Archivo mensual: julio 2016

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Boeing and Ryanair looking to take advantage of cloud and big data platforms

(c)iStock.com/flightlevel80

The airline industry has traditionally been ripe for technological innovation – and a couple of examples have hit CloudTech’s inbox with regard to how different providers are currently utilising big data and cloud.

Boeing has announced an agreement with Microsoft to build a cloud-based platform for its range of analytics tools, aiming to transition many of the airline’s commercial aviation applications into the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Among the applications ready to move into the cloud include real-time information on purchasing and leasing aeroplanes and engines, as well as route planning, managing inventory, and maintaining fleets. The airline claims that through use of its apps by customers, crew scheduling costs have gone down by as much as 7%.

“Boeing’s expertise and extensive aviation data resource, coupled with Microsoft’s cloud technology, will accelerate innovation in areas such as predictive maintenance and flight optimisation, allowing airlines to drive down costs and improve operational efficiency,” said Kevin Crowley, Boeing vice president of digital aviation. “Together, two companies that changed their industries are teaming up to accelerate the digital transformation of aviation through the use of analytics-based applications, cloud technologies, and large-scale integration.”

Elsewhere, Ryanair is using visual analytics to improve route management, reservations, and in-flight services. The low-cost flight provider is working with data analytics provider Qlik to build an overview of its business, and according to Shane Finnegan, senior BI developer at Ryanair, the use of two Qlik products – Qlik Sense, for easy to digest data visualations, and QlikView, for more in depth analytics – has helped in identifying and addressing issues much closer to real-time.

“Ultimately, we want to find the best ways to make our customers happy on-board, while being able to offer them the lowest fares on the market – and Qlik gives us the foundation to make educated decisions which will make that notion a reality,” said Finnegan.

Ryanair is looking to expand its initial collaboration with Qlik to potentially feature improving in-flight retail, as well as better targeted flight offerings, optimising the supply chain by understanding the anticipated group of passengers on a given flight.

Cloud and big data is not the only area in which airlines – and airports – are trying to take advantage. Delta has started to implement improvements around the Internet of Things (IoT), predominantly around the manufacturing and maintenance of planes, while Miami International Airport has launched the MIA Airport Official mobile app, which gives contextual information to passengers based on their location around hundreds of beacons installed at the airport.

Parallels Desktop for Mac, PDFM, Support blog, Support Post, Transfer Parallels to new Mac, Transferring Parallels Desktop

Transferring Parallels Desktop to a New Mac

Guest blog from support team member: Ajith Mamolin Are you planning to upgrade your Mac or get a new one? Or just getting a replacement? Congrats, and heres to hoping your new Mac is even more powerful than your last one! As you are reading this blog, there is a good chance you have Parallels Desktop installed. Let’s walk […]

The post Transferring Parallels Desktop to a New Mac appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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Announcing @LeaseWeb to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #API #IaaS #Cloud

SYS-CON Events announced today that LeaseWeb USA, a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
LeaseWeb is one of the world’s largest hosting brands. The company helps customers define, develop and deploy IT infrastructure tailored to their exact business needs, by combining various kinds cloud solutions.

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AI, Cognitive, Financial Results, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM makes cloud progress but reports another quarterly decline

IBMIBM revenues continued to fall for a 17th consecutive quarter despite beating analyst expectations and demonstrating healthy growth in its cloud and data business units, reports Telecoms.com.

The company reported a drop in revenues for Q2 of 2.8% to $20.24 billion, though this was an improvement on analyst expectations of $20.03 billion, encouraging shares to rise 2.6% to $164 after hours. The business units which the company deems strategic imperatives, cloud, analytics and engagement, gained 12% year-on-year, though this wasn’t enough to counter the impact of legacy technologies on reported earnings which fell to $2.5 billion from $3.45 billion in 2015. Overall, revenues are now roughly 25% lower than the numbers reported in 2011.

“We continued to deliver double-digit revenue growth in our strategic imperatives,” said CFO Martin Schroeter on the company’s earnings call this week. “Over the last 12 months, strategic imperatives delivered $31 billion in revenue, and now represent 38% of IBM.

“Growth was led by cloud, where our revenue was up 30% to $3.4 billion in the quarter, and over $11.5 billion over the last year so good progress in cloud. Looking at revenue from a segment perspective, the strongest growth came from cognitive solutions led by our analytics and cognitive capabilities and security.”

Schroeter was keen to emphasise the impact Watson is having on the business, as the team continue its journey to redefine Big Blue in the age of cloud computing. Numerous customers were listed as wins for IBM in the cognitive computing sector, as IBM continues to champion Watson as a platform to bring together the digital business with digital intelligence to improve decision-making and add intelligence to products and processes. Watson will continue to be the jewel in the crown of Big Blue as the company moves towards the new digital era.

Despite revenues continuing to fall the team has made a number of positive launches throughout the quarter. Quantum computing is now available on the IBM cloud, the team launched a new partnership with Box to counter the impact of EU-US Privacy Shield on its international business, and an expanded partnership with VMWare expanded the reach of its security portfolio.

In terms of the specific segments, revenues in the cognitive team rose 4%, though this is down from 9% growth in the previous quarter, solutions software revenue was up 6% for the quarter, SAS was another area which recorded triple digit growth and Schroeter claims IBM’s security business outperformed the market by three times. The IBM interactive experience unit also demonstrated healthy growth, as the team continue its journey into an entirely new market for Big Blue.

“We have opened over 30 digital studios around the globe including new studios in Singapore and Seoul,” said Schroeter. “We also completed the acquisition of Aperto, a digital agency in Berlin with over 300 employees and a roster of enterprise clients such as Airbus and Siemens.”

One area which has caught the headlines in recent weeks is the impact of Brexit on the fortunes of the technology sector. Despite concerns from various corners of the industry, it would not have appeared to have a significant impact on the long-term vision of IBM.

“I don’t think that Brexit coming at the end of the quarter helped us at all, but we obviously finished kind of right where we expected to finish,” said Schroeter. “And when we look at our full view of the year, we don’t see an impact, if you will, that has any real materiality on us.

“What I typically observe in these kinds of instances is that our discussions with our clients have to go through a process of reprioritization. So as they reprioritize, the length of time that takes depends a lot on how much uncertainty they’re faced with. And obviously, the political leadership in Europe and the UK can help reduce that uncertainty, but we didn’t see – again, we don’t think it helped but it didn’t cause us to change our guidance.”

While revenues have continued to fall for the tech giant, it would appear to be heading in the right direction. The strategic imperatives business units are now accounting for a larger proportion of the overall figures, now 38%, indicating the tide may be turning for IBM. Schroeter also highlighted the team are not happy relying solely on the progress of Watson, as IBM has acquired 20 companies in the last twelve months, which are now beginning to contribute in a more significant manner.

Although progress is starting to be seen, it would be worth noting it has not been an entirely smooth ride for IBM. There have been numerous new product launches and advances into new market segments, though this has come at a cost of more than 70,000 redundancies over recent months. While there has been a slight increase in share price following the announcement, it would be worth noting previous performance has had an impact on IBM. Shares in Big Blue have dropped 17% since CEO Virginia Rometty took over in January 2012 while the S&P 500 index rose 70% during the same period.

cloud security, cyber security, Dell, News & Analysis

Security still viewed as a barrier to progress – Dell

Security CCTV camera in office buildingA recent survey from Dell demonstrates security is still seen as a hindrance to innovation as companies aim to develop a more digitally orientated proposition for the market, reports Telecoms.com.

While a substantial 89% of the respondents highlighted their organization was in the middle of a digital transformation project, 76% agree security is brought into the equation too late in the development process, with 85% saying they actively avoid bringing security experts in due to the belief they will slow or even scupper the project.

“This survey produced some eye-opening results and reinforces what we’ve been hearing directly from our customers,” said John Milburn, GM of One Identity Products at Dell. “Organisations face challenges securing their digital transformations and recognise that their current security measures are exposing the business to risk.

Security has been one of the biggest talking points within the telecommunications and technology industry, generally due to a lack of understanding. Until recently, security challenges would appear to have been pushed to the side as there have not been any clear routes to success. It would seem companies are not willing to allow security concerns to stop progress, instead aiming to secure products retrospectively.

The survey demonstrates attitudes towards are still relatively negligent. While numerous CEO’s and board members have highlighted security would be considered at the top of the agenda, surveys such as this tell a different story, much to the disappointment of security professionals and vendors alike. One conclusion which could be drawn from the survey is security is still considered a barrier to success when driving towards innovation. In fact 37% of respondents agreed with the statement “it is likely that the security team will delay or block a new initiative presented to us today”, and 49% agreed with “our security team does have a reputation for blocking projects based on the past, but now we do a better job of enabling the business”.

“Our goal is to provide our customers with solutions that address these needs. When done right, security can enable organisations to aggressively adopt new technologies and practices that can have a direct, positive impact on revenue, profits, employee productivity and the customer experience. Done right, security also helps CISOs open their own ‘Department of Yes,’ empowering them to deliver the strategic projects and innovative initiatives that drive businesses forward.”

Security is, and will continue to be, a paramount facet of any organization, though the implications which can be drawn from this survey suggest there is still some way before organizations would consider themselves secure. One encourage factor from the survey is 91% of respondents agreed if the security team was given more resources they could do a better job. What is unclear is whether CEOs and other board members will follow up on the promise security will receive more investment.

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Box deploys RingCentral to modernise comms platform, saving almost $1m per year

(c)iStock.com/ngkaki

Enterprise cloud software provider Box is working with cloud communications provider RingCentral to unify its global enterprise communications in order to save up to $900,000 per year.

Box will deploy RingCentral Office, the comms vendor’s flagship UCaaS (unified communications as a service) platform, as well as planning to utilise RingCentral products which integrate with both Google for Work and Salesforce. RingCentral notes that the openness of its platform, as well as its ‘robust’ set of APIs, helped Box come to its decision.

“As we add more employees and offices in different locations, we require a solution that consolidates our entire enterprise communications in the cloud for voice and web meetings and offers the agility to grow. RingCentral addresses this while delivering a very high standard of reliability, security and quality to successfully run our global business,” said Paul Chapman, Box CIO.

“Not only have we reduce the operational headaches of managing multiple, single point communication solutions, but we’ve also cut costs by 80% since moving to RingCentral, and we’re on track to save $800,000 to $900,000 per year,” he added.

Last month RingCentral announced a strategic partnership with Google in order to target medium to large enterprises’ productivity needs. The target for the two companies’ fire, as the press release clearly notes, is Microsoft’s collaboration ecosystem, which naturally encompasses Outlook, Office 365, Skype for Business, and much more.

Speaking to this reporter, RingCentral senior manager of product marketing David Van Der Steen argued the unified comms landscape is still lacking in technology to really gain buy-in. “Vendors need to focus on a robust, elegant and delightful to use application that allows users to seamlessly transition between various communication channels and devices at will,” he said. “The first vendor to execute on this vision will realise massive rewards through viral user adoption and the resulting increased demand from IT buyers.”

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[session] Throwing Away the Codebase By @ReadyTalk | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DevOps #DigitalTransformation

Is your aging software platform suffering from technical debt while the market changes and demands new solutions at a faster clip?
It’s a bold move, but you might consider walking away from your core platform and starting fresh. ReadyTalk did exactly that.
In his General Session at 19th Cloud Expo, Michael Chambliss, Head of Engineering at ReadyTalk, will discuss why and how ReadyTalk diverted from healthy revenue and over a decade of audio conferencing product development to start an innovative project that reflects shifts in cloud, dev tools, web standards, enterprise mobility and video. Lessons learned could help your company take a similar plunge that will reshape your product portfolio and culture for years to come.

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[slides] Content Stores in the Cloud | @CloudExpo @Alfresco #ECM #BPM #DigitalTransformation

Using new techniques of information modeling, indexing, and processing, new cloud-based systems can support cloud-based workloads previously not possible for high-throughput insurance, banking, and case-based applications.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, John Newton, CTO, Founder and Chairman of Alfresco, described how to scale cloud-based content management repositories to store, manage, and retrieve billions of documents and related information with fast and linear scalability.
He addressed the challenges of scaling document repositories to this level; architectural approaches for coordinating data; search and storage technologies, Solr, and Amazon storage and database technologies; the breadth of use cases that modern content systems need to support; how to support user applications that require subsecond response times.

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Cloud Computing in Healthcare | @CloudExpo #API #PaaS #Cloud #Security

The competitive landscape of the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry is crowded due to the presence of a large number of players. The large number of participants has led to the fragmented nature of the market. Some of the major players operating in the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry are Cisco Systems Inc., Carestream Health Inc., Carecloud Corp., AGFA Healthcare, IBM Corp., Cleardata Networks, Merge Healthcare Inc., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., and Oracle Corp.

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IDC notes how public cloud IaaS is ‘transforming enterprise IT value chain’

(c)iStock.com/cherezoff

A short research note from analyst house IDC argues how enterprise acceptance and adoption rates are driving strong growth of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

According to IDC forecasts, public cloud IaaS revenues are set to more than triple, from $12.6 billion (£9.5bn) in 2015 to $43.6bn in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 28.2% over that period. The public cloud IaaS market grew 51% in 2015, according to IDC, with that growth expecting to slow after 2017 as enterprises get over the hump and move towards cloud ‘optimisation’ rather than exploration.

IDC also predicts that four in five IT organisations will be committed to hybrid architectures by 2018, arguing hybrid represents the ‘optimal path to public cloud IaaS adoption’. Previous research, from Veritas Technologies last month, argued the need for greater security and information management in hybrid cloud is vital, as almost three quarters of enterprises are adopting multiple cloud strategies.

“Public cloud services are increasingly being seen as an enabler of business agility and speed,” said Deepark Mohan, IDC research director of public cloud storage and infrastructure. “This is bringing about a shift in IT infrastructure spending, with implications for the incumbent leaders in enterprise infrastructure technologies.

“Growth of public cloud IaaS has also created new service opportunities around adoption and usage of public cloud resources,” Mohan added. “With changes at the infrastructure, architectural, and operational layers, public cloud IaaS is slowly transforming the enterprise IT value chain.”

In terms of vendors, IDC not surprisingly advocates Amazon as the leader by some distance, followed by a long tail of rivals. Their figures argue that more than half (56%) of overall revenue figures in 2015 went to the top 10 providers.