Monthly Archives: June 2016

News

Samsung Making its Move into the Cloud

samsungAt this point, there’s no denying the fact that Samsung is a major player in the smartphone space. Going head to head with Apple, the company has proved it can hold its own.

But now, the electronics giant is looking to make another big move. With its recent agreement to purchase Joyent, Inc., a well known public and private cloud provider, Samsung is positioning itself to become a major player in the cloud computing services space.

At this point, Samsung has plans to keep Joyent as a separate business, however, it will be able to use its experience and service to boost its own cloud based performance.

Is this a Good Move?

While some feel that Samsung should focus on its core, which at this point appears to be the smartphone industry, others realize that this is an opportunity for the company to expand its offerings and position itself for future success.

With this purchase, the company now has a platform that can be used across its mobile and Internet of Things services.

From a financial perspective, it’s still unclear as to how much money Joyent will generate for Samsung.

Why Now?

There are many reasons why Samsung decided to make this move right now, with a decrease in smartphone shipments likely being the primary driver.

While smartphone shipments have fallen off, the cloud computing marketing is growing by leaps and bounds. If Samsung wants to stay ahead of the game, it only makes sense for it to bury more resources into this industry.

In the months to come, it will be interesting to see if Samsung is able to get its mobile business back on track. Even if it continues to stall, the company has a big opportunity to compete with the top players in the cloud computing services space.

The post Samsung Making its Move into the Cloud appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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Traits of a Successful Startup Businesses | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud

Startup businesses are popping up at every opportunity. It seems that there are endless ideas that could become potential businesses. However, not all businesses will be successful. Here are some of the top traits of successful startup businesses.
One of the most important factors of determining the success of a business is the necessity for that business. Although it’s unfortunate, great ideas will sometimes end up as a failed business. There must be a need for the product or service provided. Before you seek out investors, spend time analyzing the need for your idea.

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API Management, News & Analysis, Open Source, Red Hat

Red Hat boosts API management biz with 3scale acquisition

Money financingRed Hat has confirmed it has entered into a definitive agreement to 3scale, a provider of API management technology, reports Telecoms.com.

The two companies have been in partnership since early 2015 to create platform for API-based application development, though the acquisition is set to close in June 2016. 3scale currently provides developers with the tools to create, manage and scale APIs, and also recently introduced a containerized version of their API Gateway for Red Hat OpenShift. The tool enabls users to create applications with microservices distributed across diverse, hybrid environments. Upon completion of the transaction, the team commented on its blog it will open source the code almost immediately.

Red Hat claim the API management platform offered by 3scale complements various aspects of its portfolio well, most notably the JBoss Middleware portfolio, and also the elastic cloud environment provided by OpenShift. Although the company has not confirmed whether the 3scale brand will continue in the long-term, it does have a technology roadmap based on current customer requirements and the competitive landscape, which will be honoured.

“3scale complements our existing middleware product portfolio and Red Hat OpenShift by enabling companies to create and publish APIs with tools such as Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and then manage and drive adoption of those APIs once they have been published,” said Craig Muzilla, SVP of Application Platforms Business at Red Hat.

Ret Hat hope the acquisition will prove to be a differentiator in a crowded market, as it believes API management offerings could be the make-or-break factor in a number of new customer acquisitions who are looking at integration solutions. This coupled with API management offerings becoming a more important requirement in cloud application platforms, is the basis of the transaction. Acquiring 3scale enables Red Hat to address these evolving requirements quickly, as it continues the wider industry trend of acquire to innovate over organic growth.

Alongside the acquisition, the team also announced its quarterly results which demonstrated healthy growth. Q1 revenue was reported at $568 million, up 18% year-on-year, with subscription revenues at $502 million, also up 18% year-on-year. Subscription revenue from Application Development-related and other emerging technologies offerings for the quarter was $98 million, an increase of 39%.

“Digital transformation and cloud computing are changing the way companies compete in virtually every industry today,” said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. “Organizations that rapidly embrace agile IT technology are succeeding as industry innovation accelerates around them. Our open source-based technologies are helping customers capture the business benefits associated with this rapid rate of change.”

In terms of the outlook for the remainder of 2016 and beyond, containers were a technology which have been prioritized for the business.

“We actually see containers as a great opportunity for us to continue to differentiate around, a, kernel space and user space being consistent,” said Whitehurst in the company’s earnings call. “So having the same host and technology in the container itself. And then secondly just ability to lifecycle manages against that.

“So containers overall are good for Linux because it helps it grow overall share versus Windows. And then within that we think we have a definitely differentiated position given our position in the OS. So that’s why we can see continue double digit growth in general in the OS category which includes containers.”

Broadband, Google, News & Analysis, wireless

Google Fiber adds Miami and Boston to roster

GoogleGoogle has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Webpass to boost its Google Fiber business unit and add to its wireless broadband ambitions, reports Telecoms.com.

The acquisition builds on an area of innovation which the Google Fiber team have been investigating. Webpass has paired its fiber network with wireless technology, an idea which the Google team have been testing in Kansas City earlier this year. Back in April, Google was given approval to test its 3.5 GHz wireless broadband capabilities using antennas on light poles and various other structures, in and around the Kansas City area. The FCC commented the innovation could create a new flavour of wifi or even an LTE Unlicensed band.

Webpass was founded in 2003, and claims to have customers in the “tens of thousands”, though these are primarily apartment blocks and business users, two demographics which are likely to be of interest to Google. Webpass has focused its sights on business users in recent months, providing services in the range of 100 megabits per second to one gigabit per second, and also operates in two markets Google Fiber which has no exposure; Miami and Boston.

“Google Fiber’s resources will enable Webpass to grow faster and reach many more customers than we could as a standalone company,” said Charles Barr, President at Webpass. “I’m very much looking forward to this next chapter for Webpass, and let me take this opportunity to once again say thank you to all of our loyal customers. We are thrilled to be on this journey together.”

While the deal is still subject to the customary approval process from regulators, it is the first acquisition for the Google Fiber business, indicating the company’s intensions in the arena. The Google Fiber business has been growing at a healthy rate in the last 18 months, though the addition of Webpass will give the company traction in five significant markets in the US, including major cities such as San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, Chicago, and Boston.

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A guide to planning for application resiliency in cloud environments

(c)iStock.com/fazon1

As businesses look to clouds for faster, more flexible growth, they confront significant challenges from a legacy application base that has varying levels of cloud suitability. Here, we examine how requirements around fault tolerance and disaster recovery can impact choice of cloud or architecture strategies within a cloud. 

Planning for application resiliency in cloud environments can present special challenges. Strategies can be similar to those used in traditional data centres, but implementations often differ.

At the base of the implementation differences is the architecture typically chosen for cloud applications.  Clouds tend to favour scaling “out” to more nodes rather than “up” to a bigger node.  This choice enables more graceful degradation in the event of node failure.  It also allows developers to add capacity in smaller units that can be finely tuned to immediate requirements, avoiding larger buys and attendant unused capacity.  Scaling out does, though, present different requirements for high availability.

In cases where services are housed on equipment that is physically proximate, like a traditional data centre, strategies like virtual IPs and load balancers often suffice to manage even scale-out infrastructures.  Planning for availability and resilience across multiple geographies, though, can require detailed consideration and engineering around managing DNS services and sessions, request routing, and persistent storage management.  Cloud providers and implementations will vary in terms of providing services to support these requirements.

Typical tiered applications or services (or microservices) rely on a core of persistent data stores, layers of business and application logic to manipulate or communicate that data, and presentation layers presenting an interface to users or applications that can execute the business logic. Distributing these layers across multiple pieces of hardware typically involves detailed planning around state management, load balancing, and latencies. Caching layers are often intermingled with the core functional layers to drive more responsiveness out of the system, and these caches have their own requirements for distributed consistency and state management.

The core persistent data stores are particularly challenging with respect to resiliency and high availability. While databases implemented on physically proximate equipment have well understood clustering solutions that retain transactional integrity by synchronising duplicate data stores, distributed large-scale databases often require more thoughtful design.  This can range from asynchronous replication of data to avoid latency in the transaction flow to data partitioning and the adoption of an “eventually consistent” paradigm for the underlying data. The specific s of the solution will depend on the application design and any requirements to limit data loss (Recovery Point Objective or RPO), but there are well understood engineering patterns that accommodate common needs.

A larger concern with distributed systems resiliency is organisational.  All infrastructure environments manage multi-layered resilience complexity with a mix of vendor and in-house engineering.  A typical non-cloud environment can leverage a more mature marketplace for vendor products and services facilitating the various layers. Resiliency in cloud environments may require more in-house engineering and less mature technologies to meet performance and availability goals for the applications or services. This often entails additional risk or organisational change to support the application.  The trend toward “devops,” creating a more synergistic relationship between applications engineering and systems administrators is one key indicator of how these changes are playing out in the enterprise.   

While moving applications into a private or public cloud environment may present an opportunity to save costs or improve operations, applications vary in their suitability for cloud infrastructures.  Some architectures (web farms, application server clusters, et al) are similar to cloud native best practice, and require little retooling to allow for resiliency.  More complex patterns are also manageable with proper planning, design, and execution.  Evaluating applications explicitly for resiliency requirements and fit against cloud native architectural principles allows firms to take best advantage of cloud economics and efficiencies in the enterprise.

News

Kstart Invests in ParaBlu

India’s leading venture capital firm Kalaari Capital’s seed program, Kstart, has recently invested $510k into cloud security startup ParaBlu. This funding will be used for both team expansion and marketing activities.

Kalaari Capital launched its Kstart program in February of 2016, allocating over $20 million for the program over the course of two years. ParaBlu marks Kstart’s fourth investment, following Affordplan, Active.ai, and Indee. Kstart plans to invest in over 40 startups over the next four years.

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About ParaBlu:
Founded in 2011, California based ParaBlu provides an award winning Cloud Access Security Broker data solution, among other cloud security solutions. The company provides Blukrypt, a secured cloud gateway, BlueSync, for secured data transfer, as well as two versions of its BlueVault solution.

Blukrypt is a CASB that allows users to manage their security policy whether the are utilizing public or private cloud.

With BlueSync, users are allowed to establish somewhat of a “mini-cloud.” These mini clouds allow different teams to operate underneath an enterprises singular large cloud network.

BlueVault comes in two versions: one for endpoints and one for servers. BlueVault for servers has the ability to backup files and databases from Windows servers.
Comments:
Vani Kola, MD, Kalaari Capital: “As cloud usage continues to increase within enterprises, there is tremendous opportunity ahead for ParaBlu’s unique product.”

Anand Prahlad, President, ParaBlu: “ParaBlu was founded with the singular vision of being the security vendor of choice for all enterprise data outside the firewall.The promise of that is already evident in our customer wins so far, and the investment from Kstart will help accelerate the realization of that vision. The experience and mentorship the Kstart team brings with them are without doubt among the best in the industry, and we’re excited to be able to take advantage of it.”

Ananda Rao Ladi: “Our solutions enable enterprises to become less dependent on in-house storage and adopt cloud with confidence. The association with Kstart will help us in expanding our product portfolio for global markets.”

The post Kstart Invests in ParaBlu appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

News, Services

Samsung Acquires Joyent

Samsung Electronics has recently announced that it will acquire Joyent, a company that is important to the cloud hosting market, for an undisclosed amount. This acquisition marks Samsung effort to transition from just a device manufacturer; the company has begun to expand into software and services with things such as Samsung Pay. The acquisition of Joyent marks Samsung’s third major procurement of a US startup in two years. Acquiring Joyent allows Samsung to have another outlet of processing power, as it currently relies on Amazon and Microsoft for cloud services. As Samsung continues to delve into the realm of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, the extra computational service is much needed. Samsung also aims to use cloud services to collect and analyze data generated by its devices to create a more personalized experience for users.

samsung

Joyent will be integrated into Samsung’s mobile division. Joyent will keep both its name and top level management through this transition. Joyent will operate with a certain amount of independence from parent company Samsung. This acquisition allows Joyent to compete within the large, rapidly developing cloud market and will help Joyent’s worldwide expansion. As Scott Hammond, CEO, wrote on Joyent’s website, “ By bringing these two companies together we are creating the opportunity to develop and bring to market vertically integrated mobile and IoT services and solutions that deliver extraordinary simplicity and value to our customers. This will accelerate the speed of innovation for both companies in high growth market segments.”

About Joyent:

Founded in 2004, the Joyent team was among the first to experiment with public and hybrid cloud as well as to industrialize containers. San Francisco based Joyent has many industry leading but lesser known products and services such as Triton, containers as a service, and Manta, object storage solution. Similarly to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Joyent allows customers to run their software on the cloud but Joyent also aids customers in constructing their own cloud like systems within their own data centers. Joyent has raised about $126 million in venture capital over the past eleven years.

Comments:

Senior vice president at Samsung’s Global Innovation Center Jacopo Lenzi: “As Samsung is increasingly focusing on software and services as part of its offering to users, it’s very important to build out our internal capabilities in cloud, not only in infrastructure but also in great talent. In Joyent we saw a combination of a proven platform that has been a leader in the forward-thinking elements of this space as well as a team that is world class.”

Joyent CEO Scott Hammond: “The partnership with Samsung gives us the global reach, the economic scale, the financial resources to not only innovate but to also extend our footprint globally. We’ll be building data centers around the globe.”

Chief technology officer of Samsung’s mobile division, “Big data is going to be a huge initiative for Samsung. Samsung devices will be increasingly intelligent, and big data is really a key component of intelligence and personalization.”

The post Samsung Acquires Joyent appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Nutanix, Nutanix Next Conference, Parallels Nutanix, Parallels Remote Application Server, VDI, VDI delivery

Parallels at the Nutanix Next Conference

Nutanix Next The Nutanix Next Conference is one of the most important and significant IT events, especially in terms of cloud solutions specifically developed to help enterprises improve their work processes. Since it wouldn’t be an event about high-quality enterprise cloud solutions without Parallels Remote Application Server, we are pleased to announce that the Parallels […]

The post Parallels at the Nutanix Next Conference appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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Digital Transformation: From Hype and Myth to Reality and Pragmatism | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Too many myths and hypes create the confusion around digital transformation. Digital transformation isn’t a technology change matter, it’s primarily about transforming business models: infrastructure and operating model. Digital transformation when tackled with proven methodologies and approaches isn’t as complex as it seems, they provide the step-by-step guide, the logic, and the tools to make it easy.

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Security Has Heightened Role in Mobile Environment | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Advances in thin clients, desktop virtualization (VDI), cloud management services, and mobile delivery networks are allowing both increased security and edge applications performance gains.
The next BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion focuses on the heightened role of security in the age of global cloud and mobile delivery of apps and data.

As enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) alike weigh the balance of apps and convenience with security — a new dynamic is emerging. Security concerns increasingly dwarf other architecture considerations.
Yet advances in thin clients, desktop virtualization (VDI), cloud management services, and mobile delivery networks are allowing both increased security and edge applications performance gains.

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