Todas las entradas hechas por Business Cloud News

diagnostics, Enterprise IT, Internet of Things, Komatsu, M2M, mining, News & Analysis

Telstra, Komatsu sign $23m cloud, IoT deal

Komatsu is tapping Telstra for its cloud, comms and M2M strategy

Komatsu is tapping Telstra for its cloud, comms and M2M strategy

Telstra inked a deal with mining and construction equipment provider Komatsu to help the company deploy and manage its ICT and IoT strategy over the next three years.

The deal, valued at $23m, is an extension of a move in 2010 to on-board Komatsu’s applications onto Telstra’s cloud platform.

As part of the latest agreement Telstra will provide the core telecoms (voice, data and mobile) and ICT services (IoT and cloud infrastructure services) to Komatsu. The company said it is building on a recent M2M trial which it said enabled a ‘zero touch’ remote download of performance diagnostic data from more than 700 pieces of its equipment on mine sites.

The company said being able to access and analyse the data from inSite Centre in Sydney in real-time removed the need to take the equipment out of the field to download data, resulting in improved fleet and production efficiency.

“From the beginning of our cloud journey with Telstra, the focus has been on giving more time back to the business so we can innovate and adapt, and not worry about IT. This new agreement will be an extension of our collaborative relationship and will ensure we continue to lead our category within the mining sector,” said Ian Harvison, chief information officer at Komatsu.

“Telstra understands where we’ve come from and more importantly where we want to take our business, and we feel very confident that our technology and business is future proofed to allow us to compete in a continually evolving and competitive landscape.”

Sean Taylor, Komatsu Australia’s managing director and chief executive said: “We’re committed to business innovation and staying one step ahead of our customer’s needs – and it’s only through relationships with key partners like Telstra that this is possible. We’re excited about the next phase in our ICT strategy and look forward to many more years of innovation.”

Coupa, Financials, Funding, News & Analysis, Rob Bernshteyn, Spend management

Coupa closes $80m funding to bolster financials in the cloud

Coupa secured $80m in its latest funding round

Coupa secured $80m in its latest funding round

Cloud-based provider Coupa has secured $80m in a funding round led by T. Rowe Price Associates and Iconiq Capital, bringing total investment raised by the startup to $165m.

Premji Invest, Crosslink Capital, Battery Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Rally Ventures also participated with the latest funding round.

“This financing allows Coupa to continue investing in our go-to-market capacity and further expand our market-leading product portfolio and cloud innovations,” said Rob Bernshteyn, chef executive of Coupa.

“With our cloud spend management solutions we are redefining the value software should deliver to businesses and changing how customers define success from enterprise software solutions. We’re thrilled to have this roster of investors backing us as we grow our leadership and continue bringing our unique Savings-as-a-Service offering to the world’s most successful companies,” Bernshteyn added.

The spend-management provider said it plans to use the capital to bolster its global operations including sales, support and marketing.

Coupa said it wants to help “consumerise B2B commerce” for firms and their suppliers and make spend management simple, and the company seems to be enjoying a reasonable amount of success at convincing some of the largest firms – some of its customers include Salesforce, one of the largest Coca Cola bottlers in America, Royal Bank of Canada and BNP Paribas North America. It also claims more than $120bn in spend has passed through its platform to date.

Over the past year the company has focused on building out integrations and partnerships with ERP providers, announcing a deal with NetSuite in October 2014 for instance. Spend management software has long been high on the priority list of larger legacy incumbents. In 2012 for instance SAP bought cloud-based cash flow and expense management provider Ariba for $4.3bn, the same year Oracle introduced its own cloud-based expense management offering.

Golgi, Internet of Things, IoT, White Papers

The Internet of Things: Bridging the gap between devices and developers with cloud services

Golgi_white_paper_ofcnewThe Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most disruptive trends in technology today but as IoT services start to hit the mainstream, the sometimes conflicting requirements of device manufacturers and developers are beginning to create tension between these two groups.

Both manufacturers and developers want many of the same things – clear standards, secure platforms and a high degree of extensibility – but, because of the nascent state of the market, don’t necessarily know how to cope with the lack of standards or clarity around how to implement effective security controls in such technically constrained environments, or how to manage interoperability. Managing the complexity of communication within heterogeneous IoT environments and vast networks at scale also makes the task of developing robust IoT services which stand up to consumer expectations all the more challenging.

These challenges need to be overcome before that tremendous value of IoT can be realised. This whitepaper, sponsored by Golgi and published by BCN, luckily, looks at how cloud-based services can help bridge the gaps between the requirements of IoT device manufacturers and application developers:

  • Navigating existing IoT standards
  • Managing data security and privacy
  • Dealing with heterogeneous networks
  • The role of cloud services in IoT

Download the whitepaper for free from BCN now…

blade server, Datacentre, Marc Rouanne, Networking, News & Analysis, NFV, Open Source, OpenStack, Phil Twist, Vendor

Nokia eyes the cloud infrastructure market with OpenStack, VMware-based servers

Nokia is offering up its own blade servers to the telco world

Nokia is offering up its own blade servers to the telco world

Nokia Networks revealed its AirFrame datacentre solutions this week, high-density blade servers running a combination of OpenStack and VMware software and designed to support Nokia’s virtualised network services for telcos.

“We are taking on the IT-telco convergence with a new solution to challenge the traditional IT approach of the datacentre,” said Marc Rouanne, executive vice president, Mobile Broadband at Nokia Networks.

“This newest solution brings telcos carrier-grade high availability, security-focused reliability as well as low latency, while leveraging the company’s deep networks expertise and strong business with operators to address an increasingly cloud-focused market valued in the tens of billions of euros.”

The servers, which come pre-integrated with Nokia’s own switches, are based on Intel’s x86 chips and run OpenStack as well as VMware, and can be managed using Nokia’s purpose-built cloud management solution. The platforms are ETSI NFV / OPNFV-certified, so they can run Nokia’s own VNFs as well as those developed by certified third parties.

The company’s orchestration software can also manage the split between both virtualised and network legacy functions in either centralised or distributed network architectures.

Phil Twist, vice president of Portfolio Marketing at Nokia Networks told BCN the company designed the servers specifically for the telco world, adding things like iNICs and accelerators to handle the security, encryption, virtual routing, digital signal processing (acceleration for radio) that otherwise would tie up processor capacity in a telco network.

But he also said the servers could be leveraged for standing up its own cloud services, or for the wider scale-out market.

“Our immediate ambition is clear: to offer a better alternative for the build-out of telco clouds optimized for that world.  But of course operators have other in-house IT requirements which could be hosted on this same cloud, and indeed they could then offer cloud services to their enterprise customers on this same cloud,” he explained.

“We could potentially build our own cloud to host SaaS propositions to our customers, or in theory potentially offer the servers for enterprise applications but that’s not our initial focus,” he added.

Though Twist didn’t confirm whether this was indeed Nokia’s first big move towards the broader IT infrastructure market outside networking, the announcement does mean the company will be brought into much closer competition with both familiar (Ericsson, Cisco) and less familiar (HP) incumbents offering their own OpenStack-integrated cloud kit.

Datacentre, GPU, Hardware, News & Analysis, Nvidia, Vendor, Virtualisation

Nvidia: ‘Cloud to generate $1bn for the firm in a few years’

Nvidia's chief exec believes cloud will generate over $1bn for the firm in just a few years

Nvidia’s chief exec believes cloud will generate over $1bn annually for the firm in just a few years

Chip maker and GPU specialist Nvidia Corp said it expects cloud computing to generate over $1bn in revenues for the firm in the next few years, according to a report from Reuters.

Speaking to reporters at Computex Nvidia’s chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang also said the company expects cloud revenues to grow between 60 and 70 per cent each year.

A number of cloud service providers have borrowed from the high performance computing world to add GPU acceleration to their services in a bid to cope with diminishing returns on CPU performance.

HPC and cloud revenue at Nvidia was $79m for the recently reported Q1 2016, up 57 per cent year-on-year, and the company has over the past year or so announced some large deals with companies like Baidu, Facebook, Flickr, Microsoft and Twitter, largely around its Tesla and GRID offerings.

Last year it also struck a deal with AWS to add GPU-accelerated instances to its growing roster of services.

Nvidia has said much of its growth in recent quarters has come from datacentre, cloud, gaming and automotive, and that its deals with virtualisation incumbents VMware and Citrix are helping to give it a strong boost in the enterprise. Speaking to journalists and analysts in February this year Huang said its deal with VMware alone means about 80 per cent of the world’s enterprises now support its GRID GPU virtualisation technology.

Azure, Cloud Foundry, Microsoft, News & Analysis, PaaS, Platform as a service

Cloud Foundry heads to Azure

Microsoft has announced a public preview of Cloud Foundry running on Azure

Microsoft has announced a public preview of Cloud Foundry running on Azure

Microsoft has announced a long awaited public preview of Cloud Foundry for Azure which the company said will help enable its customers with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.

Microsoft has been talking about adding Cloud Foundry support to Azure for the better part of a year, and earlier this month the company drew one step closer to a beta release by demoing a Cloud Foundry deployment on its public cloud service.

In a blog post explaining the move Ning Kuang, senior program manager for Microsoft Azure said Cloud Foundry can be deployed quickly using an Azure Resource Manager template, or the through open source workload lifecycle manager BOSH.

“Hybrid and Multi-cloud support is one of the key strengths of Cloud Foundry and the Azure [Cloud Provider Interface] enables you to extend your private data to Azure for running Cloud Foundry based applications. In addition, we are working to ensure that Azure CPI will in work in a private cloud environment running on Azure Stack and we will have more on that to come in the near future,” Kuang explained.

“We’re hoping to release the public Beta in a few weeks and will then upstream the code back to the community source tree in a few months prior to GA,” she added.

Cloud Foundry is one of the most popular PaaSs around today so the move to support it may help on-board more devops-types to Microsoft Azure, which is currently one of the fastest growing infrastructure as a service platforms around (at least in terms of revenue).

Datacentre, Equinix, John Hughes, M&A, News & Analysis, Stephen Smith, TelecityGroup

Equinix, Telecity reach merger agreement as Interxion gets kicked to the curb

Equinix and Telecity Group are merging, which will boost Equinix's presence in the EU

Equinix and Telecity Group are merging, which will stregthen Equinix’s presence in the EU

Equinix and TelecityGroup have agreed the terms of a merger that will see the American datacentre incumbent pay $2.35bn for all issued Telecity shares.  The deal also means the proposed merger between Telecity and Interxion is dead in the water.

Under the terms of the merger each Telecity shareholder will be entitled to receive £5.72 for each share and 0.0327 new Equinix shares. Following the merger’s completion Telecity shareholders will hold just over 10 per cent of the shares in the combined group.

John Hughes, executive chairman of the board of TelecityGroup will also be joining the Equinix board.

“On behalf of the Board of TelecityGroup, I am very pleased to recommend the combination of TelecityGroup and Equinix to our shareholders today. Having carefully considered all our options, the Board believes this is a compelling offer and an excellent outcome for shareholders, employees and customers,” Hughes said.

“Through this transaction, our customers will have new global opportunities for their connected datacentre requirements.  The combination of Equinix and TelecityGroup services and people will ensure the expanded business leads the way in the provision of highly-connected data centre services for customers in Europe and all over the world.”

Stephen Smith, chief executive officer and president of Equinix said TelecityGroup will “considerably strengthen” its current offerings in Europe and help reinforce its position in the interconnection business.

“The transaction will allow Equinix to benefit from increased scale and extend the global reach of our platform. We believe our offer is compelling to TelecityGroup shareholders who will realise significant value for their holdings while having the opportunity to participate in the future strengths of the combined business,” Smith said.

“We are especially pleased to be welcoming John Hughes onto the Board of the combined business and will greatly benefit from his experience in the technology space,” he added.

The move also means that the proposed merger between TelecityGroup and Interxion is dead. When news broke of the merger talks earlier this month Equinix’s board called Interxion out, claiming an Equinix merger would be more beneficial from the perspective of shareholders.

If the merger is approved TelecityGroup will give Equinix a stronger presence in the UK and extend its footprint into new locations with identified cloud and interconnection needs including Dublin, Helsinki, Istanbul, Milan, Stockholm and Warsaw, something Equinix is clearly willing to splurge on. Telecity’s market cap when news of the potential merger originally broke earlier this month stood at £1.4bn, so Equinix is paying a premium of around £950m.

Android, developer, Fragmentation, Google I/O, Mobile, News & Analysis, Test & Measurement

Google unveils cloud-based testing lab to combat Android fragmentation

The scale of Android fragmentation as visualised by OpenSignal

The scale of Android fragmentation in 2014 as visualised by OpenSignal

Google unveiled a cloud-based testing service for Android apps it hopes will help combat fragmentation in the growing Android ecosystem.

The service, unveiled at Google’s annual I/O conference this week and based on Appurify’s technology – an acquisition it announced at the conference last year, allows developers to run their applications on simulated versions of thousands of different Android devices.

The company said much like other app testing services the Cloud Test Lab can record what happens just before an app crashes, and provides a crash log to help users debug their apps after having tested them on tons of different devices with a wide range of specs and capabilities.

“From nearly every brand, model and version of physical devices your users might be using, to an unlimited supply of virtual devices in every language, orientation and network condition around the world. You can get rid of that device closet—ours is bigger,” the company said.

“Out of the box, without any user-written tests, robot app crawlers know just what to look out for and will find crashes in your app for you. Augment this with user-written instrumentation tests to make sure that your most important user flows work perfectly.”

There has always been fragmentation in the Android world, and while it’s considered by some users to be one of the benefits of playing in Google’s ecosystem it’s also a major headache for app developers because building crash-proof apps for a range of devices can be quite time-consuming; not getting that right can as a result cause users grief (just check out a few reviews on the Google Play store).

With a wide range of low-cost Android devices flowing in from China, coupled with other large incumbents like Samsung, LG and Sony contributing to the heterogeneity themselves, fragmentation only seems to be increasing (OpenSignal has put together an impressive report detailing the scale of Android fragmentation – and how it compares with the iOS ecosystem). These testing services will also be critical for Google developers as the company looks to target the Internet of Things with a new OS and doubles down on Chromebooks, which are both based on Android.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Shaun Gregory, Watson

Woodside to deploy IBM Watson to improve oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Australian oil and gas firm Woodside will deploy IBM’s Watson-as-a-Service in order to improve operations and employee training, the companies announced this week.

The energy firm plans to use the cloud-based cognitive compute service to help train engineers and operations specialists on fabricating and managing oil and gas infrastructure and facilities.

The company said the cognitive advisory service it plans to use, ‘Lessons Learned’, will help improve operational processes and outcomes and include over thirty years of collective knowledge and experience operating oil and gas assets.

Woodside Senior vice president strategy, science and technology Shaun Gregory said the move is a part of a broader strategy to use data more intelligently at the firm.

“We are bringing a new toolkit to the company in the form of evidence based predictive data science that will bring down costs and increase efficiencies across our organization,” Gregory said.

“Data science, underpinned by an exponentially increasing volume and variety of data and the rapidly decreasing cost of computing, is likely to be a major disruptive technology in our industry over the next decade. Our plan is to turn all of this data into a predictive tool where every part of our organisation will be able to make decisions based on informed and accurate insights.”

Kerry Purcell, managing director, IBM Australia and New Zealand said: “Here in Australia IBM Watson is transforming how banks, universities, government and now oil and gas companies capitalise on data, helping them discover completely new insights and deliver new value.”

Alex Hilton, APM Group, Cloud Industry Forum, cloud standards, ENISA, Enterprise IT, European Commission, News & Analysis, Public Sector, Richard Pharro

CIF cloud code of practice gains European Commission backing

The Cloud Industry Forum's COP gained the EC's seal of approval for cloud certification this week

The Cloud Industry Forum’s COP gained the EC’s seal of approval for cloud certification this week

The Cloud Industry Forum’s (CIF) code of practice for cloud service providers has been added to the European Commission’s growing list of cloud certification schemes. The move means it passes the EC’s benchmark for service security and reliability.

The Commission’s Cloud Certification Schemes List was set up as part of the European Cloud Strategy and developed by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA); it gives an overview of different existing certification schemes for cloud services in the region.

The scheme effectively the Commission’s way of recognising a certification’s claim to ensuring cloud contracts guarantee a certain level of security or reliability, which it hopes will assure European customers of a provider’s claims and help stimulate spending on cloud services.

“This is a major milestone for the Cloud Industry Forum and the broader cloud community.  There are no dedicated cloud standards in the market, making it difficult for small business customers to identify trusted advisors,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive officer of the Cloud Industry Forum.

“We hope this recognition will encourage more users of cloud services to actively seek providers that are CIF-certified, and likewise more CSPs to seek certification. We have taken important steps in providing a foundation in what is a fast changing and, to many, a new technology sector,” Hilton said.

Other certification schemes included in the list include the Cloud Security Alliance’s attestation, certification and self assessment, EuroCloud’s Star Audit, ISO 27001 and PCI v3.

Richard Pharro, chief executive of APM Group, the Cloud Industry Forum’s certification partner, added: “The Code of Practice was first established with the aim of driving levels of accountability, capability and transparency in the Cloud industry, which are all critical to the Cloud service contract. With the adoption of Cloud within businesses progressing at an incredibly fast rate, those key tenets of Cloud delivery are as important as ever.”

“CSPs need to ensure they operate their businesses and services in a fully open and transparent manner where it is clear to their customers – existing and new – that they are trustworthy and capable of offering the services they claim to be able to offer. The CIF CoP is one of very few schemes which offers this much needed reassurance to end users regarding the organisations they choose to work with,” he added.