Solution

Converged infrastructure has various meanings, depending on the supplier and IT professionals. For Gridstore, the company has decided to focus on offering hyperconverged infrastructure for Hyper-V-only environments. The company, which offers an appliance consisting of Intel-based multicore servers and scalable flash storage, last week said it has raised $19 million in equity finding from Acero Capital, GGV Capital and ONSET Ventures.

Microsoft has started rolling out its lightweight project management tools, Planner preview to Office 365 First Release customers, a new experience in Office 365 that offers a simple, visual way to organize teamwork. Although primarily designed for business use, Office 2016 users can also use Planner to plan vacations, creative projects and more

In addition to task management, Planner makes it easy groups share files, discuss workloads, your team to create plans, organize and assign work, and conduct chat sessions. Think of it as a virtual boardroom for team meetings

The Planner preview is available to First Release customers who have Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E4, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 Education, Office 365 Education E3, Office 365 Education E4, Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium

As 2015 comes to a close, it’ll be remembered as a year full of surprises. Who thought back in April that the New York Mets would make the playoffs (along with the Chicago Cubs) and somehow make it to the World Series? While Microsoft was on pace to have a good year when 2014 was coming to a close, it was hard to imagine Redmond would gain such a high level of respect and dialog among so many longstanding critics.

If Goldman Sachs’ mea culpa last week wasn’t enough, when I picked up this week’s issue of Barron’s magazine, which is my Saturday morning ritual, I glanced at the cover and saw the headline, “The New Microsoft,” with Satya Nadella’s photo plastered on it. Usually when a company is featured on the cover of Barron’s, it’s because it has determined its stock is going to soar — or crater. In this case it was the former. Noting that since Nadella has taken over, Microsoft’s shares are up 48 percent — 67 percent if you go back to the day his predecessor Steve Ballmer announced he was “retiring,” it has emerged again as a growth company whose shares could jump another 30 percent. The article suggests, while Amazon’s AWS cloud business is Microsoft’s most significant competitor, the growth of Azure will give it a run for its money. At the same time, the author suggests Microsoft is a beneficiary of Amazon’s growth. In April, Amazon disclosed AWS’s revenues and profits for the first time, and its shares have since grown 70 percent.

Microsoft has gone all-in with its Azure Redis Cache service and plans to stop offering a couple of alternative cache services next year.

Microsoft will end its Azure In-Role Cache Service and its Azure Managed Cache Service on Nov. 30, 2016. Organizations should switch over to using Microsoft’s Azure Redis Cache service instead as it “provides more features and a better value overall,” according to Microsoft’s announcement late last week.

Redis is an open source NoSQL key-value database. Microsoft runs it as a service as part of its Azure cloud resources. The Microsoft Azure Redis Cache service is typically used by organizations with Web applications that need persistent data access for their operations, such as applications that perform financial transactions online.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week will announce plans to tap Microsoft Azure as a preferred public cloud provider, giving customers who were using its own Helion service a place to go when it shuts down Jan. 31.

CEO Meg Whitman revealed HPE will make Azure a preferred public cloud during the final earnings call for the company that was previously known as Hewlett Packard Co. for 86 years prior to splitting into two separate businesses (HP Inc. and HPE) Nov. 1.

Hybrid computing skills should be a focus of IT pros maintaining SharePoint environments, given Microsoft’s current cloud emphasis.

That’s one of the ideas that emerged this week in a talk by Jason Himmelstein, an Office Services and Servers Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Todd Klindt, a SharePoint Microsoft MVP. They spoke on the topic, “SharePoint’s On-Prem Penalties: The Case for SharePoint Service in the Cloud.”