Articles

 Dimension Data got to be a $5 billion VAR by providing complex IT infrastructure solutions on a global scale. But with the advent of cloud computing, the solution provider needed to make some radical changes internally to help position the company for the future. 

 According to Dimension Data’s group general manager Microsoft solutions, Peter Menadue, the company has reached yet another milestone in its long-standing relationship with Microsoft

 Dimension Data, a $4.7 billion ICT services and solutions provider, announced today that it has achieved the Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner status, held by fewer than one percent of Microsoft partners around the world. Combined with Dimension Data’s existing Microsoft Hyper-V Private Cloud partner status, it reinforces the company’s position around providing clients with architectures and roadmaps for adopting cloud computing, at a pace that suits specific client needs. 

 Microsoft Windows Azure (Chicago datacentre) has topped the list of 25 cloud service providers ranked over one year’s global performance. Google Apps ranked second.

 The Cloudsleuth site compares the leading cloud platforms of the PaaS and IaaS services providers around the world in terms of response times and availability.

 Microsoft’s Windows Azure has come out on top in a year’s worth of Cloud speed tests, beating Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Rackspace and 20 others.

 Microsoft Windows Azure tops the list with the best performance, followed by Google App Engine ranking second, GoGrid in third place, OpSource in fourth and Rackspace ranking fifth.

 Managed-hosting veteran and now enterprise cloud-computing provider Savvis is trying to woo even more big-name customers with its new Symphony Database service that features Oracle Database 11g and Microsoft SQL Server with their usual cumbersome enterprise licenses.

 In January, Verizon bought the pioneer cloud company Terremark for $1.4 billion. Three months later, CenturyLink announced it would buy managed services host (and cloud infrastructure provider) Savvis for $2.5 billion. In June, a subsidiary of Japan's telecom giant, NTT, bought Opsource to establish a cloud solutions business unit. 

 OpSource, which recently got bought by Dimension Data, has opened a new IaaS cloud hosting facility in Santa Clara, California, giving its enterprise, service provider and SaaS clients a West Coast location for both development and production cloud environments. The company said it would lower the network latency of its West Coast clients and provides a secondary back-up site for existing clients. Multiple locations can be managed through a single web-based UI. OpSource can also provide a single bill.

 Like it or not, industry leaders like Facebook are shaping consumers’ expectations for all the websites and web applications they interact with. Trends like mobility and cloud computing are driving a seismic shift—where consumers, as opposed to companies and their IT teams, are in control of how, where and when they’ll connect to a company.

 OpSource’s sparkly new Silicon Valley data center should cut latency times and boost performance for enterprise and service provider customers on the West Coast.

 OpSource, the newly acquired Cloud and managed-hosting business of the global IT services company Dimension Data, launched a data center in Santa Clara, California, which will support its offerings to enterprises, service providers and Software-as-a-Service clients.