A new partnership has been launched that will give Siemens customers access to SAS advanced and predictive analytics through the open IoT platform MindSphere.

The deal will focus on creating new IoT edge and cloud-enabled services, integrating machine learning and AI to reduce operational risk.

With near real-time embedded AI for IoT applications on the edge of the network, the collaboration will enable businesses to experiment with their IoT applications in a much freer way. The integration of SAS and Siemens platforms will increase workplace productivity by providing better insights into IoT use, the company claims, and will offer businesses the chance to implement optimised asset performance across the organisation.

Specifically, SAS and Siemens are targeting their combined tools at the manufacturing, healthcare, energy and utilities, smart cities, transportation and automotive industries.

“SAS is a recognised world-leader in advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We are excited to leverage their analytics in MindSphere,” said Stephen Bashada, executive vice president and general manager of Siemens MindSphere. “The combination of Siemens’ deep industrial domain knowledge with SAS’ deep analytics knowledge is a powerful step forward for IoT.”

The partnership will offer both new and existing customers the opportunity to port and deploy SAS models into MindSphere, with access to its analytics capabilities.

“Siemens remain unmatched when it comes to revolutionising operational assets, software and processes. Siemens is committed to digitising the world’s industries and provides a unique platform for IoT to realise its full potential through AI,” said Peter Pugh-Jones, Head of Technology, SAS. “This partnership can accelerate adoption of the transformative value of IoT for our customers.”

The UK’s first-ever pet food-as-a-service specialist, PetShop.co.uk, has enjoyed phenomenal growth by running its business on NetSuite’s ERP platform.

The pet supply firm, which offers pet food as a subscription-based service dubbed Bottomless Bowl, has grown by 50 percent year-on-year and now stocks more than half a million pounds’ worth of stock spanning in excess of 10,000 products.

That’s a fantastic cloud success story when you consider that the business was born off the back of a £5,000 Prince’s Trust loan by former City worker Adam Taylor and his now-wife Lexi, out of the annoyance of running out of pet food and the inconvenience of how heavy it could be to transport.

The firm was using multiple different systems in its early days, which it found frustrating and added additional and unnecessary complexity. That’s what led to evaluating NetSuite, according to Taylor.

“We are using NetSuite for ERP, accounting, warehouse management and our pick, pack, and despatch management and we chose Bronto for email marketing because it was owned by NetSuite. Because it’s all under one umbrella, ultimately, nothing is impossible in terms of what we have tried to do,” Taylor told Cloud Pro.

“We’ve been able to grow 50% year-on-year for the last few years. It would have been very difficult to achieve that growth without NetSuite.”

While PetShop.co.uk has enjoyed immense growth thus far, it now wants to scale even further and will be using NetSuite’s many capabilities to support expansion plans.

It’s also building KPIs to help more effectively monitor the health of the business, according to Taylor.

“Our business model is already good, but I like the peace of mind of knowing how healthy it is. Alternatively, it gives us the ability to find if we have lots of leaking holes that we need to fix,” he said.

“We are building all this stuff in NetSuite now so when we grow it will grow with us. The transparency you get using cloud data means you can see instantly how the business is operating.  You can then use that information to steer your business decisions and you can be a lot more bullish.

“Having a business that is entrepreneur-owned has been key to our success. It’s forced us to look at whether we have a profitable model and where we can outthink our competitors and are able to pass on savings to customers,” Taylor told Cloud Pro.

Despite the business’ rapid rise to success, fuelled by technology, Taylor still recognises the importance of the human touch.

“I still write all the emails we send to our customers. We haven’t outsourced that,” he said. “It’s very key for any company to maintain that direct communication with the customer.”

Oracle NetSuite has launched a new benchmarking and insight resource centre designed to make it easier for organisations to make better-informed business decisions and grow using its platform. 

The ERP giant unveiled the knowledge centre, dubbed Brainyard, at its annual user conference in Las Vegas this week, effectively touting it as a game changer in terms of how the industry shares expertise and insight.

Many companies make use of professional consultancies to garner the data their need around technology implementations, but NetSuite felt this knowledge should actually be free, according to Jason Maynard, the company’s senior vice president of global field operations.

“We’re giving away the source code for business growth by providing unparalleled insights into every single critical business process. Companies tell us they want to benchmark their businesses, and we’re going to help them do that with Brainyard,” he said.

“Research firms and other vendors charge for this kind of resource, but we consider it part of our commitment to customer and partner success. We’re not just delivering bits with NetSuite: It’s not just about software; it’s about helping businesses grow.”

Specifically, Brainyard will be powered by insight derived from the company’s SuiteSuccess service and complemented by knowledge garnered from elsewhere in the company, such as value management, product management and solution consultancy.

Those visiting the Brainyard knowledge portal, will be able to access:

• A wealth of business information, such as industry status reports, and qualitative and quantitative research spanning 20 industry principles.
• Benchmarking insight and industry specific KPIs derived from 16,000 NetSuite customers as well we business performance data from FinListics.
• Performance-related advice and analysis designed to help organisations optimise their implementation in a range of formats from how to guides, best practice briefings and more.

Brainyard should help companies focus on the areas that will have the greatest impact on their future success and growth, Harish Mohan, NetSuite’s vice president of global strategy and international operations, told Cloud Pro.

“Part of [a focus on] growth is asking ‘Where should I grow?’ But if you ask any company that question, you’re going to get a list of 50 things. So, we can say that this is, generally speaking, where companies of your size find themselves, you’re in the growth curve and hear are the opportunities and challenges,” he said.

“It was driven by feedback and demand from people evaluating ERP. Companies used to come to us and say they are looking to change A, B, C, D… How is NetSuite going to make us better? Those were great questions and we wanted to figure out how to map that journey for people evaluating ERP.”

Mohan said at first NetSuite considered simply buying in the insight that would help answers some of these key questions, but that approach was dismissed due to the data being locked, too big, too abstract, not scalable or not in the right business language.

“So we decided that we were just going to do this ourselves. We’re going to provide the first business benchmark that is valid for companies and is actually consumable and delivers the insights they want,” Mohan added.

“For companies evaluating NetSuite, we’re providing a service that also gives you a blueprint of how to get from your ‘from’ state to your ‘to’ state.”

Intel has further demonstrated its intention to cosy up to cloud service providers, with the announcement of a number of cloud-focused products and features as part of its new second-generation Xeon Scalable platform.

More than fifty new processors were unveiled, including two new additions to the Xeon Gold family which have been specifically built to support networking functions. Both the Xeon Gold 6200 and 5200 series’ are NFV-optimised, and support Intel’s Select Speed technology.

A new feature introduced with the updated platform, Select Speed allows IaaS providers much more flexibility and granularity to manage the frequencies and per-core performance settings of the processors in their servers, enabling them to meet more elastic workload demands.

The new Xeon Gold chips also both promise up to 1.76x improvements to NFV workloads, according to Intel, as well as the option to assign a subset of their cores to handle high-priority virtualised workload acceleration.

To accompany the new processors, Intel also unveiled a new range of Intel Ethernet 800 Series controllers and adapters, which will be hitting production lines in Q3 this year. These networking components will support maximum speeds of 100Gb/sec, and will also make application response times more than 50% more predictable, with over 45% lower latency and thoughput improvements of more than 30% when running open source Redis – all through the implementation of Application Device Queues. They’ll also support iWARP and RoCE v2 Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), as well as dynamic device personalisation.

On the software side, the company introduced Intel Security Libraries for Data Center (Intel SecL-DC), providing an easier way for cloud companies to manage and deploy all of Intel’s hardware-rooted security technologies through a single set of tools and libraries which integrate with OpenStack, Kubernetes Extensions and Docker.

Edge computing is a growing area of interest for the cloud industry, and Intel isn’t ignoring it; the company launched a new range of Xeon D-1600 SoC processors for edge computing applications in high-density environments, including built-in QuickAssist and virtualisation tools. It also debuted its new line of Agilex FPGAs, built with a 10nm process andOptane support, aimed at hardware acceleration for edge computing.

Also updated was the company’s range of co-developed Select Solutions, produced in association with key partners to suit specific tasks. It launched new products geared towards AI, HPC and SAP HANA, as well as updates to its Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Stack HCI, VMware vSAN and more.

BMW and Microsoft have joined forces to develop a cloud-based open manufacturing platform, which aims to help businesses take advantage of industrial IoT tech.

It’s been built to power factories of the future, focusing on open technologies that can be used and interconnected with any other manufacturer’s infrastructure.

The companies have not disclosed how much money they’re investing in the project and not have they disclosed any other businesses they’re in talks with to expand it, but Microsoft has explained it hopes to work with another four to six manufacturers and suppliers by the time the year is out.

The partnership also revealed it wants to have launched 15 use cases by the end of the year, whether they’re to create open source components that can be used across manufacturers, standards or data.

The Open Manufacturing Platform will be built upon Microsoft’s industrial IoT platform and will be powered by Azure (no surprise there), just like BMW’s current set-up.

“Microsoft is joining forces with the BMW Group to transform digital production efficiency across the industry,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Microsoft Cloud + AI Group. “Our commitment to building an open community will create new opportunities for collaboration across the entire manufacturing value chain.”

The German car manufacturer said it already has 3,000 machines running using Microsoft’s cloud suite of services and analytics tools and many of its innovations will be absorbed into the Open Manufacturing Platform.

“The interconnection of production sites and systems as well as the secure integration of partners and suppliers are particularly important,” Oliver Zipse, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Production said.

“We have been relying on the cloud since 2016 and are consistently developing new approaches. With the Open Manufacturing Platform as the next step, we want to make our solutions available to other companies and jointly leverage potential in order to secure our strong position in the market in the long term.”

Gartner thinks cloud services industry revenues will increase by 17.5% during 2019, reaching a high of $214.3 billion by the end of the year, up from $182.4 billion at the end of last year.

The most significant rise will be in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which the research firm is predicting will grow by 27.5% over the 12-month period. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues will also experience a hefty jump this year, with 21.8% year-on-year growth.

Other big players in 2019 will be those focusing on business process-as-a-service that’s set to accelerate fast by 2022, with forecasted revenues of $61.1 billion compared to 2018’s revenues of $45.8 billion and cloud management and security, with revenues increasing from $10.5 billion up to $17.9 billion.

“Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organisations. What we see now is only the beginning, though. Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the growth of overall IT services.”

Tech providers are taking this seriously and are shifting towards a cloud-only model, from the previous cloud-first approach. By scrapping legacy systems, vendors can generate higher ongoing subscription revenues, while businesses benefit from lower upfront costs.

“Organisations need cloud-related services to get onboarded onto public clouds and to transform their operations as they adopt public cloud services,” Nag said.

“As cloud continues to become mainstream within most organisations, technology product managers for cloud related service offerings will need to focus on delivering solutions that combine experience and execution with hyperscale providers’ offerings,” said Mr Nag. “This complementary approach will drive both transformation and optimisation of an organisation’s infrastructure and operations.”

NetSuite used its annual user conference SuiteWorld conference in Las Vegas this week to update customers and partners on its roadmap and detail some of the secrets behind its rapid growth and product innovation.

One of the key ingredients to it’s the successful execution of its expansion plans lies in its new parentage, according to Evan Goldberg, the NetSuite’s founder and current executive vice president of development. 

“The more things change, the more things stay the same,” he said.

“We’re being aggressive – not too aggressive – for our customers to take advantage of that. We’re integrating with Oracle products and there are a couple of areas there where it is super helpful to be part of Oracle. The other giant synergy for us is the ability to expand so rapidly internationally. It’s about making sure when we go into these markets we do it in a culturally appropriate way.”

Now it’s part of Oracle, it’s also possible for resources, such as the sales force, to be diverted – both internationally and domestically – to help bolster rapid expansion plans, according to Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. Hurd added that some of the investments that have been made in the last year or so simply would not have been possible without Oracle’s investment. 

Hurd was also quick to pour cold water on suggestions around uncertainty relating to the structure of the company – previous Oracle acquisition targets have been absorbed into the business, whereas NetSuite remains a distinct operating business unit.

“We’re aligned. There is no lack of alignment. There are things to do…. Those are just natural migrations,” Hurd said.

“It’s part of our strategy to give NetSuite all of the possible benefits of Oracle, but none of the downside of Oracle. Let it leverage the best of what it does and the best of Oracle so it can grow.”

The duo also talked about how NetSuite is currently moving over to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – a process that will take a few years. 

“We’re just a few weeks away from having our first customer live on OCI,” Goldberg said, adding that he believes that will act as a proof point.

“We do all these transitions carefully to make sure they’re not disruptive to customers. We have 16,000 customers. We can’t hire a database administrator for everyone for them to tune. Autonomous will be a DBA for each of our customers and make sure it’s tuned for their particular use.”

Hurd used the conference as a platform to reiterate how his own predictions around cloud – such as cloud apps having AI embedded in the next few years – and how market activity generally is moving in the same direction.

Suggesting “the data is irrefutable” Hurd cited the number of US datacentres closing in the past year and that almost half of development and testing is now carried out in the cloud.

“This is not, in my opinion, a technology. Cloud is architecture, an approach. As an approach it is irrefutable. It has several key elements that are big deals. It costs less. It has tonnes more innovation associated with it without having to add it on to your IT budget nickel. It removes the risk,” Hurd said.

“These drivers are the reason people are talking about cloud 10 years later. This is not a reversible trend. This is more about the speed at which you get to the destination.”

Growth is key to continued business vitality, but it can’t be effectively achieved without a focus on visibility, control and agility.

That was the key message delivered to attendees of NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference in Las Vegas this week by Oracle NetSuite executive vice president Evan Goldberg. 

With an additional focus on collaboration and productivity, businesses will position themselves well to «grow beyond» regardless of their current size or industry specialism, according to Goldberg and the wider messaging associated with the user conference. 

“These five attributes for success are the blueprint for growth. But, they become harder and harder to achieve as you grow,» Goldberg said. 

During his keynote speech at SuiteWorld, however, Goldberg chose to dive into the first three tenets of business success; visibility, control and agility. 

«Visibility means seeing your past, your present and your future; How your business has performed historically and how it’s operating now and trends that lead to more opportunities for efficiency and more growth in the future,» Goldberg said, adding that Suite Analytics would be a core feature of version 19.1 of the platform.

«How do you respond to what’s happening if you don’t have a steering wheel? If you can’t respond there is not much you can do re what you see. Every business wants to be able to control outcomes and to stay on mission. The greatest threat to growth is a loss of control,» Goldberg added. 

«Agility is really about capitalising on the opportunities that obstacles actually represent. Control is great – it helps you when you know your path to growth, but if your route changes, that’s where agility can keep you from going off the road. There will be inflection points. Visibility lets you see those coming and agility lets you capitalise on them.»

Goldberg said NetSuite’s key aim was all about ensuring customers are able to execute their vision and the key to that was the ability to deliver one system in the cloud that can help organisations scale at their own pace.

«That’s always been our true north,» Goldberg said, adding that NetSuite customers generally start their business life in a similar way, with a vision to invent something that either addresses a hole in the market or an untapped need for something. 

«You’ve had adversity and triumph, but you’re here and you’ve survived and you’re ready to ‘grow beyond’ and we want to help,» Goldberg added.

«If you’re here today, you’re likely in an organisation that’s trying to increase its impact. But, the journey – wherever you begin and where you hope to end – is not a straight line. It’s filled with twists and turns and side roads. Sometimes it requires paving entirely new paths and sometimes you achieve your most significant milestones by overcoming obstacles.

‘Grow beyond’ is where you see that challenge, you meet that challenge with entrepreneurial spirit and grit. When you do that, extraordinary things can happen. It’s where growth really accelerates – we’ve seen it in our own business.»

NetSuite customers were some of the most innovative companies out there, with such organisations growing three times faster than the average S&P company, according to Goldberg. 

“SuiteWorld is all about sharing your stories – with like-minded companies, with NetSuite folks, with the tremendous array of partners we have in the exhibit hall – and learning how to grow smarter and faster.»