All posts by Business Cloud News

China, Datacentre, Guizhou, News & Analysis, processor, Qualcomm, server

Qualcomm and Guizhou to make new server chipsets in China

qualcomm sales officeSan Diego based chip maker Qualcomm and China’s Guizhou Huaxintong Semi-Conductor company have announced a joint venture to develop new server chip sets designed for the Chinese market.

The news comes only a week after chip maker AMD announced its new Opteron A1100 System-on-Chip (SoC) for ARM-based systems in data centre. Both partnerships reflect how server design for data centres is evolving to suit the cloud industry.

The Qualcomm partnership, announced on its web site, was formalised at China National Convention Center in Beijing as officials from both companies and the People’s Government of Guizhou Province signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The $280 million joint venture will be 55% owned by the Guizhou provincial government’s investment arm, while 45% will belong to Qualcomm subsidiary.

The plan is to develop advanced server chipsets in China, which is now the world’s second largest market for server technology sales.

The action is an important step for Qualcomm as it looks to deepen its level of cooperation and investment in China, said Qualcomm president Derek Aberle. In February 2015 BCN sister publication Telecoms.com reported how the chip giant had fallen foul of the Chinese authorities for violating China’s trading laws. It was fined 6 billion yuan (around $1 billion) after its marketing strategy was judged to be against the nation’s anti-monopoly law.

“The strategic cooperation with Guizhou represents a significant increase in our collaboration in China,” said Aberle. Qualcomm is to provide investment capital, license its server technology to the joint venture, help with research and development and provide implementation expertise. “This underscores our commitment as a strategic partner in China,” said Aberle.

Last week, AMD claimed the launch of its new Opteron A1100 SoC will catalyse a much more rapid development process for creating servers suited to hosting cloud computing in data centres.

AMD’s partner in chip development for servers, ARM, is better placed to create processors for the cloud market as it specialises in catering for a wider diversity of needs. Whereas Intel makes its own silicon and can only hope to ship 30 custom versions of its latest Xeon processor to large customers like Ebay or Amazon, ARM can licenses its designs to 300 third-party silicon vendors, each developing their own use case for different clients and variants of server workloads, it claimed.

“The ecosystem for ARM in the data centre is approaching an inflection point and the addition of AMD’s high-performance processor is another strong step forward for customers looking for a data centre-class ARM solution,” said Scott Aylor, AMD’s general manager of Enterprise Solutions.

Analytics, Funding, Infor, News & Analysis, Predictix, Retail

Infor invests $25 million in cloud-based retail analyst Predictix

Cloud app provider Infor has invested $25 million in data scientist Predictix with a brief to use its powers of analysis to solve the problems troubling modern retailers.

Infor will become a reseller of Predictix, incorporating its applications in the Infor cloud and its CloudSuite offering aimed at the Retail sector. Atlanta-based Predictix had 40% growth in SaaS subscriptions in 2015, has five of the top 15 global retailers as customers and manages $60bn in weekly forecasts. Its technology platform LogicBlox, which underpins all Predictix applications, has attracted funding from DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Infor cloud has 40 million users.

The addition of Predictix to CloudSuite Retail brings modules that support demand forecasting, merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, category management, network flow optimization and optimisation of allocations and markdowns.

Cloud based demand forecasting could be 50% more accurate for retailers, claims Predictix, since it is more elastic and can apply self-learning algorithms to unlimited amounts of data. The improvements in forecasts leads to higher sales and greater profitability for retailers, it claims. Merchandise financial planning, meanwhile, increases the retailer’s powers of diversifying and creates more revenue out of existing product lines, according to Predictix. Assortment planning and category management, on the other hand, can create up to $20 million in annual benefit for every one billion dollars in sales.

Network flow optimisation, meanwhile, saves retailers money by modelling their entire supply chain network, analysing the wastages and offering new more efficient alternatives. The allocation and markdown optimisation services promise to give retailers up to 20% greater revenues and profit. Predictix is suitable to all types of global retail including online, brick-and-mortar, social, mobile, fashion, hardlines, mass-merchant and grocery, the vendor says.

AWS, Datacentre, Google, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

AWS, Azure and Google intensify cloud price war

AzureAs price competition intensifies among the top three cloud service providers, one analyst has warned that cloud buyers should not get drawn into a race to the bottom.

Following price cuts by AWS and Google, last week Microsoft lowered the price bar further with cuts to its Azure service. Though smaller players will struggle to compete on costs, the cloud service is a long way from an oligopoly, according to Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom.

Amazon Web Services began the bidding in early January as chief technology evangelist Jeff Barr announced the company’s 51st cloud price cut on his official AWS blog.

In January 8th Google’s Julia Ferraioli argued via a blog post that Google is now a cheaper offering (in terms of cost effectiveness) as a result of its discounting scheme. “Google is anywhere from 15 to 41% less expensive than AWS for compute resources,” said Ferraioli. The key to the latest Google lead in cost effectiveness is automatic sustained usage discounts and custom machine types that AWS can’t match, claimed Ferraioli.

Last week Microsoft’s Cloud Platform product marketing director Nicole Herskowitz announced the latest round of price competition in a company blog post announcing a 17% cut off the prices of its Dv2 Virtual Machines.

Herskowitz claimed that Microsoft offers better price performance because, unlike AWS EC2, its Azure’s Dv2 instances have include load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no extra charge.

Microsoft is also aiming to change the perception of AWS’s superiority as an infrastructure service provider. “Azure customers are using the rich set of services spanning IaaS and PaaS,” wrote Herskowitz, “today, more than half of Azure IaaS customers are benefiting by adopting higher level PaaS services.”

Price is not everything in this market warned Quocirca analyst Longbottom, an equally important side of any cloud deal is overall value. “Even though AWS, Microsoft and Google all offer high availability and there is little doubting their professionalism in putting the stack together, it doesn’t mean that these are the right platform for all workloads. They have all had downtime that shouldn’t have happened,” said Longbottom.

The level of risk the provider is willing to protect the customer from and the business and technical help they provide are still deal breakers, Longbottom said. “If you need more support, then it may well be that something like IBM SoftLayer is a better bet. If you want pre-prepared software as a service, then you need to look elsewhere. So it’s still horses for courses and these three are not the only horses in town.”

cloud infrastructure, IDC, News & Analysis, Research

Global spending on cloud infrastructure up 23% says IDC

Global Container TradeCompanies across the world are still furiously modernising their IT infrastructure to support cloud services, according to analyst IDC, which reports ‘healthy’ growth in this sector continues.

It notes that vendors of servers, storage and Ethernet switches are all experiencing declining revenues in traditional IT environments. The figures also indicate increasing confidence in public cloud services, claims IDC.

The latest Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker from IDC compiled sales figures for Q3 2015 and found a 23% rise in revenues on the same period in 2014, with total revenue of $7.6 billion being reported by manufacturers.

Infrastructure investment is growing at a faster rate than application sales, the report noted. The proportion of cloud IT infrastructure sales in the cloud industry climbed to 33.8% in 3Q15, up from 28.7% a year ago. The revenue from infrastructure sales to the private cloud sector grew by 18.8% to $2.9 billion, while sales to the public cloud rose by 25.9% to $4.6 billion.

By contrast, Q3 revenue from sales to traditional (non-cloud) IT set ups fell by 3.2% in comparison to the previous year’s third quarter, with sales of three technology segments (servers, storage and Ethernet switches) all going into decline in the non-cloud sector. However, all three technology markets showed compensating growth in the cloud sector. Strong year-over-year growth in both private and public cloud segments is reported, with server sales leading the charge in the private cloud sector, growing at 24.3%. Meanwhile, in the public cloud, sales of Ethernet switches are growing fastest of all equipment types, rising by 37.8%. Public cloud spending on storage grew 26.7% year on year.

This healthy double-digit growth in cloud IT deployments indicates an increasing preference for public cloud infrastructure according to Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Computing Hardware and Platforms at IDC. “As public cloud offerings continue to improve in reliability and security, customers are becoming more comfortable with the flexibility they get from these these elastic environments,” said Stolarski.

Sales in Japan grew fastest in Japan at 47.1% year over year, followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) at 35.3%, Western Europe at 22.1%, Canada at 22.0% and the United States at 20.1%. However sales in Central and Eastern Europe fell 10%, which IDC attributed to political turmoil.

“As public cloud continues to becomes the de-facto choice for compute, users will greatly benefit from the next generation of container technology, which will enable true usage-based billing and flexible IT infrastructure that scales according to demand – rather than the fixed instances set by the provider,” commented Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts. “It’s time for public cloud to deliver the next generation of infrastructure to customers and bring utility computing to the present so customers can stop paying for capacity they’re not using.”

content, Content & Applications, Matrixx, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, Vlocity

Matrixx partners with Vlocity for cloud content platform

Cloud Computing color vector illustration.The lengthy gestation period for new products and services from mobile operators could be radically shortened by a new cloud-based service from a team of app software developers, reports Telecoms.com.

Telco software developer Matrixx Software and cloud apps vendor Vlocity have jointly launched Go Digital, in a bid to simplify the provision of video and music streaming, roaming passes and lifestyle applications for comms and digital service providers. Go Digital is based on the Salesforce platform and combines Vlocity’s cloud apps with Matrixx’s digital commerce platform. Vlocity claims it is Salesforce’s preferred ISV partner for the comms industry.

With comms service providers (CSPs) hamstrung by their clunky legacy platforms, many struggle to execute on their digital agendas, the partners behind Go Digital claim. The new service allows clients to define their own experience, giving them the option to try, buy and manage digital services. Clients can choose from video and music streaming services, track their usage in real-time, make one-click purchases, share selected balances with friends, add roaming passes on-the-fly and consume services in manageable chunks. Go Digital’s founder say they’ve also cracked another problem that has dogged the CSPs, by creating a consistent service experience, regardless of the device or network they use.

Go Digital gives each client a virtual control centre to manage their digital services and it promises service providers a one-click customer experience with multiple payment options for additional mobile services. The solution is immediately available and reference customer include Swisscom, Telstra and Sky Italia.

“Go Digital creates a significant new revenue opportunity that can be rapidly deployed in any carrier or service provider, of any size, anywhere in the world. The possibilities are endless,” said Vlocity founder David Schmaier. Matrixx and Vlocity will showcase Go Digital at February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Enterprise IT, HPE, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, NFV, Virtualisation

New Service Director from HPE could simplify hybrid cloud management for telcos

HPE street logoHPE claims its new Service Director system could put comms service providers back in control of their increasingly complex hybrid computing estates. It aims to achieve this by simplifying the management of network function virtualisation (NFV).

HPE claims that Service Director will automate many of the new management tasks that have been created by the expanding cloud environment and provide a simpler system of navigation for all the different functions that have to be monitored and managed. The new offering builds on HPE NFV Director’s management and orchestration (MANO) capacity and bridges existing physical and new virtualized environments.

As virtualisation has expanded it has extended beyond the remit of current generations of operations support systems (OSS) and the coexistence of physical and virtual infrastructure can introduce obstacles that slow the CSPs down, HPE said. It claims the Service Director will help CSPs roll out new offerings quicker.

The main benefits of the system outlined by HPE are automation of operations, shared information, flexible modelling of services and openness. With a single view of the entire infrastructure and dynamic service descriptors, it aims to make it easier to spot problems and create new services, HPE claims. As an open system the Service Director platform will have interfaces to any new third party software defined networking controllers and policy engines.

Since there is no such thing as a green field NFV set up there has to be a system to rationalise the legacy systems and the new virtualised estate, said David Sliter, HPE’s comms VP. “Service Director is a transformational change in the relationship between assurance and fulfilment, allowing the OSS resource pool to be treated, automated and managed as a service,” said Sliter.

The telecoms industry needs an omnipotent service orchestration system that can span every existing NFV MANO and OSS silo, according to analyst Caroline Chappell, principal analyst of NFV and Cloud for Heavy Reading. A model-driven, fulfilment and assurance system like Service Director could speed up the delivery of services across a hybrid physical and virtual network, Chappell said.

HPE Service Director 1.0 will be available worldwide in early 2016, with options for pre-configured systems to address specific use cases as extensions to the base product, starting with HPE Service Director for vCPE 1.0.

EMEA, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Oracle, Recruitment

Oracle creating 1,400 new cloud jobs in EMEA

OracleOracle has announced aggressive expansion plans with a recruitment drive for junior and senior sales staff to be based in six cities across EMEA.

The cloud software giant is now actively headhunting for 1,400 new cloud sales staff to work out of sales HQs in Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Malaga and Prague. Oracle will be investing in two new cloud sales centres in Amsterdam and Cairo and new offices opening this year in Dubai, Dublin and Prague.

The new initiative follows a multi-billion dollar investment in a new portfolio of cloud computing services which Oracle claiming it now has ‘everything from secure computing infrastructure to enterprise cloud applications’. It currently offers 600 cloud applications to complement its on-premise hardware and software offerings. As enterprises move to hybrid cloud computing models, Oracle says it is now placed to help them manage their overall enterprise computing environment while simplifying the potentially difficult transition to the cloud.

Oracle claims that in the six months since June 2015 it has added nearly 1,500 new software as a service (SaaS) customers and 2,100 platform as a service (PaaS) customers.

Oracle president Loic Le Guisquet, said that though these are ‘exciting times’ for the software giant it will be very cautious about who it selects. “I want socially savvy, switched on individuals who can help customers respond to the digital imperative and make their businesses future proof,” said Le Guisquet, “we’re looking for people who want to be relevant to the biggest trends shaping business and technology.”

Experienced cloud sales staff may soon come at a premium as Oracle admitted it may try to attract staff from other operators. “Recruits may well come from a sales organization within another cloud technology provider,” said a spokesperson.

Other stated targets will be “people with experience in the lines of business we sell to like finance, marketing and HR,” according to Oracle.

Artificial intelligence, Babylon, digital health, Funding, health, News & Analysis

Digital health startup Babylon gets £24m to develop medical AI

Babylon Simulator Screen ShotUK-based digital health service Babylon Health has raised $25m in a Series A funding round led by Swedish investment group AB Kinnevik. The venture capital advance is a record amount for a European cloud based health start up.

Babylon will use the cash to expand beyond its current online patient base of 250,000 UK users to deliver preventative medicine and sick care across EMEA. Since its launch in February 2015, the service has expanded to Ireland and there are plans for an East African service for 2016. Businesses such as Citigroup, Sky and MasterCard offer it to their staff as an employee benefit and it’s used by health insurance providers Mercer, Bupa and Aviva. It claims it’s at an early stage of partnering with the NHS to make its services available to the broader UK population.

The platform uses machine learning to analyse genetics, environment, behaviour, biology and key body functions. It uses this information as a form of preventative medicine, encouraging users to stay healthy through timely personalised health advice. It now plans an additional service which aims to help monitor and manage course completion when medicine is prescribed and to assesses the effectiveness of the treatment. Babylon has demonstrated a working prototype of this additional app, which is due for launch in 2016.

Partners in the venture include investment company BXR Group, Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and Hoxton Ventures, the fund established to bridge European companies to Silicon Valley. According to the FT.Com Babylon is valued at £100m.

In January another UK based online health start up, PushDoctor, announced it had raised $8.2million round of Series A financing from Oxford Capital, Draper Esprit and Partech Ventures.

AWS, Canada, Datacentre, News & Analysis

AWS adds hydro-powered Canadian region to its estate

AWS has announced it will open a new carbon-neutral Canadian region to its estate as well as running a new free test drive service for cloud service buyers.

AWS chief technology evangelist Jeff Barr announced on the AWS official blog that a new AWS region in Montreal, Canada will run on hydro power.

The addition of data centre facilities in the Canada-Montreal region means that AWS partners and customers can run workloads and store data in Canada. AWS has four regions in North America but they are all in the United States, with coverage in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California),US West (Oregon), and AWS GovCloud (US). There is also an additional region for Ohio planned for some time in 2016. The Ohio and Montreal additions will give AWS 14 Availability Zones in North America.

AWS’s data centre estate now comprises 32 Availability Zones across 12 geographic regions worldwide, according to the AWS Global Infrastructure page. Another 5 AWS regions (and 11 Availability Zones) are in the pipeline including new sites in China and India. These will come online “throughout the next year” said Barr.

The Montreal facilities are not exclusive to Canadian customers and partners and open to all existing AWS customers who want to process and store data in Canada, said Barr.

Meanwhile, AWS announced a collaboration with data platform provider MapR to create a ‘try before you buy’ service. Through AWS facilities MapR is to offer free test drives of the Dataguise DgSecure, HPE Vertica, Apache Drill and TIBCO Spotfire services that it runs from its integrated Spark/Hadoop systems.

The AWS Test Drives for Big Data will provide private IT sandbox environments with preconfigured servers so that cloud service shoppers can launch, login and learn about popular third-party big data IT services as they research their buying options. MapR claims that it has made the system so easy that the whole process, from launching to learning, can be achieved within an hour using its step-by-step lab manual and video. The test drives are powered by AWS CloudFormation.

MapR is currently the only Hadoop distribution on the AWS Cloud that is available as an option on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), AWS Marketplace and now via AWS Test Drive.

CCaaS, Cisco, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Shadow IT

Cisco launches Cloud Consumption as a Service to help CIOs retain control

Cisco shadow ITCisco has announced a new service to help CIOs regain control of the company computing resources as shadow IT threatens to run rampant.

Its new Cloud Consumption as a Service (CCaaS) offering promises to discover and monitor public cloud computing usage, which grew at 112 per cent last year in large enterprises. With the average organisation now using 1,220 cloud services the position of chief information officer risks being undermined, as much of the information technology that companies use is now out of the CIO’s control, according to Cisco.

Cisco alleges that cloud services are now 25 times higher than the average CIO planned for, meaning that management is impossible. The launch of CCaaS will offer measure and monitoring, in order to help CIOs to manage what it describes as ‘the significant business risks associated with uncontrolled adoption of public cloud services’. These risks range from regulatory compliance and data protection, to business continuity, cost and service performance, it warns.

The main function of the service is to discover and continually monitor public cloud use across an organisation. When tempered with detailed analytics and benchmarking from Cisco, businesses could cut both their costs and security risks while making better future cloud service purchasing decisions.

New York based health care organisation CityMD, which acted a test user of the service, found that employees across its 50 sites were using 522 cloud services, while the IT department only supported 20.

“Our company was founded by doctors, so they want cloud services fast but now we have a better idea of what risks we may face,” said Robert Florescu, Information Technology VP at CityMD.

The Cisco Cloud Consumption as a Service is now available globally via qualified Cisco channel partners, prices start at $1 to $2 dollars per employee per month, depending on the size of the business.