Roundup: Interxion, Rackspace, Internap

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

Interxion selected by ACTIV Financial. Interxion announced that ACTIV Financial, a leading global provider of fully managed low-latency market data solutions, will house its ticker plant and aggregated market data feeds at Interxion's City of London data center.  “Legacy market data systems simply cannot offer the speed and flexibility traders require to keep pace with today’s exploding data volumes and market volatility,” said Frank Piasecki, president of ACTIV Financial. “Combining Interxion’s prime City of London location and proximity to the markets with ACTIV’s ultra low-latency market data solutions means we can offer customers fast, cost-effective access to global market data helping them maximize their trading operations.”

Rackspace Offers Tools for Visual Studio: On Wednesday Rackspace Hosting (RAX) announced the Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, a Visual Studio toolkit that enables the 6 million .NET developers worldwide to seamlessly extend development and deployment to Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows. The tools allow developers to deploy applications written with Visual Studio tools directly to Rackspace’s cloud infrastructure, and will reduce deployment and provisioning time, the company said.

Internap selected by Encenta. Internap Network Services Corporation (INAP) announced that encenta, a leading global consulting firm specializing in advanced projects involving implementation of SAP solutions has selected Internap for using its Performance IP and managed hosting solutions. The 'anytime, anywhere' deployment will support ecenta's hosted contact center based on SAP Business Communications Management.  “Internap’s combination of high-performance IP routing and Managed Hosting provides the uptime and connectivity that enables a positive user experience for ecenta’s customers, thereby ensuring that its differentiated delivery model performs at the highest possible level," said John Freimuth, vice president of Managed Hosting at Internap.

Cisco and Citrix build desktop virtualization. Cisco (CSCO) and Citrix Systems announced they are working together to deliver a new combined desktop virtualization solution that will make it easier and more cost effective for businesses to deploy high-definition virtual desktops and applications to all users across the enterprise.  Combining Cisco's unified computing with technologies from Citrix like FlexCastTM and HDXTM, the new new solution will be called Cisco Desktop Virtualization and is available immediately through joint channel partners. "The combined solution we're announcing today represents a significant milestone in delivering on our vision to simplify desktop computing for enterprises around the world," said Gordon Payne, senior vice president and general manager, Desktop division at Citrix. "The combination of industry leading technology from Citrix and Cisco will help further drive down the costs of desktop virtualization and speed deployments through a high-performance and scalable architecture."  Representatives from the two companies discuss the integrated solution in this YouTube video.