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agriculture, Analytics, Azure, Fujitsu, Internet of Things, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Vendor, Windows

Fujitsu, Microsoft collaborate on Azure, Internet of Things

Fujitsu and Microsoft are partnering on IoT for farming and agricutlure

Fujitsu and Microsoft are partnering on IoT for farming and agricutlure

Fujitsu and Microsoft announced an Internet of Things partnership focused on blending the former’s devices and IoT services for agriculture and manufacturing, powered by Windows software and Azure cloud services.

The move will see the two companies offer a solution that blends Fujitsu’s Eco-Management Dashboard, an IoT service for the agricultural sector, and Microsoft’s Azure database services so that data collected from sensors deployed throughout the operations can be analysed to help firms save money and streamline processes.

The companies said the platform has uses in other sectors and can be tailored to a range of different niche verticals.

“Leveraging the Fujitsu Eco-Management Dashboard solution alongside Microsoft Azure and the Fujitsu IoT/M2M platform, we are able to deliver real-time visualisation of the engineering process for big data analytics to improve the entire production process and inform decision-making,” said Hiroyuki Sakai, corporate executive officer, executive vice president, head of global marketing at Fujitsu.

“We are proud to partner with Fujitsu to enable the next generation of manufacturing business models and services enabled by IoT along with advanced analytics capabilities like machine learning,” said Sanjay Ravi, managing director, Discrete Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft. “Fujitsu’s innovation will drive new levels of operational excellence and accelerate the pace of digital business transformation in manufacturing.”

Fujitsu has been doubling down on IoT this year, with manufacturing looking to be a strong sector for those kinds of services according to anlaysts. In January the company announced plans to expand its two core datacentres in Japan in a bid to accelerate demand for its cloud and IoT services.

The 2nd annual Internet of Things World event to be held in San Francisco in May is due to address some of the challenges ahead of the industry in terms of IoT. Sign up here.

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Big Data, Enterprise IT, ERP, IDC, Internet of Things, IoT, Kimberly Knickle, Manufacturing, News & Analysis

Close to half of manufacturers look to cloud for operational efficiency, survey reveals

Manufacturers are flocking to cloud services to reap operational benefits

Manufacturers are flocking to cloud services to reap operational benefits

About half of all large manufacturers globally are using or plan to use IT services based on public cloud platform in a bid to driver operational efficiency, an IDC research survey reveals.

A recently published IDC survey which polled 437 IT decision makers at large manufacturing firms globally suggests manufacturers are looking to cloud services primarily to simplify their operations.

A majority of manufacturers worldwide are currently using public (66 per cent) or private cloud (68 per cent) for more than two applications, and nearly 50 per send of European manufacturers have adopted or intend to adopt ERP in the public cloud.

But only 30 to 35 per cent of respondents said operations, supply chain and logistics, sales, or engineering were likely to benefit through adoption.

“Manufacturers are in the midst of a digital transformation, in which 3rd platform technologies are absolutely essential to the way they do business and in the products and services they provide to their customers.  Consequently, a strategic approach to adopting cloud is absolutely essential,” said Kimberly Knickle, research director, IDC Manufacturing Insights.

“Because of cloud’s tremendous value in making IT resources available to the business based on business terms –speed, cost, and accessibility- manufacturers must  ensure that the line of business and IT management work together in defining their requirements,” Knickle said.

The firm said manufacturers are likely to opt for private cloud platforms in the near term in a bid to expand their IT estates to the cloud, but that capacity requirements will likely eventually shift those platforms onto larger public cloud platforms. A big driver for this will be the Internet of Things, with a cloud a key component in allowing manufacturers to more easily make use of the data that will be connected from sensors throughout manufacturing operations.

Amazon, AWS, desktop as a service, desktop virtualisation, Gene Farrell, News & Analysis, Vendor, Virtualisation

AWS doubles down on DaaS with virtual desktop app marketplace

AWS is bolstering its ecosystem around desktops

AWS is bolstering its ecosystem around desktops

Amazon has launched an application marketplace for AWS WorkSpaces, the company’s public cloud-based desktop-as-a-service, which it said would help users deploy virtualised desktop apps more quickly while keeping costs and permissioning under control.

Last year AWS launched WorkSpaces to appeal to mobile enterprises and the thin-client crowd, and the company said the app marketplace will allow users to quickly provision and deploy software directly onto virtual desktops – with software subscriptions charged monthly, and Amazon handling all of the billing.

To complement the marketplace the company unveiled the WorkSpaces Application Manager, which will enable IT managers to track and manage application usage, cost, and permissions.

“With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, Amazon WorkSpaces customers are able to provision a high-quality, cloud-based desktop experience for their end users at half the cost of other virtual desktop infrastructure solutions,” said Gene Farrell, general manager of AWS Enterprise Applications.

“By introducing the AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps and Amazon WAM, AWS is adding even more value to the Amazon WorkSpaces experience by helping organizations reduce the complexity of selecting, provisioning, and deploying applications. With pay-as-you-go monthly pricing and end-user self-provisioning of applications, customers will lower the costs associated with provisioning and maintaining applications for their workforce,” Farrell said.

AWS has spent the better part of the last 9 years building up a fairly vibrant ecosystem of third-party services around its core set of infrastructure offerings, and it will be interesting to see whether the company can replicate that success on the desktop. Amazon says many companies, particularly the larger ones, deploy a mix of upwards of 200 software titles to their desktops, which would suggest a huge opportunity for the cloud giant and its partners.

IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Texas Instruments

IBM bolsters Internet of Things initiatives

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM has announced a slew of Internet of Things solutions following a recent pledge to pump £2bn into a series of IoT and cloud initiatives, including the creation of a standalone IoT division.

The company pulled the curtain back on two vertically-focused IoT solutions including IBM Aviation Maintenance, which is designed to optimise the availability and extend the life of critical aviation components; and IBM Product Line Engineering (PLE), a solution to help engineers more efficiently customise product designs for specific markets

It also reaffirmed plans to carve out a section in Bluemix for specialist IoT services (IoT Zone), and announced a number of new IoT-focused cloud services available on the platform: an asset management solution to increase visibility of the condition of assets; a managed continuous engineering platform to help large industrial manufacturing organisations speed up IoT app development, and Workbench, a service for modelling the design and impact of IoT systems.

“The IoT is generating massive amounts of data – data from mobile phones, automobiles, appliances and industrial appliances – that can be captured, analyzed and transformed into actionable insights, in a secure manner,” said Chris O’Connor, general manager, offerings, IBM Internet of Things.

“IBM is helping innovators who design and produce the next generation of connected devices and those who operate and maintain those devices, deal with the increasing complexity of creating products and solutions quickly to meet the needs of consumers,” O’Connor said.

The company also announced a partnership with Texas Instruments (TI) to develop a cloud-based provisioning and lifecycle management service for IoT devices, part of IBM’s plan to ink more IoT-focused strategic partnerships.

“Cloud connectivity and cloud services are fundamental to the IoT, but there are barriers to adoption especially for industrial applications such as manufacturing, building automation and energy management,” said Avner Goren, general manager of strategic marketing, Embedded Processing, Texas Instruments.

“By working with IBM to help secure device identity, provisioning and lifecycle management, we have created a foundation for IoT adoption to reach its full potential through better managed services across easy-to-use connectivity solutions,” Goren said.

The 2nd annual Internet of Things World event to be held in San Francisco in May is due to address some of the challenges ahead of the industry in terms of IoT. Sign up here.

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Enterprise IT, federal government, IBM, News & Analysis, Public Sector, US Army

US Army deploys hybrid cloud for logistics data analysis

The US Army is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support its logistics system

The US Army is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support its logistics system

The US Army is partnering with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support data warehousing and data analysis for its Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) platform, the Army’s logistics support service.

LOGSA provides logistics information capabilities through analytics tools and BI solutions to acquire, manage, equip and sustain the materiel needs of the organisation, and is also the home of the Logistics Information Warehouse (LIW), the Army’s official data system for collecting, storing, organizing and delivering logistics data.

The Army said it is working with IBM to deploy LOGSA, which IBM said it is the US federal government’s largest logistics system, on an internal hybrid cloud platform in a bid to improve its ability to connect to other IT systems, broaden the organisation’s analytics capabilities, and save money (the Army reckons up to 50 per cent).

Anne Altman, General Manager for U.S. Federal at IBM said: “The Army not only recognized a trend in IT that could transform how they deliver services to their logistics personnel around the world, they also implemented a cloud environment quickly and are already experiencing significant benefits. They’re taking advantage of the inherent benefits of hybrid cloud: security and the ability to connect it with an existing IT system. It also gives the Army the flexibility to incorporate new analytics services and mobile capabilities.”

Bill Fathers, Datacentre, Duncan Bennet, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, telstra, VMware

VMware, Telstra bring virtualisation giant’s public cloud to Australia

Telstra and VMware are bringing the virtualisation incumbent's public cloud service to Australia

Telstra and VMware are bringing the virtualisation incumbent’s public cloud service to Australia

VMware announced it is partnering with Telstra to bring its vCloud Air service to Australia.

VMware said the initial VMware vCloud Air deployment in Australia is hosted out of an unspecified Telstra datacentre.

“We continue to see growing client adoption and interest as we build out VMware vCloud Air with our newest service location in Australia,” said Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware.

“VMware’s new Australia service location enables local IT teams, developers and lines of business to create and build their hybrid cloud environments on an agile and resilient IT platform that supports rapid innovation and business transformation,” Fathers said.

Last July VMware made a massive push into the Asia Pacific region, inking deals with SoftBank in Japan and China Telecom in China to bring its public cloud service to the area. But the company said it was adding an Australian location in a bid to appeal to users that have strict data residency requirements.

Duncan Bennet, ‎vice president and managing director, VMware A/NZ added: “Australian businesses will have the ability to seamlessly extend applications into the cloud without any additional configuration, and will have peace of mind, knowing this IT infrastructure will provide a level of reliability and business continuity comparable to in-house IT. It means businesses can quickly respond to changing business conditions, and scale IT up and down as required without disruption to the overall business.”

Telstra has over the past couple of years inked a number of partnerships with large enterprise IT incumbents to strengthen its position in the cloud segment. It was one of the first companies to sign up to Cisco’s Intercloud programme last year, and earlier this month announced a partnership with IBM that will see the Australian telco offer direct network access to SoftLayer cloud infrastructure to local customers.

Dell, Jim Ganthier, Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat

Red Hat, Dell redouble OpenStack private cloud efforts

Red Hat and Dell are co-developing OpenStack-based private cloud solutions

Red Hat and Dell are co-developing OpenStack-based private cloud solutions

Red Hat and Dell have announced a series of co-engineered, high-density servers the companies claim are optimised for large-scale OpenStack deployments.

The co-engineered servers ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and are based on Dell PowerEdge R630 and R730xd high-density rack servers, the latter ideal for compute and the latter optimised for storage utilisation.

“Enterprise customers are requiring robust and rapidly scalable cloud infrastructures that deliver business results,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Solutions and Cloud.

“Dell and Red Hat continue to jointly deliver cost effective, open source-based cloud computing solutions that provide greater agility to our customers, and this newest version of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution leverages best of breed technology from both companies to do so,” Ganthier said.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack at Red Hat said: “Red Hat’s ongoing collaboration with Dell to co-engineer enterprise-grade cloud solutions is further enhancing OpenStack to be production-ready.End customers continue to benefit from Red Hat’s strategic partnership with Dell as we deliver joint solutions that streamline deployment and accelerate time to innovation.”

A number of interrelated forces seem to be at play here. In revealing its fourth quarter 2015 financial results last month Red Hat said deals involving OpenStack-based offerings tripled when compared to the fourth quarter 2014, and with HP pushing its Helion OpenStack-based private cloud offerings hard it seems reasonable to expect Dell, one of its largest private cloud rivals, would want to counter with OpenStack-integrated offerings of its own.

Azure, Docker, Hyper-V, Infrastructure as a Service, nano server, News & Analysis, Vendor, Windows Server

Microsoft unveils Hyper-V containers, nano servers

Microsoft has unveiled Hyper-V containers and nano servers

Microsoft has unveiled Hyper-V containers and nano servers

Microsoft has unveiled a number of updates to Windows Server including Hyper-V containers, which are essentially Docker containers embedded in Hyper-V VMs, and nano servers, a slimmed down Windows server image.

Microsoft said Hyper-V containers are ideal for users that want virtualisation-grade isolation, but still want to run their workloads within Docker containers in a Windows ecosystem.

“Through this new first-of-its-kind offering, Hyper-V Containers will ensure code running in one container remains isolated and cannot impact the host operating system or other containers running on the same host,” explained Mike Neil, general manager for Windows Server, Microsoft in a recent blog post.

“In addition, applications developed for Windows Server Containers can be deployed as a Hyper-V Container without modification, providing greater flexibility for operators who need to choose degrees of density, agility, and isolation in a multi-platform, multi-application environment.”

Windows Server Containers will be enabled in the next release of Windows Server, which is due to be demoed in the coming weeks, and makes good on Microsoft’s commitment to make the Windows Server ecosystem (including Azure) Docker-friendly.

The company also unveiled what it’s calling nano servers, a “purpose-built OS” that is essentially a stripped down Windows Server image optimised for cloud and container workloads. They can be deployed onto bare metal, and because Microsoft removed tons of code it boots up and runs more quickly.

“To achieve these benefits, we removed the GUI stack, 32 bit support (WOW64), MSI and a number of default Server Core components. There is no local logon or Remote Desktop support. All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell. We are also adding Windows Server Roles and Features using Features on Demand and DISM. We are improving remote manageability via PowerShell with Desired State Configuration as well as remote file transfer, remote script authoring and remote debugging.  We are working on a set of new Web-based management tools to replace local inbox management tools,” the company explained.

“Because Nano Server is a refactored version of Windows Server it will be API-compatible with other versions of Windows Server within the subset of components it includes. Visual Studio is fully supported with Nano Server, including remote debugging functionality and notifications when APIs reference unsupported Nano Server components.”

The move is a sign Microsoft is keen to keep its on-premise and cloud platform ahead of the technology curve, and is likely to appeal to .NET developers who are attracted to some of the benefits of containers while wanting to stay firmly within a Windows world in terms of the tools and code used. Still, the company said it is working with Chef to ensure nano servers work well with their DevOps tools.

Analytics, cloud security, Funding, Machine learning, News & Analysis, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Palerra, Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital

Cloud security vendor Palerra scores $17m

Palerra is among a number of cloud security startup combining predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to bolster cloud security

Palerra is among a number of cloud security startups combining predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms in clever ways

Cloud security vendor Palerra has secured $17m in series B funding, a move the company said would help accelerate sales and marketing efforts around its predictive analytics and threat detection services.

Palerra’s flagship service, Loric, combines threat detection and predictive analytics in order to provide automatic incident response and remediation for malicious traffic flowing to a range of cloud services and platforms.

Over the past few years we’ve seen a flurry of cloud security startups emerge, which all deploy analytics and machine learning algorithms to cleverly detect perceived and actual threats and respond in real-time, so it would seem enterprises are starting to become spoilt with choice.

The $17m round was led by August Capital, with participation from current investors Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital, and brings the total amount secured by the firm to $25m.

The funds will be used to bolster sales and marketing efforts at the firm.

“The dramatic rise in adoption of cloud services by today’s enterprises against the backdrop of our generation’s most potent cyber threats has necessitated a new approach. LORIC was designed to meet these threats head on and this new round underscores our commitment to deliver the most powerful cloud security solution in the industry,” said Rohit Gupta, founder and chief executive officer of Palerra.

“As the perimeter disintegrates into a set of federated cloud-based and on-premises infrastructures, effective monitoring becomes almost impossible, unless security controls are embedded in these heterogeneous environments. This will require enterprises to reconsider and possibly redesign their security architecture and corresponding security controls by placing those controls in the cloud,” Gupta added.

Chris Battlers, Citrix, cloud based collaboration, Don Schiavone, Grasshopper, M&A, News & Analysis

Citrix buys Grasshopper to strengthen cloud-based comms

Citrix is buying Grasshopper to bolster its cloud-based comms offerings for SMEs

Citrix is buying Grasshopper to bolster its cloud-based collaboration offerings for SMEs

Citrix has acquired Grasshopper Group, a provider of cloud-based communications services, for an undisclosed sum.

Grasshopper offers a cloud-based corporate communications suite that allows firms to set up corporate phone directories with toll-free numbers, voicemail and all. Users can add departments and employee extensions, and incoming calls can be forwarded to mobile or home phone lines or skype accounts.

The company’s pitch is that it can offer companies – particularly those that work across multiple offices without any particular HQ – the ability to stand up a corporate coms telephony system without having to invest in a PBX box or any other expensive legacy kit typically involved with such an endeavour.

Citrix said it Grasshopper will help the company expand its cloud-based collaboration offerings for SMEs.

“With the acquisition we expand the breadth of our communication and collaboration solutions for small businesses, including GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar, ShareFile and OpenVoice,” said Chris Battlers, vice president of Citrix.

Don Schiavone, chief operating officer of Grasshopper said: “Our team shares the same vision and culture as Citrix, making Citrix the perfect home as we accelerate Grasshopper’s growth. This transaction will allow Grasshopper to align itself with a well-respected leader in collaboration solutions for small businesses.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of this year, and comes the same week Citrix’s virtualisation rival VMware announced the launch of an integrated collaboration suite.