MS to 'lead with cloud'

Microsoft executives pledged to "lead with the cloud" on Thursday, acknowledging that offering business customers a choice between packaged software and cloud-based services had been a mistake, reports PC Mag.

Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner pledged to personally change the company's course toward cloud computing, which he said would actually be a way toward introducing more "on premise" software to customers.

Turner made the comments as part of Microsoft's annual analyst meeting at its corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, just days after the company reported record revenues for its latest quarter.

Sybase, maker of SQL Anywhere, has unveiled version 12 of its mobile database, states Database Journal.

Some of the features and improvements with this version are support for spatial data, language extensions, performance improvements, support for the iPhone, and central administration of remote databases, to name a few.

This sophisticated embedded database can support thousands of users. The database can hold hundreds of gigabytes of data and process up to 20 000 transactions per minute.

Networking, storage and virtualisation vendors Cisco, NetApp, and VMware revealed what they say is the first certified end-to-end fibre channel over Ethernet (FCOE) storage network for VMware server environments, Computerworld reports.

In related news, Oracle is also offering its own end-to-end certified FCOE solution.

"What this means for customers is they are able to build on a consolidated data centre fabric with the ability to mount their servers and virtual machines to any type of storage device," says Soni Jiandani, Cisco's vice-president of marketing for server access virtualisation.