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DropBox, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Dropbox launches Project Infinite to bolster mobility capabilities

Project InfiniteSpeaking at Dropbox Open London, Dropbox has announced the launch of Project Infinite, a new offering which the company claims meets expectations on how people find, access, and collaborates with large amounts of data.

Building on the ideas and new trends of mobility, collaboration and accessibility, Dropbox believe traditional tools, such as shared network drives and browser-based solutions, don’t meet the standards. The company claims Project Infinite will enable customers to work directly from the cloud, removing any concerns about the power and storage capabilities of their device.

“With Project Infinite, we’re addressing a major issue our users have asked us to solve,” said Genevieve Sheehan, Product Manager at Dropbox. “The amount of information being created and shared has exploded, but most people still work on devices with limited storage capacity. While teams can store terabyte upon terabyte in the cloud, most individuals’ laptops can only store a small fraction of that. Getting secure access to all the team’s data usually means jumping over to a web browser, a clunky user experience at best

“Project Infinite will enable users to seamlessly and securely access all their Dropbox files from the desktop, regardless of how much space they have available on their hard drives. Everything in the company’s Dropbox that you’re given access to, whether it’s stored locally or in the cloud, will show up in Dropbox on your desktop. If it’s synced locally, you’ll see the familiar green checkmark, while everything else will have a new cloud icon.”

The company also announced it has been growing in Europe, which is also supported by the appointment of a new European Vice President, Philip Lacor, who joins from Vodafone in Germany. The company now claims to have more than 500 million registered users, as well being used in 52% of companies in the Fortune 500, 33% of companies in the FTSE 100, and 29% of companies in the Global 2000.

data centre, Datacentre, News & Analysis, NFV, OpenStack, SDN, Verizon

Verizon launches NFV OpenStack cloud deployment over five data centres

VerizonVerizon has completed the launch of its NFV OpenStack cloud deployment project across five of its US data centres, alongside Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat.

The NFV project is claimed to be the largest OpenStack deployment in the industry and is currently being expanding the project to a number of domestic data centres and aggregation sites. The company also expect the deployment to be adopted in edge network sites by the end of the year, as well as a number of Verizon’s international locations, though a time-frame for the international sites was not disclosed.

“Building on our history of innovation, this NFV project is another step in building Verizon’s next-generation network – with implications for the industry,” said Adam Koeppe, VP of Network Technology Planning at Verizon. “New and emerging applications are highlighting the need for collaborative research and development in technologies like NFV. We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers’ needs anywhere, anytime, any app.”

Verizon worked with Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat to develop the OpenStack pod-based design, which went from idea to deployment of more than 50 racks in five data centres in nine months, includes a spine-leaf fabric for each pod controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The multi-vendor project uses Big Switch’s SDN controller software managing Dell switches, which are orchestrated by Red Hat OpenStack platform.

“Dell’s Open Networking initiative delivers on the promise of bringing innovative technology, services and choice to our customers and Verizon’s NFV project is a testament to that vision,” said Tom Burns, GM of Dell’s networking business unit. “With the open source leadership of Red Hat, the SDN expertise of Big Switch and the infrastructure, service and support at scale from Dell, this deployment demonstrates a level of collaboration that sets the tone for the Open Networking ecosystem. This is just the beginning.”

containers, Juniper, News & Analysis

Juniper boosts security capabilities with two new product offerings

Secure cloudJuniper Networks has launched a number of new cloud and virtualised service offerings as part of its software-defined secure networks framework.

The new offerings include a new containerised virtual firewall called cSRX and a multi-core version of the Juniper Networks vSRX. The company claims the new vSRX version is ten times faster than the nearest competitor and creates new possibilities for using agile and flexible virtual firewalls, while cSRX is the first containerized offering for the industry.

“As the security landscape continues to evolve, it is more important than ever to work together to combat cyber threats,” Kevin Walker, Security CTO at Juniper Networks. “These key additions to our security portfolio will further our Software-Defined Secure Networks vision and greatly benefit our customers. Our products provide the best opportunity to create secure networks through policy, detection and enforcement. We are excited to be releasing the most flexible firewall solutions in the market and continue to showcase our commitment to bringing SDSN to organisations across the globe.”

Juniper believes the faster vSRX offering and the scalability of the containerized cSRX, combined with the higher density of services on the Intel Xeon processor family, will increase an organizations capability to detect threats.

“Juniper Networks is delivering significant scale and total cost of ownership advantages to its customers with the new cSRX, which fundamentally changes how security is deployed and illustrates the power of Software-Defined Secure Networks to provide a holistic network protection paradigm,” Mihir Maniar, VP of Security Product Management at Juniper Networks. “Moreover, with the addition of our 100 Gbps vSRX, our security portfolio is further advancing the industry’s highest performing virtual firewall.”

Datacentre, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Software Defined Data Centre

Software-Defined Data Centre to become a common fixture in US – survey

Cloud computingA survey from security and compliance company HyTrust claims the Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) is on the verge of becoming a common fixture in corporate America.

65% of the respondents predict faster deployment in 2016, while 62% anticipate increased adoption of the SDDC. Nearly half see greater adoption of network virtualization, while even more, 53%, anticipate and increased adoption of storage virtualization. 50% of the respondents also anticipate higher levels of adoption of public cloud across the course of 2016 also.

“This survey is truly interesting in that it uncovers a new level of maturity in organizations pursuing a SDDC leveraging virtualization and the cloud. It’s long been happening, but now faster and with greater conviction and comfort than perhaps ever before,” said Eric Chiu, President of HyTrust. “Security and privacy have always been the critical inhibitors, and no one denies that these issues still concern senior executives.

“But now we can also see that technologies like those offered by HyTrust, which balance a high level of security and control with smooth automation, are having a major impact. The benefits of virtualized and cloud infrastructures are undeniable—think agility, flexibility and lower cost, among many other advantages—and the obstacles to enjoying those benefits are increasingly being overcome.”

From a security perspective, 74% of the respondents believe security is less of an obstacle to adoption compared to 12 months ago, however that is not to say security challenges have been reduced significantly. 54% of the respondents believe there will be an increased number of breaches throughout 2016, whereas only 11% say the contrary. In terms of migration, 67% believe security will ultimately slow down the process, and 70% believe there will be the same or even greater levels of internal compliance and auditing challenges following the transition to a SDDC platform.

While the Software-Defined Data Centre should not be considered a new term or trend within the industry levels of adoption and trust have been lower in comparison to other technologies in the cloud world. As the industry continues its journey towards automation, the SDDC trends will likely only become louder, as the survey demonstrates.

Cloud Technology Partners, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Rackspace and Cloud Technology Partners announce strategic partnership

Partnership hand holdingRackspace and Cloud Technology Partners have announced a strategic partnership to deliver professional and managed services, geared around the AWS public cloud offering.

The partnership will focus on a number of areas including cloud strategy & economics, security & governance, application portfolio assessment, DevOps & automation and application modernisation, migration & development, with the aim of accelerating enterprise adoption of cloud technologies.

“We are seeing increasing demand from enterprises that are seeking help moving to AWS and Azure, and then successfully managing their environments once deployed,” said Taylor Rhodes, CEO of Rackspace. “CTP is a recognised leader in helping enterprises move to the cloud and is a natural complement to our managed services expertise. Together, we provide the market leading solution that helps enterprises accelerate their realisation of cloud benefits.”

The partnership is seemingly build on the perception an enterprises adoption of cloud technologies is slowed due to the digital transformation programmes which are needed before the benefits of the cloud can be realized. The new partnership claims this process can be accelerated through combining the expertise of both organizations into one offering; Cloud Technology Partners will offer initial integrations and ongoing optimization work, whereas Rackspace provide managed services.

“Working with Rackspace was an obvious fit based on their managed cloud leadership and our shared emphasis on supporting customers through every phase of their cloud journey,” said Chris Greendale, CEO of Cloud Technology Partners. “Our prescriptive approach to public cloud adoption has been hugely successful for enterprise customers and we are very excited at the opportunity these combined services provide for both companies.”

Enterprise IT, Ericsson, News & Analysis, restructure

Ericsson restructures to prioritize cloud market segments

Ericsson is boosting its OSS/BSS activities in LATAM

Swedish networking giant Ericsson accompanied its Q1 2016 numbers with a new company structure and a reshuffle of the executive leadership team, writes Telecoms.com.

The top-line numbers were pretty much flat year-on-year, as you can see from the table below, with a strong quarter for IPR and licensing revenue offset by a weak macroeconomic environment in emerging markets. Telecoms.com spoke to Ericsson CFO Jan Frykhammar to get the inside view.

“Our quarter had its challenges and strengths as always,” he said. “We have a weak macroeconomic environment in some parts of the world, mainly emerging markets. While this is nothing strange after many quarters, even years, of challenges on the macro side, driven by things like oil price and other factors, it’s tough for many of our customers to keep up their investment levels. And then we have lower mobile broadband activity in Europe at the back end of this quarter, including one big customer project that has been completed.

“So we focus on doing everything we can to take care of the things we can control. We continue to deliver on the cost and efficiency programme and we are adding additional measures related to lower volumes. So we’re adapting the company to a challenging environment.”

The restructure essentially splits the company more clearly into its core, legacy, networks business and the areas it has been openly targeting for growth, as follows:

  • Business Unit (BU) Network Products, headed by Arun Bansal
  • BU Network Services, headed by Fredrik Jejdling
  • BU IT & Cloud Products, headed by Anders Lindblad
  • BU IT & Cloud Services, headed by Jean-Philippe Poirault
  • BU Media with central go-to-market model, headed by Per Borgklint
  • Customer Group Industry & Society with central go-to-market model, headed by Charlotta Sund

As you can see both the legacy networks and higher growth cloud segments are sub-divided into products and services, while media seems to be semi-autonomous. The industry and society group is more of a formal sales channel to make Ericson better at targeting industries outside of its core markets, especially utilities, transport and public safety.

“The purpose of this new set-up is to get enough focus, dedicated people and accountability to drive both sales in growth areas and at the same time make sure we remain focused on our core customers,” said Frykhammar. “This business unit structure will also help the market to better follow our progress in these areas. We’ve been talking a lot about targeted areas and now the investment buckets will fall wholly into these new business units.”

The changes to the executive leadership team seem to amount to a refresh, rather than a major overhaul. “The last time we had a major global reorganisation of the company was in 2010 and our industry has undergone a lot of change in that time,” said Frykhammar. “We think this is a good opportunity to bring some new people into the leadership team.”

Frykhammar was keen to stress the ongoing challenges in the broader macroeconomic environment and that Ericsson is acutely aware of them. For a while Ericsson’s quarterlies have been about trying to create a narrative around an essentially flat growth story and the company will be hoping to be able to focus attention on solid growth numbers in the from the cloud and media business when it starts reporting along those lines in Q1 2017.

hybrid, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, telstra

Telstra launches one-to-many Cloud Gateway offering

GatewayAustralian telco Telstra has bolstered his position in the growing cloud market with the launch of Cloud Gateway.

The Cloud Gateway is Telstra’s new solution which enables businesses to connect to multiple public cloud environments, acting as a one-to-many “gateway” model via Telstra’s IP network.

“Most organisations don’t realise the full value of cloud out of a single service,” said Philip Jones, Global Products and Solutions at Telstra. “Instead, our customers are investing in sophisticated hybrid cloud environments, which come with their own range of fragmented networking challenges.

“These include managing multiple vendors, portals and contracts, while trying to maintain a high level of security, performance and operational efficiency. We believe that just because these solutions are sophisticated, doesn’t mean that they should also be complex. Cloud Gateway is Telstra’s simple way to connect multiple clouds, and create hybrid environments.”

The product offering will enable Australian customers to connect to Microsoft Azure, Office365, AWS, IBM SoftLayer, and VMware vCloud Air, while international customers can only connect to AWS and IBM SoftLayer for the moment.

“Telstra is very well positioned to help customers with hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, as we bring the cloud and the network together,” said Jones. “The network is the fundamental piece of the puzzle that helps provide a secure and reliable application experience. Having a single touchpoint also helps reduce IT complexity, enabling our customers to maximise the benefits of investing in cloud.”

Telstra has been making moves within the cloud space in recent months, following the announcement of a cloud innovation centre in February. The centre was launched alongside partners AWS and Ericsson with the focus of accelerating the adoption of cloud technologies.

“Telstra’s vision is to build a trusted network service for mission critical cloud data, and we are excited to explore the opportunity of bringing this vision to life with Ericsson and AWS,” said Vish Nandlall, CTO of Telstra, at the time of the announcement. “The Cloud Innovation Center at Gurrowa intends to bring together cloud experts from Ericsson, AWS and Telstra to encourage cloud adoption and the development of new business opportunities for Telstra and our customers.”

containers, Mircrosoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft enters the containers race

male and female during the run of the marathon raceMicrosoft has cashed in on one of the industry’s trending technologies, with the announcement of the general availability of the Azure Container Service.

The Microsoft container service was initially announced in September 2015 and released for public preview in February, is built on Opensource and offers a choice between DC/OS or Docker Swarm orchestration engines.

“I’m excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Container Service; the simplest, most open and flexible way to run your container applications in the cloud,” said Ross Gardler, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, on the company’s blog. “Organizations are already experimenting with container technology in an effort to understand what they mean for applications in the cloud and on-premises, and how to best use them for their specific development and IT operations scenarios.”

While the growth of containers technology has been documented in recent months, a number of industry commentators have been concerned about the understanding of the technology within enterprise organizations themselves. A recent survey from the Cloud & DevOps World event, highlighted 74% of respondents agreed with the statement “everyone has heard of containers, but no-one really understands what containers are.”

Aside from confusion surrounding the definition and use case of containers, the Microsoft team believe the growth of the technology is being stunted by the management and orchestration. While the technology does offer organizations numerous benefits, traditional means of managing such technologies has proven to be in-effective.

“Azure Container Service addresses these challenges by providing simplified configurations of proven open source container orchestration technology, optimized to run in the cloud,” said Gardler. “With just a few clicks you can deploy your container-based applications on a framework designed to help manage the complexity of containers deployed at scale, in production.”

Along the availability announcement, Microsoft has also joined a new open source DC/OS project enabling customers to use Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System to orchestrate their containers projects. The project brings together the expertise of more than 50 partners to drive usability within the software-defined economy.

The Docker Swarm version ensures any Docker compliant tooling can be used in the service. Azure Container Service provides a ‘Docker native’ solution using the same open source technologies as Dockers Universal Control Plane, allowing customers to upgrade as and when required.

acquisition, Big Data, Data as a service, News & Analysis, Oracle

Oracle acquisition boosts position in data-as-a-service market

ContractOracle has announced its intention to acquire Israeli machine-learning company Crosswire, in a bid to strengthen its Data-as-a-Service offering.

The Crosswire technology enables marketers and publishers the opportunity to increase cross-device advertising, personalization and analytics, and builds on Oracle’s efforts to bolster its position in the smart data market segment.

“Uniting identity across desktop, browsers and mobile apps to create a meaningful and consistent relationship with customers and prospects has become one of the critical challenges for marketers,” said Omar Tawakol, General Manager at Oracle Data Cloud. “Identification methods are different on every device and across every channel, and solving this can enable marketers to have a significantly more effective dialogue with the consumer and save billions of advertising dollars.”

The team claim in combining the Crosswire capabilities with its Data Cloud portfolio, marketers will be able to build a graphical representation to identify how consumers interact with their digital devices. Oracle currently has such an offering within its portfolio, though the company claims the Crosswire capabilities increases the accuracy of the data, which in theory offers marketers the opportunity to better allocate advertising budgets.

“Oracle Data Cloud is the fastest growing global Data as a Service business, aggregating more than 3 billion profiles from over 15 million websites in its data marketplace and operating the most accurate ID Graph to enable understanding of consumer behaviour across all media channels,” said Tawakol. “The addition of Crosswise further broadens the Oracle ID Graph to construct a complete view of consumers’ digital interactions across multiple devices.”

The acquisition builds on moves by Oracle over recent years to bolster its cloud business. The company bought Ravello Systems for an estimated $500 million in February, as well as numerous acquisitions in 2015 including CloudMonkey, Maxymiser, and StackEngine.

Microsoft, News & Analysis, Saas, Salesforce, Software as a service

Microsoft grows in SaaS market but Salesforce still leads the way

Microsoft1New findings from Synergy Research Group highlight Microsoft is growing healthily in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market segment, but Salesforce is still market leader.

According to the research, Microsoft demonstrated the second highest level of growth within the segment at 70% year-on-year, only behind SAP who were at 73%, but still only sits second in the market share rankings. Salesforce was one of only four in the top ten for the segment who demonstrated less than 50% growth, however still accounts for just below 15% of the worldwide market share for SaaS. Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Google, ADP, Intuit and Workday complete the top ten.

“In many ways SaaS is a more mature market than other cloud markets like IaaS or PaaS,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “However, even for SaaS it is still early days in terms of market adoption. It is notable that the big three traditional software vendors – Microsoft, Oracle and IBM – are all now growing their SaaS revenues faster than the overall market and yet SaaS accounts for less than 8% of their total software revenues.”

The Software-as-a-Service has been demonstrating healthy growth over recent years, as Synergy estimates the market segment has grown by 40% over the last 12 months, and is expected to triple over the next five years. The growth claims are also supported by research from Cisco. Last year the team predicted by 2019 59% of total cloud workloads will be SaaS, compared to 45% in 2014.

The research also highlights Microsoft as making positive steps in the consumer SaaS market segment alongside its enterprise business. While the consumer segment is roughly a third of the size of the enterprise market, the company’s growth in this area exceeding competitors who currently have a more assured position in the space.