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A new report issued today by Flexera Software argues that software asset management (SAM) needs to evolve to keep up with software as a service (SaaS) and virtualisation moving into the mainstream.

The study, which polled almost 500 respondents answering questions on enterprise and application production, found that for 20% of respondents, more than a quarter of their software is SaaS-based, while 39% say more than a quarter is virtualised. Interestingly, while three quarters say 80% or more of their desktop apps run on Microsoft Windows, that number is expected to go down to 64% within two years.

This shift causes problems for the relatively long-standing SAM solutions in place, the report argues. “Organisations wrongly believe that if they move to the cloud, their SAM challenges disappear,” it explains. “In reality, the opposite is true – they become more complicated.”

“The definition of enterprise software has changed drastically – from an IT asset running on a local physical device to an asset that is exposed to the risks inherent in the Internet, and is often virtualised or running remotely from a cloud, leveraging cloud infrastructures that carry their own costs and risks,” said R ‘Ray’ Wang, principal analyst and founder at Constellation Research. “The old definitions of SAM are too limited and must expand to allow businesses to manage costs and risk in this new IT framework.”

Only 29% of organisations polled say they continually monitor their systems to identify unlicensed and unauthorised software – and the report argues that next generation SAM tools need to integrate with security initiatives such as software vulnerability management.

“SAM has moved from the fringes to the mainstream,” the report concludes. “Enterprises have experienced the pain and risk that occurs when their software assets are not managed properly, and SAM people, processes and technology are being implemented across organisations of all sizes to address the problem.

“But the software landscape is constantly evolving,” it adds. “SAM must evolve to redefine how software is managed in these new environments. And as software becomes the primary attack vector by which hackers invade corporate networks and threaten corporate security – SAM must also evolve to play its important role in corporate security.”

Some organisations are expanding their portfolio in line with this; Snow Software, traditionally a SAM player, is moving further into enterprise mobility management (EMM), as exemplified by its placing in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant on the topic. Alan Giles, business unit manager of Snow’s mobility arm, told this reporter that he was happy the company was in a “niche space populated by one.”

You can find out more about the Flexera report here (registration required).

We have been seeing a sudden rise in the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL). It looks like the long “AI winter” is finally over. It is interesting to note that AI was mentioned by Alan Turing in a paper he wrote back in 1950 to suggest that there is possibility to build machines with true intelligence. Then in 1956, John McCarthy organized a conference at Dartmounth and coined the phrase Artificial Intelligence. Much of the next three decades did not see much activity and hence the phrase “AI Winter” was coined. Around 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue won the chess match against Kasparov. During the last few years, we saw deployments such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and IBM’s Watson (beating Jeopardy game show champions in 2011). In 2014, DeepMind team used a deep learning algorithm to create a program to win Atari games.

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Hyperconverged: it’s a word which elicits knowing nods from those in the industry, and looks of panic from those few who haven’t heard of it. Yet hyperconverged infrastructure, bundling in compute, storage, networking and virtualisation in a software-centric architecture, is here to stay, and Massachusetts-based SimpliVity has today announced a deal to put its OmniStack technology on Huawei FusionServer in a new collaboration.

The offering is available on SimpliVity’s all-flash hyperconverged models.

SimpliVity was named as a leader in Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for integrated systems, which covers hyperconvergence, as well as being cited by Computer Weekly as a challenger in the market earlier this year.

Alongside Huawei, the company has forged technology alliances with Cisco, Lenovo and Dell. The latter, which bought EMC for $67 billion in October last year, to also include VCE and VMware, refreshed its hyperconverged lineup earlier this year, with a ZDNet article at the time noting that “every enterprise hardware vendor is rushing to this fast-growing space.”

This time round, the press materials note that Huawei and SimpliVity are two of the fastest growing IT companies addressing the fastest growing markets with this announcement.

“By combining SimpliVity’s revolutionary hyperconverged technology with Huawei’s servers and strong global footprint, more customers will be able to realise the unique benefits that only SimpliVity delivers,” said Doron Kempel, SimpliVity CEO in a statement. “By providing the most complete hyperconverged solution on the industry’s leading server platforms, SimplIVity is putting customer needs front and centre.”

Writing for this publication back in October, Geoff Smith, senior manager at GreenPages Technology Solutions, mused on the issue of day two for hyperconverged – not the implementation, but when the platform is spinning away in the data centre.

“Adopting hyperconverged as your next-generation technology play is certainly something to consider carefully, and has the potential to positively impact your overall operational maturity,” he wrote. “You can reduce the number of vendor technologies and management interfaces, get more proactive, and make decisions based on real data analytics.

“Hyperconverged platforms can certainly enhance and help mature your IT organisations, but they do provide only part of the story,” Smith added.

You can read more about SimpliVity and Huawei’s collaboration here.

For a long time, Bill Gates and in fact the entire leadership team at Microsoft were vehemently against the open source community. Steve Ballmer had once called Linux “a malignant cancer” in reference to Linux allegedly violating nearly 235 patents that Microsoft owned. Even post-retirement, Bill Gates had once picked on open source claiming that this model creates a license that prevents anybody from improving the software. “I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them”, he had said.

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• U.S.-based organisations are budgeting $1.77M for cloud spending in 2017 compared to $1.30M for non-U.S. based organisations.
• 10% of enterprises with over 1,000 employees are projecting they will spend $10M or more on cloud computing apps and platforms throughout this year.
• Organisations are using multiple cloud models to meet their business’s needs, including private (62%), public (60%), and hybrid (26%).
• By 2018 the typical IT department will have the minority of their apps and platforms (40%) residing in on-premise systems.

These and many other insights are from IDG’s Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey, 2016. You can find the 2016 Cloud Computing Executive Summary here and a presentation of the results here.  The study’s methodology is based on interviews with respondents who are reporting they are involved with cloud planning and management across their organizations. The sampling frame includes audiences across six IDG Enterprise brands (CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld and Network World) representing IT and security decision-makers across eight industries. The survey was fielded online with the objective of understanding organisational adoption, use-cases, and solution needs for cloud computing. A total of 925 respondents were interviewed to complete the study.

Key takeaways include the following:

• The cloud is the new normal for enterprise apps, with 70% of all organizations having at least one app in the cloud today. 75% of enterprises with greater than 1,000 employees have at least one app or platform running in the cloud today, leading all categories of adoption measured in the survey. 90% of all organisations today either have apps running in the cloud are planning to use cloud apps in the next 12 months, or within 1 to 3 years. The cloud has won the enterprise and will continue to see the variety and breadth of apps adopted accelerating in 2017 and beyond.

• Business/data analytics and data storage/data management (both 43%) are projected to lead cloud adoption in 2017 and beyond. 22% of organisations surveyed are predicting that business/data analytics will be the leading cloud application area they will migrate to in the next 12 months. 21% are predicting data storage/data management apps are a high priority area for their organisations’ cloud migration plans in 2017.

• 28% of organisations’ total IT budgets is dedicated to cloud computing next year. Of that, 45% is allocated to SaaS, 30% to IaaS and 19% to PaaS. The average investment organisations will make in cloud computing next year is $1.62M, with enterprises over 1,000 employees projected to spend $3.03M. The average investment in cloud computing remains constant in organisations with $1.62M invested in 2014, $1.56M in 2015 and $1.62M in 2016. 10% of enterprises with over 1,000 employees are projecting they will spend $10M or more on cloud computing apps and platforms throughout this year.

• CIOs, IT architects and IT networking/management control cloud spending in the enterprise. In contrast, CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs are driving small and medium business (SMB) cloud spending this year. The following graphic compares how influential the following groups and individuals are in the cloud computing purchase process.

• Just 46% of organisations are using Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to integrate with databases, messaging systems, portals or storage components. 40% are using them for creating connections to the application layer of their cloud and the underlying IT infrastructures. The following graphic provides insights into how APIs are being used and which teams see the most value in them.

• In 18 months the majority of organisations’ IT infrastructures will be entirely cloud-based. IDG found that in 18 months nearly one-third (28%) of all organisations interviewed will be relying on private clouds as part of their IT infrastructure. Just over a fifth (22%) will have public cloud as part of their IT infrastructure, and 10% will be using hybrid. By 2018 the typical IT department will have the minority of their apps and platforms (40%) residing in on-premise systems.

• Concerns about where data is stored (43%), cloud security (41%) and vendor lock-in (21%) are the top three challenges organisations face when adopting public cloud technologies. Private and hybrid cloud adoption in organisations is also facing the challenges of cloud security and vendor lock-in. Private and hybrid cloud adoption are being slowed by a lack of the right skill sets to manage and gain the maximum value from cloud investments.

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US tech giant CA Technologies has announced its intent to acquire business automation software provider Automic in a reported €600 million (£505m) deal.

The move is to enhance CA’s European reach, as well as adding automation and orchestration capabilities across its portfolio.

“With the acquisition of Automic, we will deliver automation, scale work flows and business processes while reducing costs and greatly improving accuracy,” said Ayman Sayed, CA Technologies president and chief product officer in a statement. “This level of intelligent automation will give our customers the insights to achieve more agility and realise business value.”

The acquisition plays into various strategic initiatives, with all the buzzwords you’d expect to find bundled in; DevOps, Internet of Things, hybrid, and so on. In other words, though, this means that organisations can automate their legacy SAP and Oracle business processes, as well as other workloads, from finance to job requests, to make organisations more proactive and productive long-term.

Writing for this publication in October, Chris Boorman, Automic CMO, discussed the importance of providing a multi-tenant offering for automation services, which helps enterprises serve multiple departments and clients on a single, shared platform. “In cloud computing, the meaning of multi-tenancy architecture has broadened because of new service models that take advantage of virtualisation and remote access,” Boorman wrote.

“This multi-tenant release automation model helps large enterprises – saddled with slow-moving, legacy infrastructures – to bridge the gap between development teams launching mobile and web-based services almost non-stop, and the operations team who are more concerned with maintaining reliability and continuity.

“A multi-tenant release automation product enables organisations like these to be agile in the back end, and be compliant and scalable in the front office,” Boorman added.

The acquisition is expected to close in Q417 for CA, with financial services firm Foros acting as advisor to the transaction.

Rapid innovation, changing business landscapes, and new IT demands force businesses to make changes quickly. In the eyes of many, containers are at the brink of becoming a pervasive technology in enterprise IT to accelerate application delivery. In this presentation, attendees learned about the:
The transformation of IT to a DevOps, microservices, and container-based architecture
What are containers and how DevOps practices can operate in a container-based environment
A demonstration of how Docker and Kubernetes reduce software delivery cycle times, drive automation, and increase efficiency
How other organizations are using DevOps + containers and how to replicate their success

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