Former Microsoft Office division president Kurt DelBene will lead troubled healthcare insurance site during the first 1/2 2014. The White House has tapped Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene to guide the government’s federal health care insurance exchange site, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday. DelBene, who most recently served as president of Microsoft Office Division, will succeed Jeff Zients as a senior advisor to Sebelius and could work closely with the White House and senior HHS leaders, Sebelius wrote in a blog post. DelBene has agreed to serve inside the role “no less than throughout the first half next year,” she said, because the administration officials prepare to toughen efforts to sign up citizens into the government’s Affordable Health Deal with America Act program. “Kurt has proven expertise in heading large, complex technology teams and in product development. He’ll be an incredible asset in our work,” Sebelius said. [ State insurance exchanges face their very own challenges. Read Medical health insurance Exchanges... Read More »

Halo attracted users to the Xbox. Will digital assistant Cortana do the identical for Windows Phone 8.1? 7 Mistakes Microsoft Made In 2013 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Does Microsoft finally have a killer consumer app? The corporate hasn’t publicly acknowledged Cortana, its much-rumored competitor to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now. But evidence of Microsoft’s alleged digital assistant continues to leak online, pointing to a probable debut in April, when the corporate is anticipated to expose Windows Phone 8.1 at its Build Conference for developers. Microsoft representatives often indicate that Windows devices can “do more” than competitors. In some ways, this is true. Unlike iPads, Windows 8.1 tablets offer true multitasking, and unlike iPhones and Android handsets, Windows Phone devices boast subscription-free access to mobile Office apps. But there’s a difference between a product with which people can do more and a product people choose to use — and lately, consumers and businesses have increasingly chosen non-Windows platforms. That’s why Cortana could... Read More »

Amazon Web Services will cut Elastic Block Store prices by as much as 50% and straightforward Storage Service by a regular of 14%, plus add two new M3 virtual servers. Amazon will cut prices on its Elastic Block Store (EBS) by as much as 50% and on its Simple Storage Service (S3) by a standard of 14% beginning Feb. 1. It is also introducing two new M3 server instance types. Amazon Web Services’s cloud evangelist Jeff Barr announced the worth changes in a blog Tuesday. EBS is where an Amazon customer saves a replica of its running system and its data. Without EBS, the customer’s system and knowledge would vanish with out a trace once the virtual machine is shut down. EBS price cuts will vary by region, in line with Barr. For instance, using EBS service for a month in AWS’s most efficient datacenter, US-East, costs 10 cents per GB, but starting Feb. 1 it will become 5 cents per GB monthly. Likewise,... Read More »

John Engates went to the White House Monday to get a better examine what went wrong with HealthCare.gov. Unlike actor Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith, Engates came far from Washington saying this problem may be fixed. Rackspace CTO John Engates went to the White House Monday to get a more in-depth look into what went wrong with HealthCare.gov. What he saw convinced him that giant Government doesn’t operate the way in which enterprises do — and perhaps it’s going to. Engates was among the few technology industry spokespersons to leap forward when the talk over HealthCare.gov broke out. He was quoted, among other places, on front page of USA Today, commenting that the location appeared to not have government repositories that may stay alongside of its needs. Engates doesn’t fit the stereotype of a business-oriented government critic. “i used to be very proud and excited to be invited,” he said in an interview after returning to his home base in San Antonio, Texas. Concurrently, he hasn’t... Read More »

Private clouds are moving rapidly from concept to production as fears about expertise and integration wane, in accordance with our new survey. It’s been 20 months since our last InformationWeek Private Cloud Survey, and boy have things changed. In that point, the proportion of enterprises reporting functional private clouds greater than doubled, from 21% to 47%. What’s equally amazing is that, in April 2012, 30% of survey respondents were only starting cloud projects. A 26-percentage-point increase in shops with functional clouds implies that most of these plans that were at the strategy planning stage two years ago made it into production. We almost never see organizations move so fast on a brand new technology. If private cloud technology ever went through Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment,” it was short-lived. Rather, the celebrities were aligned for strong growth. The OpenStack Foundation was incorporated six months after our 2012 survey, and CloudStack, an open-source private cloud suite that’s been battling it out with Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was released... Read More »