Daily Tech Briefing: May 8, 2014

Facebook started the Open Compute Project in 2011, which now has Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Mellanox Technologies and Rackspace as members.

While the months-old Open Compute Lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio may not look like much now, Paul Rad, director of the lab and vice president of research at Rackspace, told eWEEK he expects big things from it in the future.

This is one of two certification labs designed to test systems for quality assurance and ensuring they meet OCP specifications. However, Rad explained that the lab is more than just a test center. Rather, he wants it to be a center for driving innovation in the areas of cloud computing and big data.

Microsoft has rolled out a private preview of Office Mix, a free PowerPoint add-on that incorporates interactivity and sharing features into its popular PowerPoint software. While this new software could impact many industries, Microsoft is focusing on how it could help teachers.

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Office Team explained they want to make it simple for teachers to take a PowerPoint document and turn it into an interactive, playable document that can be viewed on many devices.

At the EMC World 2014 conference, the company introduced its own EMC Hybrid Cloud package, which, according to EMC, can deliver fast application provisioning and deployment to go with improved levels of IT automation. The package is designed to build a sort of bridge between easy-to-use but difficult-to-secure public cloud services and the security and speed of purpose-built private clouds.

Finally, Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems are joining forces to create the Cisco Mobile Workspace Solution with Citrix. This new mobile infrastructure combines Cisco’s computing, networking and security capabilities with Citrix’s new Workspace Suite of mobile virtualization and mobility tools.