This Week in the Cloud: Workspace Computing in the Spotlight
The past week has seen a lot of updates from a lot of companies spread across every corner of the cloud, but one segment in particular took the spotlight with a number of significant developments – the workspace cloud.
Collaboration is taking on a bigger and bigger role in organizations everywhere, and is one of the more prevalent aspects of the virtual office. Among them is NASA, who entered into yet another deal with HP. The $2.5 billion contract has a four-year base period with 2 additional 3 year optional extensions, and is designed to deliver improved collaboration tools to NASA employees. The services and products Hewlett-Packard will deliver will serve approximately 60,000 users.
This HP development comes alongside a similar product update from another company. This week, the latest update to cloud-based yaM meeting collaboration tool was released. YaM, currently a web-based application only, now features integration with Google accounts as well as functionalities, and is expected to hit iPad and other tablets within the next few months.
The third major development this week coming from the virtual office space is VMware’s acquisition of Sliderocket – a PowerPoint developer. The service stretches way beyond just presentation making, and will be used by VMware to offer presentations-as-a-service to its customers.
The virtual office has seen a lot of developments this week, but the rest of the cloud hasn’t been left behind either. Multiple sources report that Apple has acquired the domain name iCloud.com from Swedish cloud services provider Xcverion for $4.5 million. This domain may be used to offer users iTunes services or even a rebranded version of its existing cloud product, MobileMe. Around the same time we’ve learned of this acquisition, cloud-based video encoding services reported it has raised $2 million in venture capital after seeing tremendous revenue growth.
Last but not least, we’ve had some news from HP. The company rolled out its Strategic IT Advisory Services suite, which is designed for the electronics giant’s highest paying customers.
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