Red Hat, Inc., on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eNovance, a provider of open source cloud computing services. Combined with Red Hat’s existing leadership in OpenStack, the addition of eNovance’s systems integration capabilities and engineering talent is aimed at meeting growing demand for enterprise OpenStack consulting, design and deployment.
Red Hat and eNovance first partnered in 2013 to deliver OpenStack implementation and integration services to joint customers, helping to accelerate adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Most recently, in May 2014, the two companies announced an expanded collaboration to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications innovations into OpenStack, aimed at delivering the industry’s most complete, carrier-grade telecommunications offering based on Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), and OpenStack.
Archivo mensual: junio 2014
Red Hat to Acquire eNovance
Red Hat, Inc., on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eNovance, a provider of open source cloud computing services. Combined with Red Hat’s existing leadership in OpenStack, the addition of eNovance’s systems integration capabilities and engineering talent is aimed at meeting growing demand for enterprise OpenStack consulting, design and deployment.
Red Hat and eNovance first partnered in 2013 to deliver OpenStack implementation and integration services to joint customers, helping to accelerate adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Most recently, in May 2014, the two companies announced an expanded collaboration to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications innovations into OpenStack, aimed at delivering the industry’s most complete, carrier-grade telecommunications offering based on Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), and OpenStack.
Could the net neutrality battle kill cloud competition and create SaaS monopolies?
The scorched-earth legal and PR battle currently taking place between Netflix and Verizon makes for some entertaining headlines. But the outcome of this fight will have profound impacts for both end-users and IT professionals.
One thing that doesn’t get discussed enough is the potential effect that this battle could potentially have over market freedom and competitively within the general SaaS and media space. But before we get into this discussion, let’s look at some of the key areas of conflict that have pushed the Net Neutrality debate to the point where it is today. (Not just for Netflix-Verizon, but for the general ISP industry as a whole).
Consumers and SaaS/Content Providers
The argument from the consumer and SaaS and content provider perspective is simple and easy enough to understand. Consumers are paying for a specific ISP service, and they would like to enjoy the full benefits of …
Network Security: Is It Time to Think Like a Thief?
What do a firewall and a fortress have in common? They are no longer strong enough to protect the valuables housed inside. Like the walls of an old fortress, the cracks in the firewall are allowing the bad guys to slip in – unannounced and unnoticed. By the time these thieves get in, the damage is already done and the network is already compromised. Intellectual property is easily slipped out the back door leaving no trace of forced entry. If we want to reign in on these cybercriminals, it’s high time we start thinking the way these thieves think. If we don’t, malware, rootkits, AETs and other nefarious threats will continue to undermine our sense of security.
Podcast: IBM’s Sandy Carter Gets Social
«Companies that don’t leverage social will e extinct before long,» noted Sandy Carter, IBM’s General Manager of Ecosystem Development and Social Media Evangelist.
Sandy recently spoke to me about social media, the cloud, and all that it entails for Big Blue. She outlined an ecosystem of traditional partners and «influencers,» a diverse group that includes customers, academia, agencies, as well as technology partners.
«The cloud has really changed the game,» she said. ‘It’s really opened the door for these new types of partners.»
Listen to what else she had to say in our exclusive podcast:
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Getting the Most Out of Your SDN
Fundamentally, SDN is still mostly about network plumbing. While plumbing may be useful to tinker with, what you can do with your plumbing is far more intriguing. A rigid interpretation of SDN confines it to Layers 2 and 3, and that’s reasonable. But SDN opens opportunities for novel constructions in Layers 4 to 7 that solve real operational problems in data centers. “Data center,” in fact, might become anachronistic – data is everywhere, constantly on the move, seemingly always overflowing. Networks move data, but not all networks are suitable for all data.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Steve Riley, Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology, will discuss how finding (or building) the right network, with the right applications, is still a labor-intensive task. Must it always be this way? No: for networks will soon be expressed as code. Finally, the data, the applications that process it, the networks that move it and the objects that store it can all be described by software constructs – let’s call this collection a super-blob – in the hands of skilled developers. Freed from their dependence on any given location, super-blobs can move around as necessary, resting on any physical fabric that can satisfy their requirements. As requirements change, locations may change – while preserving all application states. Location-independent computing is within our grasp.
BlueMix represents the next step in the transformation of IBM’s cloud offering
Gary Barnett, Enterprise Mobility and Productivity Software
At IBM Innovate 2014 in Orlando, Florida, IBM announced that its BlueMix PaaS offering will be made generally available at the end of June. BlueMix was first launched as a beta program in February this year at IBM’s Pulse conference, and the platform has seen a considerable amount of development in the four months since its first unveiling.
BlueMix is based on CloudFoundry, and runs on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure management platform. IBM has also integrated DevOps services (both from the open source world and from its Rational portfolio), along with a number of pre-built services from IBM and its partners presented via a highly polished user interface (the result of BlueMix being one of the first projects to benefit from IBM’s major Design initiative).
While IBM will be targeting enterprise developers with BlueMix, there is also a significant opportunity …
It’s A Multi-Vendor Cloud World
Experts say that cloud computing is disruptive and then continue on to discuss how the cloud quickly enables innovation while competition between cloud service providers drive costs down. Both of these scenarios are accurate, but the disruption from cloud has additional shockwaves that only now beginning to be felt. Hardware and software vendors are starting to show signs of wear on their revenue streams due to cloud. Eventually, that wave will begin to impact the ecosystems that includes Value-Added Resellers and professional services firms that implement the products for those vendors. Sometime between these two points another wave of disruption will begin to take hold; the move to multi-vendor solutions.
Could Cloud Spell the End for ERP As We Know It?
Enterprise Resource Planning has traditionally been a software for large corporates with million dollar technology budgets. But that has been changing over the past decade with the advent of cloud based ERP systems. According to a survey conducted by Sage, nearly 30% of finance managers at UK based SMEs believe that cloud could make ERP more affordable or viable to them. In another study published by Gartner, the top five fastest growing ERP vendors today are all SaaS companies. Even the larger, mature SaaS players like NetSuite have registered exponential growth rates of nearly 40% while the traditional on-premise vendors like Oracle and SAP are showing signs of stagnation.
How SAP is going to simplify its ERP
Chris Pennell, Lead Analyst, Public Sector
It is fair to say that the public sector’s view of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one of a platform supporting a set of tightly knitted solutions that tends to be customized to suit individual enterprise needs, in turn requiring a complex array of maintenance and licensing agreements. But the disruptive forces of cloud provide buyers with a chance to reconsider this preconception. Vendors must now puzzle over how buyers can carry on consuming best-of-breed services that allow for customization while satisfying their increasing demand for flexibility that cloud-based services purport to bring.
SAP provided more insight into how it would address this issue at its annual event, Sapphire Now. Though it reaffirmed that HANA would continue to be the core path for its customers’ migration to the cloud, it recognizes that it needs to make the journey simpler. SAP will need to …