to sign up for Google Apps but don’t yet have a domain name have plenty of local options to choose from during sign-up."

The country-based domain registration is done in partnership with domaindiscount24.com, and Google says users can purchase a new domain for as little as US$ 8 for an annual subscription. This price will, of course, differ depending on the actual cost of a country domain.

Arabic Language Extension

Apart from additional domain support, Google Apps will also support Arabizi, an Arabic language slang that involves the use of regular latin characters. Arabizi then automatically converts the content to Arabic.

Google earlier released an Arabizi translation tool, but Fayeq Oweis, a director with Google's Arabic language and localization, says the company wants to extend the use of its translation tools across products.

Although I do not like writing [in Arabizi] and I would always recommend using the Arabic language directly, some users may not have a keyboard in Arabic … so these tools facilitate the process and maintain Arabic language content."

Arabizi support comes by way of Google Input Tools, which requires the installation of a local software that does the input translation. The tool is currently limited to Windows, which means there is no support for direct Arabizi input from other PC and mobile platforms.

The advantage of running locally, of course, is that Arabizi to Arabic translation can be done even without a running Internet connection.

Google is hastening its efforts to expand to international markets and non-English users. This additional language support comes right after Google confirmed the addition of 13 new languages to Voice Search, which works on Android devices that can run the speech-driven interface for doing basic Google searches and speech-driven commands, much like Apple's SIRI.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com