Aurasma Passes 16,000 Customer Mark

HP Autonomy’s augmented reality platform, Aurasma 2.0, has passed the 16,000 customer milestone and added new cloud and social features from SXSW. Aurasma allows people to use rich images instead of text or QR codes to turn search into an action-oriented interactive experience. Customers including GQ, Marvel, Subaru of America Inc., the Austin Chronicle, and USPS, are planning to use Aurasma 2.0 in upcoming marketing campaigns. More

AAA Insurance Exchange Uses HP to Manage Growth

The AAA Northern California, Nevada, & Utah Insurance Exchange has selected HP to support its mainframe environment as it expands from a regional to a national provider of insurance products to AAA members in 23 states plus Washington, D.C. HP will continue augmenting the exchange’s staff to maintain applications and administer databases in support of membership, policies, claims, and other business operations. More

HP Helps Molson Coors Move to Cloud

HP Enterprise Services is working with Molson Coors Brewing Company to transform the brewer’s finance and HR processes and systems to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve access to critical information. HP will support Molson Coors’ migration from regional support to a more cost-efficient and flexible HP cloud environment that allows the brewer to scale quickly as business needs change. More

Tintri Announces VDI Reference Architecture for VMware Horizon View 5.2

VM-aware storage platform provider Tintri Inc. has announced a reference architecture for a high-performance, low-cost VDI infrastructure supporting VMware Horizon View 5.2. The architecture has been validated in the VMware labs for 1,000 simultaneous VDI users at “Ultrabook” performance levels from a single Tintri storage appliance. The tests were run with a single Tintri VMstore T540 and sufficient server and network infrastructure to support the user population. More

Kawasaki Uses Tintri for Optimal VDI Performance

Kawasaki Motors Manufacturing Corp. USA has deployed Tintri VMstore to support its growing VDI project that is currently running more than 200 virtual desktops, with plans to double that number. Kawasaki had used a legacy storage system from Dell but suffered significant performance issues as its VDI deployment approached 100 virtual desktops. It selected Tintri after evaluating several alternatives. More

IBM Helps Black Point Arts Provide Faster IT Services through City Cloud

Black Point Arts Internet Solutions GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany,  has chosen IBM Flex Systems to support an expansion of its cloud infrastructure. It will also use IBM City Cloud, an initiative designed specifically to help MSPs quickly deliver new services and products to their midmarket clients. More

UK Bank Creates New Services using IBM, SAP, and Axxiome

The U.K.’s Nationwide Building Society today released FlexPlus, its newest current account product, built on the Society’s new banking platform delivered by IBM, SAP AG, and Axxiome.  Nationwide has transformed its technology infrastructure, enabling it to create innovative products and services to meet the changing needs of customers. FlexPlus, its first packaged account offering a range of benefits including worldwide travel insurance, mobile phone insurance, and UK and EU breakdown assistance is the latest in a series of these new services. More

Big Bang Meets Big Data as South Africa, ASTRON, and IBM Partner to Build Foundation for a New Computing Era

Square Kilometer Array (SKA) South Africa, a business unit of the country’s National Research Foundation, has partnered with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) and IBM in a four-year collaboration to research extremely fast, low-power, exascale computer systems. The effort is aimed at developing advanced technologies for handling the massive amounts of data that will be produced by the SKA, one of the most ambitious science projects ever undertaken. The SKA is an international effort to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, to be located in Southern Africa and Australia, to research the history of the universe back to the Big Bang. It constitutes an ultimate Big Data challenge. More

IDC Ranks NetApp as Top Branded Storage OS

IDC has ranked NetApp data ONTAP as the #1 branded storage OS for 2012 within the open networked disk storage systems market. IDC’s Branded Storage OS results measure the value of the worldwide external disk storage systems market by revenue and new capacity shipments, based on the underlying storage OS in use. Data ONTAP finished 2012 with 15.8% revenue share and 21.4% capacity share, leading both categories. More

NetApp to Participate in Piper Jaffray,  Pacific Coast Future of IT Conferences

NetApp’s VP of the Data Lifecycle Ecosystem Group, Tim Russell, will participate in fireside chats at the Piper Jaffray Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. ET and the Pacific Crest Future of IT Conference on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m.  ET.  Audio webcast recordings of the presentations will be available on the NetApp site after the conferences. More