No modern enterprise stands alone; each is dependent upon a network of trading partners to remain competitive in today’s global marketplace. But in most cases, the lack of business to business (B2B) integration is holding back efforts to evolve into a true digital business.
A high-performing supply chain is essentially a dynamic digital network, and every link in the supply chain is vital for business. But, remarkably, “over 50 percent of the information exchanged among business partners is still done so manually — not automatically — via email, phone calls and faxes.”1
Many enterprises are stymied by silos of data, complex linear processes and disparate application landscapes. Moreover, each enterprise is reliant on its own unique set of applications, further exacerbating the struggle to exchange key information with partners.

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Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Liquid Web, a Michigan based hosting and cloud services provider, has announced an agreement to purchase Rackspace’s Cloud Sites business unit, based in San Antonio.

The acquisition of Cloud Sites, which supports WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, .NET, and PHP among others, will give Liquid Web 550 more employees and 30,000 more global customers.

“With the addition of Cloud Sites, we further our mission to empower web professionals all over the world to create content and commerce without worry, free of problems and devoid of even one bit of hesitation by providing absolutely flawless web hosting,” said Jim Geiger, CEO of Liquid Web in a statement. “Our job is to delight and every single human being in our company is empowered to do so. Each of them has a relentless devotion to simplifying how our customers experience web hosting and cloud services.”

The news comes amidst interesting times at Rackspace. The company’s most recent financial results, had some illuminating stats – 277 customers on its AWS service in the last nine months, with 60% of them choosing the higher service option, compared to 211 Microsoft cloud customers by the end of July – as well as other titbits.

Chief executive Taylor Rhodes cited Gartner statistics on the impact of the Brexit EU referendum vote to analysts – 2017 IT spending growth would ‘almost certainly’ be negative, he said – and added that Cloud Sites was a ‘non-core’ business which would give Rackspace “more focus” by selling it.

Responding to an analyst question, and as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Rhodes explained: “In our Cloud Sites business, it runs several hundred thousand websites for its customers and it competes in a market that if we wanted to really focus there, we’d have to make some substantial investment and instead, what we’ve been able to do is find a strategic buyer in Liquid Web, who will buy the company at a higher multiple than it was producing for us and allow us to both focus our portfolio, as well as find a happy home for that business and hope us raise some incremental funds that we can invest in growth.”

In a series of articles, I am going to share my thoughts on the state of IT infrastructure and how we’ve arrived with current architecture trends. The topic today is SAN.
Storage Area Networking (SAN) is a technology that solved a real problem that existed a couple decades ago. SANs have been a foundational piece of IT infrastructure architecture for a long time and have helped drive major innovations in storage. But how relevant are SANs today in the age of software-defined datacenters? Let’s talk about how we have arrived at modern storage architecture.

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Windstream has recently completed construction of a new colocation point of presence (PoP) in Dallas, Texas, and plans to complete construction of a new colocation PoP in Columbus, Ohio, in October – both in facilities operated by Cologix, a network-neutral interconnection and data center company. This adds to Windstream’s already-established presence in the Cologix Minneapolis and Jacksonville data centers, and aligns with Windstream’s continued aggressive Data Center Interconnect (DCI) efforts, adding carrier neutral data centers to its network and giving its wholesale and enterprise customers more options to access cloud resources.

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As the title suggests one way to approach the ‘Platform Business Model’ (described in detail in our library section), is to consider how it is being adapted for specific industry sectors, via Cloud-centric acronyms such as:
GaaP – Government as a Platform
BaaP – Banking as a Platform
TaaP – Telco as a Platform

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If you’ve been following along the DevCentral team’s journey toward F5 Certification, then you may be aware that we were in Chicago last week for F5’s Agility 2016 conference and took our 101 Application Delivery Fundamentals exam. I am happy to report that all of us, Jason, John, Chase and I, passed our exams. I gotta tell you, it’s a relief since I didn’t want to title this article, ‘Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.’ Good song but wanted to avoid that.

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(c)iStock.com/maxkabakov

In some instances, encryption is a double-edged sword: if data is encrypted in the cloud, it’s secure, but you can’t get access to it. Yet a new research paper presented by Microsoft may be the first step to changing it.

The paper examines the concept of secure data exchange (SDE), where the aim, as a blog post from Microsoft Research writer John Roach puts it, is to “unlock the full value of encrypted data by using the cloud itself to perform secure data trades between multiple willing parties in a way that provides users full control over how much information the exchange reveals.”

Microsoft gave a real-world example of their plan. For instance, imagine if a group of employees wanted to know where their salary ranks in relation to each other, but not wanting to reveal their salary to the rest of the group. A trusted colleague could hear each employee’s salary in confidence, calculate an average and then forget about it. Here, the cloud – as a ‘secure multiparty computation’ enabler – makes the latter redundant.

As a result, all of the computation is performed in the cloud and is encrypted in such a way that the cloud server does not know what is being computed. If all goes to plan, the cloud reveals the decrypted results to the interested parties and privacy and security are not compromised.

The research also examines the potential such an implementation could have on machine learning – for instance, in making progress in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to assess whether genetic variants have effects on certain diseases. The report authors note that the privacy fears of those who do not wish to participate in these projects would be assuaged, as well as making better use of the data generally – “full of potential but ultimately of little use to anyone but its owner,” as Roach writes.

“What we are trying to build is a mechanism by which you can say ‘Look, I am interested in your data, but I want to verify it is really what I need before I purchase it,’” said Ran Gilad-Bachrach, a researcher in Microsoft’s Cryptography Research group and co-author of the paper.

You can read the full paper (PDF) here.

There are seven key MegaTrends driving the future of enterprise IT. You can remember them all with the helpful mnemonic acronym CAMBRIC, which stands for Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Big Data, Robotics, Internet of Things, CyberSecurity.
In this post we dive deeper into the first of these trends, Cloud Computing.
We succinctly describe Cloud Computing as the scalable delivery of computational resources. Models of cloud compute include public clouds, private clouds and blends in between. Architectures are in place now that leverage tiers of clouds that can exist in multiple sizes and locations, including homes, businesses and datacenters.

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