Star Announces launch of ‘Dev2Live’ Services for SIs and ISVs

Star provides on-demand business services to support software development projects from build and test to ‘go live’

LONDON, 15 March 2010 – Star, a provider of on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses, has announced the launch of a specialist Dev2Live service. This is a complete range of services aimed at developers and giving them access to the managed infrastructure and collaboration tools needed to support software development projects, from build and testing to the ‘live’ environment.

Star’s Dev2Live service is a solution to the resource and cost challenges of managing multiple providers and in-house hardware for every development project. Project leaders can now focus on a project’s success with the support of an extensive range of on-demand, pay-as-you-go services managed within a private cloud environment, all from one trusted partner.

Dev2Live services are built up from components that make up the Star cloud computing platform, and include a dedicated virtualisation cluster, that gives developers a single scalable platform on which to build, test and deploy software with the ability to deploy additional machines in minutes.  To ease collaboration, Star Business Email provides the resources to co-ordinate team activities and improves productivity without the need for in-house servers. Dev2Live services can be deployed within a Star managed network infrastructure, simplifying the secure delivery of applications and data to people wherever they are located.

As part of the launch of the service, Star is offering the ‘QuickStartDV’ Pack which includes a 7-day free trial of the virtualisation platform with a 30 day ‘money back’ guarantee, 5 free users of Star Business Email and Microsoft Team Foundation Server.

James Griffin, Head of Hosting Strategy at Star comments: “Whether they’re working for large corporates or smaller agencies, developers face a host of challenges in taking projects from test phase to live environments. Pressures on time scales, resources and project management combine to create a number of issues which can create barriers to successful project completion.” (more…)

The success of Web 2.0 consumer web sites teaches us many lessons about how we can improve internal IT and business to consumer online applications. Social technologies have made it progressively easier and easier for people to find each other, share information and collaborate, and we have seen how a singular focus on supporting individual needs can crete powerful network effects when aggregated at scale.

However, these and other lessons have not yet penetrated the world of corporate IT in most companies today, which means expensive, centralised and highly bureaucratic models of co-ordination and collaboration are the norm.

The recession is a perfect time to change this, and to seek leaner, flatter business processes and structures that act as enablers rather than dampeners of innovation and initiative. We simply cannot afford the high-cost models of internal co-ordination that have persisted for so long. (more…)

IT professionals yet to see the real data impact of governance, according to Telehouse survey

London, UK, – 5th January, 2010 – UK businesses are primarily concerned with SaaS and cloud computing with 31 per cent saying it is driving increased use of data centre capacity, according to a national survey commissioned by Telehouse of over 100 senior IT professionals. With Gartner forecasting that the cloud computing market could reach a global value of $150 billion by 2013, it is unsurprising that 83 per cent of respondents predict that their data centre requirement will also grow in the next three years. Looking further ahead, over 80 per cent of respondents thought that securing access to additional data centre capacity would be either ‘critical’ or ‘important’ in the next five years. (more…)