We all know change is constant, especially in technology. Look at Toshiba, a world leader and innovator in high technology. This week, the company made an interesting move and announced the opening of Toshiba’s first datacenter in Europe, located in France.
Toshiba Cloud & Solutions Division is directed at professional markets, public and private-sector companies, and entities within the Toshiba Group. The creation of this datacenter is in line with the Group’s goal of accompanying its clients right from the design of IT products and solutions through to hosting related services tailored to specific needs.
The datacenter also hosts firms located in other regions, illustrating Toshiba’s broader ambitions.
“Developing this first datacenter in Rhône-Alpes highlights the importance of the Grand Lyon project for Toshiba and embodies the group’s investment in the development of its Cloud offering,” explains Philippe Hartmanshenn, Managing Director of Toshiba Systèmes France’s Cloud & Solutions Division.
“This allows us to move both internal and external client resources and services offsite to our high-security servers – located in France. We also plan to use the datacenter to develop and integrate business solutions for our clients from every sector.”
I felt the need to highlight this as it shows the importance of the cloud, as an important tool to innovation regardless of industry.
So who are the Top 10 players of cloud computing services that has been making waves recently?
1. Google
Google Cloud is the approach of Google to provide enterprise solutions to companies. Google Cloud Platform allows you to build applications and websites, store and analyze data on Google’s infrastructure. Companies can build websites, applications and service on this platform. Apart from these Google also offers Google Apps for businesses, which is now growing. Google has recently unveiled a “patent pledge” that it hopes will shield cloud software and big data developers from litigation. The pledge, which is like a non-aggression pact, covers ten patents related to Google’s MapReduce technology.
2. Microsoft
The foundations of the Cloud OS are Windows Server and Windows Azure, complemented by the full breadth of our technology solutions, such as SQL Server, System Center and Visual Studio. Together, these technologies provide one consistent platform for infrastructure, apps and data that can span your datacenter, service provider datacenters, and the Microsoft public cloud.
3. Citrix
Citrix Cloud Platform provides the latest and most advanced open source software platform to build highly scalable and reliable cloud computing environments. Citrix offers three form of cloud computing – Hosted public cloud, Hosted private cloud and On-premise private cloud; Recently as per Info-Tech Research Group, Citrix Cloud platform is announced the Champion in Cloud Management Vendor Landscape. Citrix recently announced the availability of CloudPortal™ Business Manager 2.0, a cloud services delivery platform that enables enterprises and service providers to unify the commerce, user management, provisioning and operational aspects of a cloud into a single cloud interface for delivering anything as a service (XaaS).
4. Joyent
San Francisco infrastructure-as-a-service provider, Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications. Recently with the combined efforts of Joyent and Xeround (a cloud database company), Joyent customers can now access free and highly available with zero management MYSQL database. Xeround relational database is only available for Joyent Cloud platform.
5. CenturyLink
CenturyLink, 3rd largest telecommunication company in USA and an established leader in providing networking solutions and cloud hosting services. CenturyLink recently announced that it’s providing 100 Gigabyte per sec (Gbps) networking solutions and will continue to provide best cloud infrastructure and IT hosting solutions. Savvis, a subsidiary of CenturyLink has collaborated with VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace to provide wide variety of applications packages to its clients from various software and hardware vendors.
6. Amazon
Amazon EC2 is an Infrastructure as a Service Cloud Computing Platform provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which allows users to provision or deletion of virtual computers. Amazon is one of the true innovators in Web-based computing, offering pay-as-you-go access to virtual servers and data storage space. Recently Amazon announced AWS CloudHSM, a new service enabling customers to increase data security and meet compliance requirements by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS Cloud. The CloudHSM service allows customers to securely generate, store and manage cryptographic keys used for data encryption in a way that keys are accessible only by the customer.
7. IBM
IBM Smart Cloud – IBM’s enterprise-class public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)delivers secure and scalable hosted IT infrastructure with on-demand access to virtual server and storage resources. BM recently announced global availability for its cloud service on five continents—plus a new center opening in Spain—based on its industry-leading sourcing business to host SAP applications and other core operations. Now clients can turn to cloud computing for enterprise applications while reducing the overall cost of IT and at the same time, expanding online access and investing in innovative analytics, social business and mobile computing.
8. Salesforce
Salesforce.com’s CRM solution is broken down into several broad categories: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Collaboration Cloud and Custom Cloud. Saleforce is aiming be the first cloud computing company to hit the $4 billion annual revenue by 2014 and you can assume this from its 3rd quarter earnings. Salesforce will concentrate on social media, mobile computing and real time in a project it refers to as Cloud 2.
9. Rackspace
Rackspace, an open cloud company is delivering enterprise-level hosting services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world since 1998 and have grown to serve more than 190,000 customers. Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies for each customer’s specific need and delivers it as a service via its commitment to fanatical support. Rackspace recently opened the doors to its Open Cloud Academy by launching a pilot training program. The Open Cloud Academy is an educational program designed to provide students with affordable IT certifications, specifically around open cloud technologies.
10. Verizon Terremark
Verizon started its cloud computing services as a part of its enterprise solutions. Its infrastructure services have helped many of the world’s top enterprises improve IT performance and evolve business processes. Verizon Terremark sets the standard for IT deployments with advanced infrastructure and managed service offerings that deliver the scale, security, and reliability necessary to meet the demanding requirements of enterprises and governments around the world. Terremark launched its Enterprise Cloud Private Edition a single-tenant environment and its OS- and network-agnostic strategy shows the telco cloud understands the value of accessibility and integration.
Hayden Richards is Contributor of IntelligentHQ. He specialises in finance, trading, investment, and technology, with expertise in both buy-side, sell-side. Contributing and advising various global corporations, Hayden is a thought leader, researching on global regulatory subjects, digital, social media strategies and new trends for Businesses, Capital Markets and Financial Services.
Aside from the articles, interviews and content he writes for IntelligentHQ, Hayden is also a content curator for capital markets, analytic platforms and business industry emerging trends. An avid new media explorer Hayden is driven by a passion for business development, innovation, social business, Tech Trading, payments and eCommerce. A native Trinidadian, Hayden is also a veteran, having served with the Royal Air Force Reserves for the past 10 years.
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