Blue Box has closed a $10 million Series B financing.
The round was led by a strategic investor and included participation from prior investors including Voyager Capital and Founders Collective, as well as the Blue Box executive team.
This round follows a $4.3 million Series A closed in December of 2012 and led by Voyager Capital. In May of this year, the company announced general availability of its private cloud as a service offering, Blue Box Cloud. Since that release, the company has demonstrated market validation through customer adoption, positive reviews from industry analysts and key additions to the company’s technology and commercial teams.
This financing will allow the company to build on its successes over the past year and fuel continued technical innovation, significant growth of the engineering team and continued expansion of the company’s partnership, sales, and marketing programs. Specifically, the company will increase development of its proprietary management suite, Box Panel, with additional capabilities to support features valuable to customers and partners. The company will increase investment in both technical and channel partnerships while expanding sales and marketing teams and programs.
Eric Mandl of Guggenheim Securities advised Blue Box on the transaction.

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What are the benefits of using an enterprise-grade orchestration platform?
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Jeff Tegethoff, CEO of Appcore, and Kedar Poduri, Senior Director of Product Management at Citrix Systems, will take a closer look at the architectural design factors needed to support diverse workloads and how to run these workloads efficiently as a service provider. They will also discuss how to deploy private cloud environments in 15 minutes or less.

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Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Bitium was founded by Kriz and Erik Gustavson. The 1,500 cloud-based application using Bitium’s analytics, app management, and single sign-on services include bug trackers, customer service dashboards, Google Apps, and social networks. The firm states website administrators can do multiple tasks online without revealing passwords. Bitium’s advisors include Microsoft’s former CMO and the former senior vice president of strategy, the founder and CEO of Like.com, a product strategist at IBM and Oracle, Hootsuite’s CEO, and the founder and CEO of KISSMetric, among others. More about Bitium can be found on its website at www.bitium.com.

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Things are being built upon cloud foundations to transform organizations. This CEO Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Roger Strukhoff, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo conference chair, will address the big issues involving these technologies and, more important, the results they will achieve. How important are public, private, and hybrid cloud to the enterprise? How does one define Big Data? And how is the IoT tying all this together?

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According to a report by web censorship watchdog Great Fire, China’s infamous state firewall is performing a MITM (Man-in-the-Middle) attack against users of Apple’s Cloud-based services. It is suspected the attack has been launched in response to Apple’s new default encryption methods.

It is possible to circumvent the fake site using a VPN, or one of iCloud’s many other IP addresses.

Since iOS 8, authorities can no longer bypass on-device encryption to gain access. The convenient timing of this attack is arising suspicion that the State-run firewall is attempting to steal as many of iCloud users’ details in order to provide complete access to their accounts; including any photos or text messages stored in the cloud. 

Heading to iCloud.com using China’s most popular web browser, Qihoo, will redirect the user without warning to a dummy-site which imitates Apple’s site. However, using a browser such as Firefox or Chrome will display a warning message such as below:

It is possible to circumvent the fake site using a VPN, or one of iCloud’s many other IP addresses. It is not recommended to enter details on iCloud.com if visiting from China, and you can help reduce the risk through use of one of the browsers mentioned earlier.

Authorities everywhere are concerned about the new lack of access to mobile devices which has – on several occasions – helped with serious prosecutions and/or implementing preventive measures.

FBI Director James Comey told reporters: “I like and believe very much that we should have to obtain a warrant from an independent judge to be able to take the content of anyone’s closet or their smart phone,”

He continues: “The notion that someone would market a closet that could never be opened — even if it involves a case involving a child kidnapper and a court order — to me does not make any sense.”

Of course the argument against compromisable mobile devices is the lack of legal process which is often used. NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, unleashed a barrage of damning revelations about the agency’s PRISM program which had unparalleled access to mobile devices and was even reported to have backdoors in some of the biggest technology companies services – including Apple’s.

What do you think about Apple’s new security and China’s alleged MITM attack? Let us know in the comments.

RackWare is a privately held company focused on delivering solutions to easily and cost-effectively enable the use of cloud for today’s enterprises. The company was founded in 2009 by entrepreneurs with extensive experience delivering enterprise-class products in the server, storage, network, and virtualization markets. RackWare brings intelligence and automation to the cloud, to improve availability for enterprises, provide greater flexibility for enterprise IT users, and reduce costs for enterprise IT providers. The Rackware approach enables users to dynamically scale physical, virtual, and cloud resources across private and public environments as computing needs fluctuate.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has released two new standards for cloud computing, in an attempt to “put some order in the chaos” for users.

The generally accepted definition of cloud computing was put together by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the final version hitting the stands in September 2011. In it, cloud computing is defined as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources…that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Yet the new standards from the ISO give a largely similar definition, choosing to call cloud computing an “evolving paradigm.” The document’s assessment of cloud’s key concepts – including broad network access, measured service, multi-tenancy, on-demand self-service, rapid elasticity and scalability, and resource pooling – ring very true with the NIST ruling.

As opposed to the NIST ruling which only proffers platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service, the ISO ruling has seven distinct cloud service categories, including network as a service (NaaS) and data storage as a service (DSaaS). Similarly, ISO expands on NIST’s 2011 definition on cloud deployment models, adding community cloud to public, private and hybrid.

There are two standards which have been released by ISO; the ISO/IEC 17788, a 16 page overview, and the ISO/IEC 17789, a 58 page behemoth.

In a blog post, ISO’s Vivienne Rojas outlines the problems with current cloud computing standardisation.

“The sky’s the limit for cloud computing, which seems set to change the entire computer industry,” she wrote. “This revolutionary concept has reached unexpected heights in the last decade and is recognised by governments and private sector organisations as major game-changing technology.”

“The cloud, as it is known, poses many issues, chiefly related to compatibility,” she added. “With more and more providers offering cloud-based services, the technology has suffered from chaotic development, making it almost impossible for companies to ascertain the quality of services offered,” Rojas added.

ISO adds that its joint ISO/IEC technical committee, JTC 1/SC 38, is piloting projects in areas such as SLAs, interoperability, and dataflow across devices and cloud services.

You can see the standards in full here.

Picture credit: Marc Smith/Flickr

SAP has released its third quarter results, with cloud subscriptions and total revenue going up over 2013 figures, but software revenues taking a downturn.

Cloud subscriptions and support hit €738 million (£584.1m), a jump of 51% from Q313’s €488m (£386.2m), at an increase of 51%. Software revenues were at €2.53bn, a downturn of 3% from €2.61bn in 2013.

Total revenue was up 3% at €12.1bn, but operating expenses also increased to €9.53bn, up 5%. Profit after tax was down, at €1.97bn compared to €2.01bn. SAP gained 2774 employees between Q313 and Q314.

 “We are accelerating our shift to the cloud with more than 40% revenue growth in the cloud,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott in a statement. “SAP is THE cloud company powered by SAP HANA helping customers run simple with over 44 million cloud users and the world’s largest business network.

“Our portfolio depth in the cloud, global scale and industry domain expertise are the bedrocks that separate us in the marketplace,” he added. “With SAP HANA and the Business Network, SAP will continue to shape the future of the enterprise software industry.”

Analysis

Even as software numbers continue to fall, it represents good news in terms of SAP’s master plan. The company, like Oracle and IBM, is engaged in a long term battle to shift its key revenue streams to the cloud and provide a seamless transition.

Oracle announced its Q1 financial results this time last month. New software license revenues were down 2%, yet overall net income practically stood still, noting a very slight decrease in constant currency. The new CEOs, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, noted immediately that the first quarter was traditionally a leaner financial time, as well as arguing that cloud software will bolster the figures in due course.

SAP seems a little further down this path than Oracle, and the firm’s recent partnership with IBM, where SAP HANA will be delivered through IBM’s cloud, solidifies this.

SAP and IBM’s partnership goes back more than 40 years, so the deal makes sense from that standpoint. Doug Clark, UK&I cloud leader at IBM, told CloudTech at the time: “We are trusted by a lot of clients who live or die by that SAP system being up and running. This is SAP’s biggest news sitting on one of IBM’s biggest investments.”

The company’s first quarter figures, released back in April, started the trend which the Q3 numbers continue. Back in June Kevin Kimber, SAP UK&I managing director, told CloudTech the project was “hugely ambitious” and added the agile startup culture was something the nearly 70,000 strong German firm was aspiring to.

“The investments we’re making from an acquisition perspective, the organic developments we’re making, they’re all cloud first,” he said.

Last month SAP acquired software firm Concur Technologies for an estimated $7.4bn, the biggest buyout in its history, to bolster its cloud play. It’s one of many good signs – and both sets of numbers, cloud and software, are going in the right direction.

In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems Inc., will provide overview of the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud computing environment. He will include information on storage, networking(e.g., OpenDaylight) and compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) and the orchestration(Apache CloudStack, OpenStack) of the three to build their own cloud services.

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