Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), has announced that the AWS Database Migration Service, a fully managed service that allows customers to migrate their production Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL databases from on-premises datacenters to AWS with virtually no downtime, is now available to all customers. Customers, including global enterprises and startups from a range of industries, used the AWS Database Migration Service preview to move more than 1,000 databases to the AWS Cloud since January 1, 2016. Many of these customers also used the AWS Schema Conversion Tool to switch database engines and break free from the cost and complexity of old guard commercial databases. To learn more about the AWS Database Migration Service, visit https://aws.amazon.com/dms.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
Oracle expands cloud offering into customer datacentres
Oracle launched Cloud at Customer, a new service designed to extend Oracle’s cloud into a customer’s datacentre.
The service allows companies to place an Oracle cloud server within their own datacentre to create a hybrid environment where customers can choose whether to run workloads on the Oracle cloud or on premise. Oracle claims the new offering will remove a number of barriers to cloud adoption, as the customer will retain control on what data is stored where, removing any residency or security concerns for business critical data.
“We are committed to helping our customers move to the cloud to help speed their innovation, fuel their business growth, and drive business transformation,” said Oracle’s President of Product Development Thomas Kurian. “Today’s news is unprecedented. We announced a number of new Cloud Services and we are now the first Public Cloud Vendor to offer organizations the ultimate in choice on where and how they want to run their Oracle cloud.”
The company claims it is the first in the industry to offer such a service and aims to address security and regulatory barriers for cloud adoption. Oracle stressed the service complies with many security and data regulations including FedRAMP for the US federal government, Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act.
Data security and residency has been a topic of healthy discussion in recent months following the EU decision to dismiss Safe Harbour and the introduction of its successor Privacy Shield. Oracle could be capitalizing on the concerns of cloud buyers as it claims the offering answers business, legislative and regulatory obstacles enterprise organizations face when considering the transition to a cloud platform.
The new product launch forms part of Oracle’s general cloud offensive. “Oracle is now selling more new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud revenue than any other company in the world including Salesforce.com,” said Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, during the quarterly earnings call.
“We are growing much faster than Salesforce.com, more than twice as fast. Because we sell into a lot more SaaS and PaaS market than they do. We compete directly with Salesforce.com in every segment of the SaaS customer experience market including sales, service and market.”
The big data and IoT opportunity is here – so don’t miss out on it
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The value of big data equity in the UK was estimated at £12 billion a year or 0.7 per cent of the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2012. Four years flew by and the second report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) has put the opportunity at £46 billion by 2020, or 2.2% of GDP – nearly four times the original value.
And that’s just big data analytics adoption. We’ve now put a value on what adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) could deliver to the UK economy in 2020 – a further £16 billion, so £62 billion in total.
Big data and IoT together are expected to generate £322 billion in revenue for the UK economy from 2015 to 2020. To put this in perspective, it’s twice the size of the combined education, NHS and defence budgets for 2014-15, and more than one-fifth (22%) of the UK’s net public debt (circa. £1.5 trillion in 2014-15).
This extra revenue to UK plc should be taken seriously when you consider how the UK government – as evidenced by The Chancellor’s recent Budget – is having to tighten spending, amid predictions of an economic slowdown.
Manufacturing bucks the trend
Big data and the IoT are expected to bring much needed relief to the manufacturing sector. Big data is expected to inject a healthy sum of £57 billion, along with £27 billion of IoT value by 2020.
This is largely driven by the diversity of firms in the industry and variety of areas in which efficiency gains can be achieved. Benefits are multifold. Over time, the industry should expect improvements in areas such as supply chain management and enhancements in customer intelligence.
For example, one of our customers provides cranes to ports and industries. By looking at sensor data from the cranes, it’s possible to detect in advance when they need repairs or maintenance carried out. This maximises the time they’re in service, reduces repair costs and optimises spare part availability.
Other key industry sectors set to benefit most are telecoms and retail.
Customer intelligence sparks telecoms adoption
The telecoms industry will experience the highest current rate of big data analytics and IoT adoption at 67% and 61% respectively. However, by 2020, retail banking is expected to leapfrog telecoms and become leaders in big data analytics adoption at 81%, while the telecoms sector remains ahead in IoT adoption at 81%.
There are plenty of other interesting findings and industry sector comparisons to be found in the report. What’s for certain over the coming years, is that more organisations from multiple industries will embrace data and IoT to improve decision-making that affects efficiency, risk management and new business opportunities.
So the real question is what’s holding some businesses back from doing this now?
Barriers to adoption
The skills gap is something we’re all aware of – we need more data scientists and people in the workplace now (as well as future graduates) with skills in handling and analysing data to meet the current demand.
Technology has helped in that the latest data visualisation solutions, for example, can be used by people who aren’t necessarily experts in statistics or data science. The outputs are easy to understand and solutions that have a predictive analytics capability built-in do much more than simply historical reporting. Cloud-based as a service offerings also allow organisations to effectively hire in the analytical expertise where they don’t have this in-house.
But a major barrier can be creating a valid business case. This may require the leadership and/or culture within an organisation to become more data driven. But often it can be how do we justify the investment, and how will new technology be integrated into what we have already?
A way forward
The truth is organisations can easily build a business case. It may be a very specific business problem that they know they can resolve with data, or in some cases it can be a more complex, big data issue. Using analytics as a service, through a product such as SAS Results, or enabling businesses to experiment with data through innovation labs, makes the process possible.
As our report clearly shows, many organisations will be adopting solutions to exploit big data and IoT over the next few years – but the ones that don’t risk being left behind by the competition.
Read more: Big data and IoT expected to raise more than £300bn to UK economy by 2020
Google plays catch-up with Cloud Machine Learning
Google has entered into the machine learning market with the alpha release of Cloud Machine Learning.
Built on top of the company’s open source machine learning system TensorFlow, the offering will allow customers to build custom algorithms the make predictions for their business, aiding decision making.
“At Google, researchers collaborate closely with product teams, applying the latest advances in machine learning to existing products and services – such as speech recognition in the Google app, search in Google Photos and the Smart Reply feature in Inbox by Gmail,” said Slaven Bilac, Software Engineer at Google Research. “At GCP NEXT 2016, we announced the alpha release of Cloud Machine Learning, a framework for building and training custom models to be used in intelligent applications.”
The system is already used in a number of Google’s current offerings, though it is later to market than its competitors. AWS launched its machine learning in April last year, while IBM’s Watson has been making noise in the industry for years.
Although later to market, Google has highlighted that it will allow customers to export their TensorFlow models to use in other settings, including their own on premise data centres. Other offerings operate in vendor lock-in situation, meaning their customers have to operate the machine-learning models they’ve built in the cloud through an API. Industry insiders have told BCN that avoiding vendor lock-in situations would be seen as a priority within their organization, which could provide Google with an edge in the machine-learning market segment.
Cloud Machine Learning’s launch builds on the growing trend towards advanced data analytics and the use of data to refine automated decision making capabilities. A recent survey from Cloud World Forum showed that 85% of respondents believe data analytics is the biggest game changer for marketing campaigns in the last five years, while 82% said that data would define the way in which they interact with customers.
The company is still behind Microsoft and AWS in the public cloud space, though recent moves are showing Google’s intent to close the gap. At GCP NEXT 2016, Google’s cloud chief Diane Greene told the audience that machine learning and security will form the back bone of her new sales strategy. “If your customer is embracing machine learning, it’d be prudent for you to embrace it too,” said Greene.
Siri vs. Cortana: Shoot-Out on the iPhone Revisited
Siri vs. Cortana Shoot-out Revisited – despite one disappointing setback, Cortana leaps ahead! Since my first Siri vs. Cortana shoot-out, Apple has revised Siri, Microsoft has revised Cortana, and Microsoft has released Cortana for the iPhone. Sounds like time for another shoot-out. So that we can compare the older shoot-out with a newer one, I […]
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Cloud Networking Adoption Drives Record 2015 Revenue and EPS | @Cloud @AristaNetworks #Cloud
Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE: ANET), has announced financial results for its fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2015.
Revenue of $245.4 million, an increase of 41.5% compared to the fourth quarter of 2014, and an increase of 12.8% from the third quarter of 2015.
Non-GAAP gross margin of 64.0%, compared to non-GAAP gross margin of 67.4% in the fourth quarter of 2014 and 65.5% in the third quarter of 2015.
GAAP gross margin of 63.6%, compared to GAAP gross margin of 67.1% in the fourth quarter of 2014 and 65.2% in the third quarter of 2015.
Maximize SaaS Revenue | @CloudExpo @_ANEXIA #IoT #SaaS #IaaS
SaaS companies can greatly expand revenue potential by pushing beyond their own borders. The challenge is how to do this without degrading service quality.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Adam Rogers, Managing Director at Anexia, will discuss how IaaS providers with a global presence and both virtual and dedicated infrastructure can help companies expand their service footprint with low “go-to-market” costs.
New Relic Delivers Innovations for IT Operations Teams | @CloudExpo @NewRelic #Cloud #DevOps
New Relic, Inc. has announced a set of new features across the New Relic Software Analytics Cloud that offer IT operations teams increased visibility, and the ability to diagnose and resolve performance problems quickly. The new features further IT operations teams’ ability to leverage data and analytics, as well as drive collaboration and a common, shared understanding between teams.
Software teams are under pressure to resolve performance issues quickly and improve availability, as the complexity of software architectures they manage ranges from more traditional on-premises IT systems to those now including public cloud. The New Relic Software Analytics Cloud provides a comprehensive monitoring platform allowing software teams to work together to monitor from different perspectives for any technology stack. For IT operations this includes proactively monitoring and identifying issues that may impact the performance of critical applications, understanding which customers may be impacted, and enabling them to collaborate with developers and DevOps teams to address an issue.
Googles continues public cloud charge with 12 new data centres
Google has continued its expansion plans in the public cloud sector after announcing it will open 12 new data centres by the end of 2017.
In recent weeks, Google has been expanding its footprint in the cloud space with rumoured acquisitions, hires of industry big-hitters and blue-chip client wins, however its new announcement adds weight to the moves. With two new data centres to open in Oregon and Tokyo by the end of 2016, and a further ten by the end of 2017, Google is positioning itself to challenge Microsoft and AWS for market share in the public cloud segment.
“We’re opening these new regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness,” said Varun Sakalkar, Product Manager at Google. “With these new regions, even more applications become candidates to run on Cloud Platform, and get the benefits of Google-level scale and industry leading price/performance.”
Google currently operates in four cloud regions and the new data centres will give the company a presence in 15. AWS and Microsoft have built a market-share lead over Google thanks in part to the fact that they operate in 12 and 22 regions respectively, with Microsoft planning to open a further five.
Recent findings from Synergy Research Group show AWS is still the clear leader in the cloud space at market share of 31%, with Microsoft accounting for 9% and Google controlling 4%. Owing to its private and hybrid cloud offerings, IBM accounts for 7% of the global market according to Synergy.
Growth at AWS was measured at 63%, whereas Microsoft and Google report 124% and 108% respectively. Industry insiders have told BCN that Microsoft and Google have been making moves to improve their offering, with talent and company acquisitions. Greater proactivity in the market from the two challengers could explain the difference in growth figures over the last quarter.
Alongside the new data centres, Google’s cloud business leader Diane Greene has announced a change to the way the company operates its sales and marketing divisions. According to Bloomberg Business, Greene told employees that Google will be going on a substantial recruitment drive, while also changing the way it sells its services, focusing more on customer interaction and feedback. This practice would not be seen as unusual for its competitors, however Google’s model has been so far built on the idea of customer self-service. The cloud sales team on the west coast has already doubled in size to fifty, with the team planning on widening this recruitment drive.
While Google’s intentions have been made clear over recent months, there are still some who remain unconvinced. 451 Group Lead Analyst Carl Brooks believes the company is still not at the same level as its competitors, needing to add more enterprise compatibility, compliance, and security features. “They are probably the most advanced cloud operation on the planet. It also doesn’t matter,” he said.
Who Owns Your Customer Database in the Cloud | @CloudExpo #Cloud
The question of who owns the data is partly determined by the kind of cloud infrastructure that is in place for your business.
The advantages that cloud based hosting brings needs to reiteration. Cloud hosting is infinitely scalable, needs radically lower CapEx and with distributed hosting, it is much more fail-proof than data hosted on your premise. But the recent legal spar between Apple and the US government has brought the limelight once again back on the debate about ownership of data. In the case of Apple, the fight is over decrypting the iPhone used by a criminal in order for the government to hack in. But the case may as well be between law enforcement and a web host over data stored by your customers on your startup service.