Adam Pozniak, Senior Vice President at Dimension Data details their partner programme – onecloud – which provides a white-label cloud offering that partners can then offer on to their clients.
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Box eyes retail manufacturers, engineering, construction firms with Verold acquisition
Box is looking to bolster its pitch to niche verticals
Box has acquired Verold, a Toronto-based 3D modelling and WebGL specialist, in a bid to bolster its appeal to retail manufacturers, engineering and construction firms.
Verold, which was founded in 2010, offers WebGL-based 3D modelling technology that lets users preview and edit 3D content without much computational overhead.
As part of the acquisition Box will move to integrate Verold’s technology into its platform. Verold’s teams with also become Box employees.
“At Verold, we believe interactive 3D web content has the power to transform a wide range of industries and applications, from manufacturing to ecommerce, and we believe the tools to build the 3D web should be broadly accessible,” said Ross McKegney, chief executive officer of Verold.
“Box’s incredible success in building an enterprise content platform that already reaches 45,000 businesses presents a one-of-a-kind opportunity for us to bring the future of 3D content to millions of people around the world. We’re thrilled to be joining Box and can’t wait to get started,” McKegney said.
The cloud-based storage incumbent said the acquisition would enhance its ability to provide more solutions specifically tailored to various industries. Last year the company launched Box for Industries, a collection of Box offerings tailored to a range of niche verticals.
Box chief executive Aaron Levie discussed some of the drivers for the acquisition on the company’s blog, and hinted at where the next Box for Industries solutions might appear: “We’re finding that nearly every industry is experiencing information-driven transformation in unique ways, and the acquisition of Verold will allow us to go even farther than ever imagined.”
“Take for example a commercial construction contractor, faced with the challenge of collaborating on multiple projects at once with partners and contractors, or previewing detailed design drawings when in the field. Or an athletic wear retailer tasked with delivering the latest product design iterations across geographically dispersed teams. Being able to perform these workflows, right from a web browser, without having to download any additional software is a game-changing proposition in many industries,” he said.
The move comes just one month after Box’s latest acquisition. It recently purchased Subspace, a mobile security startup, for an undisclosed sum.
Close to 40% of IT DMs find cloud is falling short once implemented, survey finds
Enterprises are struggling to manage the transition to cloud services, an NTT report suggests
Close to four in ten IT decision makers believe the cloud as it is implemented in their organisation is falling short of its potential, nearly the same proportion (41 percent) that say they find managing cloud vendors confusing, according to a recently published report.
A recently published NTT survey of over 1,600 IT decision makers in Europe and the US sheds some light on the challenges enterprises are facing in adopting cloud services.
While nearly half believe cloud as implemented in their organisations is falling short, many are finding that a drive towards cloud services internally is displacing investment in other key areas of IT – and struggling to manage this bi-modal IT framework.
About 17 per cent of respondents agreed they spend more time developing capabilities for applications hosted in the cloud than they do for those in their datacentres, but many more said they were spending significantly more time maintaining the current performance of both cloud (44 per cent) and corporate datacentre (55 per cent) applications.
Still, about 41 per cent of respondents said just migrating their critical apps to the cloud too challenging to warrant the move.
“Our study shows the reality of cloud in 2015 is potentially as complex as the world it was supposed to replace. ICT decision-makers harbor significant frustrations over cloud, and there are no clear answers over which kinds of applications belong where,” said Len Padilla, vice president of product strategy at NTT Com. “There needs to be a far smoother migration path from the datacentre to the cloud. A different kind of planning approach is required for companies to achieve the large-scale digital transformations business executives are demanding.”
“ICT decision-makers see the cloud as a compelling enabling technology for digital transformation – there’s no better way to take a new app from the sandbox to global production quickly. However, our study suggests focusing on ambitious plans is not the best approach. Focusing on continuous improvement and incremental steps is a far more effective strategy,” he explained.
While close to 90 per cent of respondents said they plan to move some applications over to the cloud at some point, the results of the report still raise questions about how enterprises can cope with some of the challenges of managing the transition. For a full copy of the report click here.
Percona buys Tokutek to mashup MySQL, NoSQL tech
Percona acquired Tokutek to strengthen its expertise in NoSQL
Relational database services firm Percona announced it has acquired Tokutek, which provides a high-performance MongoDB distribution and NoSQL services. Percona said the move will allow it to improve support for non-relational database technologies.
Tokutek offers a distribution of MongoDB, called TokuMX, which the company pitches as a drop-in replacement for MongoDB – but with up to 20 times performance improvements and 90 per cent reduction in database size.
One of the things that makes it so performant is its deployment of fractal tree indexing, a data structure that optimises I/O while allowing for simultaneous search and sequential access but with much faster insertions and deletions (it can also be applied in MariaDB).
Percona said the move will position the company to offer the full range consulting and technology services to support MySQL and MongoDB deployments; Percona Server already supports TokuMX as an option but the move will see the later further integrated and ship standard with the former.
“This acquisition delivers game-changing advantages to our customers,” said Peter Zaitsev, co-founder and chief executive of Percona. “By adding a market-leading, ACID-compliant NoSQL data management option to our product line, customers finally have the opportunity to simplify their database decisions and on-going support relationships by relying on just one proven, expert provider for all their database design, service, management, and support needs.”
John Partridge, president and chief executive of Tokutek said: “Percona has a well-earned reputation for expert database consulting services and support. With the Tokutek acquisition, Percona is uniquely positioned to offer NoSQL and NewSQL software solutions backed by unparalleled services and support. We are excited to know Tokutek customers can look forward to leveraging Percona services and support in their TokuMX and TokuDB deployments.”
NoSQL adoption is growing at a fairly fast rate as applications shift to handle more and more unstructured data (espeically cloud apps), so it’s likely we’ll see more MySQL incumbents pick up non-relational startups in the coming months.
Cloud security vendor Adallom secures $30m in series C led by HP
Adallom secured $30m in new funding this week from HP Ventures among others
Cloud security service provider Adallom announced this week it has secured $30m in a series C funding round led by Hewlett Packard Ventures, which the company said it would put towards research and development.
Adallom, which was founded by cybersecurity veterans Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik in 2012, offers a security service that integrates with the authentication chain of a range of SaaS applications and lets IT administrators monitor usage for every user on each device.
The software works with a conjunction of end-point and network security solutions and has a built-in, self-learning engine that analyses user activity on SaaS applications and assesses the riskiness of each transaction in real-time, alerting administrators when activity becomes too risky for an organisation given its security policies.
The company said the latest funding round, which brings the total amount secured by the firm since its founding three years ago to just under $50m, speaks to the rapid growth of the SaaS market, and the need for more flexible security solutions.
“The market’s embrace of our approach to cloud security and our investors’ continued confidence in our products, team and results to date is a strong endorsement of Adallom. It also serves as encouragement to continue to execute on our mission to deliver the best platform for protecting data in the cloud,” said Rappaport, Adallom’s chief executive. “We’re determined to exceed the expectations of our customers and investors, and continue our innovation in this market.”
The company said the investment will be used to double down on development and improve support for more services; it claims the security service already supports over 13,000 cloud apps.
Adallom’s funding round caps off a successful month for a number of cloud security vendors, with Palerra, ProtectWise and Elastica all securing millions in investment.
Hortonworks buys SequenceIQ to speed up cloud deployment of Hadoop
SequenceIQ will help boost Hortonworks’ position in the Hadoop ecosystem
Hortonworks has acquired SequenceIQ, a Hungary-based startup delivering infrastructure agnostic tools to improve Hadoop deployments. The company said the move will bolster its ability to offer speedy cloud deployments of Hadoop.
SequenceIQ’s flagship offering, Cloudbreak, is a Hadoop as a Service API for multi-tenant clusters that applies some of the capabilities of Blueprint (which lets you create a Hadoop cluster without having to use the Ambari Cluster Install Wizard) and Periscope (autoscaling for Hadoop YARN) to help speed up deployment of Hadoop on different cloud infrastructures.
The two companies have partnered extensively in the Hadoop community, and Hortonworks said the move will enhance its position among a growing number of Hadoop incumbents.
“This acquisition enriches our leadership position by providing technology that automates the launching of elastic Hadoop clusters with policy-based auto-scaling on the major cloud infrastructure platforms including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and OpenStack, as well as platforms that support Docker containers. Put simply, we now provide our customers and partners with both the broadest set of deployment choices for Hadoop and quickest and easiest automation steps,” Tim Hall, vice president of product management at Hortonworks, explained.
“As Hortonworks continues to expand globally, the SequenceIQ team further expands our European presence and firmly establishes an engineering beachhead in Budapest. We are thrilled to have them join the Hortonworks team.”
Hall said the company also plans to contribute the Cloudbreak code back into the Apache Foundation sometime this year, though whether it will do so as part of an existing project or standalone one seems yet to be decided.
Hortonworks’ bread and butter is in supporting enterprise adoption of Hadoop and bringing the services component to the table, but it’s interesting to see the company commit to feeding the Cloudbreak code – which could, at least temporarily, give it a competitive edge – back into the ecosystem.
“This move is in line with our belief that the fastest path to innovation is through open source developed within an open community,” Hall explained.
The big data M&A space has seen more consolidation over the past few months, with Hitachi Data Systems acquiring big data and analytics specialist Pentaho and Infosys’ $200m acquisition of Panaya.
Box hires ex-Microsoft exec to bolster business in France
Jeremy Grinbaum, regional vice president for France and southern Europe, Box
Box has hired former Microsoft cloud sales exec Jeremy Grinbaum to lead the company’s commercial expansion efforts in France and southern Europe.
Grinbaum, who will be based in Box’s Paris office, has been broad on board as regional vice president for France and southern Europe to drive the cloud storage incumbent’s business in the region, which includes setting up a local sales team.
“We are seeing significant traction in France and southern Europe as businesses in these regions begin to adopt cloud systems to drive efficiency and collaboration,” said David Quantrell, senior vice president and general manager of EMEA at Box.
“We are excited to accelerate our growth in southern Europe, and Jeremy’s leadership and expertise are exactly what we need to drive the adoption of Box’s content and collaboration platform.”
Before joining Box Grinbaum spent the past few years as a senior sales executive at Microsoft, focusing on the company’s cloud services including Yammer and Office 265. He founded a cloud-based collaboration start up in 2007, PersonAll, and has also held senior sales roles at Google, IBM, and TRSB.
“France and southern Europe are moving quickly in the adoption of new technologies. Enterprises are looking for solutions that will allow them to move off of expensive, legacy architecture and create more agile and iterative environments for employees,” Grinbaum said. “I am excited to join this innovative company and play a role in helping organizations transform the way they work.”
Last month Box revealed its quarterly results to the public for the first time, which showed promise. Billings in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 were $82m, a 33 per cent year on year increase. But the company has over the years spent hundreds of millions of dollars bolstering its sales and marketing efforts, accumulating a significant amount of debt in the process, so it’s likely Box’s main focus will be on delivering the return shareholders are looking for from its southern European expansion.
IBM goes after healthcare with acquisitions, Apple HealthKit partnership, new business unit
IBM is pushing hard to bring Watson to the healthcare sector
IBM announced a slew of moves aimed at strengthening its presence in the healthcare sector including two strategic acquisitions, a HealthKit-focused partnership with Apple, and the creation of a new Watson and cloud-centric healthcare business unit.
IBM announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Explorys, which deploys cognitive cloud-based analytics on datasets derived from numerous and diverse financial, operational and medical record systems, and Phytel, which provides cloud-based software that helps healthcare providers and care teams coordinate activities across medical facilities by automating certain aspects of patient care.
The company said the acquisitions would bolster IBM’s efforts to sell advanced analytics and cognitive computing to primary care providers, large hospital systems and physician networks.
“As healthcare providers, health plans and life sciences companies face a deluge of data, they need a secure, reliable and dynamic way to share that data for new insight to deliver quality, effective healthcare for the individual,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson. “To address this opportunity, IBM is building a holistic platform to enable the aggregation and discovery of health data to share it with those who can make a difference.”
That ‘holistic platform’ is being developed by the recently announced Watson Health unit, which as the name suggests will put IBM’s cognitive compute cloud service Watson at the heart of a number of healthcare-focused cloud storage and analytics solutions. The unit has also developed the Watson Health Cloud platform, which allows the medical data it collects to be anonymized, shared and combined with a constantly-growing aggregated set of clinical, research and social health data.
“All this data can be overwhelming for providers and patients alike, but it also presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform the ways in which we manage our health,” said John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president, solutions portfolio and research. “We need better ways to tap into and analyze all of this information in real-time to benefit patients and to improve wellness globally.”
Lastly, IBM announced an expanded partnership with Apple that will see IBM offer its Watson Health Cloud platform as a storage and analytics service for HealthKit data aggregated from iOS devices, and open the platform up for health and fitness app developers as well as medical researchers.
Many of IBM’s core technologies, which have since found their way into Watson (i.e. NLP, proprietary algorithms, etc.) are already in use by a number of pioneering medical facilities globally, so it makes sense for IBM to pitch its cognitive compute capabilities to the healthcare sector – particularly in the US, where facilities are legally incentivised to use new technologies to reduce the cost of patient care while keeping quality of service high. Commercial deals around Watson have so far been scarce, but it’s clear the company is keen to do what it can to create a market for cloud-based cognitive computing.
Rio Tinto moves ERP, IM systems to Accenture cloud
Rio Tinto announced a partnership with Accenture that will see the global mining firm move the bulk of its application landscape to Accenture’s public cloud service.
Rather than add new systems into the mix the deal will see Accenture help the British-Australian firm consolidate its ERP and IM platforms and put them on Accenture’s cloud infrastructure. As part of the move Accenture will manage the lifecycle of the applications, which will be hosted in Accenture’s datacentres.
Rio Tinto Group said it moved its application landscape in a bid to save costs and switch to an “as-a-service” IT model that allows it to pay only for the resources it uses.
“Rio Tinto is on an ambitious journey to a world-class IS&T delivery model that is innovative, adaptable and cost-effective, fully supporting our business priorities and group operating model,” said Rio Tinto Group chief information officer Simon Benney.
“We selected Accenture to help us manage this transformation based on its global delivery capabilities, its vision for the intelligent business cloud and its ability to support our digital transformation programme,” Benney said.
Pierre Nanterme, chairman and chief executive of Accenture said: “This solution will allow Rio Tinto to smartly connect its infrastructure, software applications, data and operations capabilities in order to become an agile, intelligent, digital business that can better navigate the commodities cycles.”
Twitter nixes firehose partnership with DataSift
Twitter is consolidating its grip on data analytics and resellers using its data in real-time
Twitter has suspended negotiations over the future use of the social media giant’s data with big data analytics provider DataSift, sparking concerns the firm plans to shut out others in the ecosystem of data analytics providers it enables.
In a recent blog post penned by DataSift’s chief exec and founder, Nick Halstead, the company aimed to reaffirm to customers that’s its business model “never relied on access to Twitter data” and that it is extending its reach into “business-owned data.”
But, the company still attacked the social media giant for damaging the ecosystem it enables.
“Our goal has always been to provide a one-stop shop for our customers to access all the types of data from a variety of networks and be able to consume it in the most efficient way. Less noise, more actionable results. This is what truly matters to companies that deal with social data,” Halstead explained.
“The bottom line: Twitter has seriously damaged the ecosystem this week. 80% of our customers use technology that can’t be replaced by Twitter. At the end of the day, Twitter is providing data licensing, not processing data to enable analysis.”
“Twitter also demonstrated that it doesn’t understand the basic rules of this market: social networks make money from engagement and advertising. Revenue from data should be a secondary concern to distribution and it should occur only in a privacy-safe way. Better understanding of their audiences means more engagement and more ad spend from brands. More noise = less ad spend.”
DataSift was one three data resellers that enjoy privileged access to Twitter’s data in real-time – Gnip, which is now owned by Twitter, and NTT Data being the other two.
The move to strengthening its grip over the analysis ecosystem seems aimed at bolstering Gnip’s business. A similarly-timed post on Gnip’s blog by Zach Hofer-Shall, head of Twitter more or less explained that the Gnip acquisition was a “first step” towards developing a more direct relationship with data customers, which would suggest other firehose-related negotiations may likely sour in the coming months if they haven’t already (BCN reached out to NTT Data for comment).
Some have, reasonably, hit out at Twitter for effectively eating its own ecosystem and shutting down third party innovation. For instance Steven Willmott, chief executive of 3Scale, an API services vendor, said shutting down firehose access will result in niche verticals being underserved.
“While it makes sense at some level to want to be closer to the consumers of data (that’s valuable and laudable from a product perspective), removing other channels is an innovation bust. Twitter will no doubt do a great job on a range of use-cases but it’s severely damaging not to have a means to enable full firehose access for others. Twitter should really be expanding firehose access, not restricting it”
Julien Genestoux, founder of data feed service provider Superfeedr, said the recent move to cut off firehose access is not very different from what Twitter did a couple years ago when they started limiting the 3rd party client’s API accesses, and that Facebook often does much the same with partners it claims to give full data access to.
“The problem isn’t the company. The problem is the pattern. When using an API, developers are completely surrendering any kind of bargain power they have. There’s a reason we talk about slave and master in computer science. API’s are whips for web companies. This is the very tool they use to enforce a strong coupling and dependence to their platform,” he said.
While Twitter seems to be severely restricting the data reseller ecosystem it’s also redoubling its efforts to capture the hearts and minds of the enterprise developer, with coveted access to its data being placed front and centre. Twitter is working with IBM to make its data stream available to Big Blue’s clients, and in March this year IBM said it has over 100 pilots in place that see the company working with enterprises in a range of verticals to create cloud-based services integrating Twitter data and Watson analytics.