StubHub has selected public cloud providers Google Cloud and Pivotal to power its ticketing platform, helping it grow its mobile presence and make it easier for customers to engage with the brand.

The company will make use of Google Cloud and Pivotal’s entire stack of services, covering machine learning, analytics, databases, serverless computing and developer tools to build new apps and services to inspire customers.

“StubHub is all about the customer. Everything we create, from our mobile products to our customer service, reflects a deep desire to put the needs of fans first,” said StubHub CTO Matt Swann. “We intend to set the bar for what highly curated fan experiences can be at scale before, during and after the event, everywhere fans expect us to be. We have bold plans for innovation in the years ahead.”

Many of Google and Pivotal’s cloud-based services will replace StubHub’s legacy infrastructure that’s no longer meeting demands of its digital products. This will significantly speed up the time it takes for products and services to arrive on the market, making it more competitive.

“Digital transformation is on the mind of every technology leader, especially in industries requiring the capability to rapidly respond to changing consumer expectations,» Bill Cook, president of Pivotal said. «To adapt, enterprises need to bring together the best of modern developer environments with software-driven customer experiences designed to drive richer engagement.»

One of the new ways StubHub will be using Google and Pivotal is offering its customers to interact with live events around the world. It will also use 17 years worth of data to predict how, where and when to communicate with fans.

“Google Cloud Platform’s global presence, scale, and world-class AI and data solutions, coupled with Pivotal’s services and platform will help StubHub offer the best customer experience,» Brian Stevens, chief technology officer of Google Cloud added.

Dimension Data and Cisco have teamed up to expand their joint Connected Conservation project – a scheme designed to help protect elephants and rhinos from poachers – into Zambia, Kenya and Mozambique.

The solution works not by attaching trackers or sensors to the animals themselves, but by tracking activity in game reserves in the countries, analysing human activity via thermal cameras mounted on radio masts to transmit data back to operatives, CCTV analytics monitoring fishermen and boats on the lake, plus outdoor Wi-Fi so data can be shared in real time.

“Many organisations have committed to protecting animals through various reactive initiatives, such as dehorning, or inserting sensors in the horn and under the subcutaneous layer of skin. However, the problem with reactive initiatives is that by the time the reserve rangers reach the animal, it has been killed and the rhino horn or elephant tusks have been hacked off,» said Bruce Watson, Dimension Data Group Executive.

«With the Connected Conservation model, the technology is designed to proactively protect the land against humans. The animals are not touched, and are left to roam freely while a ‘layered’ effect of sophisticated technology, people and gadgets protect them.”

A control room is also being built for Zambia’s special marine unit with the sole responsibility of monitoring the data being fed back to it from the various source points. The Zambian local authorities will also work with local fishermen to hand out fishing permits, making it a more regulated industry than it currently is.

“More than ever before, technology has given us the ability to change the world – not tomorrow, not someday, but now,» added Karen Walker, Cisco senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

«We’re dedicated to making a difference by connecting the world and protecting the oldest and most vulnerable animals with some of the newest connectivity technology.”

Google has revealed it wants to funnel money in Google Assistant startups, launching an investment programme to help new and small companies get new voice-related ideas off the ground.

“We’re opening a new investment program for early-stage startups that share our passion for the digital assistant ecosystem, helping to push new ideas forward and advance the possibilities of what digital assistants can do,” wrote Nick Fox, VP of search and Google Assistant, and Sanjay Kapoor, VP of corporate development at Google, in a blog post.

Alongside the cash businesses may need to help their ideas become a reality, take on new staff and manage the startups, Google will also offer the businesses coming onboard early access to its upcoming features and tools, advice from Google engineers, product managers, and design experts and the use of its Google Cloud Platform as the means on which to build the tools on.

Google also said it will help businesses promote their new products through its marketing channels, which could be one of the most helpful parts of the new programme, bearing in mind Google’s massive reach.

The tech giant said it will help businesses bring their products and services to market as quickly as possible, presumably reducing risk for Google as well as the startups it’s supporting.

However, Google didn’t reveal how much money would be pumped into the new scheme, but any companies interested on getting onboard and joining the initial investments (GoMoment, Edwin, Pulse Labs and BotSociety) are able to apply online.

Fox and Kapor said the investment scheme is an extension of its Google Assistant and Actions development schemes, which are helping people «get things done in new ways we couldn’t have predicted just a few years ago». 

Image credit: Bigstock 

IDC has revealed that only 10% of European businesses are ready to implement multi-cloud infrastructure, with the majority of businesses sticking to one cloud vendor.

In fact, the company’s report revealed that 80% of businesses are stuck between a hybrid and fully cloud-based infrastructure, while the remaining 10% have made no headway at all.

Over a third of European businesses have no plans to extend their infrastructure beyond their current suppliers, although the UK industry would appear to be more open to changing vendors, with 29% saying they anticipate migration in the next 12 months.

«Virtually all European enterprises will soon use multiple cloud services,” Giorgio Nebuloni, research director, European Multicloud Infrastructure at IDC. “The smart ones are already actively planning for those services to be benchmarked, price-compared, and selected against each other based on the workload need.’

However, those that are lagging behind need to make some substantial changes to their business model.

Nebuloni explained that for businesses to see the benefit to using multiple cloud vendors, they must ensure they have a single point of control in their organisation that can ensure software and services stay aligned. They also need the skillsets, processes, and data centre infrastructure in place before they can evolve.

The cloud is not a one size fits all scenario and different workloads suit different environments, both on public and private clouds and it’s not necessarily the right strategy to focus on the big vendors – the entire market must be explored.

“While the perception of multi-cloud infrastructure as an end goal certainly resonates with European organizations, there remains uncertainty over what a multi-cloud strategy looks like and how this strategy should be disseminated within an organization,» said Michael Ceroici, research analyst, European Multicloud Infrastructure, IDC.

«Elements from infrastructure technology, aligning cloud vision between different business lines, and internal cloud expertise all play a part in facilitating successful multi-cloud endeavours.»

Rackspace has partnered with VMware to launch its Private Cloud Everywhere, enabling businesses to setup their own private cloud in data centres and co-location facilities around the world.

Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS) allows those customers wanting to take advantage of a private cloud to do so using their own existing architecture. It also means businesses in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare or governmental organisations can take advantage of the security of a private cloud, while also storing data closer to their customers.

“Today marks a new era for the VMware cloud market. For the first time, enterprises can have a fully managed VMware private cloud as a service located wherever their users need it,” said Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president, private clouds at Rackspace.

“Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere makes private cloud the optimal platform for even more enterprises and workloads. Customers receive public cloud-like services, with the ease of migration, security, performance and economic advantages of private clouds.”

The company explained those making use of Rackspace and VMware’s tie-up can build their own private cloud with savings of up to 39%, compared to building their clouds from scratch, and have the option to align costs with either operational budgets or capex.

The companies recognise that although customers may want support from Rackspace in the short term, they may have a much more detailed roadmap, preferring to operate the cloud themselves in future. This is fully supported by its Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) programme, which helps set up companies, signing the cloud over to them when the time is right.

“Rackspace has a proven track record helping customers successfully move their business to the cloud,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit at VMware. 

“Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere, powered by VMware, provides customers a common operating environment, located wherever a customer needs it, spanning customer data centers, Rackspace locations, or third-party facilities. With Rackspace, we are delivering an optimal environment for all applications-custom-built, packaged, virtualised, and SaaS.” 

Image: Shutterstock

Google Cloud is gaining traction with enterprises, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, growing substantially in the first quarter of 2018 a year after it started earning $1 billion in revenue each quarter.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, doesn’t reveal specific revenue figures for Google’s cloud, instead lumping them together in its «other revenues» column with Google Play and hardware products, but the giant’s revenue figures released earlier this week revealed that Google Cloud helped that division earn $4.35 billion for Q1 2018, up from $3.2 billion a year ago.

Meanwhile, Pichai gave a little more away in an earnings call earlier this week, saying the division’s growth was helped by Google Cloud’s recent success with enterprises. 

«We are growing across the board and are also signing significantly larger, more strategic deals for cloud,» he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. «Our security capabilities, the easy-to-use advanced data analytics and machine learning solutions and the secure and industry-leading collaboration platform, G Suite, are winning customers over. Google Cloud is growing well.»

«We believe our secure environment is an important factor in driving enterprise customer wins,» he added. «G Suite customers like Colgate-Palmolive company tell us that no one offers a better combination of hardware, network and data security.»

He referenced Cloud AutoML as one of Google’s headline launches, saying it’s making it easier for businesses without machine learning resource to build complex neural nets.

Over the last year, Google has also invested heavily in infrastructure, ensuring it can keep up with the likes of AWS and Microsoft.

«Our global infrastructure continues to expand to support demand,» Pichai added. «We commissioned three new subsea cables and announced new regions in Canada, Japan, Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, bringing our total of recently launched and upcoming regions to 20.»

SAP is helping the manufacturing sector enhance performance with the introduction of its Digital Manufacturing Cloud, built to combine IoT technologies with legacy processing techniques.

It combines various elements to help businesses grow different parts of their business. For example, the shopfloor can be integrated with the company’s wider business tools to ensure everyone has complete visibility of components and materials for single and global installations.

Detailed analytics will offer insights into how the manufacturing process and the operations running alongside the shop floor activities are performing, which can then be turned into actionable activities to boost productivity.

Manufacturers can then apply predictive algorithms to make their business more productive, reduce wastage and recommend better processes.

SAP’s Digital Manufacturing Cloud also integrates a collaboration platform with SAP Ariba, connecting manufacturers with other service providers such as 3D and computer numerical control (CNC) printing services, material providers, OEMS and technical certification companies.

“Manufacturers in the era of Industry 4.0 require solutions that are intelligent, networked and predictive,» said Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Products & Innovation.

“Our manufacturing cloud solutions help customers take advantage of the Industrial Internet of Things by connecting equipment, people and operations across the extended digital supply chain and tightly integrating manufacturing with business operations.”

SAP’s manufacturing solution is available in two versions – SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud solution for execution and the SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud solution for insights, which focuses on performance management and predictive quality. Both will be available from the end of Q2.

Less than 5% of worldwide websites use Flash, new information has revealed, with most websites favouring Javascript for running features.

Flash is used most commonly on Google websites, although there are some others, such as 6rrb.net, Monabrat.org and Intourist, also using it. Recently, Slate.com and Wappalyzer.com have started using the tech, according to technology usage survey site W3Techs, which seems a rather counterintuitive move as pretty much every other website has stopped using it.

A year ago, just under 7% of websites were using the technology and, back in 2011, 28.5% of websites used Flash. Google’s own figures echo these. At a security conference in San Diego, Google’s director of engineering said the number of people viewing a page in Chrome with Flash has decreased from 80% in 2014, to less than 8% in 2018.

It’s this significant decline that has led Adobe to make the decision to retire its technology in 2020, because it’s not worth continuing support for it. Added to increased vulnerabilities in the software, one of which was known as CVE-2018-4878 and allowed North Korean hackers to exploit the technology, Flash is now being replaced by alternative technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

Even web browser makers are phasing out support for Flash, instead encouraging developers to use alternatives if they want their content to show on the likes of Chrome and Firefox.

When Adobe announced its decision to retire Flash, back in February, a spokesperson said: «Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.

«We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.»

It’s important to note that the majority of websites still running Flash are either dormant websites that haven’t been updated or that need significant investment to replace Flash objects with non-Flash features.

VMware has updated its vSphere and vSAN products, introducing compatibility with multi-cloud hybrid environments.

VMware Sphere 6.7 crosses the boundaries between on-premise and public cloud environments, offering visibility and management of vSphere running on a wide range of platforms such as AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds.

ESXi Single Reboot and vSphere Quick Boot will reduce the time it takes for businesses to roll out patches and upgrades, with only one reboot required to complete the process. Performance will be boosted thanks to the utilisation of persistent memory and used alongside the enhanced vCenter Server Appliance, it will provide 200% faster performance in vCenter operations per second compared to vSphere 6.5.

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM 2.0 will add extra security for both the hypervisor and the guest OS.

Additions in VMware vSAN 6.7 include support for HTML5 clients and the ability to monitor and control multiple hyperconverged infrastructure environments. VMware has introduced six new dashboards for monitoring a wider range of parameters, including capacity, performance, KPIs and alerts without a separate vRealize Operations licence.

HCI support has been extended to applications such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB, making it a more suitable option for those using alternative environments for their cloud applications. Should a hardware failure occur, vSAN 6.7’s self-healing capabilities will kick in, minimising disruption.

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“The continued innovation in our award-winning compute and HCI portfolio makes the hybrid cloud a reality for our customers,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, COO of Products and Cloud Services at VMware. “The rapid adoption of vSAN, coupled with longstanding vSphere leadership is a testament to the importance of a digital foundation that extends from on-premises to the public cloud.”

A report by the Eclipse Foundation has revealed developers prefer using AWS to build their applications rather than Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which were the second and third most popular platforms.

The company’s third annual IoT developer survey discovered that more than half (51.8%) of developers would rather use AWS (up 21% year-on-year), compared to 31.2% (up 17%) that like to use Microsoft Azure and 18.8% favouring Google’s cloud.

Google’s cloud has taken a substantial hit in the last 12 months, decreasing its market share by 8%, while Kubernetes has risen rapidly, previous not ranking in the top platforms at all, up to fourth, with 12% of the market preferring its open source facilities.

Businesses are also starting to realise the potential of IoT to achieve their business goals. Previously, the technology was viewed as a fad – something ‘cool’ to use to collect data. But now, the true benefits are being realised.

18% of businesses interviewed for the Eclipse Foundation’s report said they were concerned about collecting data and analysing the outcomes, which put it in second place, behind security concerns of the IoT.

«There is unfortunately still only a limited set of security-related practices that are on the front burner of IoT developers,» Benjamin Cabé, program manager and evangelist at Eclipse IoT said. «Communication-layer security (e.g the use of TLS or DTLS) and data encryption remain the two most popular practices, used by respectively 57.3% and 45.1% of the respondents.»

Businesses are also worried about IoT connectivity, while integration with hardware was a worry for 15.5% of the developers questioned. Interoperability seems to be less of a concern than it has been for the last three years, with 15.1% of respondents concerned about IoT devices not working together.

«As someone working with IoT open source communities on a day-to-day basis, I can’t help but think about the crucial role open standards and open source IoT platforms have had in making IoT interoperability a reality,» Cabé added.