Verizon has announced it is selling its cloud and managed hosting service to IBM, alongside working with the Armonk giant on a ‘number of strategic initiatives involving networking and cloud services’.

“This is a unique cooperation between two tech leaders to support global organisations as they look to fully realise the benefits of their cloud computing investments,” said George Fischer, SVP and group president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions (VES) in a statement.

Last February, Verizon told customers in an email that it was shutting down ‘any virtual servers running on Public Cloud or Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces’ on April 12. The company clarified in a statement to CloudTech that it was ‘discontinuing its cloud service that accepts credit card payments’, however John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, saw things differently.

“Telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud and especially on public cloud services,” he told this publication last year. “They do not have the focus and the data centre footprint to compete effectively with the hyperscale cloud providers, so they are tending to drop back into subsidiary roles as partners or on-ramps to the leading cloud companies.”

How prescient that statement is now. IBM would certainly be classified as one of the hyperscale operators; alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, the four leading players continue to grow more quickly than the overall market, according to Synergy’s figures.

What’s more, various links between the two companies means this move makes sense. John Considine, general manager at IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services, was previously CTO of Verizon Terremark. The companies have also partnered on various initiatives, including in the creation of Verizon’s cognitive customer experience platform, built using IBM’s cloud and infrastructure as a service offerings.

“Our customers want to improve application performance while streamlining operations and securing information in the cloud,” Fischer added. “VES is now well positioned to provide those solutions through intelligent networking, managed IT services and business communications.”

Verizon said it was notifying affected customers directly, though adding it did not expect any immediate impact to their services. The transaction is expected to close later this year.

Did you know that you can develop for mainframes in Java? Or that the testing and deployment can be automated across mobile to mainframe?
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Vaughn Marshall, Sr. Principal Product Owner at CA Technologies, will discuss and demo how increasingly teams are developing with agile methodologies using modern development environments and automating testing and deployments, mobile to mainframe.

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I’ve been designing, developing, and testing APIs for many years, and I consider myself fortunate to have witnessed just about every type of API initiative. Although many aspects of the API lifecycle are the same as they’ve always been, over the past couple of years I’ve noticed a number of distinct trends that are revolutionizing the ways these critical assets are conceived and evaluated. In this blog post, I’ll tell you about five noteworthy transformations that are exceptionally significant, and how they will likely impact your daily work responsibilities and longer-term career.

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Cisco has announced its intent to acquire Viptela, a provider of software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology, for $610 million (£471.9m).

The acquisition will give Cisco more beef in terms of network deployments in an increasingly cloud app-heavy, Internet of Things (IoT)-connected technological landscape. The networking giant aims to combine Viptela’s cloud-first network management, orchestration and overlay technologies with its own routing platforms and services, with Cisco ‘committed to Viptela’s product offering and architecture, as well as existing Cisco Intelligent WAN and Meraki SD-WAN solutions’. The Viptela team will join Cisco’s Enterprise Routing team, within its Networking and Security arm.

“Viptela’s technology is cloud-first, with a focus on simplicity and ease of deployment while simultaneously providing a rich set of capabilities and scale,” said Scott Harrell, senior vice president of product management for the Cisco Enterprise Networking Group in a statement. “With Viptela and Cisco, we will be able to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of comprehensive on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based SD-WAN solutions.”

Rob Salvagno, head of M&A and venture investment at Cisco, added in a blog post: “With Viptela, Cisco can offer customers more choice in their enterprise branch offices and WAN deployments, with a compelling SD-WAN solution that is easy to deploy and simple to manage.

“Together, Cisco and Viptela will be able to deliver next generation SD-WAN solutions to best serve all size and scale of customer needs, while accelerating Cisco’s transition to a recurring, software-based business model,” Salvagno added.

Several of Viptela’s executives had previously served at Cisco, including current CEO Praveen Akkiraju, who had spent the best part of two decades there. Viptela’s most recent funding round, of $75 million almost one year ago, gave the company a valuation of $875m, according to multiple sources.

Most technology leaders, contemporary and from the hardware era, are reshaping their businesses to do software in the hope of capturing value in IoT. Although IoT is relatively new in the market, it has already gone through many promotional terms such as IoE, IoX, SDX, Edge/Fog, Mist Compute, etc. Ultimately, irrespective of the name, it is about deriving value from independent software assets participating in an ecosystem as one comprehensive solution.

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A new report from Salesforce sheds further light on the shifting sands of IT; eight out of 10 UK tech leaders say IT is now the primary enabler of customer experience, while three quarters admit IT is currently undergoing the biggest historical shift of its role.

“IT stands at a crossroads of change,” a post from Devon McGinnis, editorial manager of marketing research at Salesforce explains. “Companies are increasingly adopting customer-centric models. Business units like sales, customer service, and marketing – tasked with creating new experiences that meet elevated customer expectations – are changing their views to see IT as a strategic partner.

“IT now has the opportunity to not only improve customer-facing tech, but to transform it,” McGinnis adds.

It’s worth noting here that IT teams generally have modest expectations around their abilities. 61% of the more than 2,200 global respondents said they are moderate performers, compared with 24% who thought they were lower than average and 15% who rated themselves as high performers.

Salesforce argues that with the shifting position of IT the department has turned from a cost centre to a ‘value-based service brokerage’. “The old model of IT as a maintainer of the status quo infrastructure is giving way to a new mindset, in which IT adds innovative capabilities that bring a competitive edge to the business,” the report notes.

This is something which has been covered by this publication for some time – as well as Salesforce adding that the role of CIO is ‘fundamentally changing’ to the role of business leader. More than two thirds (67%) of IT teams polled said improving their collaboration with other lines of business was a high priority, while the 15% of teams who were higher performers were significantly more likely to rate the strength of their partnerships with service, marketing and sales as ‘excellent’.

Cloud computing was assessed by respondents as the most likely technology to ‘reinvent business’ by 2020, with artificial intelligence (AI) and mobile technologies for customers winning the silver and bronze medals respectively. More than four in five (83%) IT leaders polled said they felt more comfortable with their knowledge of cloud security than they did five years ago.

Discussing the UK findings in particular, Adam Spearing, Salesforce area vice president EMEA, noted with interest the position of AI. “The rise of artificial intelligence will also help IT teams to automate more mundane, time consuming tasks and free up time for team members to focus on innovation,” he said.

“While much of IT’s work happens behind the scenes, its efforts are at the forefront of customer interactions. Without IT as the company’s backbone, UK businesses will fall flat on powering crucial customer experience initiatives,” added Spearing.

You can download the full report here (registration required).

When it comes to measuring the success of your DevOps rollout, it can be challenging to identify the right metrics that will provide intelligence while avoiding the trap of vanity metrics that indicate action—but not necessarily progress—towards the outcome you’re looking for.
In my experience, the most valuable metric of all is the lead time between when you make a commit in source control and when that change makes it to your consumers. Some very mature organizations have even been able to link this metric to validated learning or planned outcomes in production (i.e., user engagement, revenue, or even a pivot decision). This sort of full-cycle measurement closes the DevOps build-measure-learn loop and gives you unparalleled insight into the performance of your overall delivery metrics.

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