http:// 2012-11-26T04:41:00Z 2012-11-26T04:41:00Z untitled-release-213

Mercurial and PharmaNext Launch Educational Event Compliance Solution for the Australian Pharmaceutical Industry Sydney, Australia, November 26, 2012 – Mercurial and PharmaNext, two Sydney-based companies, have launched MiEvents, a business solution available as a mobile application or via browser, to help Australian pharmaceutical companies streamline the collection and reporting of educational activities, which are subject to mandatory reporting with Medicines Australia (MA). Pharmaceutical companies are currently mandated to report their educational event spend to MA twice a year, a process that can be time consuming and unproductive for the individuals involved. MiEvents removes the challenges of data collation, routine data submission and reporting. Regan McCracken, Director, Commercial Effectiveness, Mercurial, says, “A new code of conduct planned for January 2013 will set rules for far more granular and regular reporting, which will prove a real pain for companies that aren’t prepared for the changes. We can now help them to swiftly navigate with MiEvents. “MiEventswas designed through a rigorous consultation process with industry stakeholders and MA and provides pharmaceutical companies with a secure, automated system that will save a significant amount of time, money and reduce the risk of non-compliance – the cost of which has risen significantly.” The service will be deployed via MiPortal®, Mercurial’s industry leading business intelligence and reporting tool, which services around 20 clients and 2000 users within the pharmaceutical industry. Gary Prince, Director, PharmaNext says, “part of the value-add is that the service will make what is mandatory reporting a much more fluid and continuous process, helping clients to understand on an ongoing basis where and how they are investing in educational meetings. “Using the MiEvents app, entries will be made and validated in real time on a mobile device from anywhere. If done on an ongoing basis, companies will be able to proactively gauge their specific performance and manage their activity to within accepted standards, well before reports are put together, with the added guarantee of an audit trail for the Code of Conduct Report Submission.” McCracken concurs, “MiEvents will reduce the current churn and heavy burden of reporting within the industry and significantly reduce the risk and cost of non-compliance.” Image – MiEvents iPad App [click here to download .jpg]About Mercurial Mercurial provides consulting and services to the pharmaceutical industry, specialising in sales, marketing effectiveness and business intelligence solutions. Mercurial was ranked at #58 in BRW Fast 100 2012 which celebrates the fastest growing companies in Australia, and last year won the 2011 APRMG Supplier of the Year, recognised for exceeding client expectations specifically around service levels. For more information, visit www.mercurial.com.au About PharmaNext PharmaNext is a niche sales and marketing audit company, focused on helping pharmaceutical companies make and implement successful decisions. For more information, please call Gary Prince on 0432 229 978. Media Contacts: Veronica Colvin Watterson Marketing Communications +61 (2) 9929 753 Veronica.colvin@watterson.com.au Commercial Contacts: Regan McCracken Mercurial +61 (0) 415 615 972 rmccracken@mercurial.com.au Gary Prince PharmaNext +61 (0) 432 229 978 gprince@pharmanext.com.au

2012-09-20T06:03:00Z openstack-launches-as-independent-foundation-begins-work-protecting-empowering-and-promoting-openstack

The following media release announcing the launch of the OpenStack Foundation was distributed overnight. Sydney based Tristan Goode, CEO of Aptira, provider of managed hosted services, public cloud infrastructure and enterprise private cloud solutions, has been voted onto the Board of Directors. Tristan states the following on his appointment: “I am honoured to be given the opportunity to sit on the OpenStack Foundation Board. It is an outstanding opportunity to promote OpenStack in every possible way, not least by driving open dialog and community cohesion. After all, we’re building world-class technology, we need to be building a world-class community to support it, ubiquitous and full-featured just like OpenStack itself,” said Tristan Goode, CEO of Aptira. About Aptira Aptira is a leading provider of managed hosted services, public cloud infrastructure and enterprise private cloud solutions. Aptira is a technology consultancy that delivers high-level solutions to meet the most demanding of IT needs. The company, known for its cost-effective, agile and highly responsive service, works with a wide range of organisations in finance, retail, utilities and government and manages complex hosting scenarios for rich media producers. Aptira is the acknowledged leader of the OpenStack community in Australia. The company is committed to the idea that what it is doing for their customers today will be mainstream tomorrow. For more information, visit aptira.com or follow them on twitter at @aptira. Aptira Media Contact:Veronica ColvinWatterson Marketing Communications(02) 9929 7533veronica.colvin@watterson.com.au ------------------------------------------ September 19, 2012 08:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time OpenStack Launches as Independent Foundation, Begins Work Protecting, Empowering and Promoting OpenStack Foundation Provides Shared Resources and Long-Term Home for Fastest Growing Open Source Cloud Community with over $10M Committed Funding from Industry Leaders AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--OpenStack ® today announced the launch of a new, independent OpenStack Foundation that will continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud software. As the independent home for OpenStack, the Foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfil the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform. The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users, and the entire ecosystem by providing a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public and private OpenStack clouds, enable technology vendors targeting the platform and assist developers in producing the best cloud software in the industry. "The launch of the OpenStack Foundation is not only an important milestone for our community, but a defining moment for the open cloud movement," said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. "When you look at what this community has done to innovate and make cloud technologies accessible, as well as make open source synonymous with cloud computing, you understand why huge technology industry leaders and users across the world are placing their bets on OpenStack. The opportunity for OpenStack to become the open source standard for cloud computing is real." Like the software, membership within the OpenStack Foundation is free and accessible to anyone. Members are expected to participate in the OpenStack community through technical contributions or community building efforts. Growth of the OpenStack platform continues on an upward trajectory. Founded in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA with the support of 25 companies and a few dozen developers, OpenStack has since grown to more than 180 participating companies and 550 contributing developers producing six software releases in a little over two years. To date, Rackspace has been leading and investing in community management activities, but a year ago the company announced plans to establish an independent Foundation, recognizing the community was thriving and ready for a permanent home. Rackspace has now transitioned management activities and contributed the OpenStack trademark to the new Foundation, creating even greater opportunity for diverse contributors and a vibrant ecosystem necessary for long-term success. "Since its inception, we knew a foundation was the ultimate goal for OpenStack,” said Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace. “Today, we are proud to finalize the process by donating the assets, handing over community management and giving the OpenStack trademark to the OpenStack Foundation.” In April 2012, intended Platinum and Gold Member companies formed a Drafting Committee to produce a set of Bylaws and legal documents for community review. In July 2012, 5,000 individuals and eighteen companies ratified the Foundation Bylaws and legal documents by signing up as members. Currently, the Foundation has eight Platinum Members including AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE, and thirteen Gold Members including CCAT, Cisco, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, Yahoo!, with Intel, NEC and VMware joining in September. Additional new companies who have begun supporting the Foundation as corporate sponsors include Brocade, eNovance, Gale Technologies, GridCentric, Huawei, Internap, Metacloud, PayPal, RiverMeadow Software, Smartscale Systems, Transcend Computing and Xemeti. The Individual, Gold and Platinum members each make up a third of the Board of Directors, which provides strategic and financial oversight of Foundation resources and staff. Alan Clark, Director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE, was elected Chairman of the Board, and Lew Tucker, Vice President and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, was elected Vice Chairman of the Board. “Our priorities and vision for the Foundation include strengthening the ecosystem, accelerating adoption and empowering the community to deliver the best cloud software out there,” said Alan Clark, Chairman of the Board. “OpenStack’s popularity and industry momentum calls for a solid operational foundation. The new board of directors is feverishly working to ensure that the Foundation is structured with the right executive leadership, staff, fiduciary models and controls all while looking to the priorities and vision for the Foundation. I am honored to serve and support this tremendously innovative community.” “The OpenStack Foundation represents a new era of establishing open source standards for cloud computing based on multi-vendor collaboration,” said Lew Tucker, Vice Chairman of the Board. “The evolution of OpenStack to an independent foundation is a landmark achievement that reinforces the growing momentum and industry support that has galvanized around this organization and its mission.” Separate of the Board, the fully elected OpenStack Technical Committee – an evolution of the Project Policy Board – will steward the technical direction of OpenStack software development and includes elected Project Technical Leads from each of the core software projects. Tim Bell, Operating Systems and Infrastructure Services Group Leader at CERN, was appointed by the Board of Directors to help establish a new User Committee, created to represent a broad set of enterprise, academic and service provider users with the Technical Committee and Board of Directors. Led by Executive Director, Jonathan Bryce, the Foundation is hiring 10-12 employees who, under the strategic direction of the Board, will help carry out the OpenStack mission. Specific responsibilities include coordinating the project's infrastructure, such as systems for testing the software at scale, community building activities, and managing the OpenStack trademark, which was transferred from Rackspace following the first board meeting. Meet the new community leaders and learn more about the Foundation at the next OpenStack Summit, October 15 – 18, in San Diego, CA. About OpenStack ® OpenStack is open source software for building clouds. Created to drive industry standards, end cloud lock-in and speed cloud adoption, OpenStack is a common, open platform for both public and private clouds with the support of over 180 industry leading companies, more than 5,500 Individual Members and 300,000 downloads. The open source cloud operating system enables businesses to manage compute, storage and networking resources via a self-service portal and APIs on standard hardware at massive scale. For more information and to join the community, visit www.OpenStack.org. Canonical "The OpenStack Foundation is leading the cloud industry in developing the most cutting-edge enterprise and carrier class cloud platform available. Ubuntu has been the reference operating system for OpenStack since the beginning and, today, more enterprises and carriers trust Ubuntu and OpenStack to deliver mission critical platforms than any other cloud platform. Canonical, as a founding platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation, contributes to the project's governance, technical development and strategy, while helping enterprises, carriers, their customers and their users benefit from the open technologies that are making the cloud more powerful, simple and ubiquitous." -- Kyle MacDonald, VP Cloud at Canonical CCAT “As a Taiwan based member, CCAT is excited to be a part of the OpenStack Foundation launch because it marks an important milestone for the global community. CCAT is committed to connecting Asian members with the global user community and promotion of the OpenStack standards. CCAT looks forward to contribute to the OpenStack ecosystem for both developers and users,” said Dr. Tzi-cker Chiueh, the Secretary General of the Cloud Computing Association in Taiwan (CCAT). Cloudscaling "Cloudscaling is delivering the most reliable, scalable and production-grade solution for building elastic infrastructure clouds based on OpenStack technology. It's the contributions of thousands of developers that have made OpenStack the only core cloud technology capable of delivering the agility, performance and economics that the IT industry has been expecting from cloud all along." -- Randy Bias, co-founder and CTO at Cloudscaling Dell “Dell’s commitment to OpenStack began more than two years ago as a way to help make the open source cloud more accessible to our customers, and has resulted in Dell innovations like our OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and Crowbar, to help speed and ease deployment of cloud clusters,” said John Igoe, executive director of Dell open source cloud and big data solutions, and OpenStack Foundation board member. “The choice for an open source cloud is an important enabler for companies to build the cloud they need, and the formation of the OpenStack Foundation is an important milestone to signify the relevance of open source to customers.” DreamHost “DreamHost has a vision to enable the world’s entrepreneurs and developers to create, share and prosper on the Internet,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. “We passionately believe that open source software, and open, compatible cloud services, are the key to the next wave of growth and innovation worldwide. OpenStack is the right platform and community to enable this shift, and the formation of the OpenStack Foundation is another step in demonstrating the long term commitment of the community to this mission.” HP “Our common goal was to establish a governance model that would enable developers to innovate on the OpenStack platform, while maintaining the technical meritocracy of the OpenStack project,” said Eileen Evans, vice president and associate general counsel, Cloud Computing and Open Source, HP and board member of the Foundation. IBM "Today's announcement ushers in a new era for the cloud interoperability, enabling OpenStack to drive deeper industry collaboration and accelerate momentum for critical industry standards," said Angel Diaz, vice president, Software Standards at IBM. "Users in all industries can be confident betting on OpenStack with its growing number of members, strong user community, maturing technology and growing adoption." Intel "Enterprises and service providers deploying OpenStack are choosing Intel Architecture as the foundation of their clouds to optimize the performance, scalability, and security of their infrastructure," said Doug Fisher, corporate vice president, Software and Services Group at Intel. “Intel helps ensure that the building blocks of OpenStack, including operating environments such as Linux, KVM, and Xen, take full advantage of Intel Architecture. We are pleased to join the OpenStack Foundation as a Gold member to enable innovative cloud usage models in open source, foster the adoption of OpenStack, and help build an vibrant ecosystem around this open source project." Mirantis “Today’s announcement isn’t just a big milestone for the OpenStack community, but is a milestone for the open source industry as a whole. The long-term impact of OpenStack on the entire IT industry cannot be overestimated,” said Boris Renski, Co-Founder of Mirantis and OpenStack foundation board member. “We, at Mirantis, feel privileged to be a part of this movement.” Morphlabs “Morphlabs has supported open source since our inception, and OpenStack closely aligns with our principles and vision of how cloud computing infrastructure should function,” said Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo. “It’s gratifying to see service providers’ continued adoption of the platform, and it echoes the tremendous response we’ve seen throughout the community.” Nebula “Nebula believes that OpenStack is key to our goal of enabling all enterprises to easily, securely and inexpensively deploy large scale private cloud computing infrastructures. We are proud to be a founding Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation,” said Jon Mittelhauser, Nebula's VP of Engineering. NEC "The value of OpenStack is not only the features of the cloud computing platform, but also the openness of the OpenStack Foundation and its Open Source development community,” said Tsugikazu Shibata, Senior Manager, OSS Promotion Center, NEC Corporation. “We believe its openness will create innovation for cloud computing by sharing knowledge and experiences among the OpenStack ecosystem. We will continue to help its ecosystem grow by joining the OpenStack Foundation and leveraging our experiences." NetApp “The OpenStack Foundation is an important step in open source cloud computing. NetApp, as a charter member of the Foundation, is proud to continue its longstanding support of open source initiatives in the IT industry,” said Jeff O'Neal, senior director, Solutions Integration Group, NetApp. "NetApp is already contributing code into OpenStack projects, where our expertise in Service Provider-grade Data Management and Storage is accelerating adoption of the OpenStack platform. This work furthers NetApp’s commitment to helping organizations of all sizes achieve faster time-to-value in the cloud, and improve IT flexibility and efficiency for both public and private cloud deployments.” Piston Cloud Computing “Over the last two years the OpenStack community has grown at a pace none of us could have predicted when we started the project at NASA and Rackspace. And today the excitement surrounding OpenStack is greater than ever before,” said Josh McKenty, co-founder and CEO of Piston Cloud. “Several members of the Piston Cloud team have been involved with the OpenStack project since day one and we look forward to working with the Foundation to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.” Rackspace ”As a driving force behind OpenStack, Rackspace helped grow the community to where it is today, and now with the amazing support from more than 180 member companies, the Foundation is ready to take flight,” said Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace. “As a member of the board, we look forward to working with the other members to continue building OpenStack to be the de facto standard open source software for public and private clouds. We believe OpenStack and the OpenStack ecosystem is truly disrupting enterprise IT and we hear about it from our customers who are using our public and private cloud options available on OpenStack. This is an exciting time for OpenStack, and Rackspace is happy to be a large part of such a momentous movement." Red Hat "Today's establishment of the OpenStack Foundation is a win for open source and open cloud computing. Red Hat has been actively involved in OpenStack - the third in contributions to Essex - and has joined the Foundation as a Platinum Member to help drive the success of the technology. As the leader in open source, Red Hat is also underway in delivering the industry's only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution incorporating Red Hat's trusted support, ecosystem and technology expertise. We look forward to continued collaboration with the OpenStack community." -- Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat VMware "VMware is pleased to be able to support our customers deploying OpenStack as a member of the Foundation,” said Mathew Lodge, vice president, cloud services, VMware. “We are looking forward to building on our existing contributions to OpenStack and customer deployments of this and other open source technologies." US Contacts OpenStack Lauren Sell, 713-398-8700 lauren@openstack.org

2012-07-17T23:59:00Z aptira-selects-piston-cloud-to-power-hosted-private-clouds-built-on-openstack

Aptira Selects Piston Cloud to Power Hosted Private Clouds Built on OpenStack™Agreement brings massively scalable, open source cloud framework to A/NZ and Indian markets SYDNEY, July 18, 2012 – Aptira, a provider of managed hosting, public cloud infrastructure and enterprise private cloud solutions, has selected Piston Cloud Computing's Piston Enterprise OpenStack™ to bring an easy, secure and open private cloud operating system to its Australian, New Zealand (A/NZ) and Indian enterprise customers. Aptira is Piston Cloud’s sole A/NZ and Indian partner, and selected Piston Enterprise OpenStack because it is the only streamlined cloud platform that can be installed in 10 minutes and can reduce cloud operating costs by more than 30 per cent1. Customers will have the choice of an on-premises model, or be provided with a hosted data centre, infrastructure management, and server and network equipment powered by Piston Enterprise OpenStack software. By deploying Piston Enterprise OpenStack, Aptira’s customers will be able to easily build and manage their private cloud without requiring a large capital outlay. “Imagine being able to configure a private cloud in minutes for significantly less money than it currently costs. That is what Piston Cloud Enterprise OpenStack does,” said Tristan Goode, Chief Executive Officer of Aptira. “Piston Enterprise OpenStack has been called the ‘boot disk’ for the private cloud. Not only does this deal let us bring the same technology that was pioneered by NASA’s cloud architects to A/NZ and India, it allows us to combine this breakthrough with our Herculean commitment to customer support which will mean worry-free implementation and management.” Piston Enterprise OpenStack is the first cloud operating system built on OpenStack, a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for private and public clouds that is quickly being adopted globally, because it allows organisations to avoid being locked-in to a particular provider and offers a flexible and evolvable cloud infrastructure. Piston Enterprise OpenStack is the first OpenStack distribution specifically focused on security and the easy operation of enterprise private clouds. Piston Cloud's innovative Null-Tier Architecture™ combines storage, compute and networking on every node to deliver massive scalability with unprecedented cost efficiency. In addition, Piston Enterprise OpenStack is hardware vendor agnostic, ensuring customers aren’t locked into one proprietary architecture or cloud provider. "We are really pleased to partner with Aptira in A/NZ and India because we know that the team understands this technology from the inside-out and the best way to support those markets," said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud. Piston Enterprise OpenStack is built to be easy, secure and open: Easy One administrator can plug a Piston CloudKey™ into their top-of-rack switch, turn it on and have a fully-operational OpenStack cloud environment up and running in less than 10 minutes. Piston Enterprise OpenStack automatically detects new hardware and installs itself onto each server allowing users to scale out more quickly. Hands-free installation prevents employee interaction with unsecured servers and eliminates the risk of tampering during installation and configuration. Secure A custom-built Linux distribution limits an organisation’s security exposure while delivering enterprise grade performance. Piston Enterprise OpenStack includes the first implementation of the CloudAudit framework for OpenStack, so that building custom reporting is as easy as clicking a button. Rigorously tested and validated security updates are automatically downloaded and can be installed across an entire cloud with a single click, and without any downtime. Open Open source software allows users to live outside of the whims of another company and as IT races forward, infrastructure is ready for what’s to come. Piston Enterprise OpenStack is compatible with all other OpenStack clouds, making it possible to burst or migrate data and applications when needed. Compatibility with a wide range of commodity hardware so users can avoid placing demand on cloud hosting infrastructure. Pricing and availability Piston Enterprise OpenStack is available at aptira.com. For more information, contact info@aptira.com or call 1800 APTIRA. [1] Compared to a leading virtualisation vendor, Piston Enterprise OpenStack compares favourably. Based on a typical five node system each with dual CPU and ideal memory configurations, Piston Enterprise OpenStack can cost less than a third of the usual licensing you have come to expect. When you start adding block and object storage, which is included standard with any Piston Enterprise OpenStack installation across every node, it negates the need for external storage components such as a SAN and NAS, even further lowering your CAPEX and OPEX investment. The best thing is the savings just keep increasing as you scale up. About Aptira Aptira is a leading provider of managed hosted services, public cloud infrastructure and enterprise private cloud solutions. Aptira is a technology consultancy that delivers high-level solutions to meet the most demanding of IT needs. The company, known for its cost-effective, agile and highly responsive service, works with a wide range of organisations in finance, retail, utilities and government and manages complex hosting scenarios for rich media producers. Aptira is the acknowledged leader of the OpenStack community in Australia. The company is committed to the idea that what it is doing for their customers today will be mainstream tomorrow. For more information, visit aptira.com or follow them on twitter at @aptira. About Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. is the enterprise OpenStackTM company. Founded in early 2011 by technical team leads from NASA and Rackspace, Piston Cloud's technology is built on OpenStack, the fastest-growing, massively scalable open source cloud framework. The company's core product, Piston Enterprise OpenStackTM is the first cloud operating system built on OpenStack, and is specifically focused on security and the easy operation of enterprise private cloud environments. Piston Cloud is based in San Francisco and funded by Hummer Winblad, True Ventures and Divergent Ventures. Visit Piston Cloud online at http://www.pistoncloud.com or follow them on twitter at @pistoncloud. Media Contact: Veronica Colvin Watterson Marketing Communications (02) 9929 7533 veronica.colvin@watterson.com.au