All posts by Kelly

Cloud computing, Cloud Services

Cisco Acquires Piston Cloud Computing

Cisco announced their intent to acquire Piston Cloud Computing, a four-year old company offering OpenStack cloud distribution. The acquisition is intended to help improve product, delivery and operational capabilities of its Intercloud services. Cisco has also recently acquired Metacloud, a private cloud provider, for the same purpose as the Piston Cloud Computing acquisition.

 

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Intercloud was launched in 2014 in an effort to create a connected cloud network. It is made up of the Intercloud Fabric (this allows workloads to be migrated among various public clouds) and the Application Centric Infrastructure software (automatically provisions resources depending on the workload). Intercloud is part of Cisco’s Data Center division that has seen rapid growth in recent years. In the 2014 Fiscal Year, divisional sales grew by 27% due to expansion in the company’s Unified Computing System products and cloud offerings.. This year they have grown by 25% so far.

 

Cisco currently has over 350 data centers around the world, as well as partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, Telestra, Johnson Controls, Wipro and Red Hat. These partnerships are to expand their infrastructure-as-a-service offerings and speed up their Internet of Everything concept. Intercloud uses Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure to improve application performance and security.

 

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Cisco has stated that they plan to spend $1 billion over the next two years expanding their cloud business. They also estimate that their Internet of Everything market to be worth $19 trillion in the next 10 years.

The post Cisco Acquires Piston Cloud Computing appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Cloud Services, Cloud Technology

Coupa Closes $80 Million Financing Round

Coupa Software is the leading provider of cloud-based financial software, with over 500 customers in over 40 countries. Coupa provides a suite of true cloud applications for finance, including accounts payable, sourcing, procurement and expense management that allows customers to see a return on their investment within a few months as well as reduce their costs.

 

Coupa Software announced the closing of an $80 million investment round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Iconiq Capital, with participation from Premji Invest as well as existing investors. Their total capital raises have now reached more than $165 million in aggregate.

 

Coupa plans to use the raised capital to further expand their global operations, grow sales, support and marketing worldwide, and increase product development to meet the evolving needs of global enterprises. One of their investors commented that they believe Coupa is delivering a disruptive force in the market with cloud innovations that are helping to redefine the value enterprise software delivers to businesses through creating business value for their customers and respective suppliers with an Open Business Network approach and Savings-as-a-Service offering.

 

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The market opportunity for cloud spend management solutions, and therefore Coupa as well, is continuing to scale. Coupa paved the way for cloud-based spend management solutions and remains a leading pure play cloud provider offering an Open Business Network free of fees. They have taken the wheel of consumerizing B2 commerce for companies and suppliers.

 

Coupa was created based on the vision of delivering real, measurable customer success. This includes saving customers money and boosting profitability, earnings per share, and stock price. The software makes all of these things tangible and measurable.

 

Other benefits from the use of Coupa’s software include: seeing results sooner than with other software, consumerized user experience that leads to greater adoption, increased real-time visibility and control of spend across a global enterprise and purchase orders and invoices processed in days instead of weeks or months

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Android, Cloud Services, Google

Google I/O Cloud News

At Google I/O (developer conference) this week, many big developments were announced, some relating to the cloud and some not. One of the most intriguing developments relating to cloud technology had to do with their new messaging system. The cloud messaging technology is already being used by apps to use push notifications to Google users’ Android devices and Chrome browsers, and it is also now compatible with iOS devices. This basically means you will be able to see the notifications on any devices that are connected.

 

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This service also has allowed developers to set up specific topics to either receive or not receive notifications about. Along with this, Chrome has a new system where websites can send push notifications to logged-in Google users.

 

Another cloud related development is the Cloud Test Lab in which developers can send in their app and Google will test it on the top 20 Android devices around the world. This will allow the developers to look for any defects or crashes that need to be fixed. Google says the service will help catch layout issues and allow developers to spot bugs with low-RAM devices.

 

Android phones already come with a photo tool installed, but Google Photos is a new way of editing, sharing and storing your photos on your mobile device. The app allows unlimited online storage of photos and videos, organization based on themes, dates or locations and people. There is also a new interface for sharing photos, making them into a video and editing them.

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Big Data, Cloud Technology

Big Data in Healthcare

The biggest industry where big data is mentioned the most is in healthcare. It makes sense because of the incredibly large amount of data the industry obtains and analyzes each day. Healthcare is trying to become lest wasteful and more cost effective, which has led to many new devices designed to automate the data collection for medical professionals.

Writer Trevir Nath recently wrote an article outlining the six main ways healthcare could take advantage of big data and cloud services. These include reducing waste and costs, improving both patient care and pharmaceutical research and development, lessening government subsidies, and improving digital health monitoring. In the article, he mentions how better research and development can lead to more positive patient outcomes, data transparency, and a significant amount of savings, on the scale of billions of dollars.

 

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In the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, the director of health policy at Thomas Jefferson University stated that the use of big data and cloud technology could help create highly customized health care based on our individual genome while at the same time analyzing patterns of a broad demographic. He also said that electronic health records would replace the systems used today, and that almost real time analysis of a patient data could help track things such as disease outbreak and spreads.

Another way this technology comes into play is through wearable technology, such as fitness tracking watches. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, many of the large technology companies had wearable tech incorporated into their showcases. The data this technology obtains can prove extremely valuable to healthcare professionals. Healthcare providers must acknowledge this and be ready to utilize this information and technology in order to provide better care.

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Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Collaboration, Microsoft

Government Agencies Adopting The Cloud At A Faster Rate Than Before

In a new report from Forbes Insights, partnering with Microsoft, strong evidence is pointed towards government agencies reaching a tipping point when it comes to adopting the cloud. Many government groups are heading towards a cloud-first orientation rather than just dabbling with the technology. The amount and type of cloud installation in this setting is expected to grow exponentially.

 

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Moving data over to the cloud has many benefits, including lower costs and higher efficiency and security, and though there was a cloud-first policy implemented back in 2010, agencies and groups have been very slow to adopt it. Cloud services account for a mere 2% of all IT spending in federal agencies.

 

Agencies have been moving slowly, testing the waters to make sure that the benefits the cloud claims to present are actually happening. Now that they have seen positive results, attempts are being made to employ the cloud in other, more in-depth implementations, such as mission-critical applications.

 

Agencies and groups on the state, county and even city level have also begun to implement cloud technology to better their services. For example, the City of Miami implemented a cloud-backed mobile and Internet application that allows for better scheduling.

 

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Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Collaboration

CERN and Rackspace Team Up Again

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and managed cloud provider Rackspace have been working together since 2013 when Rackspace created an OpenStack-based hybrid cloud set-up for CERN. Now, the two organizations are working together again to create a multi-cloud, collaborative work environment for CERN’s global research teams.

 

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So far, the reference architecture and operation models have been created in order to better manage the cloud environments. Identity authentication tools have also been made to cover multiple OpenStack clouds. This model allows the data obtained at CERN to be shared with all of their overseas research teams.

 

The amount of data collected when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is running is on the petabyte scale, and all of it flows and is stored through OpenStack. The easier this data can be shared among CERN’s researchers and with less technology the better.

 

To make sure this system flows properly and efficiently, Rackspace has a full time research fellow on location at CERN to provide assistance with design and implementation issues that come up among its OpenStack cloud environments. The open-source software is also used to manage the data center resources that power the LHC, which reportedly produces more than 30PB of data per year.

 

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Using open-source software instead of proprietary software keeps costs low while keeping flexibility high. This is a plus for research labs all over the world, especially those who are under-funded.

 

The next phase of this partnership is creating standard templates to speed up the creation of OpenStack clouds so that CERN researchers have access to the data sooner.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Technology

Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Educate

Amazon Web Services announced the launch of AWS Educate, whose goal is to help students and teachers use real-world technology in classrooms. It is designed to help teachers seeking cloud-related course content, to teach them how to use the technology and to provide students with cloud-technology experience. This all comes with AWS credits.

 

In a press release, AWS said that their educational grants have been able to give teachers and students cloud technology that they have then used to put big ideas into motion. The primary goal of AWS Educate is to help more students learn cloud technology and how to use it to do this.

 

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Upon approval, the program will be free for institutions, students or educators to join. There will also be some benefits to using the program. Educators and students can apply for and redeem AWS credits for eligible services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Glacier.

 

Educators and students will gain hands on experience through web-based training and self-paced labs. They will also have access to collaboration forums, AWS resources and other education contents including videos, case studies of customers, assignments, and webinars related to courses and practices.

 

This step for online education combined with more affordable education services can not only benefit the industry but also innovation.

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Cloud Services

Rackspace Moving To Managed Cloud Services

Rackspace has been one of the most successful companies that have moved from a traditional web-hosting model to being a cloud vendor. However, despite this they have not reached their expected level of success. Rackspace’s growth has increased, but has not been what it should be based on the amount of money in the cloud industry.

 

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Previously, they have been considered number two (next to Amazon) for cloud services, but other larger companies have swooped in and taken this title away.

 

Last year, Rackspace took itself out of the cloud service provider race to focus on being a managed cloud vendor. This move was based on the need for help when transitioning to using a cloud service, and Rackspace wanted to provide that help.

 

Their CEO Taylor Rhodes has hinted that supporting many companies’ clouds are in their future. They already work with Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint. This move is similar to the one Dell made when they stopped offering their own cloud and focused on servicing other clouds. There is a significant amount of money to be made by supporting other cloud services.

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Cloud Services, Google

Google Bigtable

Google’s new online data storage service has the potential to enable large companies to implement big data analysis as a cloud service. Google Cloud Bigtable is based on technology that has been used within Google for many years. It now powers many of Google’s core services like Search, Gmail and analytics.

 

This service could be used to store sensor data from an Internet of things monitoring system. Finance, Telecommunications, digital advertising, energy, biomedical and other data-intensive companies are examples of who could benefit from the use of this program.

 

Bigtable is a NoSQL hosted data store. Users can read and write data the API for Apache HBase, an opensource application of the Bigtable architecture for storing data across multiple servers. Due to this, customers can use the service with existing Hadoop software. Hadoop is an open source data processing platform used for large data sets. Bigtable can also work with other Google cloud services.

 

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Google claims that Bigtable is faster than other NoSQL stores. They manage the service completely, such as data replication for backup and encrypting it for security. Another interesting feature is that as you add more data, Google automatically provides the additional storage capacity.

 

The pricing structure is based on many factors, such as network usage, amount of nodes deployed and amount of storage used. Taking into account all of these things, Bigtable is total cost of ownership is less than half of its direct competitors.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Google, Microsoft

Amazon at the top of the Cloud Market

On Thursday, Amazon released their financial performance numbers, and they proved that Amazon is at the top of the cloud market compared to their competitors. Though they are known as an online marketplace, most of their stock market returns and revenue has come from renting processing power to start ups and enterprises.

 

Amazon was the leader in popularizing the cloud-computing field, and for a while they were the only ones to offer such services. This allowed for them to gain an advantage when others began to offer cloud-computing services. Others saw this field as an opportunity to tap into hundreds of billions of dollars. Microsoft has been especially committed to advancing in the field.

 

Though Amazon is the leader by a long shot, its resources are much lower than its competitors who have billions of dollars stashed away. Cloud computing demands heavy investments to set up data centers around the world as well as research and development if the field is to continue to grow and advance.

 

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In their first quarter reports, Amazon Web Services reported earnings of $1.57 billion and their operating income was $265 million. These statistics are strange coming from a company who often reports losses. This drove Amazon shares up by more than 6% in after-hours trading, and stock is at an all time high.

 

Microsoft, who ranks in at number 2 for cloud computing, reported that its annual revenue from its commercial cloud business would be $6.3 billion based on recent performance. Amazon predicted a similar figure of $5.16 billion. However, included in Microsoft’s number is revenue from different online applications. Azure, the Microsoft equivalent of Amazon’s cloud services, was estimated to be one-tenth of AWS.

 

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AWS got its start about a decade ago as a way to provide computing power to different divisions of Amazon. It has such a positive impact that it then was being offered to start-ups struggling to scale. After this, Amazon focused on expanding market share like it usually does, and it worked.

 

AWS was expected to rival the other businesses within Amazon. The cloud business has been growing by roughly 40% per year, which is twice the rate of the company overall.

 

Recently though, Google’s cloud service has been competing with AWS on pricing, which has been hurting profitability. Amazon has tried cutting prices many times at the expense of revenue growth. Their solution has been to provide other services such as database software and analytics. Amazon has also increased the number of resellers.

 

The big battle is going to be getting to the large companies that have the largest cloud computing needs.  Many companies just floated through the first years of the cloud, they were not ones to adopt the latest technology. They had compliance and contracting processes to follow. Now, cloud computing is commonplace at these companies.

 

Microsoft’s cloud business has doubled in the last year. This is great considering how they have been suffering from low PC sales. Analysts believe that Microsoft has the edge in obtaining larger companies for clients. This is because they might be able to convince them to use their cloud services in addiction to the Microsoft products they already use. For start-ups though, cloud computing and AWS are synonymous.

 

The cloud computing market is going to continue to grow, and no single company can cover all aspects of it. It will be exciting to see where things go from here.

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