Cisco System has a new Vice President of Marketing: Peder Ulander. According to his LinkedIn profile Ulander was Vice President of Product Marketing, Cloud Platform Group at Citrix for the last two years, he will be starting to work for Cisco next Monday and he will be managing Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group.
Peder Ulander is an expert in marketing and strategy, having started his career at Symantec as Product Manager and Business Development Analys about 20 years ago, he then served as Director of Marketing at Sun Micro Systems. Ulander was VP of Strategy at Pure Networks, when the company was acquired by Cisco Systems.
Year: 2013
VMware adds a new member to its Board of Directors
Yesterday, September 10, VMware announced the appointment of Pamela Craig, former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Accenture, to its board of directors.
With more than 34 years of industry experiences Pamela Craig served Accenture in various operational and finance roles, now after her retirement she has been selected to come after Renee James, who served as a member of the VMware mergers and acquisitions committee since September 2007 and informed of her resignation on September 5, to focus on her responsibilities as President of Intel Corp.
Craig, in her 34 years history at Accenture, was one of the key members who focused on rigorous financial discipline that has contributed to Accenture’s performance. Ms. Craig’s long experience in the market will help contributing with a deep understanding of the challenges technology companies face in a rapidly changing environment. Further to her new role in VMware, Ms. Craig is also a director of Akamai Technologies, where she is currently the chair of the Audit Committee.
Cisco announces acquisition of Whiptail
Cisco System Inc. just announced to have the intention to acquire solid state memory systems company: Whiptail, for approximately $415 millions in cash plus incentives for the acquisition. The parties expect the acquisition to close during the first quarter of 2014.
The acquisition is a strategic move as Cisco is aiming to improve its Unified Computing System application performance adding to the solution a solid state memory into the UCS’s fabric computing architecture, the scope is to integrate business critical applications, such as virtualized, Big Data, database, High Performance Computing and transcoding workloads, delivering optimized performance.
Release: HyTrust Appliance 3.5
Half a month after its Series C funding HyTrust released version 3.5 of its HyTrust VMware vSphere-compatible appliance.
HyTrust Appliance, once deployed in a vSphere environments, integrates with Microsoft ActiveDirectory to leverage pre-existing users, roles, and groups, provides two-factor authentication solutions support (like RSA SecurID or CA AuthMinder), the ability to lockdown privileged local accounts and to generate temporary passwords to enable time-limited privileged account access. The appliance also provide a set of pre-configured templates and the ability to create custom ones in order to assess VMware Hosts’ security configurations.
The new features introduced in version 3.5 provides administrator privileges monitoring protecting private clouds and virtualized data centers from unauthorized VMs copy, deletion or misconfiguration.
This new version also introduce a new “monitor only” mode that allows observation and logging of administrative activity before configuring granular roles and access policies and the support for VMware’s Security Hardening Guide 5.1.
Paper: What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.5 Platform
VMware has released a technical paper titled: “What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.5 Platform“.
The paper, which contains 22 pages and reached version 1.3, traces new features and enhancements introduced with version 5.5 of vSphere, announced at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco.
Release: Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2.18
Oracle has released a maintenance release, version 4.2.18 for its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. The release can be installed on top of VM VirtualBox 4.2 which was released in September last year. The update can be downloaded from the VirtualBox binaries page.
Release: XenApp 6.5 Connector SP1 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager
XenApp 6.5 Connector for Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager was released in March of this year after a collaboration project between Citrix and Microsoft lasted several months, with the aim of extend Configuration Manager range of control outside domain-joined machines to other devices including Linux, iOS and Android leveraging on the XenApp Connector itself and Citrix Receiver capabilities.
With the XenApp Connector, administrators can:
- Orchestrate the process of deploying applications to XenApp servers, farms, and worker groups from within the Configuration Manager console, both directly for traditionally managed farms, as well as for streamed farms when used in conjunction with Provisioning Services
- Extend the Configuration Manager user-centric and rules-based application delivery capabilities to deliver applications to users in the most appropriate manner for the device they are using: MSI, App-V, or XenApp
- Enable user self-service of XenApp hosted applications from both Receiver and the System Center Application Catalog
- Ensure high availability by optionally leveraging the Power and Capacity Management Concentrator to gracefully orchestrate the deployment of applications and software updates while minimizing downtime for users
Now Citrix announced, through its official blog, the release of the first service pack that delivers the following improvements:
Free eBook: Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2
Just a few days after the announcement of the release of Windows Server 2012 R2, TechNet sponsored a preview release of a free eBook called “Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2” written by Keith Mayer, Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft focused on Windows Infrastructure, Data Center Virtualization, Systems Management and Private Cloud.
The eBook bundled with the download of the Windows Server 2012 R2 Evaluation Kit, allows its reader to learn about the new features in Windows Server 2012 R2, among them there have been improvements when building a Private Cloud foundation on topics such as Virtualization, Storage, Networking, High Availability and Disaster Recovery.
Release: VMware Workstation 10
Together with the release of VMware Fusion 6, VMware released version 10 of its counterpart in desktop virtualization platforms for Microsoft’s OSes: Workstation.
This new release supports Windows 8.1 virtualization and enhances Unity mode to work with its new UI.
Release: VMware Fusion 6
As expected, at a short distance from the release of Parallels Desktop 9, VMware released version 6.0 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion.
The new release is already optimized for OS X Mavericks and leverages, in virtualized Microsoft OSes, its new features like multi-screen support, AirPlay and dictation.
Like Parallels Desktop this new release supports the brand new Windows 8.1 allowing Metro applications to be visible in Launchpad, Applications folder or in the Dock in Unity mode.
