Cloud hosting has been in existence for 10 years. Going into its second decade, it’s time for something new. What’s the latest trend? Good old, plain dedicated servers – but rebuilt and reinvented.
Although it’s not required by any definition of a cloud, virtualization has become part and parcel of cloud hosting – not because it’s necessary for clouds, but merely because it’s very convenient.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
APCON Introduces IntellaFlex 100G Network Monitoring Solution | @CloudExpo @APCON #Cloud
“Enterprises and service providers are increasing bandwidth and capabilities at critical network hot spots. This is great for users, but there is a risk of less visibility for security monitoring,” said Richard Rauch, president and CEO of APCON.
With the launch of the new IntellaFlex 100G Ethernet monitoring solution, APCON’s IntellaFlex XR family provides complete network visibility and a wide range of features for traffic optimization to match the capacity of security and performance monitoring tools.
Platform9 Introduces Multi-Region Support for Private Clouds | @CloudExpo @Platform9Sys #Cloud
Platform9 has announced that Platform9 Managed OpenStack now gives enterprise IT the ability to segment and manage distributed data center “regions” from a single pane of glass. With this release, customers can define their own regions to reflect physical or logical boundaries. For example, data centers that are located in different geographical locations, support different teams, or run different hypervisors such as KVM and VMware, can be managed seamlessly within the same private cloud user interface.
Suppliers over-promise on cloud deliverables – survey
A recent survey from law firm Eversheds claims 27% of cloud deals have fallen through due to suppliers not meeting client expectations during contract negotiations.
Despite 77% of respondents claiming they intend to increase cloud spend over the next 18 months, the research claims that a number of deals have not come to fruition due to supplier over promising on what can be delivered within the agreement.
Differing views on what should and can be delivered are only coming to light in the final stages of contract negotiation, when buyers are finding out that suppliers cannot deliver on what had previously been promised.
On top of the 27% who have terminated talks, a further 10% said they were tempted to walk away from the deal because of the differences. Suppliers also backed up these statistics, as 57% of the supplier side respondents said that they had lost deals at the contract stage.
“The number of deals breaking down at the last minute is unnecessarily high given that customers and suppliers have typically reached agreement, at least in principle, before deals get to contract negotiation,” said Charlotte Walker-Osborn, Technology & Outsourcing Partner at Eversheds.
“In cloud negotiations, issues which are both legal and commercial in nature tend to come out during contractual discussions because this is when both parties take an in-depth look at the agreed parameters around the deal. Only then, can it become apparent that differing views may be shared on certain key areas such as data privacy and related security issues,” said Walker-Osborn.
Data protection and residency has once again proved to be a contentious issue, as 33% of the customers surveyed said this was the reason they walked away from the deal. Visibility over the suppliers supply chain was another reason, as 28% of customers claimed this was the reason for the breakdown.
“Cloud purchasers are anxious about where data is hosted for two reasons. The first is regulatory. Data protection and privacy regulations vary across jurisdictions, but most countries require companies to know where their data is hosted and being processed,” said Paula Barrett, Global Head of Privacy at Eversheds.
“Conscientious suppliers will ensure relevant regulatory requirements are covered by the contractual terms. However, some suppliers still fail to include fairly mandatory terms that the law requires their clients to have in place. The second reason is because government authorities in some jurisdictions have the right to access personal data, so it is natural that businesses are concerned about where their data will reside,” said Barrett.
The survey also hints that the mass market is still to be convinced of the reliability and robustness of cloud platforms, despite early adopters demonstrated the value. 48% of cloud buyers highlighted that they would like service credits to compensate for any losses in the event of a service outage as a failsafe, whereas only 20% of service providers were likely to include them in an agreement.
Despite the appetite for cloud services being present in the industry, a lack of clarity from suppliers at the outset has seemingly quashed a number of potential deals, which could potentially be avoided with suppliers taking a more proactive stance on data protection concerns, as well as a more sympathetic view of customer caution when implementing new technologies.
VMware Announces General Availability of Horizon 7
Yesterday, VMware announced the general availability of VMware Horizon 7. There are a number of new capabilities that are worth catching up on. According to our CTO Chris Ward, the biggest one is Instant Clone, which is a big architectural change vs. having to use View composer. A few other changes that VMware highlights are:
- Transformational user experience with Blast Extreme
- Applications with Modernized Lifecycle Management
- Smart Policies with Streamlined Access
For more information, here is VMware’s blog post from yesterday that covers what’s new with Horizon 7.
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Leading in 3D – A Framework for Digital Transformation By @DHDeans | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps
CEOs across the globe now view business technology as a key component of their growth strategies. That’s why the role of today’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) has become increasingly challenging. Mounting pressure to innovate has left many CIOs flat-footed — essentially playing catch-up trying to integrate new technologies, rather than driving them.
A recent International Data Corporation (IDC ) study examined CIO and Line of Business (LOB) executive perceptions of IT organizations, the changing role of IT leadership from being an traditional operational player to becoming a strategic partner in digital business transformation scenarios.
According to the IDC study, the way in which CIOs view themselves has a direct impact on how they envision their evolving IT leadership job and their relationship with key LOB executives.
Business Technology Innovation Disconnect
Of the 150 CIO survey respondents, 40.7 percent viewed themselves predominantly as custodians of operational infrastructure, 34 percent viewed themselves as service managers, and just 25.3 percent viewed themselves as business technology innovation officers.
Conversely, 40.9 percent of LOB respondents view their CIO as an innovation officer, with only 27.5 percent viewing their CIO as operational. IDC believes that this is indicative of the challenge that CIOs face in evolving their role – where having to meet operational requirements is holding some back from reaching the expectations of their business-oriented counterparts.
“CIOs who stay operational will find themselves further marginalized over the next three years. For these executives to stay relevant, they must shift their focus to transformation and innovation and incorporating those innovations into their stable infrastructures. ‘Just keeping the lights on’ will lead the business to find other sources for technology leadership and innovation,” said Mike Jennett , vice president at IDC.
Digital Transformation Leadership Framework
To help CIOs partner with and further educate the business, IDC has introduced the ‘Leading in 3D’ framework that enables CIOs to be directly engaged in every phase of business Digital Transformation – from innovation to hybrid cloud service delivery, with a special focus on IT’s ability to manage the transition from one to the other.
IDC predicts that through 2018, two-thirds of CIOs will have embraced Leading in 3D, which requires them to simultaneously Innovate, Integrate, and Incorporate:
- Promote business innovation through visionary technology leadership and agile development. Critical to the success of “Leading Innovation” is the ability to work with business partners at the speed of business change.
- Bridge the business and IT operations transformation with an integration agenda that transitions technology innovation to a stable, secure, and reliable business service for the enterprise. Critical to the success of “Leading Integration” is strategic architecture that serves as the framework for IT platforms.
- Lead incorporation by selectively streaming new technologies, processes and methodologies to enable the transformation of existing information technology and enterprise processes. Critical to the success of “Leading Incorporation” is achieving the appropriate balance of risk and reward in the change management of IT operations.
According to the IDC study findings, there are interesting correlations between how CIOs view themselves and how they view their main area of focus. Moreover, 67.2 percent of operational CIOs will be focusing on innovation, while only 26.3 percent of innovation CIOs will put their focus there.
As a result, IDC believes that operational CIOs are getting the message. To be competitive in this rapidly changing environment of digital transformation, the IT organization and the CIO must undergo a transition – from a legacy focus on operations and service brokering to a focus on partnership, innovation, and new digitally-enabled products and services.
Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement
“Our research notes a fundamental shift in the role of CIOs as seen by themselves and the business, because of the digital transformation. While many CIOs have embraced this change, there’s still a large percentage that will benefit from evaluating their organizations as well as their relationship with their business counterparts as they continue on this journey,” concluded, Jennett.
Successful CIOs of the future will be judged by their ability to manage all three of these connected disciplines on a continuous basis while anticipating the next wave of digital transformation. IT leadership will need to forge a lasting collaboration with business partners to drive the transformation engine – from old to new, from unstable to stable, and from experimental to operational.
According to the IDC assessment, the creation of broad IT transformation strategies needs to be coupled with a culture of continuous transition. Employing program management offices, DevOps, and other coordinated IT disciplines will help to speed change and deliver new products and services within existing business and technology processes.
Red Hat CEO pins 21% growth on hybrid cloud market
Red Hat demonstrated healthy growth in its quarterly earnings, with CEO James Whitehurst attributing the success to the growing hybrid cloud market.
The company reported Q4 revenues at $544 million and total revenues for the year at $2.05 billion, both an increase of 21% on the previous year (constant currency). It now claims to be the only open-source company to have breached the $2 billion milestone.
“Our results reflect the fact that enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies, and they are turning to Red Hat as their strategic partner as they do so,” said Whitehurst. “First, the fourth quarter marked our 56th consecutive quarter of revenue growth which contributed to Red Hat’s first year of crossing the $2 billion in total revenue milestone.”
While public cloud has been dominating the headlines in recent weeks, the Red Hat team remain positive that the hybrid cloud market will ultimately deliver on expectations. “Public cloud has been a great resource for us to reach new customers, including small and medium-sized businesses,” said Whitehurst.
“During meetings Frank (Frank Calderoni, CFO) and I have hosted over the quarter, investors have asked whether the public cloud is a positive driver for Red Hat. We firmly believe that it will be a hybrid cloud world, where applications will run across four – all four footprints; physical, virtual, public cloud, and private cloud.
“Our revenue from private IaaS, PaaS and cloud management technologies is growing at nearly twice as fast as our public cloud revenue did when it was at the same size.”
Although it is unsurprising that Red Hat strongly backs the hybrid cloud model, security and data protection concerns in the industry add weight to the position. Despite progress made in the delivery and management of public cloud platforms, recent research has shown that enterprise decision makers are still concerned about the level of security offered in public cloud, but also where the data will reside geographically. Both concerns are seemingly driven hybrid cloud adoption, giving enterprise the full control on how and where company critical data is stored.
Over the last 12 months, Ret Hat has also confirmed a number of partnerships with major players in the public cloud space to increase its footprint. Last year, a partnership was announced with Microsoft where it became a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, enabling customers to run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads on Microsoft Azure. In addition the Certified Cloud and Service Provider platform also has relationships with Google and Rackspace. Red Hat claims that these relationships have resulted in more than $100 million revenue, a 90% increase year-on-year.
“In Q4, we further expanded our technology offerings that can be consumed in the cloud. For instance, RHEL on-demand is activated on Azure in February,” said Whitehurst. “OpenShift, our PaaS solution, and our storage technology will be added to the Google cloud. And RHEL OpenStack platform is now available at RackSpace as a managed service.”
Despite increased competition in the market over recent years, Ret Hat has proved to be effective at holding onto customers. The largest 25 contracts that where up for renewal in the last quarter were all renewed and the new deals were 25% higher in the aggregate. The company also claims that 498 of the largest 500 deals over the last five years have also been removed.
“We never want to lose a deal, if we do, we never give up trying to win back the business,” said Calderoni. “This quarter, I am pleased to report that we closed a multi-million-dollar ‘win-back’ of one of those two former top deals.”
The company also estimates that revenues will grow to between $558 million and $566 million for Q1 and between $2.38 billion and $2.420 billion for the financial year.
Google announces data centre expansion plans: 12 more regions by 2017
(c)iStock.com/serg3d
Google has announced a major expansion of its cloud data centres, with two new regions to start running this year and another 10 to be available by the end of 2017.
The news comes days after a note from Synergy Research which found the US remains far out in front as the number one location for data centres. Google’s two upcoming launches will include one US site, a US Western region in Oregon, with another to be built in Tokyo.
“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,” wrote Google product manager Varun Sakalkar in a company blog post. “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 [and] performance.”
It has been a busy period for Google’s cloudy operations, with recent announcements of a client win in the form of Home Depot, as well as the news that Apple would move a portion of its data to the search giant from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The majority of the reaction to the news has not surprisingly been around Google’s attempts to catch up with AWS, which turned 10 years old earlier this month and is also looking to expand its data centre operations in the UK among other locations.
Responding to Google’s expansion of its data centre footprint, John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst and research director, said: “As we have reported previously Google lags far behind AWS and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market, and at least part of that was down to having a cloud data centre network that wasn’t as extensive.
“Google is now on a drive to help fix that – in addition to increasing its corporate focus on the cloud market. This was long overdue,” he added.
Parallels ConfigMgr Plugin v4.5: New Features
Guest blog by Matt Tinney, CEO & Lead System Center Architect of Windows Management Experts Parallels is proud of our partnerships within the SCCM community. Windows Management Experts, Inc. (WME) is a key partner with us here in the Seattle area. They are system integrators for companies committed to installing, implementing and more effectively managing their […]
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Terminal Server Printing Made Easy
Terminal Server Printing Made Easy The advent of virtualization has revolutionized the IT segment. With server-based computing, businesses are now able to centrally host applications and publish them to users, regardless of the device they use. Windows applications are now published on non-Windows clients such as iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. However, terminal server printing can […]
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