Partnerships accelerate convergence

Cisco, EMC and VMware, three of the industry's largest platform vendors, are introducing pre-packaged virtual environments in the hopes of consolidating their lofty positions in the virtualisation market and extending them to the cloud, writes CTO Edge.

The new offering, which is being called the Vblock Infrastructure Packages, is a set of pre-configured server, storage and virtualisation management tools sold as a private cloud infrastructure.

The packages currently come in three flavours tailored for different market segments, but can be modified by customers after purchase.

HP has released a suite of data centre products and services aimed at tidying up the sprawl caused by legacy architecture and technology, states ZDNet UK.

The suite, called HP Converged Infrastructure, consists of management systems for the virtualised data centre - both hardware and software - and a new network management fabric.

Among the Converged Infrastructure suite's technologies is the new infrastructure operating environment aimed at helping CIOs use automation to build data centres that can respond quickly to business needs.

Israeli voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) company VocalTec Communications is in advanced talks to buy Israeli convergence start-up company, OutSmart, for about $5 million, according to Globes.

OutSmart has been for sale for over a year, after going through a difficult time organisationally and financially. Neither VocalTec nor OutSmart would comment on the report.

Outsmart has developed fixed-mobile convergence and intelligent network-based solutions.