Data visualisation firm Roambi has announced Roambi Business, a cloud-based version of its platform that takes complex data and presents it in an interactive graphic format to business users on their iPhone or iPad device.

Officially available from today, Roambi Business offers similar capabilities to the firm’s existing Roambi Analytics product, but handles the back-end processing via a cloud-based service instead of requiring customers to deploy an on-premise middleware server.

This opens up Roambi to a broader audience, including smaller businesses that may lack the IT skills or infrastructure to deploy the existing platform, according to the firm.

Roambi vice president for Northern Europe Steve Neat told V3 that in both products, the aim is to redesign the way that people interact with data, share that data and present it, all from a mobile perspective in line with the modern workplace.

“This is about delivering content in a usable format on a mobile device that people love. People want tablets and want to interact and engage with these devices. Analytics is traditionally available on the desktop, but increasingly people are more mobile, so this is about helping people to be more productive by delivering insights onto those devices,” he said.

Roambi Business can take data from a number of sources, including CRM systems, databases or traditional business intelligence systems, but most commonly this will be an Excel spreadsheet exported as comma separated values (CSV), according to Neat.

Once the data is uploaded, Roambi analyses the data and intelligently looks for key metrics such as times or dates that it can use for comparison. Users can tweak the output and then select from a number of views that the platform generates to visualise the data.

The entire process can take mere minutes, Neat said, and provides interactive visual views of the data that lets users drill down and focus on key data points where necessary.

“We’re aiming to deliver insight, helping people understand the numbers rather than overwhelming them with large spreadsheets or big BI tools. We’re distilling it down to simple key performance indicators,” he said.

Roambi also provides basic mobile device management (MDM) tools that enable an administrator to lock a mobile device temporarily, or else wipe the Roambi application from the device to protect company data if it has been stolen.

The new Roambi Business service is hosted and delivered from Amazon’s cloud platform, the firm disclosed. On the client side, it supports the iPhone, iPad and iPad Mini. Licensing is $39 (£25) per user per month, but with a minimum purchase of 10 licences for one year specified.

Sales on the government’s IT procurement service G-Cloud topped £25m in May, with £3.5m of purchases made by government departments and institutions since April.

This is slightly down on April’s spend of £4m, but that was significantly boosted by a £1.2m deal with IBM from the Home Office. This time round, many smaller but significant deals were brokered by a number of departments, including the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the NHS.

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust shelled out £129,000 to InTechnology for a hosted eHealth service, in the largest single software and hardware transaction on the list. The service allows health professionals to update health records remotely, directly from a medical instrument.

Other notable deals included an spend of over £500,000 by the Home Office, with various vendors supplying hosting and server management solutions. Elsewhere, i2N secured a £110,000 deal with the Ministry of Justice, while Microsoft secured deals for a number of Office365 subscriptions. This included a deal worth £54,300 with Suffolk County Council.

The G-Cloud procurement scheme is designed to decrease overhead costs to IT departments as well as send more business the way of SMEs. Last week at the government’s Think G-Cloud event, the Home Office revealed that 62 percent of the G-Cloud spend has gone to SMEs.

V3 contacted the Cabinet Office for more insight into the latest figures, with regards SME spend, but had received no reply at the time of publication.

In the midst of perennial “under-use” of G-Cloud, the Home Office also insisted that public sector bodies had to take the scheme “more seriously” and encouraged IT spenders to “take a risk” on the platform.

Microsoft has been given the go-ahead to build a massive $700m data centre facility in the rural US.

The Des Moines Register said that Iowa state authorities have approved a $20m tax credit plan, which would clear the way for the Redmond giant to begin work on its new data centre facility. The facility would be housed just outside the state’s capital city in West Des Moines.

While specifics on the data centre itself were not given, the report said that Microsoft’s total investment in the project could top $1bn.

The move adds Microsoft to a growing list of firms that have chosen the largely rural state as the site for a new data centre facility. With favourable tax policies and cheap land costs, Iowa houses large data centre facilities for Google and Facebook as well.

The state is also getting the thumbs-up from green technology advocates due to its heavy use of wind power plants. With energy-hungry data centres increasingly being built, environmental groups have pressured firms to choose locations that favor green energy sources over coal in local power plants.

While data centres in the US have largely been installed in more remote rural locations, many firms in the UK have chosen locations within London itself. The plan has drawn some criticism from opponents who claim that infrastructure and security concerns could arise when data centres are installed within a large city.

Microsoft has announced a deal that will see the company bring support for Oracle products to its Hyper-V and Windows Azure cloud platforms.

The companies said that the deal will allow Hyper-V and Azure to support Oracle Database, Java and WebLogic Server platforms as well as Oracle’s Linux build. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said: “Microsoft is deeply committed to giving businesses what they need, and clearly that is the ability to run enterprise workloads in private clouds, public clouds and, increasingly, across both.

“Now our customers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility our unique hybrid cloud solutions offer for their Oracle applications, middleware and databases, just like they have been able to do on Windows Server for years.”

The move marks an uncharacteristic truce between Microsoft and Oracle. The two firms have long been at odds with one another and Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has a history of criticising Redmond’s policies.

In making a deal, analysts see the two companies putting aside their differences to deal with the realities of business in the 21st century.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, said: “Larry Ellison had been adamant against working with Microsoft for years and I think he realised that both companies now face bigger threats from cloud services than they do from each other.

“Microsoft had always tried to work with Oracle, and Oracle support folks often had secret relationships with Microsoft for the benefit of mutual customers but now that all comes out of the closet.”

The move also signifies what is likely to be a growing trend in the enterprise IT space. Pund-IT principal analyst Charles King told V3 that such partnerships will become increasingly vital for large vendors.

“It behooves companies to partner with as many other companies as they can,” King explained. “We are not looking at a future cloud that is going to be as amenable to single player dominance that past markets have been.”

The move brings a formidable competitor to Amazon Web Services for Oracle’s business. The AWS platform had previously been the only cloud infrastructure as a service platform to support many of Oracle’s offerings.

King said that providing the choice between AWS and Azure will help Oracle avoid alienating customers who are heavily invested in one cloud service over the other.

“When you look at strategic partnerships, very often they come around because vendors look around and realise if they cut themselves off from too much of the market, customers that want to use AWS or Azure will go to someone else,” King said.

Microsoft has made available Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 preview versions, enabling IT professionals to start to get to grips with the new features coming in the updates of these major packages.

The software giant made the preview builds available at its TechEd Europe conference in Madrid, after showing off some of the capabilities of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 at its TechEd event in New Orleans earlier this month.

For the updated Windows Server, these include automated storage tiering using a combination of direct-attached SSDs and conventional hard drives. There is also better support for hybrid cloud computing deployments thanks to software-defined networking (SDN) features and virtual machine portability between a customer’s on-premise cloud and that of service providers and Windows Azure.

Many of these new capabilities, such as virtual machine portability, also require System Center 2012 R2 to implement.

SQL Server 2014 also aims to offer more mission-critical performance capabilities, including in-memory analytics for real-time handling of online transaction processing (OLTP), and a new point-and-click user interface in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to enable customers to easily deploy SQL Server databases onto the Windows Azure cloud computing platform.

In a blog post covering the releases, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Windows Server Brad Anderson said that Microsoft has made a big bet on its “cloud-first” design principles, and that the updated data centre products will have a massive impact on companies around the world.

“IT pros are going to see the traditional boundaries between data centres vanish and a true hybrid cloud emerge,” he said.

The full release versions of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 are scheduled for release by the end of this year, while SQL Server 2014 is due to follow early next year.

Customers can download the preview releases of the software from the TechNet Evaluation Centre from today.

Microsoft has been given the go-ahead to build a massive $700m datacentre facility in the rural US.

The Des Moines Register said that Iowa state authorities have approved a $20m tax credit plan which would clear the way for the Redmond giant to begin work on its new datacentre facility. The facility would be housed just outside of the state’s capital city in West Des Moines.

While specifics on the datacentre itself were not given, the report said that Microsoft’s total investment in the project could top $1bn.

The move adds Microsoft to a growing list of firms which have chosen the largely rural state as the site for a new datacentre facility. With favourable tax policies and cheap land costs, Iowa houses large datacentre facilities for Google and Facebook as well.

The state is also getting the thumbs-up from green technology advocates due to its heavy use of wind power plants. With energy-hungry datacentres increasingly being built, environmental groups have pressured firms to choose locations which favor green energy sources over coal in local power plants.

While datacentres in the US have largely been installed in more remote rural locations, many firms in the UK have chosen locations within London itself. The plan has drawn some criticism from opponents who claim that infrastructure and security concerns could arise when datacentres are installed within a large city.

Microsoft has announced a deal which will see the company bring support for Oracle products on its Hyper-V and Windows Azure cloud platforms.

The companies said that the deal will allow Hyper-V and Azure to support Oracle Database, Java and WebLogic Server platforms as well as Oracle’s Linux build. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Microsoft is deeply committed to giving businesses what they need, and clearly that is the ability to run enterprise workloads in private clouds, public clouds and, increasingly, across both,” said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

“Now our customers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility our unique hybrid cloud solutions offer for their Oracle applications, middleware and databases, just like they have been able to do on Windows Server for years.”

The move marks an uncharacteristic truce between Microsoft and Oracle. The two firms have long been at odds with one another and Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has a history of criticising Redmond’s policies.

In making a deal, analysts see the two companies putting aside their differences to deal with the realities of business in the 21st century.

“Larry Ellison had been adamant against working with Microsoft for years and I think he realized that both companies now face bigger threats from cloud services than they do from each other,” explained Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group.

“Microsoft had always tried to work with Oracle, and Oracle support folks often had secret relationships with Microsoft for the benefit of mutual customers but now that all comes out of the closet.”

The move also signifies what is likely to be a growing trend in the enterprise IT space. Pund-IT principal analyst Charles King told V3 that such partnerships will become increasingly vital for large vendors.

“It behooves companies to partner with as many other companies as they can,” King explained.

“We are not looking at a future cloud that is going to be as amenable to single player dominance that past markets have been.”

The move brings a formidable competitor to Amazon Web Services for Oracle’s business. The AWS platform had previously been the only cloud infrastructure as a service platform to support many of Oracle’s offerings.

King said that providing the choice between AWS and Azure will help Oracle avoid alienating customers who are heavily invested in one cloud service over the other.

“When you look at strategic partnerships, very often they come around because vendors look around and realise if they cut themselves off from too much of the market, customers that want to use AWS or Azure will go to someone else,” King said.

The European Commission (EC) has issued a call for self-proclaimed cloud computing experts to help it draw up fairer terms in how cloud services are offered to consumers and businesses.

The EC wants to ensure that businesses and citizens can benefit from cloud computing given its enormous economic potential to the region, but it fears one-sided contracts are putting off too many from embracing such services.

Now, the EC wants those that consider themselves experts on the subject to come forward and help draft terms that will be fairer and clearer for all those in the industry to abide by when using cloud tools.

“Contract law is an important part of our cloud computing strategy. Making full use of the cloud could deliver 2.5 million extra jobs in Europe, and add around one percent a year to EU GDP by 2020,” said vice president Viviane Reding, the EU’s Justice Commissioner.

“Uncertainty around cloud computing contracts may hinder cross-border trade. As this is a very complex area, we are asking experts for advice before we decide on the next steps.”

The EC expects the experts to come from across industry such as cloud services providers, consumers and small firms, academia and legal professionals. They will work on the Cloud Computing Strategy previously launched by the EC in 2012. Those interested should register on the EC’s tender page.

While cloud computing is a key part of the EC’s digital push, its strategy on the matter has been heavily criticised in the past by other bodies within the organisation, claiming it lacks direction and is not bold enough at making Europe a ‘cloud-active’ region.

Cisco has disclosed its intent to acquire data virtualisation firm Composite Software to bolster its next-generation IT services strategy. The move is intended to help customers get a coherent view of data from disparate sources in the era of cloud computing and big data, according to Cisco.

Composite Software specialises in technology that pulls together multiple data sources and presents them in a simplified consolidated view. The deal is planned to expand Cisco’s portfolio of Smart Services and extend its next-generation services platform by connecting data and infrastructure, the firm said.

The acquisition is due to close in the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2014, which ends in October, and Cisco is expected to pay $180m for Composite. Upon completion, Composite employees will join the Cisco services team.

Writing on Cisco’s blog, head of business development Hilton Romanski claimed that a proliferation of new and traditional data sources plus movement of data to the cloud is making it difficult for organisations to access all of their data assets.

“Composite’s technology connects and optimises many types of data from across the network and makes it appear as if it’s in one place, allowing companies to make better business decisions. Together, Cisco and Composite will help to accelerate the shift from physical data integration to data virtualisation,” he said.

This acquisition is set to build on Cisco’s plans for a unified platform and software services strategy and ties in with the recent acquisition of cloud integration firm SolveDirect.

Cisco’s vision is that Composite’s data virtualisation tools combined with SolveDirect’s process integration platform will provide cross-domain data and workflow integration capabilities to enable real-time business insights and operations, the firm said.

A new private cloud service, intended for use in departments dealing with confidential information, has been unveiled by a government IT supplier.

The new offering from FCO Services, which makes use of various Microsoft productivity and office tools, is intended to cut costs and improve productivity in departments such as the police, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

FCO Services is a trading fund of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and provides various secure IT services to UK and overseas government departments.

David Smith, interim head of IT at FCO Services told V3 that the new product’s aim is to keep installations ‘evergreen’, thereby cutting the financial and time costs associated with system updates. “The intent is that we would be on the prevailing version once it’s on a service pack release,” he explained. “You’ll either be on the current or previous version. It presents a chunk of cost avoidance.”

Smith hopes that the services will see widespread adoption among the relevant government departments. “There’s a big pipeline at the moment – we have 14-20 serious conversations going on at the moment,” he said.

The new service is also targeting a greater amount of flexibility. Available on the government’s G-Cloud IT procurement scheme, PSN360 can be purchased as a commodity and therefore scaled as usage requirements change.

PSN360 will sit among relatively few equivalent products on G-Cloud’s CloudStore, and will be part of a select group of private and secure solutions, according to Microsoft’s Nicola Hodson.

“Accredited private cloud services are still rare among large IT suppliers but by working with FCO Services we’re able to bring Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Dynamics, and Lync to the G-Cloud with IL3 [departmetns storing confidential information] certification,” she said. “This means public sector bodies can use business-critical programmes in a highly secure manner, protecting sensitive data and information.”

The services included with PSN360 include PSN360 Mail, Collaboration and Communicator, and can be accessed from any accredited device, anywhere in the world.

The service is now available for purchase on G-Cloud, a scheme that has seen mediocre uptake in recent months. Yesterday, the Home Office encouraged government departments to ‘take a risk’ on purchasing services on G-Cloud.