Archivo mensual: marzo 2016

Enterprise IT, GoDaddy, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

GoDaddy lauches cloud services tailored for small businesses

Godaddy logo matWeb hosting company GoDaddy has expanded its offering for small business customers to include Cloud Servers and Bitnami-powered Cloud Applications.

GoDaddy, which claims to have more than 61 million domain names under management, will offer its customers a “pay as you go” utility billing model, which will enable customers build, test and scale cloud solutions on GoDaddy’s infrastructure. The company’s traditional playing field is to give customers access to site building software like Word Press, but the new move will provide an environment where they can build and run just about any software they like.

“With the launch of Cloud Servers, GoDaddy aims to extend our lead as the number one trusted provider of Cloud Hosting solutions for individual developers and technologists. We’re looking to make it easy for developers to serve small businesses with the technology they want,” said Jeff King, GM Hosting, Security at GoDaddy. “By offering a powerful, yet simple cloud offering that integrates domains, DNS, security and backups all in one place, developers can save time and exceed their clients’ expectations.”

Unlike its better-known rivals in the cloud space, GoDaddy will build on its traditional business model of targeting individual developers, tech entrepreneurs and small-scale businesses with the new solution. The services will offer a number of features to smaller businesses that cannot afford or justify an all-encompassing service offered by the traditional players in the public cloud market. The company claims virtual instances can be built, tested, cloned and re-provisioned in less than a minute, meeting market expectations.

Alongside the servers, GoDaddy’s Cloud Applications are powered by Bitnami, an open source server application deployments library. “As a GoDaddy technology partner on Cloud Applications, we’re excited for GoDaddy’s international customer base to take advantage of our capabilities – joining the millions of developers and business users who save time and effort with our library’s consistent, secure and optimized end-user experience,” said Erica Brescia, Co-Founder at Bitnami. “We’re proud to partner with GoDaddy in serving this global market of advanced SMB-focused developers.”

The new offering from GoDaddy has seemingly been in the works for some time, as the team announced the acquisition of the public cloud customer division of Apptix for $22.5 million last September.

“With the acquisition of Apptix’s public cloud customer base, we have an opportunity to take customers using Hosted Exchange and bring them over to GoDaddy’s Microsoft Office 365 offering,” said Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of Corporate Comms, at the time.

With Microsoft and Google making moves to take market share away from AWS in the corporate space, GoDaddy is targeting the small business market, a niche that appears to be relatively overlooked.

Google, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, SME

Google said to be on cloud shopping spree

Googlers having funGoogle is rumoured to be planning the acquisition of a number of businesses to bolster its cloud computing platform and suite of workplace applications.

According to Re/code, the tech giant has amassed a short-list of various start-ups and niche service providers including automated app services start-up Metavine, e-commerce public company Shopify, and payroll and health benefits services business Namely. Re/code sources have stressed that the approaches are preliminary, and none of the companies involved have commented on the rumours.

The moves seem to address two challenges currently facing the Google team. Firstly, there is a notable gap of ‘middle range’ customers for Google Apps. The company traditionally does well with small and large companies, but has struggled with the lucrative market in between. Last year, Google attempted to lure the middle market onto Google Apps for Work by offering the service for free while seeing out their current enterprise agreement, and then $25 per user after that point.

Secondly, the acquisitions would enable Google to move its internal systems to its cloud platform, potentially creating a more solid offering to challenge AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The reports back-up recent moves in the market which indicated Google’s intentions of increasing its stake in the cloud market. While AWS and Microsoft have been firmly planted as the number one and number two players in the public and private cloud space, Google is closing the gap, making a number of company and talent acquisitions to improve its proposition.

Aside from the recent hire of VMware founder Diane Greene to lead its cloud business, last year SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle highlighted that Google cloud platform revenues could surpass Google’s advertising revenue within five years.

“The goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020,” said Hölzle in October. “Our cloud growth rate is probably industry-leading…and we have lots of enterprise customers, happy enterprise customers.”

The rumours shouldn’t come as a surprise, as Hölzle also said that there would be a number of announcements which would “remove any doubt” from Google’s future plans.

While the approaches are rumours, GCP Next 2016, the company’s cloud developer user conference taking place this week, may provide some clarity to Google’s aspirations.

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From Silos to DevOps – Going Cloud Native | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DevOps

Although the conversation about DevOps typically focuses mostly on the tool sets and platforms – Puppet, Docker, Microservices et al, the more profoundly challenging aspects for most large organizations will be in the organizational transformation is proposed as part of the ‘Cloud Native‘ mix.
As is described in the complimentary ebook from Pivotal – Migrating to Cloud Native Application Architectures:
DevOps sets out to break down the artificial boundaries that develop profusely in large, hierarchical organizations, and instead self-organize around a ‘delivery pipeline’ of the work required to deploy code faster and with fewer errors.

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Implementing the Mediator Design Pattern in Angular 2 By @YFain | @CloudExpo #Cloud

In any component-based framework you’ll need to implement component communications. The main principle is that components should be loosely coupled hence reusable hence testable. The mediator design pattern allows you to arrange component communications via “the man in the middle” so a component A never communicates with the component B directly. If a component needs data, someone will provide the data via bindings to the component’s input properties. Who’s this someone?Ain’t no business of the component. If a component needs to provide some data to the external world, it’ll emit events (with the data payload). Emits to whom? Ain’t no business of the component. Let whoever needs the data listen to the events from this component.

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AWS, Cisco, Enterprise IT, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

HPE holds off Cisco for cloud infrastructure top spot

HPE street logoFindings from Synergy Research Group have HPE as the number one provider in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, narrowly outperforming Cisco over the course of 2015.

Total revenues for the cloud infrastructure equipment segment reached over $60 billion in 2015, with HPE accounting for just over 12%, and Cisco just under. Dell, Microsoft and IBM complete the top five, each controlling about 7% market share.

“There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market as AWS and other cloud operators are having tremendous success in attracting enterprises to their ever-expanding range of service offerings,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments. Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.”

Synergy’s research showed between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015 total spend on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services exceeded $60 billion. Spend on private cloud accounted for more than 50% of these revenues, though public cloud is growing at a faster pace. HPE currently leads the private cloud space, with Cisco in second, however the roles are reversed for the public cloud segment.

While HPE and Cisco remain dominant in the server and networking segments, both companies have been releasing a number of new products in recent months to diversify their offering. Last week, HPE launched its ‘machine-learning-as-a-service’ on Microsoft Azure, which combines 60 API’s to provide machine learning capabilities. While HPE is seemingly capitalizing on the growing ‘as-a-service’ trend, Cisco is focused on its cloud-based collaboration service, Cisco Spark, which was launched with Verizon recently.

Market share graphMicrosoft features in the list due to its position in the server OS and virtualization applications market, where as Dell and IBM have demonstrated strong offerings in a broad number of cloud technology markets. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95% of the Q4 cloud infrastructure market.

While hardware and software to build cloud services revenues exceeded $60 billion, other areas of the industry demonstrated stronger growth. Public IaaS/PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 51%, followed by private & hybrid cloud infrastructure services at 45%.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Duke. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud.”

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A guide to continuous development and the cloud: Software’s solution for today

(c)iStock.com/StockFinland

Many organisations are taking a DIY approach to their hosting needs and even some of their development needs. It’s worthwhile to note though that hosting software can be a complicated and costly affair, and organisations that attempt to take on the task often find a number of hidden costs buried beneath the surface that are ultimately unexpected or surprising to them.

Before taking on this challenge, it may be a good idea to stop and ponder where those hidden costs are and what that actually means for your organisation. For example, ongoing costs for hosting your own software include applying fixes, patches, upgrades, integration maintenance, hardware maintenance and purchasing and countless other tasks. A little money saved in one area, such as implementation, can lead to a bunch spent elsewhere, for instance on operational costs.

For those looking to avoid some of these costs, the cloud has quickly become a high-quality option for mitigating costs and other obstacles. When compared to the use of on-premise solutions, the cloud almost always offers a better return on investment. Regarding costs, you’ll appear to pay more upfront for cloud solutions, but following the investment there’s likely nothing unhidden beneath the surface. This is not the case of on-premise solutions, where the upfront costs appear lower overall, but are followed with many underwater and hidden costs.

If we lay the two software models side by side and name them icebergs, the differences are often stark. Let’s say that they both have roughly the same amount of area floating above the water, but that those represent vastly different costs and ratios. For example, the portion of the iceberg above the water on the cloud side is 63% of its total cost, money spent on subscription costs. Comparatively, the portion lifted out of the water on the on-premise iceberg represents the implementation costs, or only 9% of the overall cost of the solution.

On-premise solutions costs overall are much more difficult to define. The only fees that you see popping up out of the water are for licenses, usually a very small portion of the overall solution spend. But buried beneath the water lies the operational costs including upgrades, maintenance, rewrites, and patches and fixes. All of these components are much more difficult to predict and leave organisations struggling to nail down costs and operate efficiently because of it.

With on-premise solutions having the license fee as only 9% of the total costs, what are your alternatives? Cloud solutions are gaining more and more momentum worldwide and the driving factor is efficiency. At first glance, the investment in cloud solutions seems higher, but what must be realised is that we get more in return. The total cost of ownership for these solutions is lower, their costs are more predictable and these solutions allow you to focus more on your core business. Given the unpredictable nature of costs of on-premise solutions, this simply is not the case.

Another difference between the two solutions sets is the process of continuous development. Perhaps this is a bit of an obscure element to take into account when comparing the differences between software solutions. On-premise solutions hinder the process of continuous development, while this is the primary differentiator for cloud solutions. There’s simply no reason that a cloud solutions is not constantly up to date, upgraded and regularly enhanced. Cloud solutions are designed, in part, to be updated regularly.

Dating back to the years that software was shipped on CDs, many companies still deliver on-premise updates in a yearly or half-yearly release cycles. This is simply untenable in an ever-increasingly rapidly changing world of always on. Our clients must be able to respond rapidly to our customers and their service needs, and we must be able to respond quickly to customer demands and changes in the market.

Though continuous development is a term that’s likely more important to software designer types than others, it’s really just another way for us to recognise the need for solutions that are continuously up to date and ready for our use to serve our clients, whether they are inside or outside of the organisation. Operating systems mired in the past don’t deliver optimal results for any organisation.

On-premise solutions that must wait for half yearly or yearly releases means organisations must wait for the next ‘shipping moment’ for something that may have been ready for release much earlier. Workarounds become commonplace in scenarios like this. By experiencing more structural release moments, more commonly found in the cloud, users are able to receive new solutions as they are ready.

Additionally, more releases improves the feedback loop between clients and customers. In a static situation, once a product has shipped it’s not uncommon for a half year or more to pass. Thus, by the time customer feedback reaches developers, the likelihood is that the original developers on the project have moved on or are working on other projects. Their having to switch back to solutions that were created “way back” is not very efficient. Faster feedback makes sure that developers are more involved in the customer experience, and are able to respond quickly with improvements.

All in all, continuous deployment elevates the overall user experience – found in the cloud. The most likely future of support and IT services.

ATS, ATS LB, ATSLB, Automatic terminal server load balancing, Parallels Remote Application Server, PRAS, terminal server

Automatic Terminal Server Load Balancing

Automatic Terminal Server Load Balancing Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) enables businesses to publish resources to remote users so that Windows applications can be accessed from a range of devices and from any location. With Microsoft taking terminal servers mainstream through the introduction of the Windows Server OS, most businesses are now able to configure […]

The post Automatic Terminal Server Load Balancing appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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Announcing BZ Media Named “Media Sponsor” of @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #Cloud

SYS-CON Events announced today BZ Media LLC has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
BZ Media LLC is a high-tech media company that produces technical conferences and expositions, and publishes a magazine, newsletters and websites in the software development, SharePoint, mobile development and Commercial Drone markets.

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Is the Managed Service Provider (MSP) Business Outdated? By @IanKhanLive | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Over the last few weeks I was fortunate to meet a large number of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) at two separate industry events in Toronto. At both these events, focused on MSPs, and through all my conversations, one thing that resonated throughout was the dire state in which Managed Service Providers are currently conducting business. I am sharing my thoughts to help make sense of what the industry is going through and how the inability to adapt can lead to the slow death of an otherwise highly successful industry.

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