20 More Lofty Cloud Solutions

Cloud And Clear

Clearly there's no shortage of cloud solutions. Yesterday we presented 25 cloud products and services released in the past year alone. Here are 20 more, with potential opportunities galore.

Virtual LoadMaster

When numerous vCloud Air servers are in play and in demand, the Virtual LoadMaster VLM-5000 could be the ideal traffic cop. The appliance balances traffic from as many as 1,000 virtual servers created in VMware's public cloud, along with up to 500 physical servers to boot. Working as an extension to vCloud Air, the VLM-5000 can process as many as 10,000 SSL transactions per second and up to five Gbps of packet throughput, the company says.

Barracuda BaaS

Also extending VMware environments is Barracuda Backup-as-a-Service, a cloud-integrated appliance for backing up and protecting physical and virtual systems. For an annual fee, the service includes the appliance with unlimited cloud storage, firmware updates, replacement of failed hardware, and all software for backup and recovery. The service also includes Barracuda's Cloud LiveBoot for VMware, which CRN editors deemed one of the most innovative products of 2013.

Lifesize Cloud

Claiming an industry first, the makers of Lifesize Cloud say that the cloud-based collaborative solution allows people to connect over to video from their choice of laptops, tablets or smartphones and meet as if they're sitting in the same room. This is accomplished, says the company, through utter simplicity of its software and through its hardware -- Lifesize Icon. The solution supports major teleconferencing protocols and as many as 25 participants per call.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft wants Azure to be the cloud service of choice for the enterprise because of the company's "deep understanding of cloud solutions and on-premises technology." The versatile Azure platform enables rapid construction of cloud-based apps using numerous languages for deployment on either side of the firewall. New features include ExpressRoute, which enables private connections between Azure and on-premises technology, and Azure Files, which enables a single file share from multiple VMs.

Windows Intune

Microsoft's venerable Intune cloud-based PC and mobile-device management solution recently added to its list of supported devices. Now admins can use Intune to manage devices running Android and Samsung Knox, iOS 7 and Windows Phone 8.1. Other new device-management capabilities include remote lock and password reset, as well as the option to manage mobile devices completely through Intune without integration with System Center Configuration Manager.

Power BI For Office 365

Also from Microsoft is Power BI for Office 365, a set of self-service tools for garnering business intelligence from data stored in Excel and publishing it to the cloud through SharePoint. According to claims, the solution simplifies with just a few clicks the analysis and propagation of big data through a user-friendly Office-like front-end. There's also a natural-language query feature that interprets questions, analyzes data and delivers the answer visually in an interactive graphic.

Mimecast Services For Microsoft Office 365

Once the decision is made to migrate from on-premise Exchange servers to the cloud, Mimecast Services for Office 365 might be of some help. For a nominal per-user fee, the tool safely migrates an organization's accounts and data from their physical Exchange server to Microsoft's cloud-based suite without interrupting email traffic.

Nextiva VoIP App

The Nextiva VoIP App is a business-communication system that combines video, audio and instant messaging and can be accessed from anywhere and any device, including those running Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows. Features include presence information, do not disturb, call forwarding, simultaneous ring, chat rooms, synced call logs and contact lists across devices, and the ability to transfer calls from one device to another.

Virtual Compute Appliance

The Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance enables rapid deployment of any x86 application or workload to its off-the-shelf software-defined infrastructure. According to the company, the system permits solution providers or IT administrators to "go from power on to production in about one hour and deploy ready-to-run virtual machines" for Linux, Oracle Solaris or Windows applications in just a few minutes. Additional nodes can be added as workload demands dictate.

Piston OpenStack

In just four short years, OpenStack has risen like the rockets its founders at NASA send skyward. Launching in its own tragectory is Piston OpenStack, which automates the creation and deployment of an entire private cloud environment onto x86 servers with little or no operations support. Piston claims that its new product can go from bare-metal to a fully operational OpenStack-based private cloud with compute, storage and networking in less than a day and requires no other software or per-server installation. Management of this hyper-converged hardware architecture, stateless Micro-OS and advanced clustering is provided through self-service interfaces and APIs. The tool also provides elastic resource scaling and fault tolerance.

OnQ Hybrid Cloud

Disaster recovery is made quick and easy with Quorum’s onQ Hybrid Cloud Solution, which combines cloud-based storage with on-premises hardware that keeps local data in sync with its cloned image in the cloud. In the event of a failure, the cloned image is ready and available to execute from the Quorum cloud "in minutes, not days," claims the company. Cloned images also can be tested at any time and do not rely on the appliance for execution.

Red Hat CloudForms

Cloud platforms change constantly. Helping organizations keep pace is Red Hat CloudForms, a single management infrastructure that the company says can "manage all your environments, platforms and service delivery models." The platform provides virtualization management to monitor and track capacity, optimization, resource usage, and workload and access policies across private or hybrid cloud systems. Operational controls include dashboards, a policy editor, alerting, approval workflows and reporting. Version 3.1 adds support for OpenStack and Microsoft private clouds, and extends integration with Amazon Web Services, VMware and Red Hat clouds.

SteelCentral Services Controller

Why pay for ADC capacity you don't need? That's what Riverbed is rhetorically asking when it plays up the benefits of SteelCentral Services Controller for SteepApp 1.3, an enhancement to the company's application delivery controller (ADC) that automates deployment, licensing and metering of app-delivery services. Designed for software-defined networks and data centers, the tool essentially provides each app with a dedicated ADC that controls costs and can allocate hourly charge-backs, thanks to seamless integration with third-party cloud, service orchestration and provisioning tools. Think of it like an ADC-as-a-Service tool.

CloudMapper

The links and interrelationships between apps, SDNs, and public and private clouds and the like can get pretty hairy pretty fast. That's where CloudMapper comes in. It enables organizations to visualize and monitor performance of IT services on premises, in public clouds or both. CloudMapper automatically discovers and maps all of the interdependencies that exist, and allows IT organizations to spot and resolve the root cause of service issues in seconds.

Scribe Online

Building or migrating apps to the cloud doesn't have to mean losing integration with local data and resources. Scribe Online is a cloud-based integration platform that simplifies the embedding of integration hooks within applications using a slick visual development environment. Solution providers can use Scribe Online to integrate, migrate or replicate data in their own apps or as a value-added service for modifying client apps.

Anesthesia Cloud

For health-care workers and solution providers, Anesthesia Cloud is a portable anesthesia electronic health record (EHR) that has been certified for Meaningful Use, a recent government mandate to improve quality, safety and efficiency, and reduce health disparaties. A cloud-based solution for iPad, the tool replaces paper documentation with structured electronic data, and can alert the clinician in realtime if documentation is incomplete or inaccurate, or if there is additional clinical information to consider.

Enterprise Migration Suite

Enterprise migration projects require expertise and planning and are fraught with unforeseeable challenges. Removing some of the mystery is SkyKick Enterprise Migration Suite, which automates Office 365 migration and provides guidance for every phase of the project. The suite’s four integrated modules provide staged migration and help eliminate interruptions to business.

IVA: Intelligent Voice Automation

Do your telephony customers' callers end up in IVR jail? Intelligent Voice Automation (IVA) is a voice-activated artificial intelligence system that processes natural-language speech in the cloud to complete self-service calls. Intended for midsize and large businesses, the system can integrate with ERP, SQL or other customer databases in realtime or through batch updates, implements SIP or analog PBX, and supports call-agent software APIs. It even can intelligently recover from dropped calls, for example, picking up customer service incidents right where it left off.

BitCan

For a quick and dirty file or database backup that works across public and private clouds, try BitCan. This secure backup tool works with MongoDB and MySQL databases, as well as Linux, Unix and Windows file systems on physical or virtual servers with encryption and no client-side agent or applet. A simple browser-based interface makes quick work of individual or scheduled backups with progress bars and health indicators for prior incremental backups. The network-aware tool can be set to back up only during down times.

Cloud Phone

Designed for the business with one to 10 employees is Voxox Cloud Phone, a cloud-based PBX that can route self-chosen local or toll-free numbers to any landline or mobile phone, or to a professionally recorded IVR system. Calls also can be routed to multiple phones and voicemails delivered as audio or text to email.