Cloud Computing image via Shutterstock

This week’s roundup is full of big companies looking to put their own stamp on industries like cloud computing. Read on to find out which ones are involved and more!

1. MSPexcellence aims to help cloud computing service providers, wannabes – Lynn Haber (SearchSystemsChannel)

Looking to become a cloud service provider? Lynn Haber talks about the new cloud advisory group MSPexcellence, which provides a community for solution providers who want to become a cloud computing service provider.

2. Software quality assurance testing: First mobile steps – Matt Heusser (SearchSoftwareQuality)

Software testing expert and ITKE blogger Matt Heusser gives users several ideas on how to jump start software quality assurance testing for mobile devices.

3. EMC, Intel unveil Hadoop distributions, but how many is too many? – Jack Vaughan (SearchDataManagement)

With EMC and Intel entering the big data field with their new distributions of Hadoop, Jack Vaughan looks to see if there’s any room in an already crowded field.

4. The advantages of cloud computing must be clarified to be implemented – Harvey Koeppel (SearchCIO)

As more enterprises start turning towards the cloud, Harvey Koeppel says CIOs need to be clear on chosen cloud applications before they’re implemented.

5. VMware preps vCloud-based public cloud service – Beth Pariseau (SearchCloudComputing)

VMware is looking to throw its name into the cloud service industry with its vCloud-based public cloud, but many industry experts believe this is a ‘Hail-Mary’ pass to compete with AWS.

Events image via Shutterstock

Australia, England, Puerto Rico and Spain…IT events are springing up all across the world in February! See if you can make any of these great conferences.

1. Kaspersky Threatpost Security Analyst Summit (February 3-7, San Juan, Puerto Rico)

2. Parallels Summit 2013 (February 4-6, Las Vegas, Nevada)

3. Apps World North America (February 7-8, San Francisco, California)

4. TechTarget: Leveraging SAP HANA in-memory analytics for unparalleled speed, insight and performance (February 7, Houston, Texas)

5. Everywhereelse.co: The Startup Conference (February 9-12, Memphis, Tennessee)

6. Finance Transformation & CFO Forum 2013 (February 12-14, London, England)

7. Women 2.0 Conference 2013 (February 14, San Francisco, California)

8. 17th Annual International IT Service Management Conference & Exhibition (Pink13) (February 17-20, Las Vegas, Nevada)

9. Wireless Without Limits (February 18-23, New Orleans, Louisiana)

10. HP 2013 Global Partner Conference (February 19-21, Las Vegas, Nevada)

11. MODELSWARD 2013 (February 19-21, Barcelona, Spain)

12. TechTarget: CW500 Club (February 20, London, England)

13. VMware Partner Exchange 2013 (February 23-28, Las Vegas, Nevada)

14. Gartner Business Intelligence & Information Management Summit (February 25-26, Sydney, Australia)

15. TechTarget: Desktop Virtualization 2013 (February 26, Boston, Massachusetts)

16. TechTarget: The New Rules of Backup and Data Protection (February 26, Toronto, Canada)

17. TechTarget: Building Storage Systems to Support Virtual Environments (February 28, San Jose, California)

We’ll be sharing IT events each month here on the Enterprise IT Watch blog. Got an event to add to our list? Let us know via Twitter (@ITKE) or email. Going to one of these events? Share your takeaways (and photos) with us!

Much of the IT action was in San Francisco this week as VMworld 2012 was in full swing, but there’s a whole other world out there, and plenty of cloud and big data hype to fill it. Here are some of the week’s best quotes from around the industry.

 “Is this an honest maneuver? Do they want to drive OpenStack forward? Or is it a Trojan horse?”
- Piston Cloud Computing CEO Joshua McKenty, assessing VMware’s surprise move to join the open-source cloud service as a Gold Member this week. OpenStack has long been seen as a competitor to VMware, but some think the company has realized its less than ideal standing in the cloud market.

“I don’t even know what the ballpark number for a server is — for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”
- Daniel Gross, co-founder of Cue, one of many companies using Amazon Web Services for its computing needs and apparently saving a lot of money in the process. The company got some major love for its cloud services from the New York Times this week, and recently introduced reserved instances to add to its established on-demand model.

“The reality is that people’s expectations of what is needed are rapidly maturing.”
- Outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz, talking about how the virtualization game has changed (and Microsoft is still behind) during VMworld 2012. See more of what he had to say about why his company is still the leader in this VMworld video – and read more meaty virtualization quotes from the show over at SearchVirtualDesktop.com.

“It’s like asking people in 1995 if they think that this newfangled ‘Internet’ thing is inflated or not.”
- Laura Teller, chief strategy officer for Opera Solutions, LLC, on whether the hype around big data is justified. Her take: That’s the wrong question to ask.

Follow the SearchServerVirtualization team as they cover the latest news from VMware’s annual conference.

Disclaimer: All videos presented in the “YouTube IT Video of the Week” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com community managers and staff for entertainment purposes only. They are not sponsored or influenced by outside sources.

VMworld 2012 entrance (Instagram photo by colinsteele)

If you hadn’t noticed, VMworld 2012 is in full swing, and it’s kind of blowing up the interwebs (at least, the tiny corner of the interwebs that we inhabit). It’s not a challenge to find information about what’s happening in San Francisco, but finding the best information? That’s another story. To ease the virtual pain, we’ve cobbled together a list of what we think are the best VMworld resources. Got one to add? Let us know in the comments.

VMworld2012.com – A one-stop shop for official event info, social feeds, pictures and more. Make sure to check out the official blog feed, which includes missives from various bloggers around the world who are covering the event.

SearchServerVirtualization.com – News, analysis, tweets and videos from the TechTarget team onsite at the Moscone Center. It’s all here – and be sure to check back for the results of the Best of VMworld 2012 awards.

VMworld 2012 Twitter list – Face it, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with the barrage of tweets using the various event hashtags (#vmworld, #vmworld12, #vmworld2012). Stop trying, and instead follow our curated list including only the best tweeters from the event. Let us know (@ITKE) if there are great accounts we’re missing; we’ll be creating a list of the best tweets/quotes from the event at the end of the week.

Throughout VMworld I was asked again and again, “What’s the most exciting thing you’ve seen?”. And while there were a lot of great tools on display (check out SearchServerVirtualization’s Best of VMworld), the one that sold me after just a few minutes was VMware’s Octopus. I convinced J.J. Zhuang to give me an extended tour of the package, the video of which I’ll post soon, but it looks great – much better, in fact, than the Project Octopus VMware CTO Steve Herrod demonstrated that same morning during his keynote.

First off, Octopus looks and acts a lot like Dropbox: Corporate users install a small app, sign in, and their files magically sync into the Octopus folder. That kind of syncing is a very hot area at the moment, but I haven’t seen another corporate company actually succeed at it until now, and this area, it really does need to be absolutely seamless if Dropbox is to fully succeed. If it doesn’t, as Herrod noted during his own keynote, users (even users who should know much better, like the IT crowd in attendance that almost all copped to using the service) will keep on using a service that has serious security holes.

Full disclosure: I am one of those people.

But Zhuang explained that security was baked in from the very beginning, and more importantly ultimate control lies with IT, not a third-party cloud provider. You can install Octopus servers on your own machines (preferably virtualized: It was designed from the ground up to place nicely with the rest of VMware’s suite), and layer on as much or as little security as you need. Third-party service providers can also host it for you, giving you the benefits of both shiny consumer-like service coupled with a long-standing partner you trust.

Second, it has great mobile versions tightly integrated with the rest of VMware’s suite, making using it with the other corporate products easier than not using it, another way to ensure that whether users are on the road or at the desk, they stick to the proscribed and protected corporate route rather than the consumer DIY approach.

Third, and what had me really excited, was that the web access of Octopus spotted some very basic, but very nicely integrated, collaboration features: You can roll back or compare versions, quickly share files with a co-worker, and even comment on files outside of the file itself. In short, a pared down version of SharePoint, but one that looks and works beautifully.

Full disclosure: I use – and deeply hate – SharePoint.

It looks like VMware has really nailed an almost zero-friction collaboration suite that will set the groundwork for recapturing a lot of the ground lost to consumerized applications while giving IT administrators the flexibility and control they need.

But perhaps what I’m most excited about is the team behind Octopus. Zimbra, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and then sold to VMware last year, has a track record of clever touches that just make sense, often in a direction that the rest of the industry isn’t really moving. Zhuang, who joined Zimbra before the Yahoo! acquisition, said most of the original technical team is in place and that while they’re continuing to build on the Zimbra mail product, Octopus has been the major focus the past four months.

I can’t wait to see how this tight little package develops, but for now it’s in private beta: You can sign up for more information, and I’ll be posting video of Octopus in action shortly.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

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The demo he gave looked great: Apps were responsive, alerts from one OS popped up on the other’s notifications, and switching back and forth was a relative breeze. The concept of a dual-mode work life/personal life phone isn’t new, but VMware might have the first credible take at making it a reality: The “work” side of the phone is completely encrypted and can be remotely wiped by IT.

The two biggest questions that remain in my mind are, like with many of VMware’s ambitious new launches:

• How well will this work compared to not running a virtualized OS? It’s an extra layer of complexity and software on already limited devices, and there’s been speculation that the phone processors could drag.
• How well can VMware partner to bring these phones out into the market?

The second question is important: VMware and LG first partnered about a year ago, no commercial products that support the technology are shipping yet, and Krishnamurti said it was impossible to pinpoint when MVP devices would hit the market due to ongoing negotiations with carriers. And while a VMware employee proudly touted that LG and Samsung were the two largest phone makers, that’s not necessarily an indicator of future success.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

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This isn’t the first case of Microsoft playing dirty, something VMware has grown accustomed to in the past few years. What are your thoughts on the feud and the ad? Does Microsoft have a case or are they blowing smoke?

Let me know in the comments section or send an email directly to Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

With Red Hat KVM and RHEL, Whitehurst also observed that companies won’t have to worry about extracting their value from the cloud. If, for example, you don’t like your cloud provider, or you just want to move from say a private cloud to a public one, the Red Hat KVM-based PaaS will let you shift cloud providers easily.

That is not the case, according to Whitehurst, with companies that use VMware-based solutions. In the long run, by 2016, corporate users will be moving to Red Hat and other OVA partners from VMware solutions, Whitehurst believes.

Whitehurst also sees VMware as being more of a pure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), ala Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS), play. IaaS’ are fine, as far as they go, but Whitehurst believes that Red Hat’s KVM-based solution simply offers more power and ease of use to corporate customers.

The friendly competition shouldn’t be surprising: Red Hat’s been a corporate maverick its entire existence, and all the trend lines point to the deeper levels of control, flexibility and modularity that virtualization provides, particularly as businesses look to balance portability and security against the numerous benefits cloud giants like Amazon and SalesForce.com can offer.

The big question is whether Red Hat’s approach, leveraging open-source Kernel-based Virtual Machine, can trump the fast-expanding portfolio of products VMware seems to be unveiling daily. In fact, the company’s major marketing for this particular event – Go public, go private, go hybrid – tout that same flexibility and portability.

Have some thoughts on which virtualization technology is – or should – win out? Let me know at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Image is original to this blog and is licensed under a Creative Commons share alike license. It is based on VMware’s copyrighted logo.