Monthly Archives: March 2015

API, Apigee, BlackRock, Funding, News & Analysis, Norwest Ventures, Platform as a service, SAP Ventures

API and cloud app specialist Apigee to go public

Apigee helps enterprises re-architect their apps to make them suitable for cloud, big data and IoT

Apigee helps enterprises re-architect their apps to make them suitable for cloud, big data and IoT

Apigee, an API software platform provider that helps enterprises build and scale apps, is the latest cloud provider to propose an initial public offering of shares of its common stock.

The firm, backed by notable technology investment firms including BlackRock, SAP Ventures and Norwest Ventures, has enlisted Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Securities to help manage the process of going public.

The company hopes to raise a modest $87m through the IPO according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

While Apigee claims some of the most reputable firms in the world as customers (eBay, the BBC, Orange, Equinix) and secured close to $200m in seven funding rounds since it was founded in 2004, the company’s financials raise some questions about the company’s viability in the long term.

Like Box, the pure-play cloud storage and collaboration provider that also recently went public (raising over three times when Apigee is seeking), the company has accrued a notable amount of debt compared with what it intends to raise through the IPO.

The company’s gross billings were $36.7m, $43.1m and $63.8m in fiscal 2012, 2013 and 2014, respectively. But it incurred net losses of $8.3m, $25.9m and $60.8m in 2012, 2013 and 2014, respectively. It racked up losses of $26.8m in the six months ended January 31, 2015.

Nevertheless, it’s clear enterprise app development is becoming API-centric, as an increasing number of IT services are being joined up.

“We believe that application programming interfaces, or APIs, are a critical enabling technology for the shifts in mobile, cloud computing, big data and the IoT and that APIs are a foundational technology on which digital business operates. We believe that a new and expansive market opportunity exists to help enterprises adopt digital strategies and navigate the digitally driven economy,” the company said in its SEC S-1 filing.

“Today, it is difficult for many businesses to fully participate and innovate in the digital world because traditional enterprise software is not designed to interact with and connect to the rapidly evolving digital economy. The IT architectures deployed at most businesses are based on thousands of application servers communicating with databases, other applications and numerous middleware layers, each using thousands of custom integrations and connectors. These legacy architectures generally cannot publish APIs in a way that can be used by application developers.”

Anthony Yeh, containers, Database, Google, Infrastructure as a Service, MySQL, News & Analysis, Open Source, YouTube

YouTube brings Vitess MySQL scaling magic to Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate a beefed up version of MySQL with Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate a beefed up version of MySQL with Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate Vitess, which improves the ability of MySQL databases to scale in containerised environments, with Kubernetes, an open source container deployment and management tool.

Vitess, which is available as an open source project and pitched as a high-concurrency alternative to NoSQL and vanilla MySQL databases, uses a BSON-based protocol which creates very lightweight connections (around 32KB), and its pooling feature uses Go’s concurrency support to map these lightweight connections to a small pool of MySQL connections; Vitess can handle thousands of connections.

It also handles horizontal and vertical sharding, and can dynamically re-write queries that could impede the database performance.

Anthony Yeh, a software engineer at YouTube said the company is currently using the service to handle metadata for the company’s video service, which handles billions of daily video views and 300 hours of new video uploads per minute.

“Your new website is growing exponentially. After a few rounds of high fives, you start scaling to meet this unexpected demand. While you can always add more front-end servers, eventually your database becomes a bottleneck.”

“Vitess is available as an open source project and runs best in a containerized environment. With Kubernetes and Google Container Engine as your container cluster manager, it’s now a lot easier to get started. We’ve created a single deployment configuration for Vitess that works on any platform that Kubernetes supports,” he explained in a blog post on the Google Cloud Platform website. “In this environment, Vitess provides a MySQL storage layer with improved durability, scalability, and manageability.”

Yeh said the company is just getting started with the Kubernetes integration, but once users will be able to deploy Vitess in containers with Kubernetes on any cloud platform supported by it.

Freescale, Internet of Things, Interviews, IoT, Jeff Fonseca, News & Analysis, NXP, telecoms

NXP: ‘Industry needs to ensure IoT is simple and secure’

Internet of Things devices need to be simple and secure if customers are to adopt

Internet of Things devices need to be simple and secure if customers are to adopt

The entire telecoms industry needs to focus on ensuring the IoT delivers real value to consumers, and the security and user simplicity of connected devices should be of paramount importance, said Jeff Fonseca, the regional sales director, Americas at chip vendor NXP in an interview with Telecoms.com.

As an NFC specialist whose customer case examples in the contactless payments space include the London Underground’s contactless travel, the badges at MWC, and several banks’ EMV cards, NXP is increasingly focusing on IoT. According to Fonseca, securing connected devices is something that has to happen for consumers to really get on board with the IoT.

“What we bring in terms of IoT is really the security. All the [secure] stuff we do in passports, all the stuff we do on bank cards, and secure payments, getting you securely onto trains, that type of secure technology, embedding that and infusing that into other categories like IoT [is on our agenda].”

But he said it is not yet clear what exactly is behind the much hyped term. “Honestly, IoT is a big word that I don’t know has a true definition of what’s going to be the one key thing that is IoT. There’s so many moving pieces and parts the difficulty is really unwrapping that, and then making sure we know where we need to be on the trajectory with the right players and partners.

“We need to have ways to execute upon very good security and connectivity that is simple for consumers to use, and that is scalable. It [IoT] shouldn’t be just a buzz word, it should actually have usable value for the consumer.”

Fonseca said there’s not much point in having numerous connected devices in the home unless there’s one common way to communicate with them. “You’re not gona have 10 different devices that all talk a different language in your home, that’s not gona scale in the IoT space. But if you have the ability to have a few devices that talk a similar language, then consumers start to see value from the perspective of managing your home with your smartphone, for example.”

But with having billions of devices connected to the internet come security implications, and Fonseca said ensuring consumers’ security is a key consideration. “How does that work, and how does that work securely? How do you take the cloud and connect it down to these end-point devices in your home and still manage them with your smartphone or your tablet.

“These are the difficult conversations we all have to have as an industry to move in that direction to make sure that in the end it’s all about the consumer, and making sure that there’s an extremely simple and usable product for them. Even though it’s complex underneath to do all this stuff that has to happen in IoT, the consumer doesn’t care, the consumer just wants it to work and they want it to be secure.”

At the MWC 2015 NXP was showcasing its product portfolio, which on top of the technology to secure bank cards and passports also includes solutions for connected car, wireless mobile charging, and ‘smart-audio’ solutions that enhance voice and call clarity based on information passed on by algorithms designed to recognise the environment from which the call is made. The firm has also developed wireless, magnetic inductance-based earbuds as part of a concept it calls ‘true mobility’.

At the beginning of the month NXP announced its plan to acquire competitor Freescale Semiconductor. “We are going to acquire them and the announcement so far has stated that part of that [acquisition] is this IoT convergence play,” Fonesca said. “Freescale is very strong in that category as well, and we’ll see some obvious synergies from taking what NXP has and from what they can bring to the table towards an IoT play.”

Visit the world’s largest & most comprehensive IoT event – Internet of Things World – this May

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Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie: Why the conversation needs to change in the cloud arena

(c)iStock.com/4774344sean

Sipping a coffee outside the hubbub of Cloud Expo Europe, Matthew Finnie, chief technical officer at virtual data centre provider Interoute, has something on his mind.

The vast majority of the activity going on in the ExCeL arena, he surmises, will be vendors pitching their position. Nothing unusual with that at a trade show, you might say, but Finnie wants the conversations to go one step further.

“I think one of the things we’re hoping for is people start to put two and two together,” he tells CloudTech. Users realise cloud, as a flexible consumption model, is just a metaphor for how they want to buy and build their applications, so the next step is asking: what needs to happen to make this process even simpler?

According to Finnie, the answer lies in the likes of open source app container Docker and scalable network MPLS. “It’s a little bit of an odd combination,” he admits, “but the key thing is that Docker does a brilliant job of abstracting the way for me to understand the VM, so you don’t really care what’s happening below.

“But then if you build it in the traditional architecture, you’ve still then got to go off and create relationships with those VMs, so you’re still fiddling around with firewalls and load balancers. [If] you have a model where you have an integrated platform, you’re essentially saying [you’re] going to add network control to [your] cloud. It means you can predefine what relationships those machines can have.”

Despite the odd security hiccup, Docker has strategic partnerships with many big players using the service on top of their public cloud, including Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Finnie argues the key to Docker is that it’s lightweight, so allows you to spin up as much as you want, and it can also smash through any network connection it’s given.

“You now move away from this concept of cloud computing as being isolated silos of compute that you’ve got to manage and bind together, to a model which says ‘actually, we still haven’t finished optimising what this platform is,’” says Finnie. Pointing at the main hall, he adds: “And no doubt I don’t think anyone’s going to be talking about much of that in there – because it doesn’t work for a lot of people.”

One of the primary causes of this imbroglio is the usage of the word ‘hybrid’. It’s simply everywhere. CenturyLink VP cloud platform David Shacochis described hybrid as the most “overwrought” term in IT right now. Another source told this correspondent hybrid was simply a word certain vendors hid behind. What’s going on here?

Finnie started his career in the semiconductor game, and the word hybrid was being tossed around like a tennis ball then. It just meant different. Some time on, the lines are still blurred.

“Hybrids are a transition, but most things we do with most customers are hybrid,” he explains. “The confusion with hybrid in a cloud computing perspective is where that relationship should be formed.

“The relationship has always been formed at the network interface path. It’s the universal connector, be it an AS400, an Exadata platform, and your cloud infrastructure or dedicated infrastructure. A network interface path allows you to have a common view.” But of course you can’t virtualise everything – not least an elderly IBM AS400. Is that hybrid then?

“For us…everything is implicitly hybrid, and it’s really down to you as a customer to work out how much you can put where,” Finnie adds. “The more you can stick on the network we have, in terms of compute, the more agile and flexible it’s going to be. It’s as simple as that.”

Regular readers of this publication will remember an opinion piece Finnie wrote earlier this month analysing a new original ‘distributed cloud’ model, where processing and storage is wherever you need it to be, to save issues with latency, language or data sovereignty. The truth is, it’s neither new, nor original – John Gage discussed the ‘network as a computer’ in the 1980s, while broad themes were explored in Joe Weinman’s book Cloudonomics. Yet it’s one that seems to work for Interoute. Finnie explains the strategy that, as networks have 10% of the cost model of data centres, it’s both cheaper and more agile.

“The Internet has shown that a distributed model is the most efficient way of moving information round and presenting information,” he says. “And all we’ve said really is – let’s take the same model, and apply it to computing. Distributed cloud for us is just an optimisation of the existing model, it just brings it closer to markets.”

It’s all part of a fascinating future for Finnie. Let’s see who comes along for the ride.

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Vitria to Exhibit at @ThingsExpo New York | @VitriaTech [#IoT]

SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria Technology, Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Vitria will showcase the company’s new IoT Analytics Platform through live demonstrations at booth #330. Vitria’s IoT Analytics Platform, fully integrated and powered by an operational intelligence engine, enables customers to rapidly build and operationalize advanced analytics to deliver timely business outcomes for use cases across the industrial, enterprise, and consumer segments.

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Podcast: SOA vs. Microservices – Deep Dive With Jason Bloomberg

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jason Bloomberg, President at Intellyx. When we build services we want them to be lightweight, stateless and scalable while doing one thing really well. In today’s cloud world, we’re revisiting what to takes to make a good service in the first place.microservices

Listen in to learn why following “the book” doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re solving key business problems.

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Keep CALM And Embrace DevOps – Automation | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

For me the mantra of achieving speed via automation tools is nothing new. In fact I was ‘automating’ Citrix Metaframe builds using windows scripting techniques back in 2004. The market though, has become awash with different automation products and it’s fair to say that many enterprises now suffer from ‘automation sprawl’. This results in a tactical rather than the strategic approach to automation required, meaning that benefits are never fully realized. In fact, I have spoken to many companies for which the word ‘automation’ leaves a bitter taste in the mouth as they have been burned by failed implementations.

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SOA vs. Microservices with @TheEbizWizard By @MadGreek65 | DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jason Bloomberg, President at Intellyx.

When we build services we want them to be lightweight, stateless and scalable while doing one thing really well. In today’s cloud world, we’re revisiting what to takes to make a good service in the first place.

Listen in to learn why following “the book” doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re solving key business problems.

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