UPDATED 15:42 EDT / MAY 14 2014

Today in Cloud : The old guard riding the hybrid cloud gravy train

cloud_computing_2014_0003The hybrid cloud is becoming big business as the underlying technologies mature and vendors drive better value propositions for bridging disparate on- and off-premise environments. Leveraging their large install bases and existing mindshare among CIOs, the old guard of the IT industry is spearheading adoption in the traditional enterprise, with IBM at the forefront as usual.

At its Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Tampa, Big Blue is rolling out new solutions aimed at helping customers take advantage of hybrid computing throughout the entire value chain, from lines-of-business to the ecosystem. The IBM Multi-Enterprise Relationship Management  platform, one of the products the vendor  has announced, provides a unified environment for managing shared processes across the full spectrum of business communities an average company participates in. The software can help users reduce the time it takes to sort out the tedious administrative work associated with establishing partner relations  by up to 90 percent, the vendor boasts, while streamlining the process of onboarding new customers and suppliers.

The platform is complemented by a Reporting and Analytics extension for IBM’s Sterling business data integration and collaboration tool that adds the ability to monitor all transactions taking place in an entreprise’s ecosystem. Continuing the centralized visibility theme, the vendor is also introducing enhanced versions of the vendor’s core lifecycle management solutions that it says provide a more complete view of compliance and risk at the organizational level. And completing the hybrid cloud puzzle is a new managed file sharing capability that allows users to share files regardless of the end-point they happen to be using at any given moment.

The new and updated products were announced in conjunction with IBM’s first major publicized hybrid cloud customer win. The vendor reports that it has landed a $600 million deal with NiSource, an existing client, to supply the Indiana-based gas giant with the components it needs to build out and support  a company-wide hybrid computing environment. The seven-year contract will encompass the delivery of both on-premise solutions and cloud services provided by SoftLayer, the vendor said.

The growing enterprise interest in hybrid computing is the result of several technology trends converging in the workplace, among them mobility, which has made the need to achieve balance between flexibility and security even more urgent – and difficult – than before. Dell promises to make that monumental task a little simpler with sixth iteration of its KACE K1000 Systems Management Appliance, which is among the first such solutions to address the fact that the definition of connected devices is no longer limited to just phones and tablets.

Unveiled this morning, the platform extends centralized management to “all” connected devices, the hardware maker claims, including printers, switches, routers and other infrastructure components. That is made possible by an installation-free approach that eliminates the need to download a local client while still enabling policy enforcement through automated software blacklisting and malware scanning.

HP, Dell’s arch nemesis, has also recognized the growth opportunities in the Internet of Things. To help companies cope with the vast amounts of data generated as a result in the explosion in connected devices, the vendor is debuting a set of tools meant to help IT organizations operate more effectively under the weight of all that information.

The new HP Backup Navigator utilizes data analysis technology from Autonomy to make it possible for admins monitor their disaster recovery environments in near-real time and predict problems before they occur. The tool is joined by a new version of the company’s Data Protector recovery software that recovers virtual disks faster and has been made  compatible with its StoreOnce backup appliances as well as competing storage systems from EMC. Plus, it provides  network discovery and alerting capabilities for Microsoft environments via a new System Center Operations Manager plug-in.

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