SYS-CON Events announced today that Secure Infrastructure & Services will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS) is a managed services provider of cloud computing solutions for the IBM Power Systems market. The company helps mid-market firms built on IBM hardware platforms to deploy new levels of reliable and cost-effective computing and high availability solutions, leveraging the cloud and the benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
Monthly Archives: June 2015
BaaS – The New Possibility in Mobile Cloud Technology | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Today, a mobile phone is endowed with more capabilities than it was five years ago. One of the contributing factors to the power of mobile apps is Backend as a Service (BaaS). BaaS is gaining huge momentum lately; its highly flexible and scalable nature has the capability to bring out the best from a mobile application. The use of mobile applications is also witnessing an increasing curve in the IT Market because of the features on offer, further simplifying our day-to-day needs. Focusing on statistics, BaaS is estimated to grow from $216 million to around $7.7 billion in 2017; this rise is mainly supported by the Entertainment Applications sector as it derives maximum revenue for any mobile application development company.
IBM SoftLayer opens up Italian data centre, fuelling demand for local cloud services
Picture credit: IBM/SoftLayer
IBM has opened up its first cloud data centre in Cornaredo, a municipality in Milan, strengthening its European empire.
The data centre, which runs on SoftLayer infrastructure, allows customers to more easily manage, run and store data through less latency and stronger data sovereignty.
The move follows previous openings in the UK, Germany and France. The German data centre, in Frankfurt, opened in January this year. According to the Polytechnic University of Milan’s Observatory of Cloud and ICT as a Service, the Italian cloud market saw 31% year over year growth in 2014. IBM claims that, from its new location, connections to SoftLayer services within Europe take less than 30 milliseconds.
The data centre plot has capacity for up to 11000 servers and a power rating of 2.8 megawatts. The Milan data centre is part of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment in 2014, aimed at expanding its global cloud footprint.
Jonathan Wisler, SoftLayer EMEA managing director, told CloudTech the expansion of SoftLayer’s data centres, not just across Europe but globally, were primarily down to performance and data compliance. “You see the execution of our strategy continuing,” he said. “The workloads are becoming more demanding in terms of low latency, so we’re trying to get as close as possible to build what I call a compute CDN (content delivery network).”
Nicola Ciniero, general manager for IBM Italy, said in a statement: “This data centre represents a financial and technological investment made by a multinational company that has faith in this country’s potential. Having an IBM cloud presence in Italy will provide local businesses with the right foundation to innovate and thrive on a global level.”
As with the German launch, customers can receive up to $500 off their first orders in the new Milan data centre. You can find out more here.
Announcing @Dyn to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet Performance, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Dyn is a cloud-based Internet Performance company. Dyn helps companies monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure for an exceptional end-user experience. Through a world-class network and unrivaled, objective intelligence into Internet conditions, Dyn ensures traffic gets delivered faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.
Opening Keynote by @Sandy_Carter at @CloudExpo | @IBMcloud #Cloud
Growth hacking is common for startups to make unheard-of progress in building their business. Career Hacks can help Geek Girls and those who support them (yes, that’s you too, Dad!) to excel in this typically male-dominated world.
Get ready to learn the facts:
Is there a bias against women in the tech / developer communities?
Why are women 50% of the workforce, but hold only 24% of the STEM or IT positions?
Some beginnings of what to do about it!
In her Opening Keynote at 16th Cloud Expo, Sandy Carter, IBM General Manager Cloud Ecosystem and Developers, and a Social Business Evangelist, discussed why this matters, how innovation will benefit, and how to foster an interest in tech.
IBM stands up SoftLayer datacentre in Italy
IBM has added its first SoftLayer datacentre in Italy, and its 24th globally
IBM announced the launch of its first SoftLayer datacentre in Italy this week, which is located in Cornaredo, Milan.
The company said the datacentre in Milan, a growing hub for cloud services, will enable it to offer a local option for Italian businesses looking to deploy IBM cloud services. The facility, it’s 24th SoftLayer datacentre globally, has a capacity for up to 11,000 servers, a power rating of 2.8 megawatts, and is designed to Tier III spec.
“The Italian IT sector is changing as startups and enterprises alike are increasingly turning to the cloud to optimize infrastructure, lower IT costs, create new revenue streams, and spur innovation,” said Marc Jones, chief technology officer for SoftLayer.
“The Milan datacentre extends the unique capabilities of our global platform by providing a fast, local onramp to the cloud. Customers have everything they need to quickly build out and test solutions that run the gamut from crunching big data to launching a mobile app globally,” Jones added.
Nicola Ciniero, general manager of IBM Italy said: “This datacentre represents a financial and technological investment made by a multinational company that has faith in this country’s potential. Having an IBM Cloud presence in Italy will provide local businesses with the right foundation to innovate and thrive on a global level.”
The move comes just a couple of months after IBM added a second SoftLayer datacentre in the Netherlands.
Orange, Foxconn among LoRa IoT startup Actility backers
IoT partnerships are in full swing this month
A group of tech companies including operators Orange, KPN and Swisscom and manufacturing giant Foxconn have put $25 million into Actility, an IoT startup focused on the LoRaWAN standard, reports Telecoms.com.
With the IoT land grab fully underway there are already calls for standardisation and collaboration as everyone looks to get an early piece of the action. The LoRa Alliance was unveiled at CES at the start of this year to support LoRaWAN low-power WAN technology. Minimising the amount of power required by IoT modules is considered critical if they’re to have the multi-year battery life required for embedded applications.
This $25 million round of funding was led by Ginko Ventures, which is a consortium consisting of the above tech companies and some VC players. The stated aim of the investment is to accelerate the go-to-market strategy for Actility’s ThingPark open standard IoT network solution.
“I decided to create Actility in 2010 based on the intuition that M2M would become much bigger and the need for carrier grade M2M infrastructure,” Actility founder and chief exec Olivier Hersent told Telecoms.com. “In terms of technology we have worked a lot with a technology call LoRa, which is one of the fastest growing alliances, on the LoRaWAN standard.
“ThingPark provides the technology to connect both long range and low power sensors over unlicensed ISM band spectrum, allowing low cost and fast roll-out of IoT networks for a wide range of IoT applications. We are delighted to have secured the backing of such prominent communications industry leaders.”
“Foxconn Group is transforming to be a high technology solution provider, including hardware and software value creation. Through this strategic investment, we will expand our current collaboration with Actility to bring its LoRaWAN technology and IoT Platform and Solutions to Taiwan, China, and the rest of Asia,” said Fang Ming Lu, executive vice president of Foxconn.
“This is a technology that comes at the right time for operators to accelerate the connection of objects,” Jean-Paul de Weck, CEO Swisscom Broadcast. “There is set to be a huge increase in the demand for IoT and we see Actility as a key partner as we expand our activities in this market.”
The feeling among Actility and its investors is that LoRa could well become the default IoT technology worldwide, and that it will only become so if it is open to all players. The commercial applications of IoT at this early stage tend to be more industrial, such as smart metering, remote monitoring and logistics applications. By seeding the market the aim is to prove the commercial viability of such IoT implementations and build momentum.
The announcement coincides with a flood of other IoT collaborations. Vodafone is partnering with EMC to develop an IoT testing platform, while Samsung yesterday announced a partnership and investment in Sigfox, which seems to be competitive with LoRa and already has some commercial networks, with a new one being rolled out by Engie in Belgium. Finally the Weightless SIG, yet another prospective IoT wireless standard, also picked this week to announce the deployment of a Weightless-N Smart City network in London. It seems unlikely that all these announcements are a coincidence and the IoT land grab is definitely gathering intensity.
EMC, Vodafone partner on Internet of Things platform
EMC and Vodafone are teaming on a €2m IoT platform
Storage giant EMC is teaming up with Vodafone to develop and offer a platform for industrial Internet of Things (IoT) service development and testing.
The IoT development platform, known as Infinite, is spread across three datacentres – one hosted by EMC, another by Vodafone, and another by datacentre and cloud provider Cork Internet eXchange (CIX).
The companies said the platform can be used to develop a range of IoT services, particularly those to support industrial automation in fields like manufacturing and fleet management, but also healthcare and higher education.
EMC and Vodafone said the companies are investing about €2m in the initiative.
“EMC Federation is leading an industrial partnership encompassing rich data and Internet of Things. The digital age’s IT transformation – cloud, big data, social, mobile and Internet of Things, is continuously and increasingly changing the way we live and work,” said Orna Berry, corporate vice president innovation, EMC Centres of Excellences (CoE). “EMC Federation and Ireland’s CoE are excited to take a dynamic and influential part in this important eventuation, with the creation of the Infinite innovative IoT platform.”
This is also the first large scale project approved for use by the Industrial Internet Consortium, a membership group of telcos, research institutes and technology manufacturers created last year and focused on developing interoperability standards and common architectures to bridge smart devices, machines, mobile devices and the data they create.
The move means the offering adheres to a range of interoperability standards being proposed or consolidated by the group.
“Infinite will prove to be a valuable Industrial Internet testbed for a countless number of industries including smart cities and healthcare. As the need for more dynamic systems continues to grow, organisations will turn to utilising mobile networks to connect to virtual systems,” said Richard Soley, executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium. “This testbed is going to prove the viability of doing all this with systems that require the utmost security – such as those used by hospitals and emergency medical services.”
Anne O’Leary, chief executive of Vodafone Ireland, said: “We are delighted to work with EMC in this exciting development. Vodafone is at the forefront of Internet of Things technology at a global level and I am proud to see Ireland also taking a lead in pioneering the development of these new disruptive technologies. IoT has the potential to transform business in Ireland and we are excited to be in a position to provide companies with access to start developing their own IoT services.”
With IoT heating up a broad range of IT and telecoms incumbents have thrown their hats into the development platform race. Last month for instance Google unveiled Brillo, a slimmed down version of Android with a proprietary set of APIs for IoT-specific services and communications, while SAP unveiled a thinly re-branded version of HANA in the cloud for IoT. But while telcos have long tried to get in on this segment it seems to be an interesting move for EMC, which has generally kept a low profile in IoT beyond simply tailoring the marketing around its high-IO storage arrays, and has left much of the jockeying in this segment up to others in the Federation (like Pivotal).
Deutsche Telekom promises to double cloud revenue by 2018, plans European domination
(c)iStock.com/EdStock
German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom (DT) has released a bullish statement of intent detailing its plans to more than double its cloud revenue in Europe by 2018.
The company, which specifically called out Google and Amazon as its primary competition, also announced an extension to its partnership with Huawei, originally announced in March, for IT infrastructure and private cloud solutions.
DT’s annual revenue from business customers currently stands at €1 billion (£721.8m). The company explained its strategy in being ‘on the road’ to becoming the cloud leader in Europe, and ensuring its business units ‘step up’ cloud activities across the organisation.
Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, head of the IT division at T-Systems, said: “At Deutsche Telekom, we want to grow by more than 20% each year in the field of cloud platforms, and to become the leading provider for businesses in Europe.”
The telco claims revenue from highly secure private cloud solutions increased by ‘double-figure percentage points’ at T-Systems, while the market for services from the public cloud ‘promises further growth’.
Yet the collaborative effect of partnerships also appeals. Haibo Zhang, president of the Huawei-Deutsche Telekom key account department, said: “After we agreed on our cooperation regarding IT infrastructure and private cloud services during CeBIT we are now taking the next step and combining our know how and cutting edge technology in the public cloud area to ensure that companies of all sizes are provided with the cloud of their choice.”
The idea of the telco making gains in cloud services is not a new one, and it was the overarching theme when Richard Warley, the new EMEA managing director of CenturyLink, spoke to CloudTech earlier in June. He explained why the telco ‘should win’ in cloud infrastructure services: “The cloud doesn’t work without the network. It takes a lot of innovative expertise to imagine the cloud and then to code it, but over a period of time it will become commoditised to an extent, and the people who can run infrastructure efficiently and cost effectively should be the telcos.”
Evidently, Deutsche Telekom has got the same idea.
Facebook to build Open Compute datacentre in Ireland
Facebook plans to build a datacentre in Ireland, its second in Europe
Facebook this week revealed plans to build an Open Compute datacentre in a bid to support its growth ambitions in Europe.
The proposed location of the new datacentre in County Meath will enable the company to make use of local renewable energy sources and talent, and would be the social media giant’s second in Europe. The first, in Lulea, Sweden, uses 100 per cent hydroelectricity to power its servers.
Facebook said the datacentre could generate hundreds of millions of euros in economic benefits for the region. The project is being supported by the by the Department of Jobs through IDA Ireland. Martin Shanahan, the organisation’s chief executive said: “Facebook’s existing relationship with Ireland is extremely strong and extensive in scope, but the news that the company wants to build its second European data centre in a regional location such as Meath will cement the relationship even further.”
“Ireland has been a home for Facebook since 2007 and today’s planning application demonstrates our continued interest to invest in Ireland,” said Facebook’s datacentre strategy head Rachel Peterson.
“We hope to build an innovative, environmentally friendly data centre that will help us continue to connect people in Ireland and around the world – while supporting local job creation and Ireland’s successful technology economy. We look forward to continuing our conversations with the Clonee community in coming weeks,” she said.
Facebook has less than a handful of datacentres globally but the data volumes it generates – and the infrastructure it needs to support its services – is significant. The company adds 300 million new photos every day, has a data warehouse of over 300 petabytes and processes hundreds of terabytes of data daily. And given nearly three quarters of Facebook users are outside the US, its build-out in Europe and other key strategic regions (India for instance) outside North America will likely continue.