All posts by Business Cloud News

Catalogic Software, hybrid cloud, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM and Catalogic Software combine to slash costs of data management

IBM and Catalogic Software have jointly launched a new set of systems which combine Catalogic’s copy data manager ECX with IBM’s storage offerings, in a bid to help clients trim the excessive costs of duplicate data.

The objective is to make DevOps and Hybrid Cloud initiatives easier and less wasteful for IBM clients by automating storage and data management, creating self-service options and creating access to Catalogic software though IBM’s RESTful API management.

Catalogic’s ECX is described as a virtual appliance that runs on a client’s existing infrastructure and acts as a lever of power over storage controllers, storage software systems and hypervisors. IBM claims it has validated the system through months of testing and the two can work in tandem to improve the operations of the core data centre. The combination of the two creates new tools that are necessary for supporting new workload environments and use cases, according to a Catalogic statement.

Today’s core data centre architecture and associated processes don’t lend themselves to agility and flexibility, though they are reliable and secure. Catalogic’s ECX has given IBM a method of creating the former, without sacrificing the latter, said IBM. The key to this is making the storage infrastructure more flexible so that data can be virtualised and kept in one place rather than endlessly replicated for a variety of different project teams. One of the benefits is that live environments can support key IT functions that rely on copies of production data without having to massively expand the data footprint. ECX and IBM’s service services can jointly create a culture of

elasticity and sharing of cloud resources across a variety of functions including Disaster Recovery, Test and Development, Analytics and other departments.

The lower operating costs of cloud resources and saved manual efforts through ECX’s cloud automation will bring up to a 300% return on investment, claims IBM.

Among the systems that ECX can now combine with are IBM’s Storwize family of hybrid flash/HDD systems, the SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000, Hybrid Cloud Operations with IBM SoftLayer and IBM Spectrum Protect.

“Copy data management can significantly improve data access and availability and create remarkable cost savings,” said Bina Hallman, VP of IBM Storage and Software Defined Systems.

Datacentre, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Project Natick, submarine

Microsoft’s submarine datacentre makes a splash

Microsoft project natickMicrosoft has released details of a new pilot project for an undersea datacentre designed to cut power costs with free water cooling.

Project Natick, which connects the undersea module using giant steel tubes linked by fibre optic cables, could also use turbines to convert tides and currents into electricity to power the computing and comms equipment. The new sea bed data centres could also improve cloud response times for users living near the coast.

A prototype was placed on the sea bed off the coast of California in August 2015 as art of an investigation into the environmental and technical issues involved in this form of low power cloud service. Microsoft researchers believe that economies of scale through mass production would cut deployment time from two years to 90 days. The project is the latest initiative from Microsoft Research’s New Experiences and Technologies (NExT) which began investigating new ways to power cloud computing in 2014.

In the 105 day trial an eight foot wide steel capsule was placed 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean near San Luis Obispo, California. The underwater system had 100 sensors to measure pressure, humidity, motion and other conditions but the system stayed up, which encouraged Microsoft to extend the experiment to run data-processing projects from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.

In the next stage of the research, Microsoft said, it will create an underwater data centre system that will be three times as large. This will be built in partnership with an alternative energy vendor. The identity of the trial partner has yet to be decided, but the launch date is mooted for 2017 at a venue either in Florida or Northern Europe, where hydro power is more advanced.

This “refactoring” of traditional methods will help fuel other innovations even if it doesn’t accomplish its goal of establishing underwater data farms, according to Norman Whitaker, MD for special projects at Microsoft Research and the former deputy director at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The idea with refactoring is that it tickles a whole bunch of things at the same time,” said Whitaker.

Microsoft manages more than 100 data centres around the globe and is adding always looking for new venues to support its raid expansion. The company has spent more than $15 billion on a global datacentre system that now provides more than 200 online services.

Draft investigatory powers bill, News & Analysis, Policy and Regulation, UK Parliament

UK parliament warns against new Investigatory Powers Bill

security1The UK government must ‘urgently review’ the expensive obligations it is about to pass onto the cloud industry, according to a new report on the effects of the Investigatory Powers Bill.

The Investigatory Powers Bill Technology Issues report was compiled by a parliamentary select on science and technology after taking evidence from activists, academics and tech companies. The proposed legislation could prove painfully expensive for Britain’s service providers, by forcing them to incur the costs and extra work involved in storing every customer’s entire browsing history for 12 months, the report warns. It also identifies a problem over encryption, with many in the industry unclear over the legal obligations the new bill will create.

“The Government must urgently review the legislation so that the obligations on the industry are clear and proportionate,” said Nicola Blackwood MP, chair of the Science and Technology Committee.

The draft bill calls for the collection by service providers of data on each user’s internet connection records (ICRs). According to the committee, industry feedback suggests there are too many unanswered questions over the practicalities of meeting this legal requirement. The technology industry is not clear about the meaning of the definition for ICRs framed by Home Secretary Theresa May, one of the co-authors of the draft bill.

According to May, an ICR is a record of the communications service that a person has used, but not a record of every web page they have accessed. “The current draft contains very broad and ambiguous definitions of ICRs, which are confusing communications providers,” said Blackwood, in a statement.

The ambiguity is a critical problem because it leaves service provides unable to predict the time and money they need to meet their obligations, which leaves them unable to forecast and plan. It also introduces a potentially dangerous vulnerability by creating an opportunity for hackers to access that information. The report questions whether it is ‘practical to assume’ that databases of customer activity can be kept ‘secure and safe’.

The draft Bill, in its current form, appears to instruct service providers that customer information must be kept in an unencrypted state ready for inspection, according to the committee. “The Government should clarify and state clearly in the Codes of Practice that it will not be seeking unencrypted content,” said the statement, “there are still many unanswered questions about how this legislation will work.”

There are good grounds to believe that without further refinement there could be ‘many unintended consequences for commerce’ arising from the current lack of clarity of the legislation, the report concluded.

cloud intelligence, decision engine, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Pulsant

Pulsant launches cloud comparison service

cloud question markUK based data centre and hosting company Pulsant claims it has created a system to help cloud buyers make fewer bad choices over online computing services.

The system aims to cut the confusion for C-level executives who currently struggle to make sense of the array of options, services and misleadingly named products. By automating the process of evaluation, the new Cloud Intelligence decision engine will take the end user closer to the conditions of ‘perfect information’ needed before the full benefits of the market are possible, it claims.

Cloud Intelligence is an interactive tool designed to concentrate the buyer’s mind when comparing different options. One of the user problems it aims to address is matching the offering to the needs of the buyer. In a relatively new market like cloud computing, companies ideally don’t want to trust their research to a conversation with a software salesman, according to Pulsant, which claims due diligence over cloud service choices has become a ‘definite challenge’.

The configuration aims to guide the decision makers by identifying their starting point. It separates technically savvy buyers, who may be familiar with the cloud landscape, from the non-technical procurement personnel who are increasingly embarking on research. The system aims to guide each type down customised paths in order to meet their needs. Non-technical users will interact with the decision engine in layman’s terms that concentrate on the benefits of the services on offer, while technical decision makers will be given more detailed information about configurations and platforms.

Pulsant said it aims to achieve for the B2B market what comparison sites achieve in B2C markets. The new service is necessary because cloud computing is changing software buying behaviours in the corporate world, according to Adam Eaton, sales director at Pulsant.

“Customers are doing a great deal of research before making IT decisions but there’s a lot of clutter to get through. We want to give people the information they’re looking for on the solutions and services they’re interested in, while still interactively engaging with them,” said Eaton.

According to Pulsant, 80% of visitors who start on their decision making journey with them will pursue it to the end.

bloomreach, Funding, investment, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Investors stake $56 million on BloomReach’s private cloud personalisation

bloomreach logoA new system of e-commerce personalisation has broken all records for attracting investment in a private cloud start up. Now the inventors intend to use the money to expand beyond e-commerce into all areas.

Private cloud personalisation specialist Bloomreach has announced a recent award of $56 million of venture capital. Investors contributing to the Series D round of funding included Bain Capital, Battery Ventures, Lightspeed, New Enterprise Associates and Salesforce Ventures. As part of the same initiative Guidewire Software CEO Marcus Ryu was appointed to the BloomReach board.

BloomReach offers an alternative to companies who cannot afford to buy their way to the top of Amazon’s search listings. Since Amazon captures half of the first product searches made by consumers this leaves digital businesses with a massive financial barrier to marketability. Meanwhile the marketing technology sector has fragmented into 2,000 companies offering 2,500 products. Bloomreach claims it can demystify and simplify the choices with omnichannel intelligence and a single personalization platform.

It has two main applications, BloomReach Commerce and BloomReach Compass. The former uses BloomReach’s Organic Search and SNAP applications to boost online sales up to 40% by algorithmically optimizing user’s site experience, it claims.

Compass uses role-specific analytics providing machine-intelligence insights, key performance indicator management and action-tracking for marketers and merchandisers. It claims it can create an average $8,000 in revenue a month for clients on every action taken. The development of BloomReach Compass made it possible for BloomReach to expand beyond e-commerce, it claims, but it needs venture funding to bankroll that growth.

BloomReach said it plans to use the money to strengthen its big-data technology and expand globally into all digital business markets.

E-commerce is a $3.5 trillion market driven by marketing technology with personalization at the core, according to investor Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures. “We are just in the fourth inning of the marketing-tech revolution,” said Agrawal. Instead of relying on outdated methods of personalisation with demographic or geographic data, BloomReach will provide workflow and transactional-oriented technologies to create one-to-one personalization at scale, it claims.

“There’s a ten billion dollar opportunity in marketing tech, and BloomReach has the expertise to understand, learn and apply big data to make every experience personal for all digital businesses,” said BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta.

Financial Results, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis

Cloud now makes up one third of Microsoft revenues as Azure soars

AzureMicrosoft made $9.4 billion from cloud computing in its last quarter with the 140% rise of Azure revenue surpassing expectations and over shadowing other areas of business.

Yesterday Microsoft released the figures for its quarter ending on December 31, 2015 (Q2 in its 2016 financial year). With total revenues of $25.7 billion, income from cloud computing now represents over a third of its fortune. Microsoft’s stock rose in value by 7% following its earnings announcement.

The latest cloud revenue figures show a $1.2 billion rise on the previous quarter, which saw $8.2 billion revenue on cloud deals. This represents a growth rate of 14.6% every quarter, which suggest that it cloud revenue could surpass its own expectations. Microsoft has previously predicted that its cloud revenue will rise to $20 billion in 2018.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued that the numbers of businesses that are piloting Windows 10 leads it to expect that it will be installed on over 200 million active devices in the coming year. “Businesses everywhere are using the Microsoft Cloud as their digital platform to drive their ambitious transformation agendas,” said Nadella.

The cloud outshone all other areas of the business. While revenue from server based products rose by 10%, Azure revenue grew 140%. Office 365 now has 20.6 million subscribers, which was a major contributor to the success of the sales of Productivity and Business Processes (PBP), which rose to $6.7 billion in value, from $6.3 billion in the last quarter. The service revenue from the Intelligent Cloud (IC), grew from $5.9 billion to $6.4 billion over the same period.

Sales in the More Personal Computing category, taking in Windows, Devices, Gaming and Search, went from $9.4 billion to $12.7 billion, a rise of 25.9%, even in the teeth of a 49% fall in phone revenues. Meanwhile, Microsoft reported that its success in monetizing its search advertising had grown by 29%, which it attributed to the integration of search into Windows 10.

Microsoft returned $6.5 billion to shareholders in dividends.

IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Wind River

Wind River and IBM to integrate their IoT clouds

IoT cloud iconIntel’s IoT software subsidiary Wind River is to work with IBM to make Industrial IoT projects run smoother and more efficiently. The two companies will work together on a series of initiatives aimed at clarifying their processes for each other, offering guidance to third parties and simplifying the task of integrating their respective systems with each other.

A published series of instructions, which IBM describes as ‘edge to cloud recipes’ aims to guide customers on how to integrate services from the IBM Watson IoT Cloud Platform with products from the Wind River Helix portfolio.

Any customers who use the recipes could, in theory, connect industrial devices running Wind River software to the IBM Watson IoT Cloud Platform and get access to IBM Bluemix cloud services and analytics. This, says Wind River, will help IoT developers develop smart connected devices more easily by cutting the time they’ll spend searching for relevant information and variables.

The IBM and Wind River ‘recipes’ and reference material will also help users with tasks such as device management and help users to apply IBM’s machine learning to the IoT. Other guidance that Wind River intends to offer clients and partners includes help on managing devices and systems in different vertical markets. Among the specialities on which guidance is available are smart buildings, transport, factory automation and the health sector.

Under the arrangement Wind River and IBM will provide elements that can be combined for a complete ‘edge-to-cloud’ IoT solution (a system connecting remote peripherals to the cloud). Detail is available on a range of Wind River operating systems, including VxWorks, Rocket and Pulsar Linux and Helix Cloud (Wind River’s family of software as a service offerings). Instructions are available on how to integrate each of these, in turn, with a range of IBM systems including IBM Watson IoT Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and IBM IoT Real-Time Insights for processing device data.

News & Analysis, OneOps, Open Source, Walmart

Walmart open-sources its OneOps cloud platform on Github

Walmart OneOpsRetail giant Walmart has released it OneOps cloud management and application life cycle software on GitHub in a bid to invite improvements from the developer community.

“Walmart is a cloud user, not a cloud provider. It makes sense to release OneOps as an open source project so that the community can improve or build ways for it to adapt to existing technology,” said Jeremy King, CTO of Walmart Global eCommerce in the company’s IT division Walmart Labs.

OneOps can be used to run application on public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and CenturyLink or to tailor private or hybrid environments using OpenStack. By allowing companies to port their software onto different service providers it gives the buyers of services more bargaining power, since they can change suppliers and enjoy greater flexibility over scale and features. It also frees developers from vendor lock in, as they are not trapped into creating a proprietary system that only works with a particular vendor.

The main benefits of OneOps are described as continuous lifecycle management, cloud portability and greater control of cloud environments. Users of the system said it encourages rapid innovation with safe guards. Software engineers can spin up virtual machines in minutes and start coding without having to spend hours specifying the intricacies of a specific cloud environment.

Walmart has previously released open source software such as Mupd8, which implements the MapUpdate framework, a MapReduce-style framework for processing fast/streaming data. It also released Hapi, a framework for building applications and services, to the open source community. It has also used and contributed to other popular open source projects such as React, Node.js and Openstack.

“After more than two years of development and testing OneOps is available to the open source community,” said King, “We hear from companies of all sizes that they want to spend less time and money on IT, and more time on delivering experiences to customers, faster. Today, that undertaking gets easier.”

Box, Cloud Storage, DropBox, Egnyte, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Office, Storage as a Service

Box, Dropbox and Egnyte offer cloud storage options for Office

Microsoft Office cloud storageMicrosoft has announced new co-authoring features for users of Office Mobile and Office Online who store their files with cloud services such as Box, Dropbox and Egnyte. Tighter integration with these services means that files can be worked on ‘natively’ as they reside in the cloud service, without users having to come out of their office application.

The new options come nearly a year after the Cloud Storage Partner Program (CSPP) was launched in February 2015, when Microsoft invited cloud storage providers to connect their services to Office Online and Office for iOS. “Today, we’re adding real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services, extending our Office for iOS integration to all partners in the CSPP and enabling integration between Outlook.com and cloud storage providers Dropbox and Box,” wrote Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate VP for the Office team.

Instant co-authoring with Office Online is now available for users with documents stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Koenigsbauer also invited all Microsoft’s CSPP partners to integrate their storage services with Office for iOS so that users can designate these partner cloud services as ‘places’ in Office, as is possible now with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. The new changes mean that users can browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their preferred cloud service from within an Office app without having to interrupt their train of thought by coming out of the application.

Box is now used by 41 million consumers and 54,000 paying businesses, including 55% of the Fortune 500. Among the new features offered are real time co-authoring between Box and Office Online and the integration of Box with Office for iOS and Outlook.com. Users can make concurrent, real time edits to content secured in Box including Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Box, an early member in the Cloud Storage Partner Program, has introduced a new application for Windows 10 and integrations with both Office for iPad and iPhone. DropBox and Egnyte both also announced real time co-authoring the ability to collaborate across Powerpoint, word and Excel using documents stored in the cloud.

hybrid cloud, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis

Microsoft unveils new Azure Stack migration strategy

Microsoft is to build its Azure Stack by increments on a foundation of consistency and continuity, it has pledged. The software turned cloud service vendor has blogged about the next move in its hybrid cloud strategy. Later this week it will offer the first technical preview of the new Microsoft Azure Stack.

In deference to its increasing numbers of Azure users who are nervous of committing to the public cloud, Microsoft announced it will provide incremental upgrades and changes on a foundation of continuity and consistency. While Azure Stack will use identical application programming interfaces (APIs) to the ones that reach into Microsoft Azure, developers are to be given guidance on creating .Net or open source apps that can straddle both public and private cloud. Meanwhile, according to Mike Neil, Microsoft’s enterprise Cloud VP, IT professionals can transform on-premises data centre resources into Azure IaaS/PaaS services without losing their powers of management and automation.

Microsoft is seeing nearly 100,000 new Azure subscriptions every month but many enterprises fear going fully public because of the data sovereignty and regulatory issues, Neil said. Microsoft’s strategy is to work around a client base with one foot in the public cloud and one on-premises. It will do this by providing a consistent cloud platform that spans hybrid environments. In a series of Technical previews, starting on Friday 29th of January, Microsoft is to show how Azure Stack inventions for the hyperscale data centre can be layered onto the hybrid cloud.

Since the APIs are the same, in future apps can be written once and deploy to Azure and Azure Stack and use the Azure ecosystem to jumpstart their Azure Stack development efforts. The same management, DevOps and automation tools will apply said Neil. The application model is based on Azure Resource Manager, so developers can take the same declarative approach to applications, regardless of whether they run on Azure or Azure Stack. Tooling-wise, developers can use Visual Studio, PowerShell, as well as other open-source DevOps tools, creating the same end user experiences as in Azure, Neil said.

A series of technical previews will be the vehicle for adding services and content such as OS images and Azure Resource Manager templates. “Azure has hundreds of applications and components on GitHub and as the corresponding services come to Azure Stack, users can take advantage of those as well,” said Neil, who disclosed that open source partners like Canonical are contributing validated Ubuntu Linux images to make open source applications work in Azure Stack environments.

The first Technical Preview of Azure Stack on Friday, January 29 will be followed by a web cast on February 3rd by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and Chief Architect of Enterprise Cloud Jeffrey Snover.