F5 President & CEO, Manny Rivelo, shares his vision of Innovate, Expand, Deliver at #F5Agility15. Always insightful, Manny discusses his new role as CEO, what hybrid application services means to organizations, how F5 has evolved from just a load balancing company, how organizations use F5 solutions across hybrid environments and how F5 is all about the software. He also shares some perspective on the new BIG-IP v12 and his favorite part of F5 Agility. Applications without constraints. Thanks Manny!
Monthly Archives: August 2015
GE reveals Predix-based cloud for industrial Internet of Things applications
GE is launching a cloud service aimed at industrial IoT
GE has launched a cloud service based on its industrial equipment monitoring and analytics platform, Predix, which it is aiming at industrial IoT applications in most of the verticals it already serves – aviation, manufacturing, automotive, energy and healthcare.
The cloud service will hoover up and analyse data generated by IoT sensors embedded in industrial equipment and can use the insights to optimise operations and proactively manage the equipment’s health by suggesting tailored maintenance regimes, whether an energy infrastructure asset or a jet engine.
While GE has offered these kinds of services for years this is the first time it has decided to offer them directly via the cloud to customers. The company is pitching Predix as an on-demand “cloud platform for the industrial internet.”
“Cloud computing has enabled incredible innovation across the consumer world. With Predix Cloud, GE is providing a new level of service and results across the industrial world,” said Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of GE.
“A more digital hospital means better, faster healthcare. A more digital manufacturing plant means more products are made faster. A more digital oil company means better asset management and more productivity at every well. We look forward to partnering with our customers to develop customized solutions that will help transform their business,” he said.
The service includes a range of tools to help customers manage security, compliance and data governance, and GE claims that it can integrate seamless with other services running in on a broad range of cloud platforms.
“A cloud built exclusively to capture and analyse machine data will make unforeseen problems and missed opportunities increasingly a complication of the past,” said Harel Kodesh, vice president, general manager of Predix at GE Software. “GE’s Predix Cloud will unlock an industrial app economy that delivers more value to machines, fleets and factories – and enable a thriving developer community to collaborate and rapidly deploy industrial applications in a highly protected environment.”
The reveal comes less than a month after what was effectively a softer Predix launch. In July GE announced it is partnering with Pitney Bowes to develop a custom asset performance management (APM) application that analyses the data Pitney Bowes generates from its production mailing and shipping machines to improve the efficiency of its equipment. That partnership saw the companies adapt GE’s Predix software analytics platform to its mail handing and shipping environment.
Both companies have already partnered with one another elsewhere in the IoT ecosystem. Pitney Bowes and GE are members of the Industrial Internet Consortium, a membership group of telcos, research institutes and technology manufacturers formed last year and focused on developing interoperability standards and common architectures to bridge smart devices, machines, mobile devices and the data they create.
HMRC embraces PaaS, moves tax platform to the cloud
HMRC is building out a PaaS and cloud strategy to support its digital services agenda
In a bid to offer a set of new and redesigned digital services HMRC is moving its tax platform to the cloud and rolling out automated infrastructure to support its internal platform as a service (PaaS).
“In HMRC we are scaling up our cloud infrastructure as we prepare to deliver more new and redesigned digital services. These services sit on the “Tax Platform”, our internal platform as a service,” explained Kalbir Sohi, an Infrastructure Digital Service Manager at HMRC.
“Over the last two years developing the Tax Platform we’ve been automating the creation of infrastructure to ensure consistency and quality in our infrastructure by defining it in code and decreasing the amount of time that people in our team spend doing repetitive manual tasks like provisioning and configuring servers.”
In a bid to ease vendor lock-in the organisation has been using a range of open source tools including Puppet, git and VCloud Tools to build and scale the infrastructure over the past two years; it’s also contributing code back to the codebases where relevant.
“We are committed to both using open source products and contributing back to the community to improve them based on what we are doing. This should help us to avoid being tied to one specific supplier or technology but will also allow us to contribute to some of the interesting and novel cloud tools that are emerging — hopefully making these tools more useable for organisations like HMRC,” Sohi explained.
The Tax Platform is designed to make building, testing, deploying and running microservice-based web applications very easy, and is intended to help HMRC embrace a cloud service brokerage model it said would help ease digital service delivery internally and externally.
The organisation’s next step is to focus on scripting networking, storage and compute automation into the platform, and selecting the open source tools to help make its cloud brokerage ecosystem more robust for those maintaining the platform.
“Having access to fast, repeatable, efficient infrastructure will change the way that teams approach building and running the HMRC services that do not fit the platform as a service model. We are changing much more than this too. We are taking a new approach to infrastructure which will shape how we organise ourselves to deliver services in the future. At the heart of this is designing for, and testing with our users.”
Networking the Future with SDN
SDN will be vital for everything from monitoring to security
The nature of business is constantly changing; customers are demanding faster, more responsive services, and as a result, firms need to ensure that their backend technology is up to scratch. Increasing adoption of the cloud, mobility and big data technologies has encouraged the IT department to address how they can best support these developing trends whilst benefiting the customer and employee experience.
By looking at the heart of their infrastructure, the network, businesses can provide more agile and flexible IT services that can quickly meet user demand. So what improvements can be made to the networks to satiate customer demand?
A software defined network (SDN) is emerging as an obvious approach for technology decision makers, empowering them to provide a faster, more agile and scalable infrastructure. SDN is considered the next evolution of the network, providing a way for businesses to upgrade their networks through software rather than through hardware – at a much lower cost.
SDN provides holistic network management and the ability to apply more granular unified security policies whilst reducing operational expenses such as the need to use specific vendor hardware and additional technology investments. In fact, IDC recently predicted that this market is set to grow from $960 million in 2014 to more than $8 billion by 2018, globally.
A Growing Trend
Datacentres and service providers have, until now, been the most common adopters of SDN solutions. As a result there has been a notable improvement in better customer service and faster response times with firms deploying new and innovative applications quicker than ever. In the past year, we have seen firms in sectors like healthcare and education take advantage of the technology. However, while SDN is developing quickly, it is still in its early stages, with several industries yet to consider it.
There is a focus to encourage more firms to recognise the benefits of SDN in the form of the OpenDaylight Project. The OpenDaylight Project is a collaborative open source project which aims to accelerate the adoption of SDN – having already laid the foundation for SDN deployments today, it is considered to be the central control component and intelligence that allows customers to achieve network-wide objectives in a much more simplified fashion. The community, which includes more than a dozen vendors, is addressing the need for an open reference framework programmability and control enabling accelerated innovation for customers of any size and in any vertical.
Driving Business Insights
Looking ahead to the future for this new way of networking, there are a number of ways SDN can benefit the business. For example, SDN looks set to emerge as the new choice for deploying analytics in an economical and distributed way – in part due to the flexible nature of its infrastructure and the growing prominence of APIs – as the SDN optimized network can be maintained and configured with less staff and at a lower cost.
Data analytics-as-a-service is being tipped as the vehicle that will make big data commoditised and consumable for enterprises in the coming years; analyst house IDC found that by 2017, 80% of the CIO’s time will be focused on analytics – and Gartner predicts that by 2017 most business users and analysts in organisations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis themselves.
However, the right network environment will be key so that data analytics has the right environment to flourish. An SDN implementation offers a more holistic approach to network management with the ability to apply more granular unified security policies while reducing operational expenses. Being able to manage the network centrally is a huge benefit for firms as they look to increase innovation and become more flexible in response to changing technology trends.
Using analytics in tandem with a newly optimized SDN can empower IT to quickly identify any bottlenecks or problems and also help to deploy the fixes. For example, if a firm notices that one of their applications is suffering from a slow response time and sees that part of the network is experiencing a lot of latency at the same time, it could immediately address the issue and re-route traffic to a stronger connection.
Realising the Potential of SDN
In order to implement an SDN solution, it will be imperative for enterprises to firstly make themselves familiar with the technology and its components, create cross functional IT teams that include applications, security, systems and network to get an understanding what they wish to achieve and secondly, investigate best-of-breed vendor solutions that can deliver innovative and reliable SDN solutions which leverage existing investments without the need to overhaul longstanding technologies. This way, businesses can reap the benefits of SDN whilst saving time as well as money and mitigate risk.
Using analytics and SDN in combination is just one future possibility which could make it far simpler for businesses to deploy servers and support users in a more cost-effective and less resource-intensive way. It can also provide an overall improved user experience. With SDN offering the power to automate and make the network faster and big data providing the brains behind the operation; it’s an exciting match that could be an enterprise game changer.
Written by Markus Nispel, vice president of solutions architecture and innovation at Extreme Networks
It’s Time to Tap into Desktop as a Service
Gone are the days when employees were always stuck at their office desks. Today’s IT has embraced the mobile work-style while Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) plays an important role in this setup. VMware estimates that 121 million virtual desktops were rolled out in 2014 and the DaaS market is worth $2.9 billion for service providers. According to […]
The post It’s Time to Tap into Desktop as a Service appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Zscaler raises $100m in round led by TPG
California based Zscaler, which provides security-as-a-service (SAAS), has raised $100 million dollars in Series B funding round. This was led largely by late stage investor TPG. Other investments have come from existing investors EMC, the storage company, and Lightspeed Ventures. The company has now raised well over $130 million dollars and its valuation last round was estimated to be at over a billion.
Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler, has said in a recent announcement, “Our mission is to make the Internet safe for business by delivering an amazing security platform that protects our clients and enables the strategic adoption of cloud computing, mobile devices and the Internet of Things. The investment and partnership from TPG and the global relationships and experience they provide will enable us to accelerate investment in our technology, grow our customer base and aggressively scale our business to meet growing demand. We are excited to join an elite group of security companies valued in excess of $1 billion.”
The companies’ customer base has nearly doubled since last year. The company has an estimated 5000 customers, including Humana, NBC, ExxonMobil and the UK’s National Health Services, and protects over 13 million employees.
Nehal Raj, a partner at TPG, and now a Zscaler board member, has also said, “We see tremendous opportunity in the rapidly growing cybersecurity industry, and after spending significant time in the space, we found Zscaler to be the leading cloud-based security solution for the world’s largest and most demanding customers — a true SaaS platform like that of Salesforce or Workday. We are looking forward to partnering with Jay and his team to accelerate growth, most immediately by introducing Zscaler to the potential customers and channel partners within our global network.”
The post Zscaler raises $100m in round led by TPG appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Getting Data Security Right By @KessAlan | @CloudExpo #Cloud
It seems like every time I write a blog, a new breach has occurred (for an up-to-date look at local, state and federal breaches I suggest you periodically review the Identity Theft Resource Center’s running list). Since I last penned a post, we’ve seen breaches of the Mayo Clinic, Citizen’s Bank, CVS and Arkansas BlueCross/BlueShield. To the average person, most breaches probably bleed together. If you’ve seen one breach, you’ve seen them all, right? If we’re going off of that logic, then one might assume all industries can take the same data security approach.
Media giant hoovers up analytics specialist for $500m
Advance is buying 1010data for $500m
Advance/Newhouse, the parent company of Advance Publications – owner or majority stakeholder in some of the world’s largest digital publications including Condé Nast and Reddit – announced this week it has acquired analytics and data warehouse specialist 1010data for $500m.
Advance said it intends to help scale 101data’s operations globally, with the capital being used to invest strongly in sales, marketing and engineering efforts.
“Advance believes that 1010data has a compelling vision for helping businesses unlock their true potential through data. It has created a truly innovative approach that is speeding this transition across industries,” said Nomi Bergman, president of Advance’s cable television affiliate, Bright House Networks, and a new member of 1010data’s Board.
“We believe that in the 21st century data and analytics platforms will be a core building block of all businesses. The opportunities that lie ahead for 1010data are boundless, and through our acquisition of 1010data, we are excited to partner with the company’s management team and provide the resources it needs to capitalize on all of them,” Bergman said.
1010data offers big data discovery and data sharing platforms as well as an integrated big data cloud service that can be used to analyse large datasets; it can also be plugged in to third party big data applications and mash up data from a range of sources.
The company claims to have over 750 customers across a range of sectors including telecoms, manufacturing and engineering.
Sandy Steier, co-founder and chief executive of 1010data said: “Advance is the perfect partner to help us maximize our growth potential as they fully recognize how revolutionary and impactful our technology can be. Becoming a part of Advance ensures that there will be no disruption to our customers, our employees or our business while enabling our organization to scale at an even faster rate. We are very excited about being able to leverage Advance’s significant resources to deliver an even better solution for our customers.”
Koding bags $10m to boost cloud-native IDE
Koding secured $10m in series B this week
Independent development environment provider Koding closed $10m in series B funding this week in a round led by Khosla Ventures.
Koding offers a platform that aims to bridge user-friendly collaboration features with a robust, device-agnostic development platform, and the service is hosted directly on AWS and DigitalOcean infrastructure.
500 Startups and existing investors Matrix Partners and RTP Ventures also participated in the funding round, which brings the total amount secured by the company since its founding to just under $30m.
As part of the most recent round, Ari Zilka, a partner at Khosla Ventures and formerly chief technology officer at big data specialist Hortonworks, will join the company’s board.
“The cloud-based development environment has dramatically shifted how software engineers write code and collaborate. The cloud provides an immersive environment that increases productivity without requiring any installation,” explained Nitin Gupta, Koding’s chief business officer in a recent blog post.
“Already, we have over a million software developers using Koding who, in aggregate, have written over a billion lines of code, spun up millions of virtual machines and consumed over eight petabytes of storage. Our recently forged partnerships with developer focused companies like DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS) help get Koding into the hands of even more developers worldwide.”
The company said it plans to use the funding to double down on developing its Koding for Teams offering, which brings new capabilities that allow developers to more easily on-board team members and build internal development communities across heterogeneous developer organisations.
Pivotal teams with Telstra on enterprise big data
Telstra and Pivotal are teaming up to push Cloud Foundry and big data services in Australia
Pivotal announced a partnership with Australian telco Telstra that will see the two firms jointly marketing Pivotal’s big data development services to Telstra enterprise customers.
Pivotal will also offer enterprise customers training at its newly established Pivotal Labs office in Sydney, Australia, its 16th globally.
The company said the move would help it reach a broader enterprise customer base in the region by leveraging Telstra’s existing local relationships and experience in the ICT sector.
“The arrival of Pivotal Labs in Australia presents a great opportunity for local organisations. Pivotal Labs will quickly become a software innovation hub for Australia’s largest enterprises in all industries to transform into great software companies – taking digital disruption to the next level,” said Melissa Ries, vice president and general manager APJ, Pivotal.
“Pivotal has a great relationship with Telstra, which is built on a foundation of shared visions. With Telstra’s involvement in the Cloud Foundry Foundation and our joint venture, we’re partnering to help Telstra’s customers transform into great software companies.”
The companies said that by using tools like Pivotal CF, the Cloud Foundry-based platform as a service (PaaS), and Pivotal Big Data Suite (BDS), enterprise customers will be able to improve how they develop their web and mobile services.
Kate McKenzie, chief operations officer at Telstra said: “In conjunction with our new Gurrowa Innovation Lab, Pivotal Labs will enhance our innovation offering for our customers and create a pipeline of skills to grow our development capabilities. Innovation at Telstra is about helping our customers get the best out of technology for the future and ultimately providing access to the best networks from which they can innovate, and the partnership will allow us to do just that.”