All posts by Business Cloud News

Corporate, IDC, M&A, News & Analysis, SanDisk, Western Digital

Western Digital buys SanDisk for $19 billion for its cloud driving flash

Disk CloudHard disk vendor Western Digital is to buy chip maker SanDisk for around $19 billion as the consolidation of chip-making industry continues.

Flash specialist SanDisk is one of the largest makers of NAND flash memory chips. The capacity of NAND Flash Memory products to store data in a small footprint, while simultaneously using less power but granting faster access to data, has made this technology particularly popular in the mobile, internet of things and data centre sectors, Increasingly, according to analysts, NAND is becoming the storage technology of choice in data centres that support cloud computing.

The market for NAND flash chips rose to $28.9 billion in 2014, according to IDC and SanDisk (with joint venture partner Toshiba) was the largest producer.

Meanwhile the market for traditional disk drives, where Western Digital is a market leader, is declining, say analysts. The commoditisation of hardware, driven by the software definition of data centres, has seen profit margins on sales decline, even if volumes are up.

Western Digital had a leading 44% share of the market for hard disk drives in 2014, according to statistics from market researcher IDC. However, it suffered a sales decline of 4% in its most recent financial year and the overall storage business also shrank, to $32.9 billion.

“With new storage companies coming through with all-flash systems based on consumer-grade substrate, it is not in WD or Seagate’s best interests to try and do economies of scale aimed more at the enterprise only,” said analyst Clive Longbottom, senior director at research company Quocirca. “By buying up consumer flash companies, they get that economy of scale for themselves.”

The disruption of the IT manufacturers by the cloud has changed the strategies of the encumbents like Western Digital, said Longbottom. “ Dell, HP, IBM and others do seem to be more worried about the new kids on the block than each other at the moment,” said Longbottom.

The cash-and-stock offer values SanDisk at $86.50 per share, or a total equity value of about $19 billion, using a five-day volume weighted average price ending on Oct. 20 of $79.60 per share of Western Digital stock. SanDisk’s shares rose 6.4% to $80 in pre-market trading. Western Digital’s shares were down 1.1% at $74.

The deal is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2016.

DigitalOcean, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis

DigitalOcean simplifies IP addressing of services with new cloud building invention

CloudCloud infrastructure platform maker DigitalOcean has launched new tools for developing building large-scale applications. The tools, Floating IPs and Team Account Management, aim to speed up the process by removing common blockages reported by cloud application writers.

The Floating IPs platform aims to make it easier for developers to quickly associate an IP address with a different cloud server (AKA Droplet). The system caters for quick allocation through one of two routes, using either the system control panel or application programming interface (API). “This eliminates single points of failure and empowers developers to build production applications at any scale,” said Brooke McKim, director of product at DigitalOcean.

The company has also released Team Accounts, a system to improve support for teams of developers working together to power established applications. The system allows developers to invite multiple users to access and manage the account’s resources, such as Droplets, without having to share their own login credentials or billing information.

DigitalOcean says that since its formation, in 2012, 700,000 developers have used its cloud building system to create eight million cloud servers. The release of Floating IPs will make it a lot easier to tag servers to apps and create highly available applications, according to Moisey Uretsky, co-founder and chief product officer at DigitalOcean.

“Simplicity is difficult to achieve,” said Uretsky, “There’s a lot of benefit in taking the time to get it right and making complex technology easy to use. We wanted this networking solution to have the same qualities developers love about The Droplet: simplicity, elegance and incredible user experience.”

Development of the new products was financed by an $83 million funding round in July 2015, with funds from Series B round of financing led by Access Industries. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s $37 million Series A round last year. Container pioneer Docker hosts its applications on DigitalOcean.

Corporate, Enterprise IT, Financial Results, IBM, News & Analysis, Quarterlies

IBM cloud service revenue up despite 14th quarterly revenue decline

IBM2IBM has posted an unexpectedly large drop in revenue and cut its full-year profit forecast, blaming the strong US dollar for dampening demand from China and emerging markets. Though cloud, big data, mobile and other strategic markets are growing, their rise is not enough to arrest a long term trend of decline.

IBM, which gets more than half its business from overseas, says it has been affected as the dollar is currently 17% up on its standing against a basket of currencies compared to this time last year.

Chinese sales were particularly affected, with fewer big deals being registered. As a consequence revenue from China fell 17%, IBM’s chief financial officer Martin Schroeter told analysts. Sales in Brazil, Russia, India and China combined were down 30%.

The company’s total revenue fell 13.9% to $19.28 billion in the quarter, below analysts’ average forecast of $19.62 billion.

It was the 14th quarter in a row that IBM has posted a reduction in revenue. As IBM divests itself of low-margin businesses it has failed to make up the shortfall, yet, through cloud computing, according to analysts.

“This is another example of the massive headwinds that traditional tech stalwarts are seeing in this ever-changing environment, as more customers move to the cloud,” said FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives.

According to IBM CFO Martin Schroeter, weakness in IBM’s consulting and storage businesses account for the revenue shortfall, rather than the performance of its cloud services.

“I would characterize it as the consulting and systems integration business moving away from these large, packaged applications and the storage business moving to flash and to the cloud,” Schroeter told Reuters in an interview.

Revenue from IBM’s ‘strategic imperatives’, cloud and mobile computing, data analytics, social and security software, rose 17 per cent in the third quarter ending on Sept 30th.

IBM’s net income from continuing operations fell to $2.96 billion, or $3.02 per share, from $3.46 billion, or $3.46 per share, a year earlier.

At the close of trading yesterday (Monday) IBM’s shares had fallen 7 per cent this year.

Cloud Foundry, connected car, Internet of Things, Mercedes, News & Analysis, Pivotal

Mercedes-Benz and Pivotal forge smart car apps on Cloud Foundry

connected-car-normalUsing your mobile phone while driving could become compulsory, thanks to a new connected car application being jointly developed by Mercedes-Benz and Pivotal.

The Mercedes me app will give drivers real-time information about the status of their cars through their smartphones and smart watches.

Pivotal and Mercedes-Benz are working on the app on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Spring in a bid to give Mercedes drivers information about their car’s vital signs (such as oil, water and petrol levels) and remote control of everything from heating and locks to navigation. The system will work with a navigation tool via iPhone and Apple Watch.

According to Mercedes-Benz by 2020 all vehicles will be emission-free and will feature autonomous driving and deep levels of Internet connectivity. To support these initiatives, it is using Pivotal Labs’ cloud native platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry with the developer framework Spring Boot.

With Daimler and Mercedes-Benz both anxious to meet emissions targets, their developers were keen to explore all the possibilities of Pivotal’s modern agile software development methods, said Scott Yara, Co-President at Pivotal. “They are now also a great software company,” said Yara.

Daimler’s work with Pivotal’s cloud platform minimized its innovation cycle by helping it develop a system faster than ever, according to Christoph Hartung, Head of Connected Cars at Mercedes-Benz. “Our collaboration with Pivotal will define a new digital driving culture with state of the art information technologies, online communication systems and automotive services,” said Hartnung.

Analytics, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Teradata

New Teradata apps enable IoT analytics

Internet of things cloudTeradata customers can now listen to the Internet of Things data thanks to two new software innovations designed to create insights into developments.

Teradata’s new Listener and Aster Analytics applications can intelligently listen in real-time and then use analytics to see the distinctive patterns in massive streams of IoT data, it says.

Teradata Listener is an intelligent system that can follow multiple streams of sensor and IoT data wherever it exists globally and feed it to a choice of different analytical systems. Data sent to the Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform 1800 provides access to large volumes of data with its native support of JSON (Java Script Object Notation) data. Alternatively, data fed to a Hadoop based system can be analysed at scale with Teradata Aster Analytics on Hadoop.

Teradata Listener helps data scientists, business analysts and developers to analyse new data streams for faster answers to business questions. Users can analyse data from numerous sources including sensors, telematics, mobile events, click streams, social media feeds and IT server logs, without seeking technical help from the IT department.

Teradata Aster Analytics on Hadoop has 100 pre-configured analytics techniques and seven vertical industry applications to run directly on Hadoop.

In a hospital, data from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), radiography, and ultrasound imaging equipment might be streamed as text logs. This information describing patient behaviour and sensor data could be streamed into an Hadoop data lake. The new systems allow the users to runs text analytics on the data in order to find out how effectively personnel are working and how efficiently expensive resources, such as MRI scanners, are being used.

“Customers can combine IoT data with business operations and human behavioural data to maximise analytic value,” said Hermann Wimmer, Teradata’s co-president, “Teradata Listener and Aster Analytics on Hadoop are breakthrough IoT technologies that push the analytic edge, making the ‘Analytics of Everything’ possible.”

The collection and analysis of sensor and IOT data has been integral to driving the efficiency of the rail business, according to railways expert Gerhard Kress, director of Analytical Services at Siemens’ Mobility Division.

data proteciton, Datacentre, European Commission, News & Analysis, Safe Harbour

EC/US have three months to find a new Safe Harbour

The European Commission (EC) and the US are under pressure to come up with a new replacement system for the recently invalidated Safe Harbour agreement.

A statement from EU advisory body The Article 29 Working Party on the Protection of Individuals, has given those affected by the ruling three months to devise a new system.

However, the US and the EC have previously worked for two years without success to reform the Safe Harbour agreement. The reforms were made necessary after US government surveillance programmes were revealed by National Security Agency (NSA) whistle blower Edward Snowden. However, despite co-operation, for two years progress stalled as the US couldn’t guarantee limits on access to personal data.

“If by the end of January 2016, no appropriate solution is found with the US authorities and depending on the assessment of the transfer tools by the Working Party, EU data protection authorities are committed to take all necessary and appropriate actions, which may include coordinated enforcement actions,” said the statement issued.

Following Court of Justice of the European Union (CREU) ruling on October 6th, many companies risk being prosecuted by European privacy regulators if they transfer the data of EU citizen’s to the US without a demonstrable set of privacy safeguards.

The 4,000 firms that transfer their clients’ personal data to the United States currently have no means of demonstrating compliance to EC privacy regulations. As the legal situation currently stands, EU data protection law says companies cannot transfer EU citizens’ personal data to countries outside the EU which have insufficient privacy safeguards.

EU data protection authorities, meeting in Brussels to assess the implications of the ruling, said in a statement that they would assess the impact of the judgment on other data transfer systems, such as binding corporate rules and model clauses between companies.

The regulators said in their statement the EU and the United States should negotiate an “intergovernmental agreement” providing stronger privacy guarantees to EU citizens, including oversight on government access to data and legal redress mechanisms.

Multinationals can still set up internal privacy rules for US data transfers, to be approved by regulators but these so called ‘binding corporate rules’ are only used by 70 companies. All alternative data transfer systems could now also be at risk of a legal challenge, say lawyers. “The good news is that the European data protection authorities have agreed on a kind of grace period until the end of January,” said Monika Kuschewsky, a lawyer at Covington & Burling.

Ansible, M&A, News & Analysis, Open Source, RedHat

RedHat to buy DevOps specialist Ansible

Cloud in my handOpen source vendor RedHat has announcement an agreement to buy DevOps specialist Ansible, which creates agentless automation systems designed to simplify the automation of pure and across hybrid cloud environments.

The upstream Ansible open source automation projects on GitHub have an active community of 1,200 contributors and Ansible automation is used by Fortune 100 companies to power large and complex private cloud environments. In 2015 it was granted the InfoWorld Bossie Award in recognition of being the best open source datacentre and cloud software on the market.

Ansible removes some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT, according to Joe Fitzgerald vice president of management at Red Hat. Adding Ansible to Red Hat’s hybrid management portfolio means customers can install and manage cloud applications more easily, use DevOps to improve service delivery, streamline OpenStack projects and make container adoption much easer to orchestrate and configure.

Acquiring the top IT automation and DevOps company will take Red Hat significantly closer to frictionless IT, according to Fitzgerald, but innovation has to be 100 per cent open source and built on open management. “Ansible can help us relentlessly focus on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation,” said Fitzgerald.

The addition of Ansible to Red Hat’s portfolio puts it at the forefront of cloud and DevOps, according to venture capitalist Doug Carlisle, MD of Menlo Ventures.

The acquisition, which will close in October if all conditions are met, won’t affect Red Hat’s revenue for the third and fourth quarters of its fiscal year ending on February 29, 2016. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but VentureBeat reckons the price was over $100 million.

Management expects that non-GAAP operating expenses for fiscal 2016 will increase by approximately $2.0 million, or ($0.01) per share, in the third quarter and approximately $4.0 million, or ($0.02) per share, in the fourth quarter as a result of the transaction.

According to researcher IDC’s analysis in July 2015, the global cloud systems management software market achieved total revenue of $2.3 billion in 2014. The market is currently forecast to grow to $8.3 billion in 2019.

BlueMix, Content & Applications, Enterprise IT, IBM, Infosys, News & Analysis

Infosys to use IBM’s Bluemix make next generation of cloud apps

IBM and Infosys have announced a joint venture where Infosys will use IBM’s Bluemix system to prototype, develop and roll out new cloud apps for its client base in 50 countries.

The partners will launch a Bluemix-powered Innovation Lab in which Infosys and its clients can work together to create applications. Infosys developers are to be trained on Bluemix and tutored on cloud app development. Infosys will also get access to the IBM Bluemix Dedicated, a library of cognitive computing and analytics systems and services for building client apps.

The Infosys Innovation Lab will be staffed with a dedicated team of designers, ‘extreme agile’ specialists and industry and technology architects. Infosys has 187,000 employees and a turnover of $8.7 billion.

IBM launched Bluemix with a US$ 1 billion investment in 2014 and it now claims to be the largest Cloud Foundry deployments in the world, with a catalogue of over 120 tools and software-services, with all the top open-source, IBM and third-party technologies.

The partnership is all about getting access to these technologies and sharing them with clients, according to Srikantan Moorthy, Head of Application Development and Maintenance at Infosys. “Our goal is to bring these advanced technologies to clients’ application landscape in the most rapid and collaborative way possible,” said Moorthy, “Infosys will also incorporate any Bluemix-related curriculum into its on-boarding and training process.”

The disruptive forces of cognitive computing, analytics and IoT are all delivered through the cloud and Bluemix will only exacerbate these changes, according to Steve Robinson, IBM Cloud’s General Manager. “Developers can accelerate the deployment of these next-generation apps and this collaboration with Infosys will advance our clients’ journey.”

containers, Liberty, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpensStack, SDN

OpenStack Liberty release features enhancements for SDN and containers

OpenStack SummitThe twelfth release of OpenStack will tackle the cloud software toolset’s size limitations and will offer new options for software defined networking, says the Openstack Foundation.

The new version, Liberty, will help cloud software builders to create more manageable and scalable enterprise services with ‘the broadest support for popular data centre technologies’ the foundation says.

The OpenStack Foundation says Liberty was designed in response to user requests for more detailed management controls. OpenStack has also been criticised for its inability to step up to large scale installations. As a result, its operating core has been strengthened and its production environment will include more powerful tools for managing new technologies, such as containers.

Improvements include a new common library adoption, better configuration management and a new role-based access control (RBAC) for the Heat orchestration and Neutron networking projects. These control improvements, which were specifically requested by cloud operators, will allow them to fine tune security settings at all levels of network and orchestration functions and APIs.

OpenStack’s scalability challenges are to be tackled with an updated model to support very large and multi-location systems. The foundation also promised that Liberty users will see better scaling and performance in the Horizon dashboard, Neutron networking Cinder block storage services and during upgrades to Nova’s computing services.

Liberty also marks the first full OpenStack use of the Magnum containers management project. Magnum will support popular container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. Magnum aims to simplify the adoption of container technology by tying into existing OpenStack services such as Nova, Ironic and Neutron. Further improvements are planned with new project, Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components such as libnetwork.

The Heat orchestration project promises ‘dozens’ of new resources for management, automation and orchestration of the expanded capacity of Liberty.

1,933 individuals across more than 164 organizations contributed to OpenStack Liberty through upstream code, reviews, documentation and internationalization efforts. The top code committers to the Liberty release were HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, VMware, and NEC.

enterprise applications, News & Analysis, PaaS, Platform as a service, Tibco

Tibco announces two new cloud integrators

Platform as a ServiceTibco has built two new systems for building cloud services and manage enterprise applications.

BusinessWorks Container Edition is a streamlined version of Tibco flagship product and designed to make installation, upgrades and other operational duties easier with the Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It’s aimed at companies where dealing with regulatory requirements or sensitive data is a major challenge and sets out to provide more flexible workload controls across the entire IT estate, from on-premise IT to hybrid clouds.

Tibco Cloud Integration is an integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) that will make it easier to create, govern and consuming cloud services, the vendor claims. A tool for managing application programming interfaces (APIs) is designed to make the rolling out of these services smoother, both internally and externally.

The rationale is to make it easier for enterprises to adopt cloud services, according to Tibco CTO Matt Quinn. “Integration is critical to connecting and engaging on multiple channels,” said Quinn,

Cloud Foundry environments are now so simple they can be built in a few minutes with a few commands, claims Tibco. Meanwhile they’ve been re-engineered to run on different systems irrespective of the infrastructure, without the administrators having to surrender any of their control over their IT estate. The simplification of management means that responsibility for cloud environments can be moved in-house, Tibco claims.

“The cloud first approach is really about offering new consumption models for our customers,” said Quinn.

The recent addition of Mashery’s API management system has helped speed up the process of extending the use of cloud, while the new Tibco tools will improve integration with in house system, according Quinn.