Archivo mensual: diciembre 2015

Adobe, Content & Applications, Creative Cloud, Financial Results, News & Analysis, Software as a service

Adobe posts 22% Q4 revenue growth, driven by Creative Cloud

AdobeAdobe Systems has claimed it is only just starting to gain from cloud adoption, after reporting record earnings.

Strong growth in subscriptions to Adobe Systems’ Creative Cloud has contributed to the ninth consecutive quarter in which the software vendor topped market expectations, as it reported revenue of $1.31b in Q4 of the fiscal year ending in November 2015. Of this, revenue from its digital media business, including Creative Cloud, rose by 35% to $875.3 million.

The vendor added 833,000 new subscribers to the Creative Cloud in the three months ending in November, some 150,000 more than market analysts expected. Meanwhile, Adobe Marketing Cloud brought in $352 million in revenue thanks to an unexpectedly strong adoption of its software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

Adobe’s strong growth from Creative Cloud has come as enterprises and professionals have adopted the new model of purchasing apps like graphic design tool Photoshop, web design software Dreamweaver and web video building application Flash. According to Adobe 52% of its customers subscribe to the full Creative Cloud bundle, with the remaining 48% subscribing to individual products within the portfolio.

Adobe Systems’ Photoshop Lightroom is now the fastest growing app in its Creative Cloud, CFO Mark Garrett told Reuters. “It’s growing the most because it’s attracting hobbyists and consumers,” he said. Since these were people that would never buy Adobe’s products before, the Creative Cloud and the switch from traditional licensing to web based subscription has expanded its market, Garrett said. “Our financials show that the benefits of our move to the cloud are just beginning.”

Adobe’s digital marketing business, which makes software that analyses customer interactions and manages social media content, grew by just 2.3% in comparison, to $382.7 million.

The company’s shares jumped 4.7% to $93.10 following the release of its latest trading figures.

Financing, News & Analysis, SnapLogic

SnapLogic raises $37.5m in venture capital for cloud integration innovation

Dollar SignsOne of the first cloud computing start ups has re-launched with a completely new offering, after industry evolution jinxed its first ground breaking invention.

SnapLogic has announced the receipt of $37.5 million in venture funding for a second major launch. The money was released from a Series E round of funding from backers including Microsoft and Silver Lake Waterman. The new incarnation of SnapLogic will concentrate on making technology that simplifies the process of shifting data between major platforms. It creates software that acts as a control plane which runs in the cloud and another set of software which acts as a data plane which can run anywhere.

This, according to SnapLogic, makes it easier for customers to shift data from, say, Salesforce’s customer relationship management apps into Workday. Another application would be in the emerging Internet of Things sector, where SnapLogic software makes it easier for data gathered from industrial sensors to be flowed into Hadoop data lakes. SnapLogic can be accessed on the cloud via a browser and can support hundreds of simultaneous users at a site.

SnapLogic is one of the few start ups to survive having the rug pulled from it by a major shift in demand, according to CEO Gaurav Dhillon, who launched the company on its search for capital. When it received its first round of investment, led by venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz in 2009, it offered customers “snaps” to connect cloud applications with on-premise applications, allowing them to shift data between the two. However, a combination of the increasing popularity of hybrid cloud alternatives, and SnapLogic’s proprietary nature, gradually undermined the popularity of this solution.

SnapLogic didn’t work in “pure cloud fashion,” Dhillon told the The Wall Street Journal, since every customer needed to create its own SnapLogic software, running on its own premises, to connect to its cloud apps.

Despite being abandoned by some of the original backers, SnapDragon has made a transition to create a new set of cloud system integration problems. Other contributors to the new round of funding include Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Triangle Peak Partners. SnapLogic has now raised nearly $90 million in five rounds of funding.

News, Services

IBM Acquires Clearleap

On Tuesday, December 8th, IBM announced its acquisition of Clearleap, Inc., a cloud based video service provider.

Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM Cloud “Clearleap joins IBM at a tipping point in the industry when visual information and visual communication are not just important to consumers, but are exploding across every industry. This comes together for a client when any content can be delivered quickly and economically to any device in the most natural way.”

Clearleap has gained the attention of prominent brands within the media and entertainment industry, such as HBO, BBC, and the NFL. The Clearleap video platform works to provide customers from around the world with a scalable, secure and open cloud-based solution in video asset management and multi-screen video processing.

ClearIBM

Clearleap comes with open API framework which allows business to make their videos into applications. This open framework gives users access to third-party applications.
Clearleap video services provides 24/7 assistance and technical support. IBM intends to offer the Clearleap API’s on its Bluemix. This will aid in the efficiency of the video offering process.

Clearleap, centered in Georgia, has numerous centers around the world in Las Vegas, Atlanta, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

The price for which IBM purchased Clearleap was not disclosed.

The post IBM Acquires Clearleap appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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Your eCommerce Shoppers Are Going Global. Are You Ready? | @CloudExpo #Cloud

You may want to ask yourself if you really have a good understanding of where your customers are shopping. Digital marketers are known to cuddle up with Google Analytics as they crawl into bed at night just to explore these trends. Are you doing the same? Because as more of your customers visit you from other parts of the world, you’ll have to do a little bit more to make sure they all have a great experience on your site.

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Your Enterprise File Sync and Share Vendor By @JimLiddle | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Enterprise File Sync and Share is being embraced by more and more enterprise companies and this article look at the must have features that should be demanded from an Enterprise Sync and Share vendor.
Go hybrid, private or cloud: An enterprise will likely have different topologies and different ways of wanting to deploy. The EFSS vendors should support not only cloud but also hybrid and private topologies to enable enterprises to satisfy all potential use cases.

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Cloud File-Sharing Services: Get Accurate Benchmark Results | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Early last month, TechTarget had the privilege of sponsoring the 17th Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA, and we would like to congratulate them on yet another exceptional event as they continue to year-after-year bring together storage pros from all over the globe. At the expo, attendees were treated to three full days of seminars, sessions, and exhibitions led by todays leading cloud experts, digging into everything cloud computing.

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Cloud28+, Europe, HPE, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Software as a service

Cloud28+ promises to clear up the cloudy issues of compliance

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) claims its new Cloud28+ cloud service catalogue will simplify the search for compliant cloud services for European enterprises.

Cloud 28+ is a community of commercial and public sector organisations aimed at expanding cloud service adoption across Europe. The Cloud28+ catalogue, on the other hand, is a centralized enterprise app store which now lists 680 cloud services from 150 members across the range of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. To date 1000 end user organisations have pre-registered to use the catalogue.

The matchmaking Cloud28+ service online catalogue, now on general availability, promises a broad range of benefits for European customers. It allows customers to specify data centre locations and providers, in accordance with local laws and business requirements. It will helps users to find cloud-native independent software vendors with whom they can partner and it will help companies market themselves more expansively by letting them publishing their own services in the catalogue. This could allow end user organisations to turn their IT teams into ‘revenue-generating engines’, claims HPE.

The main benefit of the Cloud28+ service catalogue, HPE claims, is that it gives open access to huge numbers of enterprise cloud services. This will help cloud buyers to compare the cloud market, on functional and non-functional criteria, including price, service level agreements and certification levels.

One of the main selling points of the system is that is makes it easier to comply with increasingly strict data protections laws in the EU, according to James Kinsella, founder of Zettabox a cloud storage and team sharing system and the latest addition to the Cloud28+ catalogue. “It’s a logical community for Zettabox to join, as its mission is to build a cohesive and collaborative cloud environment, for Europeans by Europeans,” said Kinsella.

The Cloud28+ technology framework is based on HPE Helion OpenStack. This will give it the portability of cloud services and eliminate vendor lock-in, said Xavier Poisson, Hybrid IT VP at HPE. “This is an important milestone on the journey to a European Digital Single Market,” said Poisson.

The overturning of the Safe Harbour agreement in European courts had tremendous implications for cloud service providers, according to one analyst. “It certainly makes services that comply with European data privacy requirements more attractive,” said William Fellows, analyst at 451 Research.

Azure, Backup, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Azure Backup gets fine tuned with speed, cache and retention improvements

AzureMicrosoft’s Azure has promised more speed, lower cache demands and better data retention among a range of improvement to its cloud backup services for enterprise data.

Azure Backup now uses a technology called Update Sequence Number (USN) Journal in Windows to track the files that have changed between consecutive backups. USN keeps track of these changes to files and directories on the volume and this helps to identify changed files quickly.

The upshot of this tweak is a faster backup time. “We’ve seen up to a 50% reduction of backup times when using this optimization,” said Giridhar Mosay, Azure’s Program Manager for Cloud and Enterprise. Individual file server backup times will vary according to numbers and sizes of files and directory structure, Mosay warned.

A new algorithm that computes metadata has slashed the amount of cache space needed for each Azure Backup by 66%. The standard allocation of 15% cache space per volume size being backed up to Azure has proved prohibitive for volumes greater than 10TB. The new algorithm makes the cataloguing of the file space to be backed up a much more efficient process, which creates so much less metadata that it demands only 5% cache space, or less. Azure is now modifying its requirement for cache space to a third of the old level.

Meanwhile the resilience of the system has improved as Azure Backup has increased the number of recovery points for cloud backups. This allows for flexible retention policies to meet stringent compliance requirements such as HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) for large enterprises. The new maximum number of recovery points has increased from 366 to 9999.

Other tweaks include more timeouts across the various phases of backup process to ensure that long running jobs complete reliably. Cloud backups will also run a bit more efficiently as a result of a decoupling of the processes of cataloguing and uploading the backup data. Intermittent failures, in the service to handle incremental backups, have also been identified and resolved, according to Mosay. “We are continuing our journey to make Azure backup enterprise grade,” he said.

Financing, Funding, ItsOn, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud

ItsOn gets $12.5 million funding to take Smart Services into LatAm and EMEA

Itson awardCloud based mobile service provider ItsOn has raised $12.5 million in a Series D funding round led by Delta Partners Capital Limited with follow-on investments from Verizon Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Tenaya Capital.

ItsOn’s technology aims to make mobile commerce a more enjoyable and secure experience through a range of services, content and apps. It currently runs its Smart Services primarily from North America data centres but the cash injection will help it fund regional data centres as it launches into markets in South America, Middle East, Africa and Europe.

ItsOn says it gives mobile customers better ways to buy wireless services and interact with their service providers. Its service is described as a ‘digital transformation platform for wireless operators’ that includes an integrated cloud service, on-device software and a mobile operator interface, the Service Design Center. These three components connect to IT and business systems, so operators can provide better experiences with a faster time to market for services, offers and mobile commerce growth.

Mobile operators desperately need to improve their social skills with end users and that requires a digital transformation according to Kristoff Puelinckx, co-founder at one of ItsOn’s investors, Delta Partners. Puelinckx said ItsOn’s mobile commerce platform is ‘at least five years ahead’ of every other player in this space, thanks to its engagement skills and contextual marketing for new products, services and incentives.

The ‘great digital experience’ is generally lacking among mobile operators, who rely on time-consuming and inconvenient store visits and call centre based cold callers in order to sell new services. Operators have suddenly woken up to the fact that they need to show greater transparency and more compelling service, according to Puelinckx.

Verizon Ventures started investing in ItsOn when it invented a virtual end-to-end carrier IT system, and it poured even more money in when it then created a cloud solution for OSS, BSS and user engagement, said Verizon Ventures director Ed Ruth. “It moved the mobile service market forward and we are pleased to continue investing in ItsOn,” said Ruth. The new system, he says, will help operators sell a lot more services to consumers, SMBs and IoT companies.

“There’s a rapidly growing demand for our technology as wireless service providers face increasing end-user expectations, new opportunities and new competition,” said ItsOn CEO Dr Greg Raleigh.

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DevOps And ITIL: Friends Or Enemies? @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices

ITIL has actually been around since the 1980s, and has matured substantially in the intervening time. Today it belongs to AXELOS, a joint venture between the British Government and Capita plc. In spite of these years of progress, however, today’s Agile, DevOps context for IT makes the current version of ITIL from 2011 look to some people like a recipe for roadblocks and busy work.

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