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HPE, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, Swisscom, Telco Cloud, Telecom Italia, Virtualisation

HPE scoops two telco client wins for cloud service projects

HPE office logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced partnerships with telcos Swisscom and Telecom Italia subsidiary Telecom Personal to share its cloud service expertise and boost its presence in the comms industry.

In the Swisscom project HPE’s brief is to impose a network function virtualization (NFV) discipline on the IT and telecoms infrastructure, using its OpenNFV systems. Swisscom claims it is one of the world’s first communication service providers (CSPs) to pioneer the use of NFV to offer virtual customer premise equipment (vCPE) to its business customers.

In January BCN reported that HPE has launched an initiative to simplify hybrid cloud management for telcos using a new Service Director offering. Among the productivity benefits mooted for HPE Service Director 1.0 was options for pre-configured systems to address specific use cases as extensions to the base product, starting with HPE Service Director for vCPE 1.0.

In the Swisscom project HPE will use its HPE Virtual Services Router and HPE Technology Services in tandem with Service Director to create Swisscom’s new vCPE model. The objective is to allow Swisscom to manage its customers’ network infrastructure from a centralised location and provide networking services on-demand. This will cut costs for the telco, speed up service provision and boost the availability of services. It could also, claims CPE, make it easier to create new services in future.

Argentina based Telecom Personal has asked HPE to modernise its network in order to use 4G/LTE technologies to cater for an increasing appetite for data services among subscribers. HPE has been appointed to re-engineer the infrastructure and expand and upgrade part its network core. The success of the project will be judged on whether HPE can give a measurable improvement in service experience, network speeds and capacity, according to Paolo Perfetti, Telecom Personal’s CTO.

Yesterday BCN reported that HPE has launched AppPulse Trace, a service that developer clients can use to monitor their cloud app performances.

Consumer Tech, Mobile, News & Analysis, Oracle, Samsung

Samsung and Oracle in mobile cloud development pact

mobile online datingSamsung and Oracle are to combine their respective device and cloud expertise in a pact to jointly create tools, apps and enterprise systems for the mobile world.

The two partners are working with systems integrators to help industries make use of their existing systems in the cloud, modernising them to take full advantage of the new mobile and cloud and create cost efficiencies. Another joint ambition is to create a wider set of Apache Cordova plug-ins and code samples to help customers modernize their enterprise applications.

The objective, according to Young Kim, VP of the Enterprise Business Team at Samsung Electronics, is to use the cloud to create better mobile user experiences out of their collective expertise in enterprise software, mobile cloud and device features.

Samsung and Oracle want to help developers and solution providers to create the next generation of mobile applications and services and drive ‘a new frontier of productivity’ according to Kim.

Samsung and Oracle have worked with systems integrators on new cloud based mobile and Internet of Things systems, which will be unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. These include an HCL Technologies-inspired predictive maintenance system for Samsung Gear S2, the Oracle IoT Cloud Service and the Oracle Service Cloud. This digests data and uses this intelligence so that enterprises can cut the costs of high value asset maintenance. Another invention, from Sofbang’s contracts management team, speeds the management and approval of contracts through notifications on Samsung Gear S wearables. The data is protected by Samsung’s cloud-based KNOX mobile security. Another system that combines wearable devices and the cloud is L&T Infotech’s, which hooks into the Oracle IoT Cloud Service using Samsung tablets, smartphones and wearables to increase asset operating life, decrease downtime and cater for proactive maintenance.

Samsung said it is beefing up its support of Apache Cordova with extra plugins for developers to use in the Oracle Mobile Application Framework and Oracle JavaScript Extension.

“The support and unique additions found in Samsung hardware helped us create differentiated end user experiences in weeks with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service,” said Mia Urman, CEO at development partner Auraplayer.

Big Data, Database, health, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM Watson Health buys Truven Health Analytics for $2.6B

Legs of Fit Couple Exercising on Treadmill DeviceIBM Watson Health has announced an agreement to acquire cloud based big data specialist Truven Health Analytics. The deal, valued at $2.6 billion, will give the IBM Watson Health portfolio an additional 8,500 clients and information on 215 million new patients, subject to the merger being concluded. Upon completion of due diligence, IBM will buy Truven from its current owner Veritas Capital.

Truven Health Analytics has a client list that includes US federal and state government agencies, employers, health plans, hospitals, clinicians and life sciences companies. The 215 million records of patient lives from Truven will be added to data from previous IBM Watson Health acquisitions of big data companies. These include 50 million patient case histories that came with its acquisition of cloud based health care intelligence company Explorys and 45 million records owned by population health analyser Phytel. IBM Watson Health has also bought medical imaging expert Merge Healthcare. In total, IBM Watson Health now has 310 million records of ‘patient lives’ which, IBM claims, gives it a health cloud housing ‘one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of health-related data’.

In September BCN reported how two new cloud services, IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance and IBM Watson Care Manager had been created to unblock the big data bottlenecks in clinical research. The first service helps biomedical companies bring their inventions to market more efficiently, while the Care Manager system gives medical professionals a wider perspective on the factors they need to consider for personalised patient engagement programmes.

According to IBM it has now invested over $4 billion on buying health data and systems and will have 5,000 staff in its Watson Health division, including clinicians, epidemiologists, statisticians, healthcare administrators, policy experts and consultants.

Truven’s cloud-based technology, systems and health claims data, currently housed in offices and data centers across facilities in Michigan, Denver, Chicago, Carolina and India, are to be integrated with the Watson Health Cloud.

IBM has invited partners to build text, speech and image recognition capacity into their software and systems and 100 ecosystem partners have launched their own Watson-based apps. IBM opened a San Francisco office for its Watson developer cloud in September 2015 and is also building a new Watson data centre there, which is due to open in early 2016.

Azure, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Microsoft adds RedHat Linux, Containers and OneOps options to Azure

AzureMicrosoft has launched a trio of initiatives aimed at widening the options of its potential clients of its Azure cloud services.

It made the announcements through the Azure Blog, which promises the availability of new RedHat Enterprise Linux ‘instances’ (i.e. units of computing resources), a new application lifecycle manager, OneOps, and showcased a preview of an imminent Azure Container service.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances are available from the Azure Marketplace. According to the blog, 60 percent of the images available are now Linux-based. Microsoft claims its hybrid model can be running ‘in minutes’ with Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available on Azure Marketplace on a Pay-as-you-go model with hourly billing.

Among the eligible products are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat OpenShift.

“Both Microsoft and I love Linux,” said Corey Sanders, Azure’s Director of Program Management. The new instances will help cloud users cater for on-demand workloads, development and testing and cloud bursting in a simple, easily quantifiable system, Sanders said. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 images are now live in all regions, except China and the US Government.

The imminent Azure Container Service – currently available for preview – will build on previous Docker and Mesosphere initiatives to make it easier to provision clusters of Azure Virtual Machines onto containerized applications. The process will be a lot quicker since the machines will have been pre-configured with open source components, Sanders said.

Sanders also disclosed that Microsoft has certified for the Azure Marketplace a group of Linux images created by Bitnami. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s new OneOps offering on Azure, which gives clients the user of an open-source cloud and application lifecycle management platform, is a product of a collaboration with the WalmartLabs team (the IT offshoot of retail giant Walmart).

acquisition, Ingram Micro, M&A, News & Analysis

Giant IT distributor Ingram bought by HNA Group for $6 billion

M&A merger acquisitionGlobal technology distributor turned cloud service provider Ingram Micro is to be bought by Chinese conglomerate HNA Group for $6 billion.

Ingram will continue to be based in California but is now a subsidiary of marine logistics specialist Tianjin Tianhai, which is owned by The HNA Group, an aviation, tourism and logistics outfit. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2016. Ingram CEO Alain Monié and his management team will remain and its business is expected to continue as normal.

“The addition of Ingram Micro would help the logistics sector of HNA Group transform from a logistics operator to a supply chain operator, and provide one-stop services while improving efficiencies,” said Adam Tan, CEO of HNA Group.

Founded in 1989 when IT was a hardware defined industry Ingram Micro became the world’s largest wholesale technology products distributor with clients such as Acer, Apple, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo, Microsof and Samsung. It ranks 62nd in the 2015 Fortune 500. As the IT industry evolved to become software driven, it has taken steps to transform itself. It announced cloud partnerships with IBM and Parallels at its Ingram Micro Cloud Summit 2014 and promised tools to help its reseller clients make the transition to selling cloud services. To this end Ingram Micro added three new services, Hosted Exchange, Virtual Private Server and Web Hosting.

However, the funding from the new owners could help it make more of a transition, according to a statement from Alain Monié, Ingram Micro CEO. “Our agreement to join HNA Group delivers near-term and compelling cash value to our stockholders and we expect it to provide exciting new opportunities for our vendors, customers and associates,” said Monie, “innovation, new services introduction, brand management and ensuring the stability and continuity of the businesses joining their enterprise are fundamental to HNA Group’s overall strategy.”

Analyst Clive Longbottom at Quocirca said TTI seems to be ‘paying high’ in order to gain direct access to western markets. “Whether this will work remains to be seen,” said Longbottom, “will the US government and all its dependent departments shy away from Ingram now, fearing that the Chinese will be implementing back doors via firmware or software changes?”

For the general user, this will probably make very little difference, the analyst predicted. “It’s likely that TTI will be hands off, using Ingram to optimise its overall buying power on a global basis to be able to either provide better margins or to compete on price more effectively where required, ” said Longbottom. Ingram shareholders, meanwhile, are getting a 39% premium over Ingram’s closing price.

News & Analysis, Nokia, Telco Cloud

Nokia creates foundations for launching telcos into the cloud

nokia data center servicesNokia’s Data Center Services division has unveiled plans to launch mobile telcos into the cloud. Plans include a custom-made a multivendor infrastructure to support its transformation consulting services.

These services aim to help telecoms operators re-shape their people and processes for the new cloud-centric comms industry. In a statement it explained that its new managed cloud operations aim to make the introduction of multi-vendor hybrid operations, cloud data centres and the virtualisation of network functions (VNFs) as painless as possible.

The networking vendor is expanding its cloud services portfolio with the launch of three professional services. Nokia Data Center services will offer development and operations (DevOps) services, with a brief to help telcos use cloud technology to launch services as quickly as possible.

Secondly, the Nokia Cloud Transformation Consulting services aim to help operators make the fullest use of telco cloud opportunities. Nokia said it is using expertise rom the Bell Labs Consulting practice to support operators and enterprises in addressing cloud transformation.

Finally the Managed Cloud Operations managed service will help telcos run hybrid operations across hardware, cloudware and application layer management, without the build up of silos of information that have traditionally hamstrung telcos turned comms service providers.

In order to support the data centre services Nokia is creating a design facility in the UK, supported by global delivery depots across the globe. To complement its services portfolio, Nokia has now invited partners, such as global supply chain Sanmina, to focus on Data Center services.

The service is needed because 62% of operators are very likely to rely on network equipment providers for data centre transformation, according to Heavy Reading research figures quoted by Nokia.

Meanwhile, in a related announcement Nokia said it will simplify networks with a new Shared Data Layer, a central point of storage for all the data used by Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). This could free VNFs from the need to manage their own data, creating so-called stateless VNFs that are simpler and have the capacity for rapid expansion or contraction.

The result is a more flexible, programmable network for 5G that can minimise latency and maximise network speeds in order to cater for the Internet of Things (IoT). The network also becomes more reliable as a failed stateless VNF can instantly activate and provide access to the shared data to maintain seamless service continuity.

AWS, Financial Results, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Rackspace grows Q4 2015 net revenue 11%, hopes riding on AWS performance

Rackspace logoRackspace has reported results that surpassed expectations for the final quarter of 2015 but it acknowledged its faces an uphill struggle and fortunes may now be tied to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Though the Texas-based managed cloud company reported net revenue for the fourth quarter of 2015 to be up by 10.7% on the same period in 2014 it expects a fall in the next financial quarter. Rackspace predicted that the Q4 revenue total of $523 million will fall to around $517 million in the next quarter (Q1 2016). For the full year of 2016, Rackspace expects revenue to be between $2.08 billion and $2.16 billion.

Top of the highlights that Rackspace listed for the year 2015 was the strategy to support AWS, Microsoft’s Azure public cloud and Microsoft Office 365. These moves will open up ‘huge and fast-growing new markets’, predicted CEO Taylor Rhodes. “We intend to be the number one managed services provider for AWS, and we are well on our way toward that goal.”

Outsourcing has made the company more dynamics, according to Rhodes: “Our business is becoming less capital intensive, resulting in higher free cash flow.”

Capital efficiency initiatives helped Rackspace reduce capital expenditures to 23% of its revenue, and the company’s adjusted free cash flow rose to $196 million for 2015. Rackspace shared its increased Adjusted Free Cash Flow with stockholders through a major share buyback that is still underway.

Since the October launch of Rackspace Fanatical Support for AWS, Rackspace has won 100 customers, while its technical support team has collectively earned 230 AWS technical certifications and more than 1,100 business and technical accreditations. In January 2016 Rackspace appointed Brian Stein as its new head of global engineering. According to Rhodes, the support team is the key to expansion, as it aims to sell its managed services customers more products. The tide of recent events has seen incremental workloads go to AWS, which slowed growth but Rackspace’s new multi-cloud portfolio can “reignite that essential part of our growth engine,” Rhodes said.

Of the AWS customers Rackspace has signed, 70% have chosen Rackspace’s highest service level, Aviator. “This indicates we are adding significant value on top of the AWS infrastructure,” said Rhodes.

HPE, News & Analysis

HPE launches AppTrace Pulse to monitor cloud apps

HPE street logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a service that developer clients can use to monitor their cloud app performances.

The HPE AppPulse Trace is intended for developers and DevOps teams to use for isolating and fixing problems. The new module fits into HPE’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software suite and is integrated with HPE’s analytics engine Vertica.

HPE claims it can pinpoint the exact lines of code and server location at the root of every glitch in the cloud. It achieves this by trawling massive volumes of data produced by applications and end user interactions. AppPulse Trace can find faults in user interactions, analyse crashes and measure resource usage, according to HPE. The intelligence can then be used by developers to fine tune apps, create new tools and rethink their approach to building applications.

AppPulse Trace works alongside two other modules already available, AppPulse Active and AppPulse Mobile. Active lets developers emulate real-user behaviour with scripts and synthetic transaction robots. This helps to model events and identify problems to fix before apps are put into production. AppPulse Mobile tracks the digital user experience of mobile apps in production, giving developers and DevOps teams real-user data so they can prioritise the issues affect users most. It also gives instant insight into the health of any application.

With developers under pressure to deliver apps at short notice this could be an indispensable tool according to Tony Sumpster, general manager of HPE’s IT Operations Management.

Beta test user Chris Trimper, Application Services Manager at Independent Health Association said it saved him nearly a whole week of work. “The worst way to monitor performance is to wait for someone to complain. With HPE AppPulse we saved 36 IT hours a month by reusing scripts and we reduced our average app response time from 12 seconds down to 4 seconds,” he said.

blockchain, Database, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

IBM and Microsoft race to develop Blockchain-As-A-Service

Money cloudIBM has made 44,000 lines of code available to the Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Project in a bid to speed the development of a Blockchain ledger for secure distributed online financial transactions.

IBM is now competing with a number of vendors, such as Microsoft Azure and Digital Asset, to bring Blockchain services to market either as a Bitcoin crypto currency enabler or for wider applications in financial services trading and even the IoT.

In a statement IBM said it wants to help create a new class of distributed ledger applications by letting developers use IBM’s new blockchain services available on Bluemix, where they can get DevOps tools to create and run blockchain apps on the IBM Cloud or z System mainframes. New application programming interfaces mean Blockchain apps will now be able to access existing transactions on these systems to support new payment, settlement, supply chain and business processes.

IBM also unveiled plans to put Blockchain technology to use on the Internet of Things (IoT) through its Watson IoT Platform. Information from RFID-based locations, barcode-scans or device-reported data could be managed through IBM’s version of Blockchain with devices communicating with the ledger to update or validate smart contracts. Under the scheme, the movement of an IoT-connected package through multiple distribution points could be managed and updated on a Blockchain system to give a more accurate and timely record of events in the supply chain.

The vendor intends to foster greater levels of Blockchain app design activity through its new IBM Garages that will open in London, New York, Singapore and Tokyo.

In Tokyo IBM and the Japan Exchange Group have agreed to test the potential of blockchain technology for use in trading in low transaction markets. As the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project evolves, the joint IBM and JPX evaluation work will adapt to use of the code produced by that effort.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is to launch its own Blockchain as a service (BaaS) offering within in its Azure service portfolio with a certified version of the online ledger scheduled to be launched in April.

In January 2016, Microsoft announced that it is developing Blockchain related services in its Azure’s DevTest Labs. In November BCN reported that Microsoft has launched a cloud-based ledger system for would-be bitcoin traders.

Microsoft is also inviting potential service provider partners pioneer the use of Blockchain technology in the cloud.

Channel, Cisco, News & Analysis, Pivotal

Cisco to resell Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry service alongside Metapod

Cisco corporatePivotal and Cisco are to jointly will jointly offer an enterprise cloud service designed to help developers work quicker.

A global agreement between the two will see Cisco partners resell Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry services blended alongside Cisco’s own Metapod offering. The selling point for the combined service is the promise that it will help companies set up cloud native applications quicker, from a wider choice of hosted, public and private clouds.

While Cisco’s OpenStack-based Metapod is designed to run on company premises the Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available to clients as an externally hosted system. Cloud Foundry’s main promise is to improve the productivity of developers, fine tune operations and provide IT systems with enterprise grade security, scalability and availability. Both system take different approaches to a common delivery goal, to help companies get their software to market faster.

Under the terms of the Cisco Solution Partner Program, which is part of the Cisco Partner Ecosystem, Cisco and third-party independent hardware, software and technology vendors integrate various IT systems and offer them to clients. As a Cisco Solution Partner, Pivotal has already been granted Cisco compatibility certification and offers 24X7 customer support.

Cloud Foundry has five major elements to its service. Microservices help developers to move faster by using composable services designed for independent deployment, scaling and recovery. Containers help create a flexible, secure and manageable workload which can be distributed and scheduled in order to create greater efficiency. Cloud Foundry’s Open Source is backed by contributions from over 40 members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. A short software delivery cycle is the aim of the Continuous Delivery element of Cloud Foundry, while the DevOps element can provide a structured platform for app creation.

The integration of Cisco Metapod and Pivotal Cloud Foundry marries the top managed private cloud with the leading Cloud Native developer experience, according to Peder Ulander, Cisco’s VP of Cloud and Managed Services. The goal is to help customers “quickly and easily modernize their IT,” said Ulnder.

The combination of Metapod and Clod Foundry gives companies the clout of an enterprise but the stealth of an SME, according to James Watters, senior VP of Products at Pivotal. Enterprises can use the cloud service to build “next generation applications that rival that of Silicon Valley’s most renowned start-ups,” said Watters.