Every year, the technology industry gathers at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to see the latest gadgets ranging from home appliances, TVs, wearables, games, cars, etc. We have all come to expect the unveiling of cutting-edge technology that according to the rhetoric of their manufacturers make our lives just a little bit better. Technology has become so embedded in our daily lives that we can use it to outsource common tasks such as home management, personal fitness and family communications.
Monthly Archives: March 2015
CenturyLink expands public cloud in APAC
CenturyLink is expanding its public cloud platform in Singapore
American telco CenturyLink has expanded the presence of its public cloud platform to Singapore in a bid to cater to growing regional demand for cloud services.
CenturyLink, which recently expanded its managed services presence in China and its private cloud services in Europe and the UK, is adding public cloud nodes to one of its Singapore datacentres.
“The launch of a CenturyLink Cloud node in Singapore further enhances our position as a leading managed hybrid IT provider for businesses with operations in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Gery Messer, CenturyLink managing director, Asia Pacific.
“We continue to invest in the high-growth Asia-Pacific region to meet increasing customer demand,” Messer said.
The company said it wants to cater to what it sees as growing demand for cloud services in the region, citing Frost & Sullivan figures that show the Asia-Pacific region spent almost $6.6bn on public cloud services last year. That firm predicts annual cloud services spending in the region will exceed $20bn by 2018.
The move also comes at a time when the Singapore Government is looking to invest more in both using cloud services and growing usage of cloud platforms in the region.
Last year the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) said it was working with Amazon Web Services to trial a data as a service project the organisations believe will help increase the visibility of privately-held data sets.
The agency also signed a Memorandum of Intent with AWS that would see the cloud provider offer usage credits $3,000 (US) to the first 25 companies to sign up to the pilot, which will go towards the cost of hosting their dataset registries or datasets.
It’s also announced similar partnerships in the past with Pivotal and Red Hat.
Birst scores $65m to grow cloud analytics
Birst has secured $65m to grow its cloud-based analytics platform globally
BI and analytics provider Birst has secured $65m in its latest round of funding which the firm said would be used to fuel sales and marketing efforts globally.
The latest funding round brings the total amount secured by the company to $156m.
“We’ve seen an explosion in data volumes, data sources, and end-user demand in the analytics market. Organizations need speed, end-user self-service and robust data governance from their next-generation business intelligence platform. That’s exactly what we deliver at Birst,” said Jay Larson, chief executive officer of Birst.
Doug Leone, partner at Sequoia Capital, one of Birst’s investors, said the business intelligence market is going through a massive transformation at the moment.
“The BI market is going through a major transition as the legacy suppliers continue to decline. The race for next-generation leadership in BI and analytics is going to be won by the supplier that offers world-class technology, great business leadership, and a proven capability to focus on today’s needs versus those from a decade ago,” Leone said.
Birst’s strategy seems to be in line with where enterprises are headed. According to the BCN Annual Industry Survey, which polled over 700 senior IT decision makers globally, about two thirds of enterprises plan to use cloud-based analytics platforms over the next 18 months.
Last year Birst moved to bolster its presence in Europe and the UK, launching a version of its solution hosted in AWS’s Ireland datacentre, and expanding its UK team. It also struck a deal with SAP to make Birst’s analytics platform available on HANA.
Ford deploys connected car platform on Microsoft’s cloud
Ford plans to roll out the Azure-based service later this year
Ford Motor Company and Microsoft have teamed up to create the Ford Service Delivery Network, a cloud-based connected car platform for Ford vehicles the companies said would make it easier and faster to add more in-car digital services.
Microsoft said the service will provide Ford a global platform to enable over-the-air software updates and expand availability of MyFord and MyLincoln Mobile connected services, which ships with features like scheduled remote start, vehicle finder, and vehicle status (fuel or charge level, tire pressure).
The connected car platform will be hosted on Azure-based technology in a combination of Azure and Ford datacentres.
“As consumers shift toward more cloud-based services, the Ford Service Delivery Network architecture is a strategic approach to keep vehicles up-to-date and relevant throughout the vehicle ownership period by making it easy to add or evolve services. Microsoft Azure provides a global common cloud platform that allows Ford to deliver services worldwide and scale quickly to reach its broad customer base,” explained Sanjay Ravi, senior director of worldwide manufacturing at Microsoft.
“This means that Ford can send updates as they become available, ensuring customers will have the latest technology as it becomes available,” Ravi said.
Customer deployment will begin later this year, the companies said.
Microsoft is among a growing fleet of technology firms looking to capitalise on growth of the connected car market. According to global telecoms association the GSMA the size of the market will nearly triple over the next four years to $53bn.
Report shows majority of cloud providers not hitting SLA targets
(c)iStock.com/antoniokhr
76% of organisations surveyed by CDW in its Cloud 401 report say at least one cloud vendor failed to meet their SLAs.
The report, released in February, found reliability (43%) as the most important metric for cloud service providers, far ahead of cost (28%) and ability to integrate with existing infrastructure (27%), meaning a double whammy for providers who couldn’t meet their uptime figures.
Cloud services go down for a variety of reasons, from the preventable, such as a fat finger, to the less preventable, like adverse weather conditions. Very few cloud service providers have spotless records in this department, as data from benchmarking provider CloudHarmony found.
Yet if you claim a certain figure and can’t match up to it, as Mimecast famously did, customers won’t be happy. Nor, as Verizon found out, will they be happy if you propose ‘planned’ downtime to improve infrastructure in order to reduce the risks of further outages.
CDW also found a discord from respondents between the hype cloud promises and the reality it delivers. When asked if greater flexibility in IT was a reality, 19% agreed and 7% disagreed. For ease of use, 16% agreed and 7% disagreed, while it was equal for cost savings (17% agree, 17% disagree) and a majority disagreed regarding security (11% agree, 21% disagree).
Despite this, the research found 35% of IT services today are delivered totally or partially by cloud. Going forward, organisations are considering delivering 35% of entirely new IT services via the cloud. Barriers for further adoption according to survey respondents are security (47%) – surprise, surprise – trust in solutions (31%), budget (24%) and management support (19%).
Yet the overall consensus from the report was that cloud “works”, and organisations, particularly in more regulated industries, should face up to their fears.
A CIO in federal government told the report, “Be very optimistic and open-minded about how it can enhance the efficiency and reliability of an entity’s operations”, while a healthcare CTO said, “Although it may seem complex, cloud is by far the way to go as far as infrastructure and storage.”
Do you agree with the report’s findings?
NaviSite’s Sumeet Sabharwal on the evolution of desktop as a service
(c)iStock.com/4X-Image
At the back end of 2014 Sumeet Sabharwal, group vice president and general manager at NaviSite, penned a company blog explaining how the year had been “significant” for desktop as a service (DaaS) on a number of fronts. Maturation of technology, expansion of the provider landscape, and expansion of endpoint devices, such as the support of Chromebooks, have helped create a maelstrom going into 2015.
Speaking at Cloud Expo Europe Sabharwal expanded on this vision, and why a technology with such high potential had been struggling in recent years.
“It was positioned as everything for everyone,” he tells CloudTech. “It’s really aimed at very specific workloads, very specific use cases. We kind of figured that out by trial and error.”
The theory two years ago was ‘the desktop is dead, long live the desktop’, Sabharwal argues. But it’s for industry specific workloads; if a company had 200,000 employees, then it’s only around 5,000 to 10,000 that NaviSite would see fit to target with its cloud-based virtual desktop solutions, delivered through a DaaS model.
Maturation of technology is seen as key. IP protocol issues, latency problems and resolution difficulties were major issues, but aren’t as much of a headache now. Yet Sabharwal notes it’s still a highly complex system to get to work.
“It’s not child’s play,” he says, citing the issues of image management, desktop engineering and Active Directory integration. “What we realised from customers was just taking a platform alone and saying ‘here’s a platform, go make it work’ does not work. It’s complex, it’s hard work.
“All of that has to be done as a managed service – [customers] don’t have the inclination, expertise, wherewithal, so we’ve expanded our capabilities and streamlined that.
“That is where enterprises say ‘yep, I get it, now it’s great; I know there’s applicability and I struggle to make it work, now I’ve got the expertise to make it work,’” he adds.
Back in December Sabharwal noted how 2014 was the year DaaS “came out of the shadows of VDI” (virtual desktop infrastructure). VDI, however, is at an interesting path. As Ken Hess writes for ZDNet: “I remember a time when predictions were in the billions of dollars related to converting standard desktops to virtual ones. Funny thing is it hasn’t really happened.”
For VMware however, who work with NaviSite, the acquisition of CloudVolumes is an exciting development according to Sabharwal. “The ability to build virtual desktops on the fly with the end user data, the personalisation of Ops and being able to deliver persistent desktops…the economics further makes the solution much more palatable and affordable,” he says.
How do you see desktop as a service evolving? You can find out more about NaviSite’s solutions here.
From @Plantronics WebRTC-Ready Today | @ThingsExpo [#IoT #WebRTC]
WebRTC is an up-and-coming standard that enables real-time voice and video to be directly embedded into browsers making the browser a primary user interface for communications and collaboration. WebRTC runs in a number of browsers today and is currently supported in over a billion installed browsers globally, across a range of platform OS and devices. Today, organizations that choose to deploy WebRTC applications and use a host machine that supports audio through USB or Bluetooth can use Plantronics products to connect and transit or receive the audio associated with the WebRTC session.
WSM’s DevOps Specialty Practice | @DevOpsSummit @WSMIntl [#DevOps]
WSM International is launching a DevOps services division that offers assessment, consulting and implementation to large enterprises and organizations with complex infrastructures. This is the first independent services company to create a dedicated practice to help organizations looking to transition to the DevOps model.
The concept of DevOps is to blend information technology (IT) software development with operations to optimize the computing infrastructure according to the specific needs of the organization. According to a recent press release (www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2999017) from Gartner, “By 2016, DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25 percent of Global 2000 organizations.”
WebRTC SDK Support From @VoxImplant | @ThingsExpo [#IoT #WebRTC]
VoxImplant has announced full WebRTC support in the newest versions of its Android SDK and iOS SDK. The updated SDKs, which enable audio and video calls on mobile devices, are now compatible with the WebRTC standard to allow any mobile app to communicate with WebRTC-enabled browsers, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and, when available, Microsoft Spartan.
The WebRTC-updated SDKs represent VoxImplant’s continued leadership in simplifying the development of real-time communications (RTC) services for app developers. VoxImplant (built by Zingaya, the real-time communication service provider for business) allows developers to easily embed RTC functionalities into both web and mobile apps; mobile users can then make and receive voice and video calls via data or Wi-Fi connections.
Frost & Sullivan Award Goes to @BroadSoftNews | @ThingsExpo [#WebRTC]
BroadSoft on Tuesday announced that it is a recipient of the 2014 Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Hosted/Cloud Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony market for Latin America.
According to Frost & Sullivan market research, the Latin America (LATAM) hosted/cloud Internet Protocol (IP) telephony market, including integrated unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) applications, is currently experiencing a rapid growth trajectory and is expected to exhibit a tenfold rise in annual revenues in the 2013-2020 period. With more than 600 cloud deployments internationally, BroadSoft was recognized as a pioneer in delivering hosted communications solutions in LATAM and across the globe, and as being strongly positioned to enable LATAM service providers to capitalize on this market opportunity.