Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Oracle Launches Database Appliance

Oracle Wednesday introduced the turnkey Oracle Database Appliance in a bid to boost SMB sales of its software and ex-Sun hardware. The appliance bundles Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (Enterprise Edition), Real Application Clusters technology, and other Oracle software on a two-node, Intel-based Sun Fire server running Oracle Linux. List price at just under $100,000, it is designed for companies with as few as 50 seats.

Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president of worldwide alliances and channels and embedded sales, said up to 90 percent of the appliances could go through channel partners.

Gartner: Google A Bona Fide Rival To Exchange

Google's Gmail is now a viable alternative to Microsoft Exchange online and other cloud e-mail offerings, accounting for about half of the enterprise cloud e-mail market, Gartner said this week. Google currently has a minuscule one percent of the total enterprise e-mail market, but about 50 percent of the cloud enterprise e-mail market, Gartner said.

Intel's UltraSlim Desktop Board Looking Good

The CRN Test Center looked at an unbranded all-in-one PC based on Intel's new DH61AG mini-ITX motherboard and found it to provide a new format that will enable Tier 1 vendors and custom system builders to lead the next wave of PCs. With support for a broad array of media and devices, the DH61AG offers a way to build systems that directly compete with Apple’s iMac as well as other Windows PCs. Best of all, all the required components, including all-in-one chassis, are already available through distributors.

Vidyo Closes $22.5M VC Funding Round

Vidyo, an emerging upstart challenger to Cisco and Polycom in the videoconferencing market, this week said it closed a $22.5 million round of funding, bringing its total funding haul to $96 million. Vidyo develops a software-based platform it claims offers flexible high-definition videoconferencing for a fraction of the price of traditional telepresence endpoints. Its products use the company's Adaptive Video Layering (AVL) technology to optimize video quality over general data networks and the Internet rather than a dedicated QoS network.

OpenStack Releases Diablo

OpenStack, the Rackspace-led open-source cloud initiative, this week unveiled its fourth version in just over a year. Called Diablo, it adds about 70 new features for automating and controlling pools of compute, storage, and networking resources across multiple data centers with better scale, performance and networking capabilities.

Diablo brings two new projects to OpenStack's three existing core projects. OpenStack Dashboard lets administrators access and provision cloud-based resources through a self-service portal, with mobile support coming soon. OpenStack Keystone provides unified authentication across all OpenStack projects and integrates with internal authentication systems.