Cloud News: Salesforce.com, Intel, SOASTA, Wyse

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Salesforce.com invests in Japan to grow Cloud 2. Salesforce.com (CRM) announced its latest strategic investments in Japan. The goal of these investments is to drive the continued growth of Japan’s Cloud 2 industry and accelerate the availability of locally developed social, mobile, and open cloud computing services. Salesforce.com will invest in a Tokyo data center with NTT Communications and further the development of Ruby programming language in collaboration with Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto. Salesforce.com plans to make an investment of approximately 223 million yen (approximately $2.7 million) in Toyota Media Service Co., which oversees the Toyota Motor Corporation’s global cloud platform development. "Salesforce.com remains committed to Japan and to growing the Cloud 2 economy globally," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Through our investments, we hope to inspire and incent Japan’s innovators to transform Japanese businesses with social, mobile, and open cloud computing."

Intel creates AppUp on hybrid cloud.  Intel (INTC) launched the Intel AppUp Small Business Service, an innovative service running on the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform that enables server manufacturers, software vendors, and service providers to offer small businesses key advantages of cloud computing with applications and data running on their own premises. The new offering at Intel consists of a server, a catalog of prepackaged small business applications from a range of software providers, and Intel-developed software to securely manage and track use of the application software.  "We developed the Intel AppUp Small Business Service to build a foundation on which the industry can innovate and provide small business customers with a more convenient, secure, and high-performance experience," said Bridget Karlin, general manager, Intel Hybrid Cloud. "Small businesses are the ultimate beneficiaries because this service gives them a compelling new option for improving their business results through IT.This Intel-based solution comes ready to use, and doesn't require their own IT staff or the capital cost of a server." Available now to qualified IT service providers and MSPs in North America and India the platform includes a Lenovo ThinkServer TS200v and a white box server.

SOASTA launches two CloudTest editions.  SOASTA announced that it has added two new editions to its line of CloudTest solutions: CloudTest Enterprise Edition and CloudTest Standard Edition. The Enterprise edition is for performance testing multiple applications across global enterprises while the Standard edition addresses the market need for more agile and affordable performance testing from within the firewall. "With the addition of CloudTest Enterprise and CloudTest Standard, we are adding ‘bookends’ to our current offerings — a comprehensive performance testing solution for enterprises, as well as a more agile solution for internal-only performance testing teams. Regardless of the edition used, all CloudTest customers get the scalable testing with real-time resolution that SOASTA is known for," said SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos.

Wyse selected by top-ranked hospital for cloud client.  Wyse announced another successful customer implementation at Seattle Children's Hospital in Seattle, WA. "We wanted the technology to be so fast, pervasive, and intuitive for our staff that it was almost invisible to our patients," explains Mike Kindle, Sr. Director of Enterprise Architecture at Seattle Children's. "As soon as we identified VDI-basd desktop as our approach, we knew we wanted Citrix and Wyse as our partners.  The partnership between the companies and the integration of their technologies made us confident that they would work together to help us get the solution we wanted." The selected solution combines 3,000 Wyse Xenith next-generation zero-client devices with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp.  The hospital estimates that over the next five years this implementation will save them an estimated $1.2 million of IT staff time, $6 million in PC replacement costs, and $1 million in energy cost.