Cloud News: Microsoft, SOASTA, EarthLink

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

SOASTA brings CloudTest to CollabNet CloudForge.  SOASTA announced that CloudTest will be offered as the first mobile and web performance testing service as part of CollabNet’s new CloudForge hybrid cloud development platform. CloudTest delivers functional test automation and performance testing, and CloudForge offers an enterprise-grade dPaaS offering, and underpins CollabNet’s strategy to lead the adoption and growth of Enterprise Cloud Development. "CollabNet understands that delivering a complete platform for Agile ALM and DevOps requires functionaltest automation and realistic scale performance testing," said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. "CloudForge brings together all of the critical services needed to rapidly build cloud-based applications in the enterprise."” CloudTest is available today as a free download via CollabNet App Center.

EarthLink announces three packaged cloud solutions. EarthLink announced the launch of three new EarthLink Business IT Services packaged solutions. These packages are designed to simplify cloud computing so businesses can leverage the benefits of virtualization services. The Cloud Launch Pad, the Cloud Entry Bundle, and the Secure Email Bundle enable customers to economically partner with EarthLink to complement their internal IT resources by leveraging a comprehensive mix of IT Services and security experts in an enterprise class data center environment. The entry bundle is for customers that have not virtualized or have limited IT capital or operating budget and the Cloud Launch Pad is designed for organizations that want to leverage the benefits of a virtual environment or that currently run VMware environments and need additional elastic computing capacity. “With these carefully designed bundles, EarthLink has removed many of the real or perceived barriers for customers of any size to explore what the cloud can mean for their business,“ said Barbara Dondiego, EarthLink Chief Marketing Officer. “We often hear from customers that they want their provider to act as an extension of their internal IT team, helping them become more productive and effective. These bundles are a toolkit that enables that to happen easily.”

Microsoft selected by Media Valet.  Microsoft (MSFT) announced that content services and photography provider VRX Studios turned to Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud platform, Windows Azure, to replace its costly, unscalable, server-based digital asset management system and, in the process, developed one of the world’s first 100 percent cloud-based digital asset management systems. Built from the ground up on Azure, MediaValet can scale in real time to accommodate its customers’ daily storage, bandwidth and computing requirements as well as easily and cost-effectively scale over time. The Media Valet digital asset management system is available in data centers throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. "We turned to Windows Azure because it gave us the tools, the infrastructure and the support to solve our short- and long-term business challenges,” said Davd MacLaren, founder and CEO of VRX Studios and now of MediaValet. “As a platform-as-a-service cloud offering, Azure lets us focus all our resources on building the solution we required and left building, managing and maintaining the global infrastructure that we required entirely up to Microsoft.”