The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis's The Birth of The Cool:

 

Vendor Intridea has announced the debut of Scalr, what company officials describe as "the self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment" using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

 

For $50 per month, you can use Scalr to set up server farms capable of scaling up to 100,000 or more users. The on-demand service requires no installation or configuration. The product is being introduced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, being held May 29 - June 1 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

 

Scalr is built on Amazon Web Services and lets developers create server farms through a Web-based interface using pre-built Amazon Machine Images for load balancers, such as Pound or Nginx; application servers, including Apache among others; databases, such as MySQL; and a generic AMI that developers can customize.

 

Once a developer sets up a server farm, Scalr monitors and maintains it, providing automatic scaling, redundancy and failover as needed. When the load average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold, a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load, and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes, Scalr inserts a new machine of that type into the farm to replace it.

 

Developers can further customize each AMI in Scalr, bundle the image, and use it for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. They can also change one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.

 

"Typically enterprises have to buy extra server capacity and expensive load balancing products to prevent spikes from bringing their Web sites to a crawl," said Dave Naffis, Intridea founding partner and director of product development.

 

Nope, sorry, Miles just isn't doing it for us today. Time for that rollicking good times music to get the blood flowing -- Frankie Blue Eyes' Come Fly With Me.

 

Kainos, an IT consulting company, has announced that it has selected Autonomy (News - Alert) as preferred partner for information processing and Information Risk Management.

 

Autonomy Meridio is a long-standing Kainos partner and the two companies have collaborated in the past on projects with the UK Audit Commission, Havant Council and Northern Ireland's Eastern Health and Social Services Board.

Prompted by what Kainos officials call "the huge market opportunity presented by the staggering growth in unstructured information, stringent regulation, and highly-publicized internal fraud cases," Kainos chose to expand the range of Autonomy technologies it offers.

 

Kainos will create an Autonomy "center of excellence" specializing in Autonomy's high-end information processing capabilities and Autonomy Zantaz Proactive IRM technology, Kainos officials say, to deliver "intelligent information governance products to its customer base."

 

Kainos was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Belfast with offices in Dublin, London and Gdansk.

 

Open Solutions, a vendor of integrated enabling technologies for financial services providers across the United States, Canada and internationally, has announced an international reseller partnership agreement with Senior Solution, a Brazilian software and services provider for the financial market.

 

Through this partnership, Senior Solutions officials say, they will offer all Open Solutions' products and services, including The Complete Banking Solution, to its retail banking client base within the Latin American financial services marketplace.

 

The platform integrates with Senior Solution's wholesale banking system for treasury, brokerage and insurance markets.

 

"Historically, Brazilian banks had extremely fragmented software environments," said Aurimar (Harry) Cerqueira, commercial director for Senior Solution. "For core processing, there are as many as 50 separate products from numerous vendors."

 

Open Solutions seems to want to expand its international presence through strategic reseller agreements. In early 2008, the company announced a partnership with Hildebrando, a Mexican IT corporation with a presence in Spain that provides software development, systems integration, business intelligence and outsourcing services.

 

Open Solutions formed several strategic partnerships throughout 2007, including Thailand Equipment Research Co., Asian-based Solution Corner, Canadian-based Celero, Asian-based CSII, Asian-based Thien Nam Information Technology and India-based R Systems.

 

"The international marketplace is tremendously important to us," said Open Solutions senior vice president of International Operations Wayne Ginn, said.

 

XTuple, a vendor of open source enterprise resource planning software, has announced the free and open source PostBooks Edition of its xTuple ERP product recently passed the 100,000 download milestone on the SourceForge.net open source hosting portal.

 

The company also announced that a beta release of the all-new Version 3 of its product is now available for testing.

Ned Lilly, CEO of xTuple, said that "while we've had daily builds available for some time, this beta release includes sample databases and upgrade scripts."

The PostBooks Edition of xTuple ERP is the company's entry-level offering, available completely free and open source, suitable for small businesses of all kinds. It includes full financials, CRM, sales and purchasing, financial and ad-hoc reporting and lightweight inventory, manufacturing and distribution.

xTuple ERP Standard Edition is a midrange commercially-licensed offering, which adds advanced inventory control, warehousing, and other features to the core package. The OpenMFG Edition is the premium commercial offering.

 

National Retirement Partners has partnered with Salesforce.com (News - Alert) to offer the product. The system is designed to be a central location for advisers, organized as they choose.

 

Features on the NRP CRM system include unlimited document storage, weekly commissions at a glance per client and profitability analytics on a per client basis.

 

Using the Enterprise version of Salesforce.com, which allows for the integration of outside data fields, NRP says it has created what company officials call "a one-stop tool for virtually all client servicing needs - from plan benchmarking and client profitably analysis to the most basic client scheduling activities."

 

The release of the NRP CRM application on the Salesforce.com platform comes after more than a year of research and development, company officials say.  The system has been used the past several months by a few NRP Member Firms across the country.

 

"The major advantage is that the NRP CRM product is customized specifically to the needs of the pension-focused adviser," said Troy Hammond, Pensionmark CEO and president. "Being able to integrate the investments and commissions into the CRM system is huge for us."