Tesco to offer iPhone in the UK

Supermarket giant Tesco has joined a growing number of UK firms offering Apple's popular iPhone.

A spokesperson for the firm said that it hoped to offer the phone "in time for Christmas". Although Tesco has not revealed tariffs, the spokesperson said that its prices were "competitive". In September, it was revealed that O2 had lost its exclusive deal to sell the phone, which had been in place since its launch in 2007. Both Vodafone and Orange have signed deals to sell the phone.

Orange has already begun selling the touchscreen whilst Vodafone will offer it from early 2010. Orange said it had sold more than 30,000 handsets on its first day. Tesco Mobile is a joint venture with O2. It offers phones on both contract and pay as you go tariffs from its stores around the UK. O2 has offered the iPhone in the UK for more than two years. Its popularity allowed the firm to win subscribers from other networks, according to analysts. Earlier this year, O2 said it had sold more than 1m of the phones. All of the firms will offer the iPhone 3G and the newer iPhone 3GS.

High-Performance Unified Threat Management

Ambitious UK 'Start-Up' Answers Small Business Demand  


NetPilot's UTM Range Boasts Industry's First On-Board 3rd Generation SSL VPN

Bristol-based NetPilot Internet Security (NIS) has today unveiled its advanced range of Unified Threat Management solutions which benefit organisations from 25 to 500 users with the highest possible level of end-to-end security, compliance and access controls whilst not compromising performance. The NetPilot Guardsman, Vanguard and Globemaster appliances incorporating SSL VPN Plus™ provide outstanding throughput that exceeds IPSec and can even exceed wire speed performance. NetPilot's are the only UTM appliances available with SSL VPN Plus™, powered by Neoaccel.

"Small and mid-sized businesses depend upon fast IP links, but many security manufacturers struggle to meet these demands with solutions that take too much time to process traffic," commented Jamie Pushman, Director of Sales and co-founder at NIS. "The trend toward greater cloud computing is pushing computing resources even further away from users, increasing the need for strong encryption and policy enforcement from endpoint to endpoint, and increasing the strain upon performance and uptime. However, our unique OEM agreement with international industry leaders Neoaccel puts our UK customers at a distinct advantage. The NetPilot platforms' comprehensive UTM capabilities inspect traffic for all major threats, while SSL VPN Plus™ optimises the connection."

The NetPilot range scales from the 25-user Guardsman S2025 right up to the 500-user Globemaster R2500. All come fully loaded with a range of advanced features including minimum 40GB solid-state storage (up to 160GB for the R2500), on-board SSL VPN Plus™, and a full range of UTM components including email anti-virus (Clam or Sophos depending on bundle purchased), email policy filtering, advanced firewall, anti-spam and URL filtering. All but the smallest appliances also feature anti-spyware, browsing anti-virus and IDS.

SSL VPN Plus™ supports RSA, Citrix, reverse proxy, RADIUS and AD, and comes with comprehensive user-based access controls, data leakage prevention, and full log/audit reporting as standard. Its self-installing Java agent also eliminates costly remote client management issues.

Prices (including UTM Standard bundle) start at £895 plus VAT. The NetPilot appliances are also available at base units providing firewall and VPN functionality only.
 
visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

SugarCRM on Windows Azure Cloud Computing Platform

SugarCRM today announced that it will offer its CRM applications on Windows Azure to enable its customers and value-added resellers to benefit from the real-time scalability, high availability and on-demand infrastructure of Microsoft Corp.'s cloud platform for web applications and services. "With Windows Azure, Microsoft has built a true cloud computing platform going well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today," said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM.

"Windows Azure enables SugarCRM value-added resellers to create and deploy unique solutions for customers around the globe. This new service is another key component of the Sugar Open Cloud, the SugarCRM cloud strategy for delivering simple, affordable CRM anywhere based on customer need. Sugar on Windows Azure combines the most user-friendly CRM application on the market with a highly available, scalable and secure cloud computing platform."

The process for making SugarCRM applications available on Microsoft Windows Azure was simple and straightforward, taking just a couple weeks of development time. This rapid implementation period was enabled by the strong native support the Microsoft Azure platform delivers for PHP, the programming language in which Sugar is written.

"We are pleased to have SugarCRM running on Windows Azure," said Doug Hauger, general manager of Windows Azure at Microsoft Corp. "The ease by which SugarCRM was able to offer its CRM services demonstrates how the openness of the Windows Azure platform allowed it to deliver Web applications using its tools of choice."

Windows Azure is an Internet-scale cloud services platform that is hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used separately or together. Windows Azure offers a scalable infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go pricing model that enables customers to pay for the service as they consume it, rather than buying and managing on-premises technology.

SugarCRM provides CRM cloud applications designed to run in any computing environment, including cloud platforms such as Windows Azure, partner clouds provided by SugarCRM partners such as BT and Tata Communications or in private clouds managed directly by SugarCRM customers. SugarCRM is delivering the Sugar Open Cloud because customers demand control and flexibility around how their CRM applications are managed and first generation CRM SaaS providers create risk for customers by locking them into a set of monolithic and inflexible services.

Microsoft and SugarCRM began working together in 2006 to deliver Sugar applications on top of Microsoft technology. SugarCRM supports IIS as well as Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. The two companies have continued to collaborate as part of the Interop Vendor Alliance. In August, SugarCRM announced Sugar Community Edition on the Microsoft Web Platform, a framework for developing, deploying and hosting Web applications.

Cloud AntiVirus Company Secures $2 Million in Funding

Immunet, developer of next generation AntiVirus technologies, announced today that it has raised $2 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Altos Ventures with participation from Atlanta-based TechOperators. Ho Nam, General Partner of Altos Ventures, has joined the board of Immunet. Immunet launched Immunet Protect, its first product, in August 2009. Immunet Protect is the first free, cloud-based antivirus application focused on protecting your community. Immunet Protect harnesses the growing power of social networks with its community sharing features and "Collective Immunity(TM)" technology to protect personal computers from virus threats.


Upon installing Immunet Protect, users immediately become protected members within the "Immunet Community" (at 20,000 users and expanding rapidly). The Immunet Community leverages the collective knowledge of threats gathered from its users to defend ALL members in real time against thousands of new threats created every day.

Immunet's defenses grow stronger with every new user that joins the Immunet Community. This provides users with a natural incentive to share the product through its community-sharing features, which use Facebook Connect, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and regular email.

"Immunet Protect is unlike any antivirus software on the market because it is the first product focused on protecting an individual's own community," says Immunet Founder and CEO Oliver Friedrichs, a former Symantec and McAfee security veteran and entrepreneur. "Immunet Protect acts as a shield for entire communities, and that shield becomes stronger with each new user and each new threat that is detected. We want to spread the goodness of antivirus protection with Immunet Protect and allow our users to do so easily. We encourage users to 'Get Immunet Protect Before You Connect' "

"Immunet combines the collective intelligence of the Immunet Community with the power of social networks to create a powerful application that users have a common incentive to share for the greater good for all users," said Ho Nam of Altos Ventures. "We look forward to working with the Immunet team to support the viral growth of applications in the cloud AntiVirus space over the coming year and are excited to have them in our portfolio."

MindTouch Goes Cloud

MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today extended its popular enterprise collaboration platform to the cloud. The new offering makes it easy for business power users with no programming knowledge to mashup data from existing enterprise systems into real time charts, graphs, reports and tabular data.

MindTouch Cloud allows companies to replicate the features and functionality of MindTouch 2009 Standard in seconds with the swipe of a credit card and without a call to their IT department.


"MindTouch has essentially built an open source, cloud-enabled SharePoint that is accessible to non-programmers," said Sam Ramji, Vice President of Strategy at Sonoa Systems, a provider of analytics, management and cloud governance solutions for APIs and cloud services. "The more I look at what they've done, the more I realize they've built a business platform more than a technology platform."

The new platform is the company's first foray into cloud computing and is the first SaaS-based solution to give organizations the ability to easily collaborate across data from multiple enterprise systems and web applications.

Never before have non-programmers been able to so easily overlay critical data from commonly used enterprise systems --Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, support ticketing, accounts payable, ERP-- all within an easy to use collaborative environment. Pricing for the company's new SaaS offering starts as low as $7 per user per month.