All posts by Business Cloud News

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, NTT, SAP

NTT achieves SAP Global Certification

multi cloudNTT Comms has achieved SAP Global Certification for hosting services, cloud services and SAP HANA operations services.

The certification will enable NTT to build and manage SAP applications by utilizing the company’s enterprise cloud and its Global Management One platform. The offering will be made available on all NTT infrastructures across private, public and hybrid clouds, through a consumption-based delivery model.

“We’re set to see more organizations place key infrastructure and applications in the cloud. However, for global enterprises it is often a difficult and complex journey,” said Damian Skendrovic, CEO at NTT Comms Managed Services. “Our new cloud solutions for SAP put our customers in pole position to migrate to the cloud and manage their applications more effectively. This ensures that business operations are enhanced as quickly as possible and without disruption.”

To achieve the certification, a provider’s cloud platform must undertake comprehensive testing by SAP to authorize the integration with its complete application set. Aside from the company’s infrastructure being tested against the standards, NTT’s technical staff in the EMEA, Americas and Asia Pacific regions were also placed under the same scrutiny.

Outside of the managed services business unit, the NTT team have continued efforts to diversify its revenue channels and grow its business in new markets. NTT Data recently announced plans to acquire Dell Services for $3.06 billion, as it prioritized growth in international markets.

“NTT Data is pleased with the unique opportunity to acquire such high-calibre talent, and a corporate culture that shares common values with NTT Data, with emphasis on client first, foresight, teamwork and a commitment to innovation,” said Toshio Iwamoto, President and CEO of NTT Data Corporation. “Welcoming Dell Services to NTT DATA is expected to strengthen our leadership position in the IT Services market and initiates an important business relationship with Dell.”

The acquisition is the fourth made by NTT over the course of 2016, though it would appear that EMC are not in such a favourable position. Dell Services as a business unit was reportedly to be valued in the region of $5 billion, which could highlight Dell’s urgency in completing the sale. If reports are correct, it would appear NTT Data has negotiated a good deal.

Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Open Source

Microsoft announces R Server availability inside Azure HDInsight

MicrosoftMicrosoft has announced the availability of R Server inside Azure HDInsight, the company’s Hadoop-as-a-service aspect of Azure Data Lake.

Speaking at Strata + Hadoop World, the company is seemingly hoping to capitalize on the growing trend of open source technologies. Microsoft R is now 100% compatible with Open Source R and any library that exists can be used in the R Server context.

Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics in early 2015 as a means of entering the R-based analytics market, and has since delivered SQL Server R Services on SQL Server 2016 CTP3. R is one of the world’s most widely used programming languages for predictive analytics.

“By making R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, we remove obstacles for users to unlock the power of R by eliminating memory and processing constraints and extending analytics from the laptop to large multi-node Hadoop and Spark clusters,” said Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing, Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing at Microsoft. “This enables the ability to train and run ML models on larger datasets than previously possible to make more accurate predictions that affect the business.”

The company claims that by making the R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, it will remove memory and processing constraints allowing developers to better utilize the power of Hadoop and Spark clusters. If correct, organizations will be able to run machine learning models on larger datasets, increasing the accuracy of business predications which are made by the model.

“This gives you the familiarity of the R language for machine learning while leveraging the scalability and reliability built into Hadoop and Spark,” said Chiu. “It also eliminates memory and processing constraints and easily extends their code from their laptop to large multi-terabyte files producing models that are more powerful and accurate.”

M&A, News & Analysis

Micro Focus moves into DevOps space with $540 million Serena acquisition

Money cloudUK enterprise software vendor Micro Focus has announced its intention to acquire US firm Serena Software, in a bid to improve its position in the DevOps space.

Subject to competition clearances from the US and Germany the $540 million acquisition is set to close in May. It will enable Micro Focus to enhance its DevOps credentials, and capitalize on one of the industry’s fastest growing trends.

“Today’s announcement marks another significant milestone for Micro Focus, bringing together two highly complementary solution sets that enable customers to build better applications, adapt to changing business conditions more rapidly and maximise the value of existing investments to drive further innovation within their business,” said Stephen Murdoch, CEO at Micro Focus.

“With Serena, we are further positioned to deliver richer solutions for the complex business demands customers are solving today – with greater reliability, predictability and less risk of failure.”

Micro Focus claims Serena’s capabilities around “true DevOps” will improve its position in a growing market and enable them to improve new business services through automated release and deployment solutions.

“This is an exciting announcement that promises to offer substantial value to Serena customers and partners,” said Greg Hughes, CEO of Serena. “Our complementary strengths in software development and IT Operations will only serve to provide a stronger foundation for the next-generation of applications and services they require to meet ongoing business demands.”

Micro Focus, which says it specializes in enterprise application modernization, has been bolstering its capabilities in recent years, with a focus of diversifying its customer base and portfolio. In 2014, the company announced it was merging with Attachmate Group for approximately US$1.2 billion, which also owned Novell and Suse Linux.

At the time, Kevin Loosemore, Executive Chairman of Micro Focus said “This is a transformational event that enables Micro Focus International to further meet the needs and demands of our customers and global partner network with greater scale, a broader portfolio and the global reach their businesses require.”

Google, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, SME

Google said to be on cloud shopping spree

Googlers having funGoogle is rumoured to be planning the acquisition of a number of businesses to bolster its cloud computing platform and suite of workplace applications.

According to Re/code, the tech giant has amassed a short-list of various start-ups and niche service providers including automated app services start-up Metavine, e-commerce public company Shopify, and payroll and health benefits services business Namely. Re/code sources have stressed that the approaches are preliminary, and none of the companies involved have commented on the rumours.

The moves seem to address two challenges currently facing the Google team. Firstly, there is a notable gap of ‘middle range’ customers for Google Apps. The company traditionally does well with small and large companies, but has struggled with the lucrative market in between. Last year, Google attempted to lure the middle market onto Google Apps for Work by offering the service for free while seeing out their current enterprise agreement, and then $25 per user after that point.

Secondly, the acquisitions would enable Google to move its internal systems to its cloud platform, potentially creating a more solid offering to challenge AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The reports back-up recent moves in the market which indicated Google’s intentions of increasing its stake in the cloud market. While AWS and Microsoft have been firmly planted as the number one and number two players in the public and private cloud space, Google is closing the gap, making a number of company and talent acquisitions to improve its proposition.

Aside from the recent hire of VMware founder Diane Greene to lead its cloud business, last year SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle highlighted that Google cloud platform revenues could surpass Google’s advertising revenue within five years.

“The goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020,” said Hölzle in October. “Our cloud growth rate is probably industry-leading…and we have lots of enterprise customers, happy enterprise customers.”

The rumours shouldn’t come as a surprise, as Hölzle also said that there would be a number of announcements which would “remove any doubt” from Google’s future plans.

While the approaches are rumours, GCP Next 2016, the company’s cloud developer user conference taking place this week, may provide some clarity to Google’s aspirations.

hybrid cloud, natural resources wales, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Trustmarque

Natural Resources Wales extends cloud ERP relationship with Trustmarque

CloudSystem integrator Trustmarque has announced it will continue it work with Natural Resources Wales, focusing on disaster recovery, and application and infrastructure support.

The agreement, which has now been in place for two years, was initially launched to help Natural Resources Wales simplify its IT estate following the merger of the three different bodies. Natural Resources Wales was brought about through the merger of Countryside Council for Wales, Environment Agency Wales, and the Forestry Commission Wales, all of which operated on different ERP systems.

“The creation of Natural Resources Wales resulted in a complex and disparate IT estate, and over the past two years Trustmarque has helped us effectively simplify it,” said Paul Subacchi, Head of Business Support Services at Natural Resources Wales. “Our ERP system is absolutely critical to the organisation, enabling us to become more efficient and offer greater self-service functionality to our employees.  Cloud is a significant part of our IT strategy, so we need a platform that is available, resilient, flexible and secure to deliver our ERP system.”

Initially projects focused on consolidating all ERP systems it was using for finance and HR onto a single platform, delivered through a combination of cloud, on premise and managed services. Trustmarque will now deliver Natural Resources Wales’ sole ERP system as a private cloud service, as well as creating a self-service portal, MyNRW, for the organizations 2000 employees.

Security was an important consideration for Natural Resources Wales, as Trustmarque has to continually demonstrate that it meets minimum security requirements set forward by G-Cloud. The requirements range from encryption to protect consumer data transiting networks, Trustmarque staff security screening and consumer separation, as well as ensuring that its own supply chain meets the same standards.

“The work we have done with NRW throughout our collaboration is testament to Trustmarque’s end-to-end IT service capabilities and our expertise in delivering cloud services,” said Mike Henson, Cloud and Managed Services Director at Trustmarque. “By selecting the Trustmarque Cloud, Natural Resources Wales is now able to realise the benefits of its Unit 4 ERP system via a secure and robust platform.

“We’ve also removed the potential ‘headache’ that software licensing can cause, allowing Natural Resources Wales to focus on its core business without any compliance concerns. We see our continuing partnership with Natural Resources Wales as an important and valuable digital transformation programme, and look forward to our future work together.”

EMC, Enterprise IT, EY, News & Analysis, partnership

EY and EMC announce strategic technology partnership

Red Hat and Fujitsu are partnering to develop OpenStack converged infrastructure solutions

EY and EMC have announced a formal strategic partnership over business technology services, building on a long-standing relationship between the two firms.

The partnership will offer a number of different services to clients ranging from enterprise mobility management, hybrid cloud enablement, governance risk & compliance and cyber security.

“Working together as an integrated team, combining advisory services and innovative products, we will be able to connect on both existing and future initiatives to help our clients maximize their technology investments and drive better  business outcomes,” said Mark Weinberger, Chairman and CEO at EY. “The alliance will further expand EY’s digital capabilities and range of services offered to clients.”

Addressing growing trends in the industry, security will form one of the central pillars of the partnership. One of the first offerings from the team is Isolated Recovery, an offering which protects company data from cyber-attacks. The team claim a combination of cyber, business impact analysis and resiliency services, will provide a more secure environment for company data.

The partnership will also include Identity Access Management Monitoring (IAM) for single sign on, which will utilize real-time monitoring technologies. Security monitoring is not something that enterprise organizations traditionally engage in, though it is a growing trend as organizations aim to reduce risk when moving through to a cloud environment.

The alliance builds on EMC’s trend of partnering with major technology players to deliver alternative solutions. Last month, EMC and VMware jointly launched a family of hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments.

The VxRail appliance family combines EMC’s data services and systems management with VMware’s software such as vSphere and Virtual SAN.

AWS, Database, News & Analysis

AWS expands reach of Database Migration Service

City lights - EuropeAmazon Web Services has expanded the availability of its Database Migration Service to nearly all its territories worldwide.

Having already performed 1000 migrations since the turn of the year, the service is now available throughout the US, Europe and several locations in Asia. The company is yet to expand to its other regions including Sao Paolo and Seoul.

“Hundreds of customers moved more than a thousand of their on-premises databases to Amazon Aurora, other Amazon RDS engines, or databases running on Amazon EC2 during the preview of the AWS Database Migration Service,” said Hal Berenson, VP, Relational Database Services at AWS. “Customers repeatedly told us they wanted help moving their on-premises databases to AWS, and also moving to more open database engine options, but the response to the AWS Database Migration Service has been even stronger than we expected.”

Migrating a database to the cloud can be a complex and costly project, with enterprises sometimes having to make a tough decision. The decision Enterprises have traditionally had to make is to either take the database out of service while they copy the data, or purchase migration tools which can cost a small fortune. Amazon claims its service is a more cost effective proposition, starting at $3/TB, and it can reduce downtime.

AWS customer Thomas Publishing is an example of one such company who have utilized the service. The team are currently undergoing a transformation project to ensure the products are more user-friendly in the digital world.

“Faced with the challenge of rapidly growing volumes of data and the need to increase efficiency and deliver results on shorter timelines, we were confronted with unattractive options requiring significant upfront investment in both infrastructure and Oracle license expense,” said Hans Wald, Chief Technology Officer, Thomas Publishing

Amazon said that they plan to roll the service out to additional locations in the coming months.

Enterprise IT, Exponential-e, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Rendering-as-a-Service

Exponential-e and Microsoft create Render-as-a-Service offering

Casa 3D progetto su carteExponential-e has announced that it will be working with Microsoft to deliver its new Render-as-a-Service offering.

The partnership, built through the Azure platform, will enable Exponential-e to deliver hybrid render services to a variety of industries that utilise 3D modelling. Potential customers highlighted by the team include manufacturing, architecture, medical providers and scientific research organizations.

“Due to steadily rising image resolutions, rendering is requiring more and more computing horsepower,” said Mukesh Bavisi, Managing Director at Exponential-e. “Also the limitations of power, space and cooling for in-house render farms means they are increasingly more expensive and complex to run.

“Exponential-e’s unique collaboration with Microsoft Azure solves the headache of restricted resource on maxed out internal render nodes.  It provides an on-demand, scalable solution that enables seamless hybrid integration of on premise resource privately connected to the raw compute power. The service is managed as one environment via a single self-service pane of glass.”

3D modelling has been growing healthily in recent years as the technology becomes more affordable and accurate. Analysts have estimated industry revenue will increase from $1.9 billion to $17 billion between 2015 and 2020. Current applications vary widely from the healthcare industry, foetal monitoring and ultrasound scans of pregnant women, to engineering, 3D computer aided design (CAD) programs, to 3D imaging in the entertainment industry.

While the software has become increasing accurate and detailed, the compute power required to run such programs on a consistent basis is also increasing. The success of Exponential-e’s product does rely on the demands of rendering becoming too much of a burden for organizations to run in-house, though it believes the market is heading that direction.

“Render-as-a-Service will alleviate the key pain point for businesses that utilise render processing across the globe,” said Bavisi. “Marrying our network with the Microsoft Azure cloud means greater rendering efficiencies than ever before, and provides us with the opportunity to take this solution to new sectors. By alleviating a key challenge in rendering, our customers can instead focus on driving innovation in an increasingly competitive landscape.”

The RaaS solution is currently in the beta testing stages, though visual effects (VFX) studio, Jellyfish Pictures is already utilising RaaS to flexibly scale resources on demand.

BPM, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Tibco

Tibco focuses on user experience with Spotfire update

cloud exchangeTibco software has released an update to its data analytics offering, Spotfire, focusing on improving user experience and increased collaboration.

The update offering focuses on enhancements to core visualisations, built-in data access and data preparation functions and simplified web-based administration tools.

“This release accelerates self-service productivity, enabling faster, more accurate insights that can be shared over a platform that scales on cloud or on-premises,” said Michael O’Connell, Chief Analytics Officer at Tibco. “Our goal is to enable users to simplify and reduce time to insight, while enabling actions through a unified Spotfire platform that does not rely on costly add-ons or extensions.”

Tibco also recently joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, an industry standard platform for cloud applications. Using the company’s BusinessWorks Container Edition platform, Tibco will contribute to programs focused on portable cloud-native applications.

“At the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we are always looking for ways to enhance our platform so that it provides vendor-agnostic flexibility, scalability, and interoperability for cloud deployments to help enterprises develop cloud deployments that best suit their business needs,” said Sam Ramji, CEO of Cloud Foundry. “Integration remains a key concern as cloud development proliferates, so we are pleased that Tibco will be sharing its expertise to deepen the Cloud Foundry platform’s capabilities.”

The company also released Nimbus maps, a new interface aimed at giving customers complete overview of business processes and operations through a single cloud-based application. The product is aimed at enabling digital transformation to ensure updates are communicated to relevant team members across the enterprise.

“If you’re going to become a Digital Business, you first need to understand how your processes actually work, and what they affect,” said Matt Quinn, CTO at Tibco. “This allows you to focus on transforming the processes that matter the most, such as those that have direct customer touch points, impact your customer experience or affect your time to market for new products or services.

“Nimbus Maps puts process discovery and communication directly in the hands of those that know your business the best, which not only accelerates process improvement, but also helps tie the improvements directly to key metrics from Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to customer Service Level Agreements.”

Datacentre, News & Analysis, Rackspace, server

Rackspace updates OpenStack-powered cloud server, OnMetal

Cisco and IBM are teaming up on converged hardware solutions

Rackspace has updated its OpenStack-powered cloud server, OnMetal, focusing its new features on building connectivity between public cloud and dedicated hardware.

The company highlighted it delivers enhanced compute power, and is designed for customers aiming to run workloads such as Cassandra, Docker and Spark, which require intensive data processing as well as the ability to quickly scale and deploy.

“With the combination of new features and performance capabilities in the next generation of OnMetal, it can be a solution for many customers seeking OpenStack as the platform to run their most demanding workloads,” said Paul Voccio, VP Software Development at Rackspace.

The new servers, designed from Open Compute Project specs, feature the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors, and build on Rackspace’s journey to lead the OpenStack market. Last month, Rackspace added an OpenStack-as-a-Service option, in partnership with Red Hat, to its proposition while highlighting its ambitions “to deliver the most reliable and easy-to-use OpenStack private and hybrid clouds in the world.”

Rackspace claims app performance and reliability indicators are increased with OnMetal cloud servers. The bare metal offering, generally associated with increased security, has helped its customer Brigade avoid performance limitations common with virtualized environments.

“OnMetal has played a significant role in our ability to deliver the Brigade app with optimal uptime, and to innovate and grow the application with the performance of a dedicated environment,” said John Thrall, CTO of Brigade.