All posts by Lavanya

News

Synchronoss Impresses Investors

Synchronoss Technologies Inc, a global leader in managed mobility solutions, continued its upward trend that was evident in its third-quarter results. A company release showed that the adjusted revenue climbed to $181 million, while net income rose to $32.5 million. Both these numbers are 20 percent higher than the same quarter last year. As a result, the company’s adjusted earnings was $0.68 per share. These numbers are sure to make investors happy as the expected revenue was almost three million more than what they expected, and the adjusted earnings was also $0.01 more. Due to such impressive numbers and happy investors, the shares of Synchronoss rose by 13.7 percent during trading on Tuesday.

A closer look at these numbers show that revenue from its cloud business grew by 40 percent year over year, and accounts for almost 60 percent of the company’s total sales. This growth was fueled by the rising demand from customers who wanted to make the most of cloud power. Specifically, successful cloud migrations to companies like Softbank and British Telecom helped it to gain international recognition. Also, this company’s enterprise security mobility platform brought in new clients from healthcare, legal, and financial industries. More importantly, Synchross’ partnership with Verizon UID gave it access to almost one-third of the US consumer market, besides the enterprise market. All these developments and strategies have helped Synchronoss to make such impressive strides over the last year.

Despite these numbers, there are some things that investors should watch out for. An important aspect is stock-based compensation expense, that was almost $9 million in this quarter, while the acquisition expenses amounted to $7.3 million. There is a big difference between both these expenses – the first one is something that investors will see every quarter, but the second one is more of a rarity, so it’s impact will also be for a short term only. In other words, investors should watch out for this stock-based compensation, and should ensure that it does not go too high.

Currently, this company boasts of more than 130 patents, and three billion plus mobile subscribers from around the world. Many of its customers include leading companies such as Verizon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Vodafone, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable in the communications sector, Goldman Sachs and Softbank in the financial sector, and OEM companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Samsung. Other than these big names, Synchronoss caters to almost 300 of the Fortune 500 companies.

Going forward, this client-base is only going to increase. In fact, Synchronoss is likely to be a good bet for investors, as it is focusing more on its cloud business, and through it, plans to increase its sales and revenue multi-fold. It is also planning to come up with more cloud-based solutions, and expand the features on its existing products, to meet the growing demands of its customers.

This company has three broad lines of business – universal ID, secure mobility, and personal cloud. It  is headquartered in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and trades under the stock symbol SNCR on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Amazon AWS

Powering Cloud with Renewable Energy

A common criticism of cloud technology is its energy consumption. The many data centers that make cloud storage seamless and convenient, is also a major consumer of power. According to the Natural Resource Defense Council, US data centers consumed a whopping 91 billion kilowatts of electricity in 2013, and this is roughly equal to the output of 34 mega coal power plants. At this rate of consumption, it is estimated that data centers will need 140 billion kilowatts of electricity by 2020.

Sounds unsustainable? You’re absolutely right!

The amount of coal that’ll be needed to power these plants coupled with the high rates of emission is sure to add more damage to climate change and environmental degradation.

To lower pollution levels, many top cloud providers are beginning to look at the possible use of renewable energy to power their data centers. Wind and solar are expected to the biggest sources of renewable power for cloud technology within the next few years.

Recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it would build a 189-megawatt wind farm in Hardin County, Ohio. This wind farm alone is expected to generate 530,000 megawatts a year, beginning from the end of December, 2017. In fact, this wind farm will be AWS’ fifth renewable energy farm, with already three being operational, and the fourth one expected to come online in May 2017. The existing three wind farms are located in North Carolina, Virginia, and Indiana respectively. With these farms, already 40 percent of AWS’ operations are powered by renewable energy, and the company plans to increase it to 50 percent by the end of 2017. Eventually, AWS plans to source 100 percent of its energy consumption from renewable energy.

Besides AWS, other top cloud providers are also taking the renewable route, though their plans are not as ambitious as that of the market leader. Microsoft uses wind, solar, and hydro power plants to power its data centers, and estimates show that about 44 percent of its energy consumption comes from these sources. The company aims to reach the half-way mark by 2018, and keep improving from there on. In addition, Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012.

Google, another major player in the cloud market, has a different approach to tackling the problem of power consumption. This company believes it’s not practical to build large renewable energy farms in places where its data centers are located, rather it believes these farms should be located in places that are most conducive to it. For example, solar farms should be in sunny states like Arizona and California, and not in Minnesota and Wisconsin, even if this is where the data centers are located.

This company thinks a more pragmatic approach would be to buy renewable energy to power its data centers, instead of harnessing it directly from farms. This way, the company may have more flexibility in terms of the provider.

Regardless of the approach, it’s heartening to see these top companies lead the way in making this planet a more sustainable and livable place for future generations.

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Technology

Top 5 Reasons to Move to the Cloud

Cloud has become a ubiquitous term today, and I’m sure you would’ve heard it many times over. Have you ever wondered why so many companies move to the cloud, and if your company should also be looking at this transition, if you’re not there already?

Well, the simple answer to this question is – cloud is the future. The many benefits that come from cloud far outweigh the costs associated with it, and this is why just about everyone is moving their operations to the cloud.

Benefits of Cloud

Here are some of the advantages your company gets by moving to the cloud.

Business continuity

The biggest advantage with cloud is business continuity. Regardless of your location or the natural calamity that strikes your part of the world, business will continue as usual, and no part of your service will be disrupted.

A case in point is that of the National Kidney Registry (NKR), a nonprofit organization, that aims to match kidney donors with needy patients. When this NGO started off, it maintained its own servers at its Long Island office, but staying on top of security, medical regulations, and demand proved to be difficult. So, the company decided in 2012, to move its operations to a cloud company called Rackspace. This proved to be a great move, as operations of the organization were unaffected when Superstorm Sandy struck a few months later. Though the offices of NKR were closed for a week after the storm, needy patients were still able to get in touch with potential donors, and this business continuity was possible due to cloud.

Flexibility

Cloud is ideal for companies that are looking to expand its operations and customer base, as it’s easy to scale up capacity without worrying about infrastructure requirements. Such agility can give businesses an edge over competitors, and this is why most CIOs and IT Directors rank this as the a top reason for cloud adoption.

Hassle-free maintenance

When you have your own servers, you’ll need a dedicated team to take care of its maintenance. Your team has to stay on top of security, software updates, and other tasks that can prove to be a hassle in terms of both time and money. With a cloud provider, you don’t have to worry about any of these maintenance tasks, thereby giving you more time and resources to focus on your business.

Collaboration

Cloud makes it possible for your employees to share and collaborate work, regardless of physical location. In other words, your employee in China can easily share his work with an employee in the US, so there is no time-lag or delay in implementation. In addition, it also gives you the flexibility to hire workers from any part of the world.

More choices

When you move to the cloud, you have the option to work on different enterprise-class applications and technology, without having to spend on the underlying infrastructure. A pay-as-you-go model and a robust set of business applications mean you’re better off trying innovation in the cloud.

Now that you know the benefits, are you ready to move to the cloud?

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Technology

Environment Data Cloud – An Innovative Cloud Application

Cloud can be used for many innovative applications that extend beyond the business world. Though it is used extensively for businesses now, its use across other sectors, especially social and environmental sectors, are also being explored actively. One such innovative application is the Environment Data Cloud.

As the name suggests, Environment Data Cloud helps to understand the environment and hopefully, make more accurate predictions. It consists of four services platforms and an integration platform, all of which come together to provide better insights into environmental data. The aim of this application is to integrate all data related to the environment across different government units, to make it easier to share data between the many government departments and agencies. In addition, this data will be made available to private companies to help them make meaningful analysis and inferences.

An integral part of Environment Data Cloud is its database called ERDB, that stores tons of historical information about the environment. Such information can be a boon to researchers to identify patterns, and make the right connections to improve weather prediction.

This application is already functional as it has integrated more than 6,000 data sets from different government units. It has also released around 960 data sets as open data to private companies including the weather app of ASUS, and based on this information, more than 40 value-added cases have been reported.

One of the most important result of this app is the platform it has offered for social interaction. Known as i-Environment web portal, this platform helps citizens to get the information they want easily, and has also encouraged more citizens to become aware of their environment. With such information, it won’t be long before local communities get together to preserve their immediate environment. This participation and awareness is critical, as we’re already reeling under the effects of climate change and its many consequences.

This project, in many ways, brings out the power of cloud applications and its ability to have far-reaching consequences that extend beyond the business world. The social applications of cloud are enormous, and this is just the beginning of it all. More companies around the world are working on similar applications that’ll help people to truly enjoy the benefits of technological advancements.

Due to the positive impact and potential of Environment Data Cloud,  the Cloud Computing Association in Taiwan has given away an award called “Cloud Computing and IoT Innovation Award 2016.” This award recognizes companies and government agencies that are coming up with innovative applications of the cloud. In general, this award is divided into two categories – one for innovation from private companies and the other for innovation from government agencies. Environment Data Cloud won the award in the government category.

Such awards are sure to encourage more companies to come up with social and environmental applications of the cloud, so that it benefits every section of the society, and augurs well for the future of humankind. Going forward, it’s hoped that more such applications will be developed for the larger good of the society.

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News

Alibaba’s Cloud Business Soars

The last few weeks have some top companies like Amazon and Microsoft declare positive quarterly results, much of which came from their successful cloud business segment. Yesterday, it was the turn of Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba, to join this bandwagon. Its revenue from sales went up by 55 percent in the last quarter, thanks to the doubling of revenue from its cloud computing division, according to a release by the company.

Alibaba’s cloud business saw a jump of 130 percent that is equivalent to about $224 million, while its overall digital business saw a jump of 302 percent, and this equates to a whopping $541 million. These huge numbers reflect the growing digital adoption among the Chinese, and is significant because it comes at a time when the Chinese economy is in a slump. Much of it can be attributed to the growth in both consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and business-to-consumer(B2C) transactions.

As more young Chinese upgrade to a tech-savvy lifestyle, there is a greater demand for digital products. It is estimated that the Alibaba group controls more than 90 percent of C2C business through its portal Taobao. Likewise, more Chinese businesses are turning to the Internet to cater to a tech-savvy population within and outside China. Since Alibaba’s T mall platform, geared for B2B transactions, account for over 50 percent of all traffic in this sector, it’s little wonder that the digital profits have soared over the last year.

Alibaba, often seen as the Chinese version of eBay or Amazon, has grown past its core e-commerce business as it has expanded to many areas including sports and entertainment. This expansion is what has given the company a solid infrastructure to tap into the growing digital needs of its customers.

That said, the core commerce unit also saw an increase of 41 percent, when compared to the same period last year. But, the core business alone cannot drive Alibaba’s business, as its customers are evolving to keep pace of the trends happening elsewhere. This is why the company’s strategy to expand across different areas has paid off. Recently, Alibaba Pictures took a minority shareholding in Amblin Partners, a Spielberg company that includes DreamWorks studios. Going forward too, Alibaba is likely to continue its expansion strategy.

Despite these positive numbers, the shares of Alibaba Holding Group fell by about three percent in trading, on the New York Stock Exchange. This fall can be partly due to the fact that the year-on-year growth was not matched by the increase in net profit. Of course, this comparison is not fair because last year, the company booked an exceptional gain due to the re-evaluation of one of its units. If this comparison is left aside, Alibaba sure had a great quarter, and it is poised for greater growth in the coming months too, as its mobile users increased by 23 million in this quarter alone. This means, Alibaba has more than 450 million mobile users, and it is up to the company now to monetize this huge customer base by providing them the right social and digital experiences.

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Storage

Cisco Introduces New Products

Cloud applications are becoming an integral part of everyday life, both at the personal and professional level. It’s little wonder that companies are vying with each other to tap into this huge market. The latest company to join this bandwagon of enterprise cloud suite applications is Cisco, with the introduction of ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite.

Introduced at Cisco’s Partner Summit in San Francisco on November 1st, ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite is a hybrid cloud software solution that’ll allow companies to make the most of their cloud environment. In many ways, this is a self-service portal that is customized to meet the needs of end-users, app developers, and IT professionals, so they can have a flexible environment backed by a solid infrastructure. It’ll offer advanced automation tools for managing the infrastructure, cloud, and other related services by providing real-time diagnostics and historical analysis. One of the most important features of ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite is Big Data automation, so as to provide higher levels of consistency and reduced risk.

Besides this cloud enterprise suite, Cisco also announced a new storage server called UCS S3260. Part of its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), this is the first offering in UCS S-series of servers. Known for its modular architecture, the first of its kind in the industry, this server offers a high level of scalability and cloud connectivity that is sure to go a long way in helping customers to convert their data into useful business insights. Further, this server can store terabytes of data, that can be quickly scaled to Petabytes if needed, with Cisco’s UCS manager, and unified I/O connectivity.

Another unique aspect of this server is that it consumes almost 50 percent less power than similar servers, and takes up to 60 percent less space. This is a big move considering that power consumption is one of the biggest aspects of a server’s maintenance costs, closely followed by the cost of space. By addressing both these aspects, Cisco has lowered the cost of total ownership by almost 50 percent when compared to public cloud, and at the same time, offers the perfect infrastructure to power any kind of workload. This can be particularly important for IoT and other data-driven applications, as this server can be quickly scaled to store the enormous amounts of data that is being generated every minute today. Going forward, the rate of data generation is only going to increase, and servers like UCS S3260 are expected to fill this growing demand for storage.

Through this new cloud platform and storage server, Cisco wants to provide an architecture that’ll make it easy for customers to Analyze, Simplify, Automate, and Protect (ASAP) their data, according to a press release from the company. In addition, both these announcements are sure to make it smooth and easy for businesses to make the most of their hybrid cloud adoption.

With these offerings, Cisco has made a foray into the storage business through its successful domain of server business.

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News

Nitrous.io – We’ll miss you!

If you’ve done a fair amount of development, you’re sure to have used Nitrou.io at some point of time during your development career. For others, Nitrous.io is a ubiquitous cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that made it easy for developers to work on any programming language without having to download any tool, software kit, or editor. In other words, you can open nitrous.io on your browser, login, and start coding in a programming language of your choice. You even had the choice to share it with other developers and teammates for better collaboration.

Well, all this convenience and ease of use is going to end on November 14! An official release by the company says that it will stop taking on new users, and will refund all payments made to its service after October 16. Anyone with an existing project on Nitrous.io will be sent an email link to download their data, and this link will expire within 15 days.

This announcement came as a surprise for its customers, and the cloud IDE community at large, because Nitrous.io is a popular platform for developers. Founded in 2012, this company has offices in San Francisco and Singapore. It attracted more than 500 investors, including some big names like Golden Gate Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Lion Rock Capital. It even got a funding to the tune of $6.65 million in March 2014. This company is well-known for the huge jump it got within the first year of its operations – 100,000 users even before its first anniversary. With such an impressive background, and a large and satisfied customer base, it’s not clear why the company decided to shut down its operations. Though the team says that it’ll soon release an open-source version of its cloud IDE, it’s not clear when this release would happen. No timelines have been given in this regard.

Looking back, things have been quiet with Nitrous.io since the beginning of this year. The only change was the company’s pricing that was announced in April of this year. Also, this company hired Alex Malinovich, a GitHub alum, as its CEO in July. This strategic change was done with the aim to reach out to more professional developers, along with novices and students. Besides this announcement, there has been no major feature releases for the whole of this year.

Such a long silence followed by this sudden announcement has opened much speculation about what could have gone wrong with the company. Some contend that its strategy to bring in more professional developers did not work out, and the company eventually ran out of money, thereby forcing it to stop operations. A few others believe that it is likely to be acquired by a major player, just like how another cloud IDE, Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon Web Services. None of these speculations have been confirmed by the company yet.

This means, the more than 200,000 developers on this site are going to feel disappointed, as of now. Let’s hope Nitrous.io comes up with its new open-source version soon!

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News

FireMon Acquires FortyCloud

 

FireMon, a leading provider of US Network Security Policy Management (NSPM), has acquired an Israel-based security company called FortyCloud, for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition is expected to boost the cloud management capabilities of FireMon, as it looks to expand its customer base.

FortyCloud is based in Hod Hasharon, Israel, and it was founded by Amit Cohen, Amir Naftali, and Noam Singer. They are the present CEO, CTO, and Chief Architect of the company respectively. This company specializes in providing secure connectivity across multiple cloud environments, offers identity access management, two-factor authentication for remote cloud access, and abstraction of cloud platforms to ensure that it is easy to comply with the existing regulations.  It’s a small company with ten employees, and all these employees have joined FireMon when the deal was closed earlier this month.

FireMon, on the other hand, is based in Overland Park, Kansas. It was founded in 2004 with an aim to help organizations identify and correct the infrastructural and security gaps in cloud architecture.

This acquisition comes within a year of FireMon launching its first cloud infrastructure security offering, thereby signaling the impressive growth that it has seen over the last year. With this acquisition, FireMon can effectively secure cloud infrastructure and connectivity, that in turn, will make it easier for enterprise clients to move their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. Currently, security is one of the major concerns of many enterprise, and this is also what is preventing them from moving completely to the cloud. When the underlying infrastructure and connectivity are strengthened, it’s only natural that more companies will move to the cloud. In this sense, this acquisition is likely to boost the client-base of FireMon.

After this acquisition, FireMon will offer support for:

  • Management capabilities of native cloud
  • Automated security mapping
  • Cloud discovery
  • Object abstraction across on-premise security infrastructure and multiple cloud environments
  • Security enforcement across multiple cloud platforms

Besides this addition, FireMon has added more capabilities that’ll allow it to automate its cloud security, encryption, and policy enforcement. In turn, this’ll provide secure connectivity across different cloud providers, and also between an organization’s data center and public cloud infrastructure. All these additions are a part of FireMon’s strategy to help companies better manage their cloud infrastructure.

A report by Gartner shows that by 2020, 95% of cloud security issues will be due to the organization, and not the cloud provider. Addressing these inadequacies in an organization is easier said than done because today’s networked environment is complex, and involves a variety of technologies both on-premise and in the cloud. Such a complex situation requires a clear strategy as well as a set of security tools, and this is exactly where FireMon fits in.

Going forward, FireMon’s acquisition is expected to benefits its customers in a big way, by enhancing security in their connectivity and communication. Such partnerships augur well not only for the companies involved, but also for enterprises that depend on the cloud, as well as the cloud market at large.

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Amazon AWS

Amazon Cloud Posts Yet Another Stellar Quarter Results

Amazon Cloud posted yet another impressive number for the last quarter, signaling the continued strength of this line of Amazon’s business. AWS reported a sale of $3.2 billion, and this is almost 55 percent higher than the $2.08 billion it posted during the same period, a year ago. The operating income of the company was $1.02 billion, up nearly 96 percent from the $521 million it posted a year ago.

These numbers clearly show that AWS is growing at an incredible pace, despite facing intense competition from deep-pocketed companies such as Microsoft and Google. Much of this success can be attributed to a simple and clear strategy of helping business leverage the power of AWS to improve their performance. When AWS was launched ten years ago, it allowed firms to rent computing capacity, which means, they paid only for what they used. Such a model made cloud more accessible for all companies, including startups with limited budgets.

Another important strategy that AWS followed was to make strategic partnerships at the right times. Recently, AWS announced a partnership with VMware, under which VMware’s cloud software will run on AWS. Other similar partnerships have helped AWS to gain a strong foothold in the cloud market, and this in turn, has helped it to stay ahead of its competitors.

Even during the earnings call, AWS reiterated that the company will focus on helping more businesses to move to AWS, from both on-premise and hybrid environment. To this end, it has launched a new tool called Server Migration Service, that’ll ease the process of moving legacy applications to the cloud. This tool will help IT teams to create incremental replication of virtual machines from their on-premise infrastructure to AWS, with an aim to help them reap the many benefits that come with public cloud. This is an important move because moving legacy applications to the cloud is a painful process, to say the least, and this is mainly why many companies are opting for a hybrid environment. As a result, they miss out on the flexibility and cost-saving that a public cloud offers. With this tool, companies now have the option to move their operations entirely to the cloud, so they can make the most of the benefits offered by it.

Besides this tool, Amazon Cloud has also announced that it’ll add data center facilities across many new geographical regions. This move is in tune with the trend of keeping data as close to the customers as possible, so they experience low latency and faster access speeds. Some countries like Germany even mandate that data should be kept only within its sovereign borders, so the new data center facilities are being setup to comply with these regulations as well. These strategies are likely to bring more benefits to AWS and its customers in the future.

Despite all these positive data, shares of Amazon fell in after hours trading, with an almost six percent drop towards the end. This fall is because the parent company’s profits was lesser than what was expected. In this sense, Amazon Cloud can be the silver lining for this company.

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News, Press Release

IBM Buys a Hybrid Cloud Company Called Sanovi Technologies

IBM has acquired a company called Sanovi Technologies to give a boost to its hybrid cloud offerings. According to a company release, this acquisition will enhance the resiliency capabilities of IBM’s cloud tools, so it can provide more advanced analytics for hybrid environments. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Sanovi Technologies is a company based in Bangalore, India. It was founded in 2003 by Chandra Sekha Pulamarasetti, Lakshman Narayanaswamy, and Raja Vonna, and has operations in the United States, Middle East, and India. This company’s Application Defined Continuity (ADC) technology is used to spread the workload across different physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. During a disaster, this tool will spread the workload, thereby making recovery easier, and at the same, will mitigate the impact of the disaster. IBM believes this capability to disburse workload will give a big fillip to its own Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) solutions. In addition, ADC can help to simply workflows,  automate disaster recovery, and reduce operational costs and time.

Sanovi Technologies also offers a cloud migration manager platform to help businesses and enterprises make the move towards public cloud. This enterprise software platform provide lifecycle automation, along with workload migration design. This manager is also built on ADC to ensure business continuity during migration.

Both the ADC technology as well as the migration manager tool are relevant today, as more companies are migrating to the cloud. In this perspective, IBM can get a big boost with this acquisition.

This acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of 2016, after which, it will be integrated into IBM Global Technology Services unit. Eventually, IBM plans to leverage Watson’s capabilities, and expand it to Sanovi’s DRM capabilities, so that end-clients can have a proactive business continuity plan. In fact, IBM plans to help businesses transition from a business continuity plan to a proactive resilience program, so that potential failures can be identified and fixed, even before they occur. If IBM’s plan falls in place, it could signal the beginning of a new approach towards disaster recovery.

This move can be a significant one, for many reasons. Firstly, climate change and unpredictable weather patterns have increased the chances for wilder weather, that in turn, can impact businesses profoundly. To tackle such situations, a proactive approach and a sound DRM that will distribute workloads to regions that are not affected by the disaster can make a huge difference for the business operations of companies.  Secondly, it can give IBM an edge over that of its competitors in the hybrid cloud, as it can combine DRM with Watson’s capabilities to provide a fool-proof DRM service.

Thirdly, this acquisition can give IBM a firm grip in the growing Indian market. Since hybrid clouds are the preferred choice for enterprises in India, this acquisition is sure to provide these clients with greater security, efficiency, and productivity. It can also help IBM to get a larger market share in one of the top growing economies in the world.

According to a press release from IBM, Sanovi’s DRM service will be offered as a standalone product on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.

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