Monthly Archives: April 2015

Amazon Web Services, Apache, Big Data, Docker, Google Cloud Platform, Hadoop, Hortonworks, M&A, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, OpenStack, SequenceIQ, Vendor

Hortonworks buys SequenceIQ to speed up cloud deployment of Hadoop

CloudBreak

SequenceIQ will help boost Hortonworks’ position in the Hadoop ecosystem

Hortonworks has acquired SequenceIQ, a Hungary-based startup delivering infrastructure agnostic tools to improve Hadoop deployments. The company said the move will bolster its ability to offer speedy cloud deployments of Hadoop.

SequenceIQ’s flagship offering, Cloudbreak, is a Hadoop as a Service API for multi-tenant clusters that applies some of the capabilities of Blueprint (which lets you create a Hadoop cluster without having to use the Ambari Cluster Install Wizard) and Periscope (autoscaling for Hadoop YARN) to help speed up deployment of Hadoop on different cloud infrastructures.

The two companies have partnered extensively in the Hadoop community, and Hortonworks said the move will enhance its position among a growing number of Hadoop incumbents.

“This acquisition enriches our leadership position by providing technology that automates the launching of elastic Hadoop clusters with policy-based auto-scaling on the major cloud infrastructure platforms including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and OpenStack, as well as platforms that support Docker containers. Put simply, we now provide our customers and partners with both the broadest set of deployment choices for Hadoop and quickest and easiest automation steps,” Tim Hall, vice president of product management at Hortonworks, explained.

“As Hortonworks continues to expand globally, the SequenceIQ team further expands our European presence and firmly establishes an engineering beachhead in Budapest. We are thrilled to have them join the Hortonworks team.”

Hall said the company also plans to contribute the Cloudbreak code back into the Apache Foundation sometime this year, though whether it will do so as part of an existing project or standalone one seems yet to be decided.

Hortonworks’ bread and butter is in supporting enterprise adoption of Hadoop and bringing the services component to the table, but it’s interesting to see the company commit to feeding the Cloudbreak code – which could, at least temporarily, give it a competitive edge – back into the ecosystem.

“This move is in line with our belief that the fastest path to innovation is through open source developed within an open community,” Hall explained.

The big data M&A space has seen more consolidation over the past few months, with Hitachi Data Systems acquiring big data and analytics specialist Pentaho and Infosys’ $200m acquisition of Panaya.

Appointment, Box, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Office 365, Yammer

Box hires ex-Microsoft exec to bolster business in France

Jeremy Grinbaum, regional vice president for France and southern Europe, Box

Jeremy Grinbaum, regional vice president for France and southern Europe, Box

Box has hired former Microsoft cloud sales exec Jeremy Grinbaum to lead the company’s commercial expansion efforts in France and southern Europe.

Grinbaum, who will be based in Box’s Paris office, has been broad on board as regional vice president for France and southern Europe to drive the cloud storage incumbent’s business in the region, which includes setting up a local sales team.

“We are seeing significant traction in France and southern Europe as businesses in these regions begin to adopt cloud systems to drive efficiency and collaboration,” said David Quantrell, senior vice president and general manager of EMEA at Box.

“We are excited to accelerate our growth in southern Europe, and Jeremy’s leadership and expertise are exactly what we need to drive the adoption of Box’s content and collaboration platform.”

Before joining Box Grinbaum spent the past few years as a senior sales executive at Microsoft, focusing on the company’s cloud services including Yammer and Office 265. He founded a cloud-based collaboration start up in 2007, PersonAll, and has also held senior sales roles at Google, IBM, and TRSB.

“France and southern Europe are moving quickly in the adoption of new technologies. Enterprises are looking for solutions that will allow them to move off of expensive, legacy architecture and create more agile and iterative environments for employees,” Grinbaum said. “I am excited to join this innovative company and play a role in helping organizations transform the way they work.”

Last month Box revealed its quarterly results to the public for the first time, which showed promise. Billings in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 were $82m, a 33 per cent year on year increase. But the company has over the years spent hundreds of millions of dollars bolstering its sales and marketing efforts, accumulating a significant amount of debt in the process, so it’s likely Box’s main focus will be on delivering the return shareholders are looking for from its southern European expansion.

Analytics, Apple, Big Data, Healthcare, IBM, John E. Kelly III, Mike Rhodin, News & Analysis, Vendor, Watson

IBM goes after healthcare with acquisitions, Apple HealthKit partnership, new business unit

IBM is pushing hard to bring Watson to the healthcare sector

IBM is pushing hard to bring Watson to the healthcare sector

IBM announced a slew of moves aimed at strengthening its presence in the healthcare sector including two strategic acquisitions, a HealthKit-focused partnership with Apple, and the creation of a new Watson and cloud-centric healthcare business unit.

IBM announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Explorys, which deploys cognitive cloud-based analytics on datasets derived from numerous and diverse financial, operational and medical record systems, and Phytel, which provides cloud-based software that helps healthcare providers and care teams coordinate activities across medical facilities by automating certain aspects of patient care.

The company said the acquisitions would bolster IBM’s efforts to sell advanced analytics and cognitive computing to primary care providers, large hospital systems and physician networks.

“As healthcare providers, health plans and life sciences companies face a deluge of data, they need a secure, reliable and dynamic way to share that data for new insight to deliver quality, effective healthcare for the individual,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson. “To address this opportunity, IBM is building a holistic platform to enable the aggregation and discovery of health data to share it with those who can make a difference.”

That ‘holistic platform’ is being developed by the recently announced Watson Health unit, which as the name suggests will put IBM’s cognitive compute cloud service Watson at the heart of a number of healthcare-focused cloud storage and analytics solutions. The unit has also developed the Watson Health Cloud platform, which allows the medical data it collects to be anonymized, shared and combined with a constantly-growing aggregated set of clinical, research and social health data.

“All this data can be overwhelming for providers and patients alike, but it also presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform the ways in which we manage our health,” said John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president, solutions portfolio and research. “We need better ways to tap into and analyze all of this information in real-time to benefit patients and to improve wellness globally.”

Lastly, IBM announced an expanded partnership with Apple that will see IBM offer its Watson Health Cloud platform as a storage and analytics service for HealthKit data aggregated from iOS devices, and open the platform up for health and fitness app developers as well as medical researchers.

Many of IBM’s core technologies, which have since found their way into Watson (i.e. NLP, proprietary algorithms, etc.) are already in use by a number of pioneering medical facilities globally, so it makes sense for IBM to pitch its cognitive compute capabilities to the healthcare sector – particularly in the US, where facilities are legally incentivised to use new technologies to reduce the cost of patient care while keeping quality of service high. Commercial deals around Watson have so far been scarce, but it’s clear the company is keen to do what it can to create a market for cloud-based cognitive computing.

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Cloud ‘reality check’ in store for IT leaders, report affirms

(c)iStock.com/benoitb

As we’re now full swing into 2015, there is certainly a greater understanding over the potential – and the limitations – of cloud computing. Research from NTT Communications has explored the varying issues and argued there needs to be a smoother migration path from the corporate data centre to the cloud.

Similarly, even though cloud will claim a growing share of IT budgets in coming years, many IT decision makers don’t believe it is living up to its potential.

The complexity of companies’ IT is growing and becoming difficult to manage. UK IT decision makers claim they have to support 250 applications on average, compared to 100 in the US, 58 in Benelux and 57 in Germany. Globally, IT is having to deal with more than four clouds on average.

There was also an interesting examination of which apps are most suited to the cloud or the corporate data centre. Office productivity and document management (20% cloud, 9% data centre) had the clearest cloud swing, while many others were negligible – ERP and CRM had 13% for cloud, with 11% and 9% for data centre respectively.

The report came up with several interesting takeaways shedding light on how cloud deployments are developing in 2015:

  • There are no definitive answers for which app goes where. Some 10% of apps will never migrate to the cloud, while variables such as the nature of the application, its maturity, and the industry sector in question are often in play
  • IT decision makers are still unconvinced by platform as a service (PaaS), while infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the platform of choice for almost half of respondents. “While the industry has always supported the PaaS concept, our results only cement the assessment that it has failed to truly take off yet,” the report notes
  • Bimodal IT – a system of IT advocated by Gartner in 2014 whereby two models of IT, one traditional and one agile, work together – is increasingly difficult according to respondents. More time is spent maintaining the current performance of applications as opposed to building functionality for the future

“Our study shows the reality of cloud in 2015 is potentially as complex as the world it was supposed to replace,” said Len Padilla, NTT VP product strategy. “ICT decision makers harbour significant frustrations over cloud, and there are no clear answers over which kinds of applications belong where.”

You can find out more about the study here.

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The Rise of Private Equity in Technology By @JnanDash | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Last week, a public company Informatica got acquired by two private equity funds – the Permira fund and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) for $5.3B. This is the biggest leveraged buyout so far this year.
I am happy for my friend Sohaib Abbasi (we were colleagues at Oracle during the 1990s) who is CEO of Informatica after being a board member for a couple of years. During Sohaib’s time, the company entered into playing a bigger role in data archiving and life cycle management. It also made progress into offering cloud-based services.

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Mitchell Hashimoto of @HashiCorp with @MadGreek65 | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

Our guest on the podcast this week is Mitchell Hashimoto, Founder of HashiCorp. We discuss golden images which ensure that every copy of a replicated environment is identical. Image creation has historically caused organizational problems, however, new technologies utilize configuration management tools that are DevOps friendly creating an easy and valuable process that enables teams to iterate often and deliver a consistent product to end users.

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Ruby on Rails Performance Tips By @Monitis | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

2015 is the 10th birthday of Ruby on Rails (or simply called Rails), the popular open source web application framework that uses the Ruby programming language. Ever since Rails burst on the scene a decade ago it has continued to scale up as an elegant way to build dynamic websites quickly and efficiently. Rails has garnered a strong following, especially among tech startups. In fact, some of the best known firms out there are using the framework to build their sites. Examples of elegant sites built on Rails are Groupon, Airbnb, and Bloomberg.

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Accenture, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Pierre Nanterme, Rio Tinto, Simon Benney

Rio Tinto moves ERP, IM systems to Accenture cloud

miningRio Tinto announced a partnership with Accenture that will see the global mining firm move the bulk of its application landscape to Accenture’s public cloud service.

Rather than add new systems into the mix the deal will see Accenture help the British-Australian firm consolidate its ERP and IM platforms and put them on Accenture’s cloud infrastructure. As part of the move Accenture will manage the lifecycle of the applications, which will be hosted in Accenture’s datacentres.

Rio Tinto Group said it moved its application landscape in a bid to save costs and switch to an “as-a-service” IT model that allows it to pay only for the resources it uses.

“Rio Tinto is on an ambitious journey to a world-class IS&T delivery model that is innovative, adaptable and cost-effective, fully supporting our business priorities and group operating model,” said Rio Tinto Group chief information officer Simon Benney.

“We selected Accenture to help us manage this transformation based on its global delivery capabilities, its vision for the intelligent business cloud and its ability to support our digital transformation programme,” Benney said.

Pierre Nanterme, chairman and chief executive of Accenture said: “This solution will allow Rio Tinto to smartly connect its infrastructure, software applications, data and operations capabilities in order to become an agile, intelligent, digital business that can better navigate the commodities cycles.”

Future of Apps, Future of Mobile, Future of Smartphones, Mobile Apps, Parallels Access, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Remote access, Remote Access App, Remote Desktop, Remote Desktop App, Science Fiction, Smartphones, Smartphones Future

What Will Smartphones Be Like in 100 Years?

What do you think smartphones will be like in 100 years? After all, these became real… And THIS is happening: Which is basically the real-life version of Tony Stark tech: And 3D printers are basically early replicators: So, what can we expect for the advancement of mobile technology? Some pretty sci-fi-savvy mobile tech is already […]

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