Panasonic has ushered in the cloud computing era by adopting IBM’s  LotusLive suite for of collaboration and communication. LotusLive suite enable Panasonic workforce to communicate and collaborate more efficiently with their global network of customers, partners and suppliers through a cloud-based community. Panasonic will adopt IBM’s LotusLive.com services for Web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging and project management. The company will also implement LotusLive Connections for business social networking between employees, partners and suppliers to find and share the right insight when needed. As part of this investment in open IBM technology, Panasonic will migrate employees from Microsoft Exchange or other collaboration software to LotusLive for email, calendaring and contact management. Panasonic will present more details at IBM’s annual Lotusphere Conference January 17 – 21 in Orlando, Florida.

Mitsuhiro Aoyama, Vice President Corporate Information Systems Company, Panasonic Corporation Siad,

LotusLive is an integral vehicle for our employees to truly function as a globally integrated enterprise. It will allow us to work securely with our extended enterprise of Panasonic partners and customers as if they are all in the same location, bringing the promise of quicker, more efficient teamwork and commerce worldwide.

Sean Poulley, Vice President, IBM Cloud Collaboration,Said

Panasonic would only make this strategic move with the assurance that their daily business workflow will be safeguarded from costly interruptions and intrusions as millions of existing LotusLive users know. When responsible businesses such as Panasonic move to the cloud, they want innovative technologies without compromising security, reliability or privacy. That’s why they choose IBM.

Microsoft introduced a new version of Windows Server 2008 called Windows Server 2008 Foundation for SMB with users 15 or less. Initially it will be available in 40 countries. Windows Server 2008 Foundation is available through Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) only.Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM are going to release the Windows Server 2008 foundation server sometime in the second half of this year, according to Microsoft.

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IBM and Amazon teamed up for providing pay-as-you-go IBM development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products, all running on Novell’s SUSE Linux on Amazon EC2. Developers can also use their existing licenses of IBM software with Amazon cloud computing platform.  IBM Passport Advantage Customers can install and run IBM Programs in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment using Program licenses obtained from IBM on a Processor Value Unit (PVU) basis.  The table below lists the number of PVU licenses required per IBM Program for each Amazon EC2 Instance Type currently available as of the table publish date. Charges for the Amazon Web Services EC2 service are separate and remain the responsibility of the customer.

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The IBM (International Business Machines Corp.) is going to launch a virtual desktop applications based on Linux that runs on a backroom server and doesn’t require Microsoft software. The virtual Linux Desktop will cost around $59 to $289 per user. The price will depend upon the software & services selected by you. IBM offers special Software package for corporate customer, they can save ~ $800(max) per user, instead of using Microsoft’s costly package such as Microsoft’s Vista operating system, Office suite and collaboration tools. So IBM has planned a lot to cut the Microsoft’s Corporate Customers but it’s all depend on the success of IBM’s  Virtual Linux Desktop. One advantage of that is- thin clients don’t get viruses, and Linux servers make it much harder for viruses to do a lot of damage. 

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IBM opens one Cloud Computing data center in India. Apart from this data center IBM has opened three other cloud computing data centers also. These for new cloud computing data centers will help enterprises, universities and governments test Web-based services and applications. The Society for the Promotion of Excellence in Brazilian Software (SOFTEX) and Vietnam Technology and Telecommunications (VNTT) are some of the early customers for the new cloud computing centers. With these four new data centers IBM has total 13 data centers.

Ponani Gopalakrishnan, vice president of IBM’s India Software Lab, Said

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology, and issues such as usage models need to be studied. The cloud computing model allows businesses and consumers to remotely access computers over the Internet to access services, IBM said. Using shared infrastructure like a cloud computing center allows businesses to manage and provision IT infrastructure dynamically depending on the requirements of business. The new center in India is positioned as an experimental platform for businesses and academic institutions to deploy and test applications.  While the platform would be offered free to academic institutions that IBM partners with, businesses will be charged. There are a number of production-scale applications using cloud computing available. Academic institutions in India are expected to work on using cloud computing for e-government applications and researching deployment models for cloud computing. Inadequate communications bandwidth in emerging economies like India will not be a bottleneck for the adoption of cloud computing. There are a lot of mobile applications built around cloud computing, for example, that run on less than broadband-grade connectivity.

Source : IBM- Cloud computing spreads in emerging countries

Sun Microsystems announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, the world’s most popular open source database. This announcement reaffirms Sun’s position as the leading provider of hardware and software platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

with this announcement, Sun demonstrates its commitment to support customers and ISV’s who choose to implement open source solutions, complementing the strong history and continued partnership with commercial database ISV’s including Oracle, IBM DB2, Sybase and others.

MySQL has over 400 blue chip customers and is used by virtually every Web 2.0 and e-commerce company. This acquisition represents substantial new go to market potential for Sun and ISV partners seeking high growth opportunities.

At Sun, we understand your success, our success and that of our customers are tied together. We constantly look for ways to deliver more value to our partners and grow mutual business opportunities. The Sun Partner Advantage Program for ISV’s connects you to Sun technology, sales and marketing support–giving you the power to innovate, collaborate and accelerate growth.