Archivo mensual: octubre 2015

Big Data, IBM, marketing cloud, News & Analysis

IBM adds Universal Behavior Exchange into its Marketing Cloud

IBMIBM says the new Universal Behavior Exchange (UBE) in its Marketing Cloud will help businesses to understand their customers better.

The vendor and cloud service provider claims UBE can solve the problem of connect up all the different sources of information available to them. In some companies this means taking data from up to 30 different systems. Cloud service UBE aims to connect and personalise all relevant information and allow marketing staff to devise more effective campaigns on Facebook and across the Web.

UBX is supported by an open ecosystem of certified partners that includes social, mobile, CRM and paid advertising solutions. Vendor partners include MediaMath, Spredfast, MutualMind, SugarCRM and Exchange Solutions.

Features in the cloud based system include a click-to-connect integration that should simplify the getting and using of data marketers. A pre-integrated network of the vendor partner’s technology should give clients a faster access to a wide range of customer behaviour types, with event and audience data available across a range of paid, owned and earned channels. The system ultimately allows users to study the behaviour of customers and create a highly personalised interaction in response, according to IBM.

“IBM is making it simpler to understand how customers prefer to engage,” said MediaMath president Mike Lamb, “Connecting advertiser data to other channels could create more timely and relevant interactions.”

In a related announcement, mobile marketing system vendor Vibes leader has announced a complementary offering. The Vibes mobile marketing platform will now personalise mobile campaigns with IBM Campaign for targeted text messaging and mobile wallet offers. It will also work IBM Marketing Cloud systems to trigger transactional and service-oriented mobile messages, like appointment reminders and service updates.

“UBX is cracking the code on big data applied to the marketing cloud, and we’re thrilled to be a part of this emerging ecosystem,” said Vibes CEO Jack Philbin.

Amazon, AWS, Datacentre, Financial Results, News & Analysis, Q3 2015

AWS profitability quadruples as revenue surges 78%

amazon awsAmazon Web Services’ revenue grew by 78% year over year to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2015 and its operating profit more than quadrupled to $521 million. Its high profits – attributed to 500 new inventions and eight price cuts – contributed to earnings which surpassed analyst expectations and created a surge in parent company Amazon’s stock price.

The high growth rate in AWS profitability could be accounted for by last year’s low margins caused by a competitive price cuts on AWS services.

Meanwhile parent company Amazon reported an overall third-quarter operating profit of $406 million on $25.4 billion of sales. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky answered criticism that AWS is keeping the company profitable and that, in the face of cloud competition, it may have to cut prices again to ensure further growth.

“I will point out that this quarter showed a lot of innovation, a lot of new products and features and a lot of investment,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts. “Globally we are investing very heavily in our Prime platform. We’ve launched multiple devices including e-readers, tablets priced under $50, Echo dash buttons, so there’s a lot of investment going on, and there will continue to be, especially related to prime. Innovation and investment will continue and can be lumpy over time.”

The pace of innovation in AWS and the scale of its business has allowed it to do the ‘heavy lifting for Amazon’ said one Wall Street blogger.

By constantly re-inventing itself AWS has been able to cut its prices eight times since April 2014, said Phil Hardin, Amazon director of investor relations, in an analyst conference calls. “The company rolled out 539 new features and services in the past year alone, many of which have been designed so that its customers can access enterprise-grade services for a fraction of what they would traditionally cost on-premise,” said Hardin.

Enterprise IT, HP, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

HP Helion Public Cloud to end, buyers told to go to Amazon

HPHP has revealed that the OpenStack-driven HP Helion Public Cloud will close on January 31 2016 as it looks to focus on private and managed cloud offerings, which is says it will now ramp up.

HP announced the news via its blog in which it also revealed that would invest more in the Helion OpenStack platform which, it said, has more realistic prospects for strong customer adoption. The Helion Openstack system is the foundation of its private cloud offering.

Bill Hilf, HP Cloud’s general manager, explained the logic behind the decision. “The market for hybrid infrastructure is evolving quickly. Today, our customers are consistently telling us they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud,” said Hilf. They only want access to software as a service (SaaS) applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads, he added.

With customers pushing for private cloud to be delivered faster than ever before, the company has had to prioritise, he said.

“We will continue to innovate and grow in our areas of strength, we will continue to help our partners and to help develop the broader open cloud ecosystem, and we will continue to listen to our customers to understand how we can help them with their entire end-to-end IT strategies,” said Hilf.

HP will support its new model by expanding its partner base and integrating different public cloud environments, Hilf said. Customers who want public cloud should go to Amazon, Hilf said.

“For customers who want access to existing large-scale public cloud providers, we have already added greater support for Amazon Web Services as part of our hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus,” said Hilf.

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Logz.io to Present at @DevOpsSummit | @Logzio #DevOps #Microservices

In their session at DevOps Summit, Asaf Yigal, co-founder and the VP of Product at Logz.io, and Tomer Levy, co-founder and CEO of Logz.io, will explore the entire process that they have undergone – through research, benchmarking, implementation, optimization, and customer success – in developing a processing engine that can handle petabytes of data.
They will also discuss the requirements of such an engine in terms of scalability, resilience, security, and availability along with how the architecture accomplishes these requirements.
Lastly, they will review the gory details of the technologies they have chosen, which are based mostly on open source platforms including Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Docker as well as other proprietary technologies.

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history of Windows, Infographic, Microsoft history, Microsoft Windows, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Windows Users

The Evolution of Windows Users (Infographic)

While we’ve reminisced about Windows in both slideshow and infographic form here on the Parallels blog, we’ve yet to view the history of Microsoft’s mighty OS through the lens of its users. We know exactly how Windows itself has evolved over the past thirty years, but how have we, the users, changed? This infographic shows […]

The post The Evolution of Windows Users (Infographic) appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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Big Data in the Cloud | @CloudExpo #IoT #BigData #Microservices

The cloud promises agility for companies wanting to utilize it for Big Data, but it can be challenging to understand all the new options and approaches – from IaaS and PaaS to newer services like HaaS and BDaaS. It’s an important concept to understand as more than half of enterprises plan to use the cloud for Big Data.
In her session at 17th Cloud Expo, Hannah Smalltree, a director with Cazena, will discuss the emerging technology categories for Big Data and the cloud, and hear important considerations for your decision. In addition, you’ll get common evaluation criteria to help evaluate and rank your options.

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Microsoft, Amazon and Google: How cloud underpins their financial figures

(c)iStock.com/baona

Yesterday was a pretty busy day if you were tracking financial results, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all declaring their figures. And it was an impressive showing on the cloud side for the three tech giants, with Microsoft announcing Azure usage and compute usage more than doubling year on year and Amazon Web Services (AWS) showing similar quarterly and yearly growth.

AWS brought in $2.09bn for the firm in Q315, compared with $1.17bn for this time last year, with $5.47bn in the nine months from January 2015. As for Microsoft Azure, the exact figures remain undisclosed, but under Microsoft’s four buckets in which they divulge their revenue, ‘intelligent cloud’ contributed to $5.89bn for the quarter ended September 30 – up from $5.48bn this time last year.

Regarding Google, the specific figures again remained under cloak and dagger, but the company, of course now under the umbrella of parent firm Alphabet, intimated cloud had contributed strong growth. The company also promised, as early as the next quarter, financial results to be more transparent than the usual ‘advertising’ and ‘other’ brackets.

In terms of overall figures, revenue for Amazon was at $25bn for the latest quarter, compared to Microsoft at $20.4bn GAAP for Q116 and Alphabet’s $18.7bn.

Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google, said: “Our Q3 results show the strength of Google’s business, particularly in mobile search. With six products now having more than one billion users globally, we’re excited about the opportunities ahead of Google, and across Alphabet.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said: “We are making strong progress across each of our three ambitions by delivering innovation people love. Customer excitement for new devices, Windows 10, Office 365, and Azure is increasing as we bring together the best Microsoft experiences to empower people to achieve more.”

The cloud infrastructure revenues of each company comparatively makes for interesting reading, with notes from Synergy Research revealing how, while AWS maintains a major lead, Microsoft is finding a niche in second place. Back in July, the latest figures revealed the combined market share of the ‘big four’ – AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google – was at 54% of the overall cloud infrastructure market, with quarterly revenues of the four behemoths having surpassed $3 billion for the first time.

John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst, told this reporter that the status quo, of Azure revenue growing significantly more rapidly than AWS or IBM, remains – yet AWS will maintain a substantial lead. “Considering the scale of their cloud operations, both AWS and Microsoft are growing at remarkable rates,” he said.

You can find the full Amazon figures here, the Microsoft results here, and the Google announcement here.

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Cloudify: TOSCA Orchestration of Microservices | @CloudExpo #Microservices

Martin Fowler describes how infrastructure automation is a key enabler of microservices:

“Many of the products or systems being build with microservices are being built by teams with extensive experience of Continuous Delivery and it’s precursor, Continuous Integration. Teams building software this way make extensive use of infrastructure automation techniques. This is illustrated in the build pipeline shown below.”

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Gamification and the Internet of Things | @ThingsExpo #IoT #API #Microservices

Most people haven’t heard the word, “gamification,” even though they probably, and perhaps unwittingly, participate in it every day.
Gamification is “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (as a task) so as to encourage participation.” Further, gamification is about bringing game mechanics – rules, constructs, processes, and methods – into the real world in an effort to engage people.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Robert Endo, owner and engagement manager of Intrepid Data, will discuss how wearables, analytics, and geospatial technologies can be combined to transform the world into the ultimate game board. Organizations can grasp consumer, employee, or client intrinsic interest by setting up cool, collaborative, and rewarding systems using the IoT.

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Join @AgilDataInc at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud #BigData

SYS-CON Events announced today that AgilData will exhibit at the 17th International CloudExpo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
AgilData offers a seamlessly integrated best-of-breed solution for Big Data problems like streaming analytics, data pipeline orchestration, and batch processing. AgilData unifies proven open source technologies with a seamless developer and operations experience.

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