Monthly Archives: May 2015

Apple, Enterprise IT, Ginni Rometty, IBM, Japan Post Group, News & Analysis, Taizo Nishimuro, Tim Cook

Japan Post, IBM and Apple ink cloud, iPad deal

Tim Cook, Apple CEO and Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, walking the walk and talking the talk

Tim Cook, Apple CEO and Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, walking the walk and talking the talk

Japan Post, IBM and Apple are partnering to deploy iPads with IBM-developed apps and cloud services to give local seniors access to healthcare and community services.

As part of its Watch Over service for the elderly, Japan Post will deploy custom iOS apps built by IBM Global Business Services, which will provide services like medication reminders, exercise and diet tracking, community activity scheduling and grocery shopping.

“What we’re starting today draws on IBM’s long heritage of innovation at the intersection of technology, business and society,” said Ginni Rometty, president, chairman and chief executive of IBM.

“The potential we see here – as broad as national economics and as specific as the quality of life of individuals and their families – is one example of the potential of mobile-led transformation anywhere in the world where issues of an aging population exist,” Rometty said.

The move will also see Japan Post deploy iPads and IBM cloud services – thinks like analytics, training services and collaboration services – for its own employees.

“We are joining with two of the world’s most respected leaders in technology to bring our elderly generation into the connected world, expand our businesses by deepening relationships, and discover new ways to strengthen the fabric of our society and economy,” said Taizo Nishimuro, chief executive of Japan Post Group.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook also commented on the deal: “This initiative has potential for global impact, as many countries face the challenge of supporting an aging population, and we are honoured to be involved in supporting Japan’s senior citizens and helping enrich their lives.”

Japan Post Group had been piloting iPads and custom apps and cloud services for the elderly since last year and the company hopes to reach between four and five million elderly customers by 2020.

451Research, Kilo, Michael Yoon, News & Analysis, OpenStack

OpenStack Kilo ships with identity federation, storage improvements, bare-metal service

OpenStack Kilo is out, but some challenges persist

OpenStack Kilo is out, but some organisations may think twice about deployment

The OpenStack community released the eleventh version of the open source platform this week, codenamed Kilo, which ships with loads of improvements including new management APIs, security improvements for NFV, and the first full release of the bare metal cloud service. But a number of challenges still conspire to make the platform difficult to implement for some organisations.

The organisation has added improvements across the board, including:

  • Nova Compute: New API versioning management with v2.1 and microversions, which makes it easier to write long-lived applications against compute functionality. Operational improvements include live upgrades when a database schema change is required and better support for changing the resources of a running VM.
  • Swift Object Storage: Erasure coding provides efficient and cost-effective storage, and container-level temporary URLs allow time-limited access to a set of objects in a container. The latest release also brings improvements to global cluster replication and storage policy metrics.
  • Cinder Block Storage: Major updates to testing and validation requirements for backend storage systems across 70 options. Users can now attach a volume to multiple compute instances for high-availability and migration use cases.
  • Neutron Networking: The load-balancing-as-a-service API is now in its second version. The community also added additional features support NFV like port security for OpenVSwitch, VLAN transparency and MTU API extensions.
  • Ironic Bare-Metal Provisioning: The first full release of the Ironic bare-metal provisioning project with support for existing VM workloads and Linux containers, platform-as-a-service and NFV.
  • Keystone Identity Service: Identity federation enhancements to support hybrid workloads in multi-cloud environments.

This is the latest version of OpenStack since Juno, which was first released in October last year. Liberty, the version currently under development, is due to be released in October this year.

The OpenStack foundation said deployments of OpenStack are growing, with production deployments accounting for about half of those. But the project still needs to improve in some areas – which reflects the maturity of the platform more than anything.

“One thing I would definitely call out when considering OpenStack versus something like AWS is that with the former we have the ability to take advantage of innovation more rapidly than would be the case with the latter,” Michael Yoon, chief technology officer of MiMedia, an OpenStack user, told BCN. “So specifically, things like erasure coding, SMR technology, kinetic drive and object storage at the drive level, these are all making a very serious impact when comparing one solution from another.”

“But the container strategy hasn’t really been there in Swift. Also upgradability is certainly a challenge – one that’s been improved upon since the early releases, but still needs a lot of work.”

One of the biggest challenges, Yoon explained, is that there aren’t enough vendor-agnostic best-practice and architectural guides out there today. So the overhead, in terms of the initial research required to stand up an OpenStack cloud in the first place, is high.

“There’s a decent amount of research you need to do if you’re looking to get into this, and the problem is every vendor has their version, stocked with their own IP, of what makes a performant OpenStack distribution; each has a set of best practices and there’s still a fair amount of having to wade through it all to make things less vendor specific,” Yoon added.

This challenge seems to be highlighted in the latest cloud research from 451Research. According to the analyst house’s latest Cloud Price Index (CPI) report the TCO of proprietary commercial cloud management offerings is less than that of OpenStack distributions because of the cost of hiring additional manpower to implement them.

“The proprietary offering’s TCO benefit is simply the result of the high cost of OpenStack engineers – the distributions themselves are priced lower than the proprietary offerings,” the report explained. “With OpenStack, migration should, on paper, be less expensive, but it will be made more difficult than necessary due to a lack of federation among providers and the numerous OpenStack reference architectures.”

Nevertheless, the newly announced features may help improve the attractiveness of the platform among organisations.

“OpenStack continues to grow, and features like federated identity and bare metal provisioning support make the platform more compelling for enterprise IT leadership and application developers who want a stable, open source alternative to proprietary options,” said Al Sadowski, research director at 451 Research and one of the lead authors on the CPI report.

Cardiff Council, Cormac Watters, HANA, News & Analysis, Ross Maude, SAP

Cardiff Council moves customer services onto SAP cloud

Cardiff Council is aligning its IT strategy with a shift towards self-service government

Cardiff Council is aligning its IT strategy with a shift towards self-service government

The City of Cardiff Council is moving onto SAP’s customer service cloud in a bid to streamline customer service operations and deliver budget savings, the organisations announced this week.

The three-year project will see Cardiff Council work with SAP to move onto its customer services cloud, which is powered by the company’s in-memory compute platform HANA.

The Council’s goal is to create a digital self-service portal that will enable residents to interact online with municipal services, which will significantly reduce administrative costs according to the Council.

“The public service mandate of ‘do more with less’ is not going away, but for us, it’s an opportunity to bring our thriving city into the digital age in a way that will bring us long-term financial savings” said Ross Maude, senior enterprise architect at Cardiff Council.

Indeed the Council is facing £124m in budget cuts over the next three years, and to deliver those savings without impacting the services delivered to residents the Council is looking to increase automation – which is where cloud services comes into play.

“The services we provide are important for everyone from the elderly, to university students and public sector workers, and ensuring we’re still able to maintain the level and quality of service we have today despite our financial pressures is crucial. Our relationship with SAP means that together we’re able to implement an integrated cloud-based solution that brings all of our systems together allows us to focus on the growing needs of Cardiff residents,” Maude added.

Cormac Watters, managing director, SAP UK and Ireland said: For local authorities like Cardiff Council, finding ways to minimise costs is their number one priority. Coupled with a young, digitally-advanced demographic, the Council has taken a bold approach to meet today’s and tomorrow’s challenges”

“It will also support the delivery of new digital services geared to the highly-connected user, providing greater choice, more self-service options, better access and flexibility, resulting in improved user adoption and unlocking cost savings at every turn. This is essential at a time when budgets are under substantial pressure,” Watters said.