Parallels announced that ProServe has selected Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 to deliver a cost-efficient and scalable Online Backup solution via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers provides the virtualization technology for ProServe's Virtual Online Backup Server (VOBS) offering. By using Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, ProServe is able to deliver an on-line backup solution with the necessary performance, cost-efficiency, scalability and isolation required for their VOBS offered in a SaaS delivery model.

Novell says it's going to 'simplify' pricing and discounts on SLES for mainframes for the rest of the year. That means it's going to cut prices by 33%-47% by offering a three-year subscription for the price of a two-year subscription or a five-year subscription for the price of a three-year subscription. The discounts apply to workload consolidation from non-System z platforms and renewals of existing SLES subscriptions.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Virtualization on Wall Street Conference & Expo will take place on March 22-24, 2009, in New York City. The event is expected to attract over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe who will be converging in New York City to attend this comprehensive meeting on Virtualization on Wall Street.

Virtualization has quickly become a staple new concept for enterprise IT. At SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24, we had exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT. The two content-packed days emphasized value with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of virtualization.

The fireworks over Armonk this 4th of July are going to be a bit brighter and more awesome because - by the flick of a checkbook - IBM has gotten out from under a threat to its precious multibillion-dollar mainframe monopoly.

NetSuite, the Larry Ellison SaaS company, is buying OpenAir, the 56-man shop that is supposed to be the leader in on-demand professional services automation, for $26 million cash, net of the cash on the acquisition's balance sheet. NetSuite says it probably won't be able recognize most of the deferred revenue on OpenAir's balance sheet so the acquisition will add to its losses this year. It is now projecting non-GAAP losses of $2.5 million-$3.5 million (four-six cents) on revenues of $156 million-$159 million.

There seems to be a lot of debate as to what Grid computing really is. In fact, the blogosphere seems to be throwing around terms like Grid, Cloud, Utility, Distributed and Cluster computing almost interchangeably. And rather than clarifying things, I feel that the waters are just getting muddier.

Google is currently the pet of the American consumer. Although many in the industry don't find it particularly likeable, the company's reputation is tops among US consumers, based largely on how it treats employees and a perception of social responsibility, according to a Harris poll, in which Google dislodged Microsoft from the perch. Johnson & Johnson, the Band-Aid king, came in second and Intel third. Microsoft is now number 10. Google was previously number four. Companies with the worst reps include Halliburton, Comcast, Northwest Airlines and Exxon.

PlateSpin has trotted out its first major product release since Novell bought the virtualization management operation back in March with the launch of PowerConvert 7.0, its data center disaster recovery mojo. The software has new backup and recovery features and expanded multi-platform support.

Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8 is the gold standard in complete Windows system recovery allowing businesses and IT to recover from system loss or disasters in minutes, even to dissimilar hardware and virtual environments. Helping IT administrators meet recovery time objectives, Backup Exec System Recovery provides system restoration or full bare-metal recovery for servers, desktops or laptops. It also enables you to recover systems in remote, unattended locations.

The Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance is a self contained software stack of o/s, database, and business intelligence tools. The solution is provided in a single stream install enabling a rapid and easy deployment of a complete BI environment within a VM. The software appliance comes with an online web service update mechanism to manage patches and upgrades in a seamless fashion. Users apply updates to the entire multi-component stack with a single click. Users are able to stay current and online with their BI investment at a significantly lower cost. The solution is built from open source technologies from Ingres, JasperSoft, & rPath.

Kidaro delivers an end-to-end desktop computing solution for enterprise desktops and laptops. The Kidaro platform leverages innovative virtualization technology to enable enhanced security, manageability, and mobility without disrupting existing desktop capabilities and infrastructure.

Parallels Desktop 3.0 is a Mac system utility that allows users to run Windows, Linux, and more side-by-side with Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Mac, without rebooting. Parallels' Mac virtualization technology has won over 25 major industry awards and is used by more than 850,000 users every day.

DataSynapse's GridServer is a service execution platform that dynamically scales enterprise application services based on performance and business requirements. GridServer provides a simplified approach to enabling business critical application components to execute across the entire available computing infrastructure -- the 'grid'.

Following the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft reached another milestone with the release of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology that is a feature of select versions of Windows Server 2008. The nearly 1.5 million copies of the Hyper-V beta version that have been distributed demonstrate how customer interest in virtualization is moving from evaluation to production environment deployments.

Univa UD announced it has named industry veterans Alex Brown and Kent Purdy to lead its data center automation business division and retool its product suite. The announcement comes as Univa UD officially launches Reliance as its cornerstone product for service-based management of application delivery environments.

Egenera announced that BroadRiver Communications Corporation has chosen the Egenera BladeFrame system and Egenera vBlade software for its new hosted virtual server offering. BroadRiver combines the best of both worlds -- a full selection of products and services that can be customized to customer needs with prices for bundled services that are competitively priced. The customer's solution contains just the services they need, without having to pay a premium for not fitting into an inflexible 'package.' This flexibility enables BroadRiver to effectively provide customized solutions to many customers of different sizes, sectors and lines of business.

BLADE Network Technologies announced its 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet network virtualization switch for IBM BladeCenter. BLADE's new switch provides the ability to use six 1-Gigabit copper and three 10-Gigabit SFP+ fiber uplinks concurrently -- for 50 percent more bandwidth than alternative blade switch offerings.

VIRTERA is an independent Information Technology (IT) professional services and consulting firm delivering virtualization technology solutions and services to companies nationwide. VIRTERA's proven Virtual Operations Framework (VOF) methodology ensures successful and rapid adoption of virtualization technologies and an optimum return on organizations' IT investments. VIRTERA's team of certified IT architects and consultants develop, deploy and manage Virtual Infrastructure (VI) solutions designed to solve today's most challenging IT issues while its industry-unique vAssure Strategy group tests and analyzes virtualization trends across the entire virtual ecosystem.

SECUDE announced the release of FinallySecure 9.1 with Centralized Management to its Data Protection portfolio. FinallySecure is a hybrid software - or hardware - based Full Disk Encryption. FinallySecure enables early adoption and migration to the upcoming wave of hardware-based FDE technologies such as Seagate Momentus Full Disk Encryption (FDE) disk drives.

SoftLayer extends its solution set to include virtualization with the release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a next-generation virtualization hypervisor that allows a single physical server to be separated into multiple virtual machines that can run independent operating systems - Windows, Linux and others. As with all SoftLayer services, Hyper-V can be ordered through the customer portal and provisioned automatically along with a server's operating system or systems.

vmSight announced that the company was granted U.S. patent number 7,386,889 for its Connector ID technology. The patents applies to the technology vmSight uses to automatically, continuously and efficiently locate and track users, terminals and virtual machines in a virtual desktop deployment.

Trigence announced the appointment of Greg O'Connor as President and Chief Executive Officer. O'Connor, a software industry veteran, brings over 20 years of industry knowledge and technology vision to Trigence. O'Connor joins Trigence from Progress Software, where he was President and Founder of Sonic Software.

Specifically created for Citrix XenDesktop and with knowledge workers in mind, the all-new Wyse Viance high performance desktop appliances are designed to both maximize the user experience and minimize administration across a virtualized infrastructure. Wyse Viance desktop appliances immediately connect to Citrix XenDesktop sessions, delivering their users rich multimedia (such as smooth video and audio playback) decoded locally on the appliance, multi-display support, and broad USB peripheral compatibility that's virtualized in the data center through the built-in Wyse TCX software suite. In summary, Wyse Viance desktop appliance users gain simple, fast access to their virtualized desktops, their applications of choice and documents without compromising data security or performance.

Apani announced that EpiForce VM is now shipping. EpiForce VM is a software-based solution that secures corporate networks, containing both physical and virtual servers, from a single platform. EpiForce VM is part of Apani's comprehensive security software product family and leverages the latest platform of the company's flagship product EpiForce 2.5.

SemanticSpace announced its acquisition of 100 percent of Prolifics, a distinguished systems integrator specializing in IBM technologies. Prolifics complements SemanticSpace's offering with its high-value services focused around the IBM brand - making the combined entity a truly Global organization with a strong and balanced presence across the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific. Together Prolifics, SemanticSpace Technologies, and Arsin Corporation will operate as SemanticSpace Group, creating a new overall organization of 1500 employees with more than $100 million in revenue on a proforma basis.

Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities. Dr Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, Inc., will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

Vyatta delivers complete, ready-to-deploy, open-source networking solutions that make it possible for anyone to own an enterprise-class router/firewall/VPN for a fraction of the cost of traditional closed-source, proprietary products. By combining the features, performance and reliability of an enterprise-class router, firewall and VPN with the cost savings and flexibility of open-source solutions, Vyatta software enables customers to build routing and security solutions using hardware of their choosing, ensuring that the network will always meet performance requirements and scalability needs.

Embotics announced its U.S. expansion with a new office in Charlotte and the appointment of U.S. Sales Director, Adam Kurtz. The U.S. expansion is a result of customer and partner growth, helping to increase visibility as well as support of Embotics' virtualization management and automation technology deployments.

Parallels announced that its Parallels Automation solution now integrates with Secure64 DNS, giving service providers who use Parallels Automation the ability to easily manage Secure64 servers within their datacenters. Through the collaboration, Parallels Automation is able to offer a new option for service providers searching for secure and highly available DNS solution.

VMware announced it has completed the acquisition of B-hive Networks. VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive on May 28, 2008. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. With this acquisition, VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to enhance the VMware portfolio of application and infrastructure management products by offering proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within virtual machines.

Continuing to fulfill and expand the Cisco Data Center 3.0 initiative, Cisco announced new products and professional services that will help customers virtualize data centers for greater operational and energy efficiency. The new offerings make the virtual network a highly efficient platform for delivering data center services-accelerating, providing security, and orchestrating application delivery networks, servers, virtualized computing, and storage, while providing greater responsiveness and resource conservation.

Cisco Systems has released new products and professional services, designed to assist customers with virtualization efforts for data center operational and energy efficiency. The company states that the new offerings make the virtual network an efficient platform for delivering data center services - accelerating, providing security, and orchestrating application delivery networks, servers, virtualized computing, and storage, while providing greater responsiveness and resource conservation.

Egenera announced three new members to the Egenera Assured Solution Alliances program: Axeda, Micron Technology and Transitive. The Egenera Assured Solution Alliances program leverages a technical assurance process designed to optimize the interoperability of third-party software solutions with Egenera virtualization solutions. The relationships forged between Egenera's support organization and each member's support team create highly integrated, seamless service standards for joint-customer engagements.

Egenera announced it has named Christine Crandell executive vice president and Chief Marketing Officer. A technology veteran with over two decades of marketing and strategy experience, Ms. Crandell will spearhead the company's efforts to build its high standing position in the fast growing global market of data center virtualization solutions.

File sharing and collaboration are requirements for dynamic and fast growing businesses. Etelos announced Etelos Share, an enterprise-class service that enables any business to utilize a virtual server. Etelos Share brings a company's data onto a secure server that is accessible from virtually anywhere. This service provides backups, secure data storage and secure access to a company's files anywhere and anytime.

The demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current 'in house' storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Patrick Harr, CEO of Nirvanix, will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - a brand new adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

With the stock market crashing, or giving a good approximation of a crash Thursday, Yahoo, poor thing - well, it has behaved like a sick lost puppy, now hasn't it - announced a supposedly pressure-relieving reorganization just like its familiars in the press said it would. It is, as was widely observed, the company's third or fourth attempt in the last 18 months or so - one loses count after a while - to rearrange the deck chairs and supposedly prove it can stay afloat with Microsoft out of the picture.

Catbird is a pioneer in security and compliance for virtual environments. Via Catbird V-Security and the Catbird V-Agent virtual appliance, Catbird has full visibility and enforcement of the virtual network. Catbird compliance functionality includes enforcement of separation of duties; backup and secondary controls; and monitoring of VMs with corporate and regulatory policies. Catbird security protection includes vulnerability monitoring, automatic quarantine of suspicious network traffic and compromised virtual machines, trusted zones and IDP.