Monthly Archives: June 2016

Apache Spark, Artificial intelligence, Big Data, Cortana, Micrsoft Azure, News & Analysis

Microsoft launches Spark for Azure HDInsight and pushes into consumer AI

CortanaAlmost 12 months after releasing the public preview of Spark for Azure HDInsight Microsoft has announced general availability of the proposition to the industry, as well as extending Cortana’s offering to the Xbox.

Making the announcement on the Azure blog, Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing Manager for Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing, outlined the improvements made on the offering as well as the company’s efforts to make big data easy and more approachable. The company claims the Hadoop and Spark cloud service is now an enterprise-ready solution which is fully managed, secured, and highly available.

“Since we announced the public preview, Spark for HDInsight has gained rapid adoption and is now 50% of all new HDInsight clusters deployed,” said Chiu. “With GA (General Availability), we are revealing improvements we’ve made to the service to make Spark hardened for the enterprise and easy for your users. This includes improvements to the availability, scalability, and productivity of our managed Spark service.”

Features for the new services include new capabilities to the YARN resource manager to create an open source Apache licensed REST web service, as well as integrations between Spark and Azure Data Lake Store to increase scalability, Spark and Data Lake Store to increase security, Jupyter (iPython) notebooks and Power BI to build interactive visualizations over data of any size.

Alongside the Spark announcement, the Microsoft team has also ventured into the consumer AI market as Cortana will now be available on Xbox One, Xbox Live and Windows Stores. Starting with a limited Xbox Preview audience for Xbox One, the offering will be more widely released to the Xbox app (beta) on Windows 10 over the course of the summer.

Starting out with U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Germany and Spain, Cortana voice commands on Xbox One will work with both headsets and Kinect. Firstly users will be able to find new games, see what your friends are up to, start a party and accomplish common tasks, though new features will be adding over time.

Despite the company suffering a very public set-back in the AI world with the malfunction of Tay, the team have pressed forward, seemingly prioritizing AI for new features throughout the portfolio. CEO Satya Nadella stated at the Microsoft Build 2016 event AI would feature heavily in future investments, as the team target a Conversation-as-a-Platform proposition. The Cortana Intelligence Suite, which was launched at the event, allows developers to build apps and bots which interact with customers in a personalized way, but also react to real-world developments in real-time.

“As an industry, we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence,” said Nadella. “At Microsoft, we call this Conversation-as-a-Platform, and it builds on and extends the power of the Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.”

News & Analysis, Operator, Postpaid, Subscribers, T-Mobile

T-Mobile exchanges stock for referrals in pursuit of new subscribers

GrowthT-Mobile US has launched its new #GetThanked initiative to engage existing customers, offering various rewards including stock in the company.

Building on the company’s view that its competitors only offer rewards as an incentive for subscribers to spend more money, the T-Mobile initiative rewards customers simply for being customers. While those who want to participate in the Stock-Up initiative do not have to spend any money, they do have to ensure their family and friends sign up to a post-paid contract, in a similar manner social media uses viral marketing to promote apps and games.

“Get ready for a gratitude adjustment, America! This Un-carrier move is all about giving you a good thanking! No strings. No gotchas. Just ‘thank you for being a customer!’” said John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile. “At T-Mobile, we already wake up every day working for our customers—so I’ve decided to make it official and turn T-Mobile customers into T-Mobile owners by offering them stock. And we’re thanking customers every week with cool stuff from brands people love. For free. Every Tuesday!”

Newer customers will receive one share for every successful referral, whereas those who have been customers for five years or more will receive two. An individual can receive up to 100 shares a year on the scheme, which is managed by T-Mobile’s brokerage partner, LOYAL3. Aside from the shares, subscribers can also receive more conventional rewards including free in-flight, Domino’s pizza, holidays to Las Vegas, hiking trips to Machu Picchu, as well as other prizes.

T-Mobile currently accounts for 15.8% of the US market share, according to statistics from Ovum’s WCIS service, which has been steadily increasing from 13.9% in June 2014. The Un-carrier initiative was launched in March 2013, seemingly as a means to differentiate the brand in the US, made stronger strides into the post-paid market and increase brand loyalty. While the stock initiative could be perceived by some as a PR stunt, it could have an impact on brand loyalty, as customers may feel more affinity to T-Mobile should they own a small percentage of the company, as well as acquiring new post-paid customers.

The overall Un-carrier strategy itself would appear to be a successful initiative, as the company recently reported healthy Q1 results including subscriber gain, revenue growth, churn reduction and an improved forecast for the remainder of 2016. The company claims it acquired 2.2 million customers over the period, marking its 12th consecutive quarter of over 1 million customer acquisitions. Ovum suggests T-Mobile were amongst the biggest winners of Q1 with AT&T bringing in 1.8 million new customers, Verizon 2.2 million and Sprint just 500,000.

Data migration, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

82% of C-suite say public cloud is the way forward

Silhouette Businessman Holding PuzzleResearch from HyTrust claims 82% of C-suite execs are to increase the number of workloads their organization hosts on public cloud, reports Telecoms.com.

The transition to a cloud-based mentality and business model has given rise to arguably one of the most influential brands in the world; AWS. That is not to say Amazon as a brand wasn’t influential before the rise of the cloud; more the concept of the cloud made Amazon a major player in the Enterprise IT world.

In April, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky delivered the quarterly earnings call which outlined the team’s belief the AWS business unit would break through the $10 billion barrier. While this number does only represent roughly 10% of the company’s annual revenues, it demonstrates the progress of the cloud industry on the whole.

But the cloud is still seen as a proposition which is mainly utilized by the technologically advanced organizations, so what’s holding it back? The first answer for most would be security, but this might not be the case.

A recent survey from HyTrust highlighted while there may still be concerns for decision makers in trusting the cloud, this is certainly not holding these organizations back from investing. 42% of C-suite executives (CEO, CFO, CIO etc.) say critical server workloads have already been virtualized in their environments; for IT systems administrators and engineers, that number is 65%.

Data and security breaches are still top of the list of concerns when considering such a move, but the survey also highlighted 74% of respondents are planning to move (new or additional) workloads to a public cloud in 2016. This statistic is also weighted more towards the boardroom, as executives would appear to be more bullish in their cloud ambitions than other levels within the business. 82% of C-suite executives who were surveyed believe they will migrate additional workloads to the public cloud in 2016, compared to 66% at director level and 73% at administrator or engineer level.

For most, the C-suite would generally be perceived as the more risk adverse individuals within the business, having been exposed to the stakeholders and media alike when something does go wrong, however the statistics may demonstrate a more general acceptance of cloud computing throughout the business. Security has always been a concern of organizations since the beginning of the cloud revolution, though it would appear decision makers are now okay with accepting 100% secure is impossible and the new objectives should be to remain as secure as possible, consistently.

In terms of the top players within the industry, there are few surprises as to what brand decision makers are leaning towards during 2016. The only difference from many previous reports is the inclusion of VMware vCloud Air, which made an appearance in second accounting for 24% of the respondents, pushing Google Cloud out of the top three. Microsoft Azure was top of the list representing 32% of the vote, whereas the widely recognized market leader AWS sits in third, bringing in 22%.

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ContentMX to Offer Free Marketing Planning Session to Cloud Expo Sponsors, Exhibitors and Resellers

ContentMX, the marketing technology and services company that drives more conversations through their focus on the relevancy of content, today announced the that they are offering free marketing planning sessions to all Cloud Expo sponsors, exhibitors and resellers.
“Statistics indicate that 85 percent of trade show leads are not followed up on” said Jeff Mesnik, President of ContentMX, “and yet companies cite lead generation as the main reason they attend tradeshows. The disconnect is that companies do not have a lead follow-up plan, and when 80% of leads don’t buy until after the 5th contact with a company, they are leaving money on the show floor.”

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Cloud Centric Data Management | @CloudExpo @Commvault #DataCenter #Storage

As organizations shift towards IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. Commvault can ensure protection, access and E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
In his general session at 18th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist – Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships at Commvault, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.

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Assessing the opportunities and pain points presented by a multi-cloud strategy

(c)iStock.com/TERADAT SANTIVIVUT

A study released by VMTurbo argues more than half (57%) of organisations polled do not have a multi-cloud strategy in place.

The survey, which polled 1,368 organisations, also found 35% had no private cloud strategy while 28% did not have a public cloud strategy. VMTurbo was keen to note, however, that not having a strategy in this instance did not mean organisations had not examined a cloud strategy before dismissing it and sticking with on-prem; they had given adoption ‘little or no thought at all’.

31% said they had a mix of public cloud and on-prem, while an additional 28% of respondents said they did not use public cloud. 2.5% said they used only public cloud.

Responses were interesting when it came to deciding what wouldn’t be part of the public cloud first data strategy. For smaller organisations, data was generally allowed but not when it was HIPAA regulated or requested by a customer, but for those with 201 to 1000 employees and 1,001 or more employees, many responses indicated that no data could reside in the public cloud. For organisations of all sizes, compliance – especially HIPAA – and cost were key reasons why they were reticent to use public cloud.

Only 7.8% of respondents said they have not built a public cloud within their organisation, while 39% said they planned and implemented their private cloud between one and two years. Not surprisingly, larger organisations are paying for greater functionality in their private cloud; hosting VMs was the most popular among businesses of all sizes (90% for large, 67% for small), while SaaS (76% and 38% respectively) and PaaS integration (55% and 23% respectively) had similar trends. Firms of up to 200 employees only tended to have more features to their private cloud than those with 201 to 1000 workers.

Naturally, VMTurbo advocates a multi-cloud strategy as the answer, yet three in five organisations (60%) said they take over a year to plan and build their multi-cloud offerings. 6% of respondents admitted their infrastructure took more than three years to complete. 31% said they own or plan to build a multi-cloud.

“What is clear from the data is that differences in organisational structure, asset inheritance and application requirements all impact the financial effect of public and private cloud adoption,” the report notes, adding: “Multi-cloud, and eventually hybrid cloud, must of necessity reconcile these trade-offs to strike the optimal blend of capital and operational expense; application availability, reliability and performance; security and compliance and manageability.”

You can find a link to the full report here (email required).

AI, Artificial intelligence, Big Data, cognitive computing, IBM, Interactive Advertising, News & Analysis, Watson

IBM launches interactive ads on Watson

Robotic hand, accessing on laptop, the virtual world of information. Concept of artificial intelligence and replacement of humans by machines.IBM has announced the launch of Watson Ads to harness the AI potential of its cognitive computing platform and create interactive ads, personalized to individual customers. The first offerings of the initiative will be made available through The Weather Company sub-brand.

Personalized advertising has proved to be big business in recent months as brands aim to move away from the blanket marketing approach, as towards a proposition where one-to-one communications are the norm. IBM believe Watson’s ability to understand and comprehend natural language will enable advertisers to interact with customers on a more personal level, and also on a wide scale.

“The dawn of cognitive advertising is truly a watershed moment. Now as part of IBM, we have even more tools and technologies at our disposal to inspire innovations within advertising, artificial intelligence and storytelling,” said Domenic Venuto, GM of Consumer products at The Weather Company. “This is a huge opportunity to expose consumers to all of the surprising and delightful experiences that Watson has in store for them – and to make advertising a truly valuable interaction for both our fans and our marketing partners, which is always our goal.”

IBM claim the new proposition will aide advertiser in numerous ways including a better understanding of brand perception and customer favourability, helping customers make a more informed decision, improve overall experience, optimize creative and advertising strategies, as well as helping marketers use data more effectively.

As part of the initiative, the team will also create the Watson Ads Council, a collection of marketers from various verticals, who will act as a sounding board for the latest innovations leveraging Watson Ads and cognitive advancements in advertising.

“Transforming ourselves and industries is part of The Weather Company DNA,” said Jeremy Steinberg, Global Head of Sales at The Weather Company. “We’ve embraced big data and leveraged it to improve every aspect of our business, from forecast accuracy to ad targeting. Now we’ve set our sights on cognition. We believe human interaction is the new ‘search,’ and that cognitive advertising is the next frontier in marketing – and we’re leading the charge to make it a reality.”

Watson Ads will launch first exclusively across The Weather Company properties, but this is expected to have broad implications for other marketing channels, including out of home, television, connected cars and social media platforms.

AWS, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Service Outage

Aussies lose AWS for six hours

amazon awsAWS’ Australian customers suffered an outage over the course of the weekend for approximately six hours due to a power outage which coincided with adverse weather conditions.

The cause of the outage has not been officially confirmed, though did occur at the same time as a storm system that ran from Brisbane to the NSW South Coast which caused widespread flooding, was limited to the Sydney data centre roughly between 11.30pm 4.30am (PST) on June 4.

On the company’s status page it stated, “We are investigating increased connectivity issues for EC2 instances in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region,” at 10.47pm as well as, “We can confirm that instances have experienced a power event with a single availability zone AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region. Error rates for the EC2 APIs have improved and launches of new EC2 APIs instances are succeeding within the other Availability Zones in the Region,” at 11.49pm PST. Full connectivity was not reported until 4.43am PST.

Although the company has not since commented on the episode, the status page on the website currently states all services are up and running. The outage impacted a number of core and value add services including EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, ElastiCache, Redshift, Relational Database Service, Route 53 Private DNS, CloudFormation, CloudHSM, Database Migration Service, Elastic Beanstalk and Storage Gateway.

While there have been a number of outages in recent months, AWS has seemingly faired pretty well avoiding headlines for the most part. Google appeared to be taking the route of damage control in April following an 18 minute outage, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took to twitter last month to apologize for his company’s 12 hour outage and Apple customers lost numerous iCloud services for seven hours earlier this month.

AWS Outage

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AWS EC2 falls over in Sydney for six hours, stormy weather blamed

(c)iStock.com/DWalker44

Amazon Web Services (AWS) took a hit in its Sydney region for six hours over the weekend, according to official status updates, with stormy weather being blamed as the source of the problem.

The alarm was first raised on June 4 at 2247 PDT – or 1547 on June 5 Sydney time – with AWS announcing it was investigating increased connectivity issues for EC2 instances in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 region. An hour later, a “power event” was cited as the culprit, with power restored 45 minutes after that and periodic updates appearing until a message at 0443 PDT on June 5, saying the majority of the instances had been fixed. The issues hit various AWS services, including ElastiCache, CloudFormation and Database Migration Service.

“On June 4th at 10:25 PM PDT a significant number of EC2 instances and EBS volumes within a single availability zone in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 region experienced a loss of power,” AWS confirmed, adding: “A couple of unexpected issues prevented our automated systems from recovering the remaining instances and volumes.

“The team was able to fix these issues, and by 8:00 AM PDT, all but a small number of instances and volumes were recovered.”

AWS currently employs five regions in Asia Pacific, with 12 availability zones available overall. Three of these exist in Australia, all of which are in Sydney. Some customers on Twitter were bemoaning this relative lack of coverage across Australia; Microsoft, in comparison, has only two Azure zones in the country but in New South Wales and Victoria respectively.

Australia, in comparison to the majority of Asia Pacific nations, has a relatively good infrastructure; the country placed fourth in the most recent analysis from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), with strong economic stability, physical infrastructure and international connectivity.

Last month AWS released X1 instances for its EC2 cloud, claiming to have the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today. But all that memory won’t get you very far if the system has fallen over.

ADC, application delivery controllers, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, virtual application

What is a Virtual Application?

What is a virtual application? In a traditional IT environment, applications are installed locally on each system. When an application is installed, it writes specific information at specific locations. For instance, the Windows registry is updated with the application settings, and the system32 folder is updated with .DLL files related to that application. There are […]

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