3rd-Party Application Services – a sign of PaaS maturity

As mentioned in a number of posts, there is a clear trend away from Platform-specific PaaS (where you write your application to the platform) and Language-Specific PaaS (which provide support to one or possibly a couple of languages) to Universal PaaS, which is capable of supporting any language and any platform. There’s a little bit of a gray area, but we would include ActiveState Stackato, AppFog, dotCloud, GigaSpaces Cloudify, Red Hat OpenShift, Salesforce Heroku, Uhuru Software AppCloud and VMWare CloudFoundry in this category. These vendors differentiate themselves by providing a broad range of Application Services or Application Lifecycle Services.

Is the Software Defined Data Center the Future?

VMware purchased Nicira, backed the Openflow Community, and is now touting software defined data centers (SDDC). But what is a software defined datacenter? Is it just virtualization or cloud with a software defined network? Or is it something more than that? Given heavy automation and scripting of most clouds, do we not already have SDDC? If not where are we going with this concept? What does SDN add to the mix?

Citrix release XenClient Enterprise 4.1: revolution or evolution in desktop virtualisation for laptops

Citrix XenClient Enterprise 4.1, first full release since the Virtual Computer acquisition. How does 4.1 compare with previous versions? How has NxTop been utilised? FlexCast missed corporate laptops, does XenClient give an enterprise desktop virtualization platform for laptops?

News: Windows 2012 Licensing – Mircrosoft learns from VMware's mistakes?

Perhaps with the release of 2012, Microsoft have a rare moment of being a vendor that made a change to product licensing without upsetting someone. There are now only four Windows 2012 Licensing versions, and licensing is processor and client access license based. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be hard.