I recently attended and presented at the east coast version of the Jenkins User Conference held this year in Washington, DC. The weather certainly fit the theme of the conference: The heat was continuous. The humidity was fully integrated with the heat. And, most importantly as you can see above, SWAG was out in full force.
Right from the opening keynote by the founder of Jenkins, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, this conference was jam-packed with all the latest capabilities of Jenkins, including discussions around the new capabilities like workflow, and several sessions on Linux containers, micro-services, and, everyone’s favorite topic, DevOps.
Monthly Archives: July 2015
[slides] The Evolution of the Car By @JPGreenough | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings
The enterprise market will drive IoT device adoption over the next five years.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Greenough, an analyst at BI Intelligence, division of Business Insider, analyzed how companies will adopt IoT products and the associated cost of adopting those products.
John Greenough is the lead analyst covering the Internet of Things for BI Intelligence- Business Insider’s paid research service. Numerous IoT companies have cited his analysis of the IoT. Prior to joining BI Intelligence, he worked analyzing bank technology for Corporate Insight and The Clearing House Payments Company.
[video] IT Managed Services with David Cintron | @CloudExpo #Cloud
“We’re an IT services company and we do a lot of managed services around disaster recovery and data protection,” explained David Cintron, Vice President of Managed Services at dcVAST, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
[webinar] The Cloud Just Killed Your LAN & WAN | @CloudExpo #Cloud
In a world where users are on the Internet and the applications are in the cloud, how do you maintain your historic SLA with your users?
Peter Christy, Research Director, Networks at 451 Research, will discuss this new network paradigm, one in which there is no LAN and no WAN, and discuss what users and network administrators gain and give up when migrating to the agile world of cloud.
Soha Senior Director of Product Marketing Robert Berlin will also share insights on today’s cloud application and security landscape, and discuss how Soha’s solution enables highly secure application delivery networks.
[slides] Taking Back Cloud Control By @tShawnMills | @CloudExpo #Cloud
With SaaS use rampant across organizations, how can IT departments track company data and maintain security? More and more departments are commissioning their own solutions and bypassing IT. A cloud environment is amorphous and powerful, allowing you to set up solutions for all of your user needs: document sharing and collaboration, mobile access, e-mail, even industry-specific applications.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Shawn Mills, President and a founder of Green House Data, discussed how to get users to stay in compliance with corporate guidelines and actually use the tools provided for them rather than turning to outside, unsanctioned resources and potentially putting security at risk.
Finding the Right On-Ramp to the Cloud By @Dana_Gardner | @CloudExpo #Cloud
The best of virtualization and the best of hardware integration are creating the preferred on-ramps to the cloud.
IT organizations are well enamored of virtualization. They are so into the trend that many have more than 80 percent of their server workloads virtualized. They like hybrid cloud conceptually, but are by no means adopting it enterprise-wide. We’re talking less than 30 percent of all workloads for typical companies, and a lot of that is via shadow IT and software as a service (SaaS).
What’s Driving Collaboration in the Cloud | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Business Cloud News recently tied up with Sharp Document Solutions to interview more than 715 enterprise IT professionals from across the world for their study on cloud based collaboration. The objective of the study was to look at the level of proliferation of cloud tools in the enterprise setup of today and also to understand the factors that may be challenging this unbridled growth.
Aligning SaaS Customer Acquisition By @ChaoticFlow | @CloudExpo #Cloud
SaaS businesses can be overwhelmingly complex. If the multi-tenant, cloud-based technology isn’t enough, there’s the recurring revenue model which creates all kinds of challenges from accounting to sales compensation to funding. Then, there’s the marketing. Getting noticed on the Internet gets harder every year and almost every SaaS product category has a crowded field of competitors. And of course there is mobile, which should come first right? In my own SaaS experience, be it scaling a sales and marketing team, consulting for SaaS startups or bootstrapping my agile marketing SaaS, Markodojo, I find myself returning to a common theme that always cuts through the complexity: SaaS customer alignment.
AWS rakes in $1.8bn in Q2 as ‘big four’ corner half the cloud services market
AWS is bringing in nearly $2bn in quarterly revenues
AWS revenue for the second quarter of this year topped $1.82bn, an increase of about 81 per cent year on year. The results come as other major IT service providers revealed strong cloud growth for the quarter.
Last quarter, the first time it pulled the curtain back on its cloud business, Amazon revealed AWS raked in $1.57bn in revenue. Operating income for Q2 increased 407 per cent to $391m.
Commenting on the results Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said “[we] continued to double down on our fastest growing geography — India, launched 350 significant AWS features and services so far this year, ahead of last year’s pace, introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms — enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40 per cent renewable energy.”
Speaking to analysts this week Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said the company is also getting more competitive on cost as it continues to optimise its services.
“We had over 350 significant new features and services and we believe that’s what resonates with customers. While pricing is certainly a factor we don’t believe it’s always the primary factor; in fact what we hear from our customers is that the ability to move faster and more agility is what they value,” he explained.
But he deflected questions about the capital intensity of the AWS business – which represent about 80 per cent of its overall capex.
“We do realise it’s a capital-intensive business and we have modelling that shows it’s going to be a very good business for us and that’s what we aim for as long-term return on invested capital and free cash flow. So, we’re certainly cognizant of the capital part of the calculation,” he said.
Amazon revealed the results as other large incumbents pulled back the curtain on their cloud performance. The second quarter saw Microsoft grow its cloud revenues 88 per cent and IBM 60 per cent.
But the results suggest some of the smaller cloud providers are being left in the dust. According to John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) are now approaching the $6bn, while trailing twelve-month revenues hitting close to $20bn. Synergy estimates AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google (the ‘big four’) control well over half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market.
“The cloud infrastructure services market is quite clearly bifurcating with a widening gap between the big four cloud providers and the rest of the service provider community,” Dinsdale explained. “Developing the necessary global hyperscale datacentre infrastructure along with the required marketing and operations support is simply beyond the reach of all but a very small number of players. This is not going to change.”
The good news for smaller and medium-sized cloud providers, he said, is that there does remain a wealth of opportunity for them to specialise in a particular niche industry or geography. At the moment the firm reckons North America accounts for over half of the worldwide cloud services market, followed by the EMEA and APAC regions.
IBM buys Compose to strengthen database as a service
IBM has acquired Compose, a DBaaS specialist
IBM has acquired Compose, a database as a service provider specialising in NoSQL and NewSQL technologies.
Compose helps set up and manage databases running at pretty much any scale, deployed on all-SSD storage. The company’s platform supports most of the newer database technologies including MongoDB, Redis, Elastisearch, RethinkDB and PostgresSQL and is deployed on AWS, DigitalOcean and SoftLayer.
“Compose’s breadth of database offerings will expand IBM’s Bluemix platform for the many app developers seeking production-ready databases built on open source,” said Derek Schoettle, general manager, IBM Cloud Data Services.
“Compose furthers IBM’s commitment to ensuring developers have access to the right tools for the job by offering the broadest set of DBaaS service and the flexibility of hybrid cloud deployment,” Schoettle said.
Kurt Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Compose said: “By joining IBM, we will have an opportunity to accelerate the development of our database platform and offer even more services and support to developer teams. As developers, we know how hard it can be to manage databases at scale, which is exactly why we built Compose –to take that burden off of our customers and allow them to get back to the engineering they love.”
IBM said the move would give a big boost to its cloud data services division, where it’s seeing some solid traction; this week the company said its cloud data services, one of its big ‘strategic imperatives’, saw revenues swell 30 per cent year on year. And according to a report cited by the IT incumbent and produced by MarketsandMarkets, the cloud-based data services market is expected to swell from $1.07bn in 2014 to $14bn by 2019.
This is the latest in a series of database-centric acquisitions for IBM in recent years. In February last year the company acquired database as a service specialist Cloudant, which built a distributed, fault tolerant data layer on top of Apache CouchDB and offered it as a service largely focused on mobile and web app-generated data. Before that it also bought Daeja Image Systems, a UK-based company that provides rapid search capability for large image files spread over multiple databases.