SYS-CON Events announced today that eCube Systems, the leading provider of modern development tools and best practices for Continuous Integration on OpenVMS, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
eCube Systems offers a family of middleware products and development tools that maximize return on technology investment by leveraging existing technical equity to meet evolving business needs. Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies turn to eCube Systems to reduce risk, extend ROI and increase productivity as they consolidate existing capabilities and evolve legacy systems to meet modern requirements for productivity, flexibility and modern best practices.
Monthly Archives: April 2016
What SAP HANA Cloud Integration Means to Enterprise IT | @CloudExpo #Cloud
SAP SE has taken tremendous strides toward a completely unified stack with SAP HANA. By focusing technological research and product development efforts on their own platforms first, SAP is able to deliver an industry leading solution to market with advanced functionality while staying philosophically aligned with their overall vision and trajectory.
In light of SAP’s strategy, the release of HANA Cloud Integration (HCI) may seem surprising. Businesses want to know whether HCI signals a change in SAP’s strategy, and what it means for their long-term IT strategy.
In addition to SAP HANA’s renowned database services, companies benefit from its full range of capabilities, including optimized data analytics, modeling, integration and a native application development platform. Coupled with seamless SAP product integration, this offers organizations increased capabilities that are unmatched by any traditional RDBMS platforms.
In light of SAP’s strategy, the release of HANA Cloud Integration (HCI) may seem surprising. Businesses want to know whether HCI signals a change in SAP’s strategy, and what it means for their long-term IT strategy.
The Problem with the Unified Stack
SAP is not the only business software provider moving toward a catalog that would allow their customers to run a homogenous operational landscape — competitors like Oracle and Microsoft have been moving in the same direction.
But while the benefits of a unified SAP stack are appealing, many companies run on a foundation of disparate platforms and technologies. Often, processes are facilitated by customized interfaces and/or technologies that span several software and cloud vendors. As such, many face challenges as they look for ways to gain competitive advantage without disrupting processes that were built on a multitude of technologies, and are supported by specifically trained staff.
The Role of HANA Cloud Integration
While SAP will continue to focus efforts on its own technologies, it recognizes that the business world is reliant on a wide range of systems, software, and processes. HANA Cloud Integration addresses this by providing connectivity across multiple on premise and cloud solutions. Companies are now able to integrate data across their IT landscapes, while addressing cross-organizational, and business-to-business scenarios.
HCI leverages SAP HANA Cloud clustering technology to handle data transformation, runtime processing, transformation and routing of messages between relevant systems, while ensuring that customer data is segregated and secure.
How HCI is Reshaping Enterprise IT
HCI has the potential to substantially reduce the cost and complexity of enterprise IT infrastructure. It is already simplifying long term IT planning and reducing TCO by allowing customers to address process integration, data services, and middleware needs with a subscription-based license model.
Out-of- the-box integration is available via a web based Integration Content Catalog containing content for SAP and 3rd party on premise systems, and cloud solutions. This removes the burden of acquiring additional hardware and hiring or training integration skills. Incongruent landscapes and environments are no longer a cost prohibitive barrier to business flows, data movement, and transformation.
The Future of Enterprise IT
SAP and its competitors will continue to move toward unified product stacks, but HCI signals an awareness of the need for a universally accessible and compatible integration layer that harnesses the power and flexibility of the SAP HANA Cloud. There are plenty of advantages to unified deployments, but there will also always be particular use cases and cross-organizational situations where it’s not a practical solution.
Companies with a complex technology stack need to weigh the cost savings and ease of integration offered by HCI along with other factors when formulating a medium and long-term IT strategy. HCI can also be an important factor in partnerships or client relationships between businesses, as it gives organizations the ability to easily overcome technological differences.
Research argues IT hasn’t shrugged off cost cutting reputation yet
(c)iStock.com/Marcela Barsse
The divide between the IT and line of business departments, and the role of the IT department today, has frequently come in for scrutiny. Yet according to new research from Claranet, the role of IT continues to be one of cost cutting.
The survey, which polled 900 IT leaders across Europe, found almost half (46%) identify cost reduction as a core function for IT today, a number which has risen sharply from 34% the previous year. In terms of other priorities, revenue generation as an important role for IT to play was only cited by 29% of respondents, while only a quarter (25%) said they should help increase customer loyalty.
Not surprisingly, Claranet argues the need for a managed service provider to deal with the imbroglio between business and IT. “Any business looking to digitally transform their processes must have the right partners and suppliers in place to carry out those standard tasks universal to IT departments. By working with a managed service provider, CIOs can effectively outsource this work and spend more time working on strategy and revenue generating activities,” said Michel Robert, Claranet UK managing director.
“It is clear from the data that the focus on cost reduction and ‘keeping the lights on’ we witnessed in last year’s report has been maintained and, for many, has actually increased,” he added. “It goes without saying that costs are important, but it’s critical that IT departments can reposition themselves internally as enablers of business agility and innovation, rather than as cost centres.”
The position of IT as more of a traditional berth in keeping the lights on does appear somewhat out of date when factoring the maturation of the cloud market – but some old habits die hard. A recent study from 451 Research argues colocation, usually considered dead in the water with the rise of more affordable data centres, as the “nexus” of cloud and enterprise IT.
[session] Building Your Bimodal Digital Future By @Interoute | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Traditional IT, great for stable systems of record, is struggling to cope with newer, agile systems of engagement requirements coming straight from the business.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, William Morrish, General Manager of Product Sales at Interoute, will outline ways of exploiting new architectures to enable both systems and building them to support your existing platforms, with an eye for the future. Technologies such as Docker and the hyper-convergence of computing, networking and storage creates a platform for consolidation, migration and enabling digital transformation.
HPE and Blackstone agree $825 million deal for Indian IT services business
HPE has announced its intention to sell its majority stake in Mphasis in a deal with Blackstone, believed to work in the region of $825 million.
The company said that Blackstone has agreed to purchase at least 84% of its stake in Mphasis for INR 430 per share. Blackstone will purchase the maximum amount of the remaining 16% stake that is permitted by Indian securities laws and subject to the outcome of a mandatory tender offer between signing and closing. Assuming the values are correct, HPE’s in the Indian business would be values in the region of $825 million.
Indian IT Services company Mphasis has been part of the HPE group since 2008, after its parent company EDS was wholly acquired by HPE. The company had 23,000 staff at the end of the quarter, delivering both business process outsourcing and IT services.
“While our financial relationship is changing, the business and commercial relationship with Mphasis remains an important part of our service delivery strategy,” said Mike Nefkens, GM of HPE Enterprise Services. “We remain committed to our strategic partnership with Mphasis and to providing our customers with the high level of service and support they expect from HPE.”
It is believed that the deal represents a move from HPE to remove business components which do not line with future business objectives. In recent weeks, the company has made moves to improve its position in a number of markets including cloud infrastructure equipment market and machines learning. While the deal may represent HPE moving away from the Indian IT services market, it will not affect the commercial relationship between the two companies.
HPE plans to renew the current master services agreement with Mphasis for another five years in connection with this transaction. It is estimated that HPE business accounted for 24 percent of the Indian company’s total revenue of rupees 15 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015.
[webinar] Operationalizing Advanced Analytics on the Cloud | @CloudExpo @Informatica #Cloud
The adoption of cloud analytics is accelerating in companies of all sizes and across industries. For an increasing number of companies in all industries around the globe, their center of gravity for mission-critical business data is moving to cloud applications. Companies are looking to use cloud analytics solutions to accelerate the delivery of actionable business insights. Cloud offers strong advantages in terms of speed and agility. Hear from UBM how they have implemented their Cloud Analytics environment using Amazon Redshift and visualize it via powerful dashboards using Tableau.
Korea to mount challenge in AI industry
Korea has announced plans to invest roughly 100 billion won (approximately $87.2 million) to foster the development of supercomputers in the country, according to the Korea Times.
Following the 5-game Go match between Google’s AlphaGo programme and Go World Champion Lee Se-dol, there has been a rise in interest in AI within the country. The attention has seemingly prompted the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning to invest 10 billion won annually for the next 10 years to boost the growth of artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet-of-Things technologies and other emerging industries through supercomputers.
The Go match would appear to have raised the profile in a country which is already in the process of bolstering its cloud computing credentials. At a cloud conference, the ministry also announced plans to increase the adoption of cloud computing from 6.4% to 13% over the next 12 months, as well as targeting international growth for Korean cloud computing companies.
The ministry has outlined a plan to develop a supercomputer with a data-processing speed of 1 petaflop (PF) in five years, eventually reaching 30 PF by 2025. The 1 petaflop supercomputer could be utilized in such use cases as predicting maritime and landslide-related disasters. It is believed that the supercomputer project has been granted state-level importance as more than 95% of Korea’s market for high-performance computers is controlled by overseas firms. The country’s market for high-performance computing is estimated at 260 billion won for 2015, accounting for 2.5% of the global total.
Google’s publicity stunt is only one of a number is recent months to demonstrate the potential and also challenges of AI. While Google’s stunt could be deemed a success, Microsoft’s twitter inspired AI bot Tay was less so. Tay highlighted to the industry that while there has been progress in the development and deployment of AI, there are still some challenges which persist. It would appear programming morals, values as well as the sense of right and wrong is one of the challenges which remain within AI.
The Korean government would appear to be targeting cloud computing and other emerging technology markets for future growth. The ministry has highlighted that as little as 6.4% of Korean companies currently utilize cloud computing technologies, representing a huge area of growth for domestic cloud computing organizations, as well as any international players who are active in south east Asia.
What the buzz is DevOps?
In an industry where there seems to be a constant conveyor belt of buzzwords, you’ll struggle to find one that is currently more widely used that DevOps.
In its simplest form, DevOps is, among other things, a business practise which ensures greater collaboration between the development and operations function within the organization, the Holy Grail for most businesses! Development often considers operations too regimented, and operations tends to consider developers too wishy-washy. Finding a middle ground can be a tricky task.
But this is where DevOps fits perfectly; a cultural shift which enables collaboration between development and operations. It’s an ideology which strengthens communication, collaboration, integration and automation.
There are various nuances of the definition, but is more or less the same irrelevant of who you are talking to, but the use-case can vary. Not dramatically, but the output of DevOps can depend on the organization which you belong to, and the business case for the cultural change within the organization itself.
What is refreshing is that DevOps seems to be one of few concepts/technologies/ideologies which doesn’t seem to focus on being more cost effective. Almost every use case for DevOps focuses on proactive business benefits, as opposed to simply reducing CAPEX/OPEX.
The business applications for DevOps are potentially limitless, though here, we’ll focus on three areas; speed of delivery, improved quality and greater control/security.
First and foremost, speed. Speed is defining almost every facet of the digital business landscape, as well as consumer expectations. If you’re not working fast enough, your boss will start looking over your shoulder, and if you’re not releasing products fast enough your customers will buy elsewhere. In short, if you’re not fast, you’re not in business.
“DevOps enables IT to move applications from development and into production as quickly as possible,” said Brett Hofer, Global DevOps Practise Lead at Dynatrace.
“DevOps can also ensure testing doesn’t occur too late in the development lifecycle, to maximise its potential value. If you don’t integrate automated testing throughout development, operations teams will have to repeat tests manually every time a configuration is made, and problems will be found too late to make vital changes,” said Hofer.
The concept of DevOps brings development and operations teams together, ensuring that the team are working in a complimentary manner. The essence of collaboration which is driven by DevOps allows teams to work towards the same objectives to ensure that product delivery is more efficient.
“If companies align toolsets so teams are able to share insights and cooperate effectively, they can ensure everyone is working toward the same goals and that everyone is measured against the same benchmarks. With a unified view of performance data across teams, DevOps gives employees a unified comprehensive outlook that translates into an overall competitive advantage,” said Hofer.
Speed to market is all well and good, but this does not necessarily guarantee you will have the most effective product. An alternative objective for DevOps is evolution and continuous evaluation.
“As a DevOps user, Salesforce has seen benefits in several areas,” said Pauline Dufour, EMEA Developer Relations team at Salesforce. “The continual iteration, testing and collaboration that DevOps involves means it is much easier to incorporate customer feedback into products and to do this more quickly.”
“This has a big impact on our customers as we really do include much of their feedback into our product design and upgrades,” said Dufour. “The DevOps approach also enables us to be more innovative and nimble – values that are core to our company. Continual collaboration and iteration means that we are able to deliver continual innovation.”
While there are other uses for the concept, Salesforce have seemingly prioritized product relevance, keeping themselves ahead of competitors. Here, DevOps enables the team to update the product offering, building in new features and answering the call of customer feedback, while minimizing downtown and disruption to customers.
“In fact we believe that unless businesses adopt an open, integrated approach they will find themselves displaced by digital disruptors, as we’ve seen with Uber and Hailo in the taxi industry,” said Dufour. “For organisations with a less collaborative and open culture, DevOps may be harder to implement, but I believe it is definitely worth the effort – it can turn your development into a competitive advantage.”
Alongside Salesforce, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) have also utilised this methodology of continuous development to develop its new product offering Digital Content Store. The offering is being trialled currently by five universities, and will enable CLA’s customers to more effectively manage extracts which are under licence, as well as making the content more widely available for the students.
“I’d define DevOps as a culture which enables IT (as a whole, not just Development and Ops) to be more productive and efficient,” said Adam Sewell, IT Director at the CLA. “Which in turn means they can be more reactive to changes in the market, more responsive in terms of delivering solutions to customer (e.g. by taking feedback from customers actually using new products early on in the product lifecycle and being able to develop and release new features faster and with confidence) and ultimately, be more innovative as a business.”
As with every other aspect of the community, security is another consideration here. While most people would now consider themselves cloud experts, let’s not forget that it is just entering the mass market. Most buyers are continually concerned with security, robustness and reliability. DevOps presents a very simple solution.
“In product development data has to be both accessible and secure,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO at Actifio. “It’s a tricky balancing act, made all the more difficult by excess physical copy growth. More data copies will just increase the ‘attack surface’. So the idea is to create fewer physical copies, decrease the number of security targets, mask sensitive data, create an audit trail and reduce overall risk.
“The control of sensitive data starts with the reducing excess physical copies. What’s essential is that the system incorporates all key technical standards and multiple levels of data security that will address physical, virtual and hybrid environments. It’s fast, simple to understand and operate. It supports and helps to reinforce broader enterprise security strategies.”
Although the question of cost will always arise, as we can see from the examples above, early adopters of cloud technologies and derived methodologies (including DevOps), can create new business opportunities, launching brands into new markets and attracting new customers. Cloud, DevOps and all the other buzzwords in this space are more than just a means of reducing cost.
NTT achieves SAP Global Certification
NTT Comms has achieved SAP Global Certification for hosting services, cloud services and SAP HANA operations services.
The certification will enable NTT to build and manage SAP applications by utilizing the company’s enterprise cloud and its Global Management One platform. The offering will be made available on all NTT infrastructures across private, public and hybrid clouds, through a consumption-based delivery model.
“We’re set to see more organizations place key infrastructure and applications in the cloud. However, for global enterprises it is often a difficult and complex journey,” said Damian Skendrovic, CEO at NTT Comms Managed Services. “Our new cloud solutions for SAP put our customers in pole position to migrate to the cloud and manage their applications more effectively. This ensures that business operations are enhanced as quickly as possible and without disruption.”
To achieve the certification, a provider’s cloud platform must undertake comprehensive testing by SAP to authorize the integration with its complete application set. Aside from the company’s infrastructure being tested against the standards, NTT’s technical staff in the EMEA, Americas and Asia Pacific regions were also placed under the same scrutiny.
Outside of the managed services business unit, the NTT team have continued efforts to diversify its revenue channels and grow its business in new markets. NTT Data recently announced plans to acquire Dell Services for $3.06 billion, as it prioritized growth in international markets.
“NTT Data is pleased with the unique opportunity to acquire such high-calibre talent, and a corporate culture that shares common values with NTT Data, with emphasis on client first, foresight, teamwork and a commitment to innovation,” said Toshio Iwamoto, President and CEO of NTT Data Corporation. “Welcoming Dell Services to NTT DATA is expected to strengthen our leadership position in the IT Services market and initiates an important business relationship with Dell.”
The acquisition is the fourth made by NTT over the course of 2016, though it would appear that EMC are not in such a favourable position. Dell Services as a business unit was reportedly to be valued in the region of $5 billion, which could highlight Dell’s urgency in completing the sale. If reports are correct, it would appear NTT Data has negotiated a good deal.
Angular 2 Workshop at @ThingsExpo | #IoT #Angular2 #TypeScript #JavaScript
SYS-CON Events announced today the How to Create Angular 2 Clients for the Cloud Workshop, being held June 7, 2016, in conjunction with 18th Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
Angular 2 is a complete re-write of the popular framework AngularJS. Programming in Angular 2 is greatly simplified. Now it’s a component-based well-performing framework. The immersive one-day workshop led by Yakov Fain, a Java Champion and a co-founder of the IT consultancy Farata Systems and the product company SuranceBay, will provide you with everything you wanted to know about Angular 2.