Roundup: Cisco, Savvis, Viridity, Embrane

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

Cisco acquires Versly. Cisco announced that it has acquired privately-held Versly.  Versly integrates collaboration capabilities via a plug-in into Microsoft Office applications, simplifying the way people work by enabling more effective collaboration around content in documents, spreadsheets, presentations and email. As one of Cisco's top five priorities, collaboration is what Versly offers - directly in Microsoft Office applications. The acquisition will expand the Cisco collaboration architecture to change the way businesses work and Versley employees will be integrated into Cisco's Collaboration Software Group (CSG). "With this acquisition we're enhancing our collaboration offerings and improving the user experience by integrating social technologies within the business applications individuals and teams use at work," said Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager, Collaboration Software Group, Cisco. "Furthermore, the integration with Versly will drive productivity improvements for organizations and their knowledge workers, many of whom are among the 600 million Microsoft Office users."

Savvis Symphony announces VPDC Premier. Savvis, now a CenturyLink company, announced a new Premier service profile for their Symphony VPDC (Virtual Private Data Center) enterprise-class cloud solution. As a top-tier service, the Symphony VPDC Premier combines a high degree of resource commitment and priority, security, redundancy, support and performance needed for large-scale, essential enterprise applications. With assurance of application performance on a continuous basis in the cloud, customers can optimize their infrastructure in many dimensions, including compute services, bandwidth, storage and security. Some of the attributes reserved for the Premier service include three-tier information life-cycle management, not being subject to CPU over-subscription scenarios, fully managed 24/7 virtual servers, and pooled, fixed server load balancers. "From our survey of the cloud market, we don't believe there is another provider that can offer the kind of robustness, dependability, efficiency and peace-of-mind represented in our Premier offering," said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at Savvis. "The Premier option broadens the range of Symphony VPDC service profiles to meet evolving market demands and makes our public cloud applicable to service needs ranging from test/dev to turnkey virtual data centers."

Viridity to incorporate Intel DCIM. Viridity Software announced that Intel Data Center Manager SDK will be incorporated into their EnergyCenter software. “The relationship with Intel and the addition of its technology into our EnergyCenter software is a critical next step as it provides the ability to communicate directly with the hardware and to expand the capabilities we can offer, as servers continue to become more sophisticated,” said Michael Tresh, Director of Product Management and Marketing at Viridity Software. “Simply put, Viridity can now provide customers with the ability to monitor and manage data center assets at a much more granular level, as well as offer a head-start on supporting and managing future technology.”

Embrane secures $18 million. Distributed software platform Embrane announced that it has received $18 million in Series-B financing, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Embrane delivers the first distributed software platform that powers high-performance, elastic, virtual network services on-demand. Currently in Beta and set to launch later this year, Embrane will use the funding to continue to innovate in the area of virtual network services as well as to ramp up sales and marketing.  “While most of the attention around building cloud infrastructures has focused on virtualizing compute and storage, the network has been long overlooked,” said Pete Sonsini, partner at NEA. “Until now, the network has been far too rigid, expensive and limited in its ability to deliver multi-tenancy options at scale – particularly when it comes to network services. Embrane has tackled this and will enable both cloud service providers and enterprises to procure, provision, grow, and shrink network services on-demand."