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acquisition, Easynet, Interoute, M&A, Managed services, News & Analysis

Interoute buys Easynet for £402 million

interoute logoNetwork and cloud service operator Interoute has entered an agreement to buy European managed services provider Easynet in a deal valued at £402 million.

Easynet manages services for clients including Sports Direct, EDF, Bouygues, Anglian Water, Bridgestone, Levi Strauss and Campofrio Food Group. It has a twenty year pedigree of running integrated networks, hosting and unified communications solutions to national and global clients. Its data center and cloud computing services include colocation, security, voice and application performance management. It has been appointed by the UK government’s Procurement Service to assist the UK Government in creating a ‘network of networks’ with an emphasis on machine to machine (M2M) development.

Interoute’s technology estate includes 12 data centres, 14 virtual data centres and 31 colocation centres along with connection to 195 additional third-party data centres across Europe. It owns and operates 24 connected city networks within Europe’s major business centres.

According to Interoute, the acquisition means that enterprise, government and service provider customers of the two companies will get a fuller suite of products, services and skillsets.

“These are exciting times for Interoute customers,” said Interoute CEO Gareth Williams, “Interoute is creating a leading, independent European ICT provider. This is the next step in our acquisition strategy and moves us much closer to our goal of being the provider of choice to Europe’s digital economy.”

Easynet CEO Mark Thompson reassured customers that the combination of the two service providers will bring better service to clients of both. “The combined companies can offer broader and deeper connectivity options, as well as an expanded portfolio of products and services,” said Thompson. “The acquisition will expand an already market-leading cloud hosting capability in Europe.”

Williams had previously told analysts that Interoute needed to grow before going public. The takeover will double revenue in the division that sells telecoms services to large companies and government departments.

British telco Easynet became one of the champions of broadband competition in Britain after it was acquired in 2006 by Sky for £211 million. In 2010, Easynet announced its sale from BSkyB (Sky) to Lloyds Development Capital (LDC), the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group.

In December 2013 the company was acquired by MDNX Group, the UK’s largest independent carrier integrator.

Interoute was recently recognised by market analyst Gartner as a leader in its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Europe report.

IDC, News & Analysis, Research, Storage

The cloud is commoditising storage for enterprises – report

Cloud storageLittle known unbranded manufacturers are making inroads into the storage market as the cloud commoditises the industry storage, according to a new report by market researcher IDC. Meanwhile, the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, it warns.

The data centres of big cloud companies like Google and Facebook are much more likely to buy from smaller, lesser known storage vendors now, as they are no longer compelled to commit themselves to specialised storage platforms, said IDC in its latest Enterprise Storage report.

Revenue for original design manufacturers (ODMs) that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew 25.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2015, in a period when overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 per cent. However, data centre purchases accounted for US$1 billion in the second quarter, while the overall industry revenue is still larger, for now, at $8.8 billion. However, the growth trends indicate that a shift in buying power will take place, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, said Sheppard.

ODMs such as Quanta Computer and Wistron are becoming increasingly influential, said Sheppard. Like many low-profile vendors, based in Taiwan, they are providing hardware to be sold under the badges of better known brand names, as sales of server-based storage rose 10 per cent in the second quarter to reach $2.1 billion.

Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the bulk of the enterprise storage business, which was worth $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment are declining, down 3.9 per cent in that period.

With the cloud transferring the burden of processing to data centres, the biggest purchasers of storage are now Internet giants and cloud service providers. Typically their hyper-scale data centres are software controlled and no longer need the more expensive proprietary systems that individual companies were persuaded to buy, according to the report. Generic, unbranded hardware is sufficient, provided that it is software defined, the report said.

“The software, not the hardware, defines the storage architecture,” said Sheppard. The cloud has made it possible to define the management of storage in more detail, so that the resources can be matched more evenly to each virtual machine. This has cut the long term operating costs. These changes will intensify in the next five years, the analyst predicted.

EMC remained the biggest vendor by revenue with just over 19 per cent of the market, followed by Hewlett-Packard with just over 16 per cent.

forecast, News & Analysis, Personal Cloud, Research

World personal cloud worth $90 billion by 2020 says Allied Market Research

metalcloud_lowresThe personal cloud market will have a compound annual growth rate of 33.1 per cent between now and 2020, by which time it will be worth $89.9 billion globally, according to a new study.

The report, World Personal Cloud Market- Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014-2020, says growing customer awareness of personal cloud services is driving the growth. Europe and the USA will be surpassed by the Asia-Pacific region as the most voracious users of personal cloud apps, with the latter accounting for two-fifths of total market share in 2020.

Advances in smartphones, tablets and mobile devices have boosted the growth of the personal cloud market as storage needs grow, it says. The change was catalysed by the virtualizing of the work environment as employers began using personal cloud storage as a solution to work problems, says the report.

Growth rate apart, the main finding of the study by Allied Market Research was that there has been a reversal of expectations, with individuals dictating the growth of corporate networks.

In addition, the study found that the personal cloud will become a conduit for lead generation and other indirect marketing methods. These could create new opportunities and provide the potential for revenue generated through advertising. Individuals will continue to lead the personal cloud as a result of the increasing influence of personal digital content, as devices with cameras proliferate and visuals become increasingly influential in the multimedia world, says the study.

The faster growth rate enjoyed by the Asia-Pacific region is anticipated as a result of different consumer behaviour in a different computing environment. Its population has significantly higher usage of multimedia devices coupled with faster broadband networks, according to the report.

Another strong influence will be exerted by the established market players, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Dropbox, who are leading the market with their flexible packages and affordable pricing structure. Their advanced features and attractive app prices, such as two-factor authentication for security, have improved customer satisfaction and driven wider adoption. The addition of Dropbox’s two-factor authentication, in June 2015, is cited as a major confidence builder in the personal cloud.

In turn, the mobile social media applications made possible by the new multi-featured, affordable smartphones created the demand for storing personal data using personal cloud platforms. Improvised secure features helped to popularise personal data storage and make the cloud a less ominous proposition, said the report.

AutoDesk, CAD, News & Analysis, Software as a service

Autodesk to ‘embrace the new norm’ and sell its software by subscription on the cloud

autodesk st louisSoftware vendor Autodesk is to move distribution of its computer aided design (CAD) system to the cloud.

After July 31, 2016, new commercial licenses of Autodesk Design and Creation suites and individual products will be available by subscription only. The transition allows the vendor to offer new, simplified subscription options to customers, who can get multiple products and share licenses with the added benefit of flexibility, it said.

Along with a simpler customer experience, Autodesk promised its new subscription model will offer lower upfront costs and a pay per use option on Autodesk products and cloud services with multi-year, annual, quarterly or monthly subscription terms. The new model makes companies more adaptable and makes changing business environments less expensive, according to Autodesk.

“The way we design and make things is changing. Every industry is being disrupted by changes in production, demand and products,” said Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk’s senior VP of Industry Strategy and Marketing.

By giving customers the flexibility to subscribe to software Autodesk is “embracing this new norm”, said Anagnost.

Autodesk announced in March 2015 that will stop selling perpetual licenses of most of its individual products after January 31, 2016, after which new licenses will only be available as subscriptions. Now the exceptions to that announcement, Autodesk’s Design & Creation Suites, are included in its subscription-based strategy.

Autodesk said it aimed to “pave the way for a smooth transition” with a choice of simplified subscription plans tailored to individuals, teams and enterprises. Customers can buy subscription plans to gain access to individual products or a portfolio of products with the option of single user licensing or shared network licensing.

Those who buy a perpetual license of Autodesk Design & Creation Suites and affected products prior to July 31 2016 will continue to own and have full usage rights for those licenses. Customers on the Maintenance scheme for those perpetual licenses will continue to receive corresponding benefits for as long as they continue to renew their Maintenance subscription.

Autodesk has published a list of changes for Perpetual Licenses for both individual desktop software and design and creation suites affected by the cut off deadlines. A number of country specific variations is also published on the site.

autoscaling, Datacentre, Google Cloud Platform, News & Analysis, Platform as a service

Google’s new autoscaling aims to offer instants gratification

Google cloud platformGoogle is to give users more detailed and tightly controlled management of their virtual machines through a new autoscaling feature.

Announced on Google’s own blog, the Google Compute Engine Autoscaler aims to help managers exert tighter control over all the billable components of their virtual machine infrastructure, such as processing power, memory and storage. The rationale is to give its customers tighter control of the costs of all the ‘instances’ (virtual machines) running on Google’s infrastructure and to ramp up resources more effectively when demand for computing power soars.

The new Google Compute Engine allows users to specify the machine properties of their instances, such as the amounts of CPUs and RAM, on the virtual machines running on its Linux and Windows Servers. Cloud computing systems that are subject to volatile workload variations will no longer be subject to escalating costs and performance ceilings as the platform brings greater scalability, Google promised.

“Our customers have a wide range of compute needs, from temporary batch processing to high-scale web workloads. Google Cloud Platform provides a resilient compute platform for workloads of all sizes enabling our customers with both scale out and scale up capabilities,” said a joint statement from Google Compute Engine Product Managers Jerzy Foryciarz and Scott Van Woudenberg.

Spiky traffic, caused by sudden popularity, flash sales or unexpected mood swings among customers, can overwhelm some managers with millions of requests per second. Autoscaler makes this complex process simpler, according to Google’s engineers.

Autoscaler will dynamically adjust the number of instances in response to load conditions and remove virtual machines from the cloud portfolio when they are a needless expense. Autoscaler will rise from nought to millions of requests per second in minutes without the need to pre-warm, Google said.

In another related announcement, Google is to make 32-core virtual machines (VMs) available. This offering is aimed at customers with industrial scale computing loads and storage-intensive projects, such as graphics rendering. Three variations of 32-core VMs are now on offer. The Standard offering has 32 virtual CPUs and 120 GB of memory. The High Memory option providers 32 virtual CPUs and 208 GB of memory, while the High-CPU offering provides 32 virtual CPUs and 28.8 GB of memory.

“During our beta trials, 32-core VMs have proven very popular with customers running many different workloads, including visual effects rendering, video transcoding, large MySQL and Postgres instances,” said the blog.

cloud backup, Enterprise IT, Fujitsu, News & Analysis

New Fujitsu data protection appliance backs up hybrid IT

FujitsuFujitsu has announced its new Rapid Recovery Appliance, which it claimed will make it easier to install a cloud backup as a service (BaaS) offering. The new appliance will make Fujitsu’s globally available Fujitsu Cloud BaaS more resilient and secure, it claimed.

The pre-configured system is designed to be installed on the customer’s premises in order to give users of hybrid IT systems greater control over their data protection processes. The new system will solve the logistical problems created by the mixture of internal IT and external cloud services that many companies now have, according to Fujitsu.

The system should combine the benefits of a backup and recovery appliance with the convenience of cloud-computing’s ‘pay-as-you-grow’ pricing policies and data security. According to Fujitsu, it makes an enterprise’s data both secure and readily recoverable, wherever it resides.

The new Fujitsu BaaS automatically replicates data to the secure cloud for offsite data protection. It facilitates the rapid recovery of recent local backup data through the use of Fujitsu’s cloud-based backup data and retrieval services. The system uses deduplication technology from Seagate and compression techniques to minimise the cost of transferring large volumes of data across the cloud.

Fujitsu Cloud BaaS will use 256-bit AES encryption to convert data both in-flight and at-rest in both the onsite appliance backup vault and the cloud backup vault. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance also provides automated, continuous cloud replication, helping to cut the costs and resources needed to maintain system integrity.

The pre-configured system will cut the storage footprint and minimise the bandwidth costs associated with cloud backup, said Fujitsu’s Global Offering Manager James Jefferd. The main business benefit, he said, is that it simplifies and speeds up a process that hybrid clouds could make more complicated for end users.

“With the trend toward a cloud service delivery model, IT buyers want easy-to-integrate cloud offerings that combine the benefits of cloud with existing assets,” said Jefferd. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance can replace traditional on-site, tape-based backup with an easy to use flexible system, he said.

Gartner analyst Dave Russell predicted it would be good for remote-office and departmental computing environments. “Most organisations cite concerns over security as their top cloud issue. The greater issue is often latency, so a disk-to-disk-to-cloud model is emerging,” said Russell.

cloud security, Funding, Netskope, News & Analysis

Cloud broker Netskope raises $75 million for analytics based security enforcement services

Secure cloudCloud security firm Netskope has received $75 million to develop its policy enforcement systems for cloud applications.

Describing itself as a cloud access security broker, Netskope raised the investment in a Series D funding round led by Iconiq Capital. Existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and the Social + Capital Partnership also participated.

Netskope monitors and enforces policy on data shared across cloud applications. It aims to give companies an instant view of the use of their data and creates plans of action to prevent betrayed confidences and information leakage. In May 2014 investors staked $35 million in a Series C round of funding. It total, the company has raised $130 million in investment.

Data protection for cloud based apps is an emerging niche in the security market which, according to analysis by Gartner, has a market value of $5 billion. The new genre of Cloud Access Security Brokers solves problems that cannot be addressed by traditional firewalls, according to Gartner.

Netskope’s founder claims that the company differentiates itself by being more precise, and going deeper into the data. This, says founder and CEO Sanjay Beri, helps customers gain better understanding of their data’s exposure.

While cloud apps give the workforce better tools and flexibility, the IT department has to manage the proliferation of data shared across the masses of unsanctioned cloud apps, said Beri. Since there are often ten times more cloud apps in use than IT departments are aware of, this is creating a massive security problem, which Netskope aims to solve, according to Beri.

“Only Netskope provides surgical visibility and control for all cloud apps, whether sanctioned by IT or not,” said Beri. Mobile apps in particular will create security problems for enterprises, as the bring your own device trend continues, according to Netskope, which offers a data loss prevention system that examines 400 different file types across over 3000 different data identifiers. Its own internal figures suggest that 90 per cent of the apps used by its enterprise customers are unsanctioned and not considered as enterprise ready. In addition, 13.6 per cent of those app users have had their account credentials compromised.

The new capital will be used to expand sales, marketing, customer success, engineering and research operations worldwide, adding to its current 250 person headcount. New data centres are planned for Asia-Pacific and Europe to meet growing demand.

ARM, electronics, IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis

IBM launches cloud-based Internet of Things service for electronic industry

IBM has launched the first in a series of cloud-based, industry-specific services for the Internet of Things (IoT), with an offering for the electronics industry. Its debut IoT service will gather data from individual sensors to provide instant analysis of the production processes of electronics manufacturers.

Meanwhile, IBM said it has integrated its IoT system, IBM IoT Foundation, with the firmware of chipmaker ARM, so that all devices driven by ARM chips will be able to release data for analysis. IBM said the fusion will allow ‘huge quantities’ of data from industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring devices to be gathered, analysed and acted upon.

The IBM IoT Foundation, a cloud-hosted offering, aims to simplify the complexity of analysing masses of machine to machine (M2M) data. It offers tools for analysing large quantities of fast-moving data and provides access to Bluemix, IBM’s service for managing and prioritising data flows. It also offers to secure confidential financial, IP and strategy information.

During the integration process, products powered by ARM’s ‘mbed-enabled’ chips will automatically register with the IBM IoT Foundation and connect with IBM analytics services. This unification means that information gathered from sensors in any connected device is delivered to the cloud for analysis. The IoT connection also means that commands can be pushed to devices, with actions being taken on the basis of the intelligence gathered.

If an alarm message is triggered on a machine in a manufacturing plant, it can now be automatically shut down and an engineer despatched to trouble shoot the disruption, IBM said. This cost-saving damage limitation is best achieved by combining the knowledge and communications protocols of different vendors at different levels of the ICT stack, according IBM’s General Manager for the Internet of Things, Pat Toole.

“The IoT is now at an inflection point and it needs the big data expertise of IBM and little data expertise of ARM to ensure it reaches its global potential,” said Toole.

Original design manufacturers and OEMs, like Ionics, are already seeing value in the chip level architecture harmonisation, said Krisztian Flautner, the General Manager of ARM’s IoT business. “Deploying IoT technology has to be easy, secure and scalable for it to feel like a natural extension of a company’s business,” said Flautner.

health, health cloud, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce says its Health Cloud is about building relationships, not records

Salesforce has unveiled a new cloud based system aimed at helping clinicians to build stronger relationships with patients. The launch comes in the same week that UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced plans to give patients in England access to their entire medical record by 2018, and to let them read and add to their GP record using their smartphone within a year.

Salesforce Health Cloud (SHC) is a cloud-based patient relationship manager that aims to give health service providers a more complete picture of each patient, by integrating data from electronic medical records, wearables and other sources, such as general practitioner and hospital notes.

The service was developed in the US, where recent legislation – such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – aims to put more emphasis on improving the patient experience. According to Salesforce, wearable technology has changed the way health services are administered and new cloud apps must cater for the new expectations of patients. The SHC is designed to meet the demands of a generation of digital natives that grew up with iPhones, Facebook and FitBits who expect to use technology to manage their care. According to Salesforce’s research, 71 per cent of  ‘millennials’ (those reaching adulthood around the year 2000) want their doctors to provide a mobile app to actively manage their health. Salesforce claims that 63 per cent of them want health data extracted from their wearables to be available to their doctors.

The Health Cloud was developed with input from a variety of US-based healthcare companies, including Centura Health, DJO Global, Radboud University Medical Center, Philips and the University of California and San Francisco. Development partners included Accenture, Deloitte Digital, PwC, MuleSoft and Persistent Systems, who collectively integrated records and customised content.

Features include a Patient Caregiver Map, which can map household relationships, as well as all providers and specialists involved in a patient’s care. A ‘Today’ screen alerts caregivers to timely issues, such as missed appointments or the need to refill medications. The logic of the system is that fewer patients will fall through the cracks in any health service, an issue that Salesforce Chatter – an internal social networking tool – aims to combat through a review process for internal health service conversations.

“The era of precision healthcare is upon us,” said Joshua Newman, Chief Medical Officer for Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences.

Apttus, Funding, investment, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Cloud vendor Apttus raises $108m to fund new services and features

Cloud software vendor Apttus has raised a further $108 million to fund the growth of its quote and renewals management business.

The new investment comes only seven months after it secured $41m in February 2015, as investor confidence in its e-commerce, contract management and renewals management software has surged. Founded in 2006, it received its first series of investment funding in 2013, when it received $37 million.

The Series C funding round was led by KIA. Previous investment rounds have been led by Salesforce’s venture capital arm Salesforce Ventures, which also contributed to this round of investment. Investors in this latest round also included Iconiq Capital and K1 Capital.

The Apttus cloud systems integrate with Salesforce’s CRM platform and are used to develop sales and renewal quotes within Salesforce’s system.

The funds will be used to develop new systems and provide new services to Apttus customers and prospects. According to Apttus, the main targets will be in the manufacturing, life sciences, financial services and telecommunications industries.

Apttus aims to give clients a better system of demand management by giving its users more information about their clients. The intelligence it curates allows sales staff to identify and concentrate their efforts on the most likely sales prospects. This information is gathered by the system by assessing the online track record of the potential customer. By monitoring and managing every transaction, this system gives the seller an ‘unbroken funnel’ throughout the sales cycle. This channelling of the customer is known as the Quote-to-Cash process.

The Apttus system was built on the Salesforce1 platform and it claims to have been an active partner of Salesforce since its foundation in 2006, with participation in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Apttus has 70 customers in the Fortune 500 and is projected tohave 1,000 employees by the end of 2015, a 400% growth in headcount since 2013. It now has offices in London, Sydney and Chicago with a Japanese location planned.

Apttus’s cloud software has re-defined the Quote-to-Cash process and the flow of money, said Farouq Bastaki, Executive Director of Alternative Investments at KIA. “We believe they have developed the future of how organizations manage their entire revenue operation with a modern front office, in the cloud,” said Bastaki.