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Opinion This week has been a pretty big one for VMware. The San Francisco end user computing giant has launched what it claims to be the industry’s first unified platform of virtualised compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud, as well as announcing new partners for its Partner Network.

Despite past claims that VMware had been a bit late to the cloud party, only pushing out vCloud Air in 2013, the firm is taking big steps to remedy it with a litany of products as part of its hybrid push: VMware vSphere 6, the foundation for the software-defined data centre, VMware Integrated OpenStack, VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere Virtual Volumes, for mass enterprise adoption of software-defined storage, and VMware vCloud Air, bridging public and private clouds to enable a secure network domain.

The soundbites around the announcements were as you’d expect. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a statement: “Every traditional industry across the globe is being transformed by software. To navigate and thrive in the face of this change, businesses must be decisive in the face of uncertainty.

“Today, we are taking another leap forward in helping our customers meet these demands through a unified platform, defined in software, which will offer unmatched choice and extends our innovations across compute, networking and storage to deliver the hybrid cloud,” he added.

The past 12 to 18 months have seen plenty of change from VMware in adopting to a cloud strategy, opening data centres at the rate of approximately one a month last year, including one in Chessington in July. There’s a lot of noise – but what is the overall view of how successful the strategy is?

The first point to note is the company’s image is still in a process of flux. Regular readers of CloudTech will know that it takes months, if not years, for mindsets to change from traditional software to cloud. IBM, for example, has been telling anyone and everyone that it’s now a cloud first company, and put $1bn of investments into that very purpose.

But it’s a different story here. As chief cloud technologist Simone Brunozzi told Bloomberg, when he joined VMware a year ago “most companies were not aware of the fact that we were doing cloud at all.” VMware’s expertise in virtualisation technologies is well-founded, but this is a completely different ball game.

Oracle is regarded as a similar latecomer to the cloud mindset; despite undergoing a boardroom shuffle and gobbling up various high level cloud employees, from SAP’s former head of cloud Shawn Price to Google App Engine mastermind Peter Magnusson, the company’s still playing catch-up.

Yet all this may be insignificant. Why? VMware’s concerted push in the still-not-quite-mature hybrid cloud space means there’s room to manoeuvre.

This time last year, the key tenet for the company was end user computing and enterprise mobility, as evinced in the acquisition of AirWatch. Now, hybrid cloud is an ideal arena in which to play. More than half (58%) of attendees at the 2014 Cloud Expo and AWS Summit admitted they are building hybrid cloud solutions for their organisations. A January study from IDC and Red Hat found 69% of respondents were using at least four public cloud IaaS platforms – including VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.

For larger organisations, they’re neither going all-in to the cloud or all on one cloud – it’s a healthy mix. Yet VMware’s disaster recovery service, announced in April last year, is aimed at curing reticent customers of their cloud phobia.

Of course, there’s a long way to go before VMware is at the front of the queue in hybrid cloud vendors. IBM pushed out an announcement citing Synergy Research figures positioning it as numero uno in hybrid and private enterprise cloud. Yet the signs are there. As IDC analyst Gary Chen put it; VMware won’t capture all of the business out there, but if a company their size is making more and more noise, it’s getting increasingly difficult to ignore them.

Find out more about VMware’s hybrid cloud announcements here.

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86% of cloud apps used by enterprises fall under the category of shadow IT, while nearly three quarters aren’t ‘Safe Harbour’ approved, according to an industry report from CipherCloud.

The research findings, coming amidst worries of more sophisticated mobile malware and vulnerabilities, suggest organisations need to do more to assess what’s going on in their internal IT. One major US enterprise polled estimated it had 10 to 15 file sharing applications in use; the real number was almost 70.

More than half (52%) of publishing apps were considered high risk, while 42% of social apps and 40% of career-based apps were also considered risky.

Enterprises in both North America and Europe are leveraging cloud applications extensively. An average global enterprises uses more than 1000 apps, and though North American businesses (1245) predictably use more than European firms (981), the gap is closing. Not surprisingly, social was the most popular class of cloud app, followed by collaboration, marketing, IT infrastructure and media.

Yet the majority of this usage is through unapproved applications.

One major US enterprise polled estimated it had 10 to 15 file sharing applications in use; the real number was almost 70.

“Our findings suggest that organisations vastly underestimate the level of shadow IT when it comes to cloud adoption”, the report notes. “As a result, hundreds of high-risk cloud applications are in common use across North American and European enterprises.”

The report adds: “To achieve governance, it is imperative that organisations build the necessary legal and technological infrastructure to address cloud risks.”

But is shadow IT such a bugbear? The vast majority of articles and thought pieces paints it as a complete no-no; however, recent opinion assesses it in the context of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. Rather than stamp out shadow IT completely – which is practically impossible as employees will find a way to get around the system – it should be taken as constructive criticism.

As EMM provider MobileIron writes on sister site Enterprise AppsTech: “CIOs should see shadow IT as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity in the sense that it highlights, often very clearly, where something isn’t working for people.

“Instead of trying to wage war against people who are trying to do their jobs as best they can – something that will appear as punitive and unjustified to those people – a more forward thinking and long term approach is to engage them, understand their needs, and work to resolve the issue in a way that works for them and for IT.”

Then again, this point of view might not be the easiest to run by the CIO if corporate data is leaked through an employee’s personal Dropbox account.

You can find the full CipherCloud report here (registration required).

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Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) market share in cloud infrastructure services has hit a five year high despite competition from Microsoft, according to latest figures from Synergy Research.

The research, which examines infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), private and hybrid cloud, sees AWS’ overall share at 28%, compared to Microsoft’s 10%, IBM at 7%, Google at 5%, Salesforce 4%, and Rackspace 3%. Year on year growth saw Microsoft (96%) and Google (88%) the biggest climbers, with Amazon (51%) and IBM (48%) holding steady.

Synergy estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues are now approaching the $5 billion (£3.32bn) mark. Total revenues for 2014 grew by almost half from the previous year.

“The momentum that has been built up at AWS and Microsoft is particularly impressive,” commented John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy. “They have an ever-broadening portfolio of services and they are also benefitting from a slowdown in the super-aggressive price competition that was a feature of the first half of 2014.”

AWS and Microsoft’s uptime figures were recently put under scrutiny by CloudEndure. Microsoft Azure saw 28 full service interruptions in Q2 last year, compared to 16 in Q3 and none in Q4. The vast majority of the 259 service errors in the first quarter of 2014 were advisory. In comparison, AWS in 2014 saw 46 service errors in EC2, 24 in scalable DNS provider Route 53, and 20 in network monitoring service CloudWatch.

In December last year AWS dramatically cut its rates for several types of data transfers, as well as changing how it priced reserved EC2 instances.

Comparative figures from Synergy in previous quarters have shown Microsoft strive to claim second position in the cloud infrastructure market, with AWS way out in front. “Many actual or perceived barriers to cloud adoption have now been removed, and the worldwide market is on a strong growth trajectory,” Dinsdale added.

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Research conducted by Forrester and commissioned by EnterpriseDB (EDB) has found nearly half (42%) of respondents are struggling to manage the NoSQL solutions deployed in their environments.

The study sheds more light on the NoSQL vs relational database discussion facing companies looking to store data today. NoSQL providers will explain their technology is pivotal to deal with increasing changes in terms of processing power, scale and speed; yet according to EDB, relational database providers are slowly clawing back ground and are evolving to support new data capabilities.

Statistics from the report make for interesting reading:

• A third (30%) of respondents said data stored in NoSQL solutions was creating data siloes
• 36% said they want to link their unstructured data with their structured data most of the time
• More than half (52%) said they were unable to prevent developers from deploying new apps on separate NoSQL databases

It’s worth noting here that the majority of the survey results point towards one database to solve all needs – and lo and behold, EDB is pushing out a solution which does exactly that. Yet the more interesting takeaway is the position of relational databases – traditionally the older, poorer relation to the NoSQL players – in the discussion.

Bob Wiederhold, CEO of NoSQL vendor Couchbase, who most recently worked to scale Facebook hit game Cookie Jam, told this publication back in 2013 that NoSQL will “dominate and ultimately…cause Oracle, IBM, SAP and others to have a very difficult time.”

Yet EDB seems to disagree. “Relational databases – and Postgres especially – have responded to changing data demands and incorporated capabilities for managing unstructured data as well as traditional structured data types,” said EDB chief exec Ed Boyajian in a statement.

“Today’s applications are more demanding, and using multiple different database solutions to support them creates problems with usability, adds cost and complexity and poses greater risk for the enterprise,” he added.

Elsewhere, SQL database management providers NuoDB has put out a relational database competitive analysis chart, comparing each vendor to various capabilities including availability, programming languages and multi-tenancy among others. Naturally, NuoDB puts itself firmly at the top of the pile, but it’s still an interesting examination, which can be seen here.

Picture credit: SoftLayer

Six months after it was launched, IBM and SoftLayer opened the doors of its new UK data centre to the media, with IBM UK&I cloud leader Doug Clark and SoftLayer CTO Marc Jones in attendance to review 2014 and look forward to the year ahead.

The data centre in Chessington, run by Digital Realty, was until 2012 a shipping warehouse before being converted. Each pod, which Jones pointed out had the same design in every SoftLayer data centre, has 150 racks, 4000 physical nodes, and a 10,000 ft² isolated zone. Alongside the usual mix of generators is a series of car batteries to share the load for the first few minutes while the generators whir up.

The compute nodes which power SAP HANA have as much as 1TB of memory

2014 has been an extremely busy year for both IBM and SoftLayer, with a mix of the familiar, such as the partnership with SAP’s in-memory database HANA, and the unfamiliar. Firmly in the latter category includes IBM’s deals with Twitterand Docker, which Clark called “positively disruptive.” Part of SAP HANA runs on SoftLayer, and Jones noted the compute nodes that power it have as much as one terabyte of memory each.

Picture credit: SoftLayer

The event also featured customer testimonials from Gyrocom and GoCardless, although SoftLayer was keen to emphasise others, most notably “poster child” WhatsApp, which is run entirely on the SoftLayer infrastructure, as well as Cloudant, which before being acquired by IBM was a “major” SoftLayer customer.

For each customer, SoftLayer’s expertise in bare metal servers was a key differentiator alongside, naturally, location. This publication has extensively covered the geography of newly built data centres, not just from a data sovereignty view with European customers wanting their data to reside in European data houses, but also within the UK; greater connectivity and relatively similar latency means vendors can choose their build sites a bit further away from London.

SoftLayer’s expertise in bare metal servers was a key differentiator for all customers

GoCardless CTO Harry Marr explained how the startup was also looking at AWS, but eventually plumped for SoftLayer. Marr noted how GoCardless was “having real problems with the cloud” when initially attempting to scale, mainly due to multi-tenancy issues and the ‘noisy neighbour’. As regular readers of this publication will remember, IBM secured a patent last year to solve that very issue, utilising software defined networking (SDN) to ensure virtual machines give consistent network performance.

Clark noted the importance of SoftLayer in IBM’s strategy going forward, describing the IaaS provider in a slide as the “foundation of the IBM cloud portfolio”, as well as explaining SoftLayer was a “fundamental” and “maybe dominant” piece of the hybrid cloud equation.

Another interesting nugget came in the form of developers; with 18.2 million developers in the world, only 25% develop on the cloud. Clark expects both numbers to rise, with IBM predicting the overall figure will increase to 26 million in the coming years. Jones noted SoftLayer has an API, and a small team of API evangelists to aid customer integration.

“If anybody takes their eye off the ball, woe betide them in this new world,” said Clark.

Elsewhere, it was confirmed that SoftLayer’s CEO Lance Crosby has left IBM 20 months after his company was acquired. “We wish Lance Crosby the best as he takes a well deserved break before pursuing new endeavours,” a statement from IBM read. Earlier this month it was confirmed that Robert LeBlanc, an IBM veteran, had moved into the role of head of cloud.

Another picture of the SoftLayer data centre can be found below:

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IBM has announced the launch of Identity Mixer, a cloud-based technology which aims to protect personal data by only revealing the bare minimum for transactions, on its BlueMix developer platform.

The release, which has not coincidentally been pegged for Data Privacy Day, uses a cryptographic algorithm to only reveal selected pieces of a user’s information, such as date of birth, home address, and credit card number, to third parties.

An example given of how this service works is through a video streaming service for age-restricted films. Instead of a user submitting full date of birth and address to assess whether they are old enough and in the right region to view the film, Identity Mixer will tell the streaming service only the fact that the user is old enough and in the right region.

The completed product has taken over a decade of research, and is available for developers to test in their own applications and web services. Developers can choose the type of data they wish to secure, and BlueMix will provide the code.

“Identity Mixer enables users to choose precisely which data to share, and with whom,” said Christina Peters, IBM chief privacy officer. “Now web service providers can improve their risk profile and enhance trust with customers, and it’s all in the cloud making it easy for developers to program.”

This innovation is hardly surprising, as IBM has won the most US patents for 21 years in a row, with the culture of the organisation deeply embedded in its staff. When this publication spoke to UK&I cloud leader Doug Clark back in March, he explained even he had a patent, despite being a “salesy” person. Despite this, IBM’s most recent financial results left analysts unconvinced, even though the company hit its target of $7bn in yearly cloud revenue.

Take a look at the video below which explains Identity Mixer in more detail:

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“IPOs are one of the great, mysterious Wall Street spectacles,” Shawn Tully wrote in Forbes earlier this week. “The praise is overwhelming, the definition of ‘success’ is baffling, and anyone who questions the system is taken for a dullard.”

This might explain why everyone and their dog has attempted to shed light on one of tech’s most eagerly anticipated public offerings. So let’s start off with the facts. Box secured a $1.7 billion valuation in its IPO, raising about $175 million on its first day. Shares soared to a high of $24.73, significantly higher than its initial $14 price.

This is despite in its updated filing Box noted profitability at -137% and sales and marketing at 137% compared to revenue. Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint venture capitalist, noted that in today’s market, which “values revenue growth and seemingly ignores profitability”, Box is actually in a better position to capitalise than many believe.

Indeed, CEO Aaron Levie was on the warpath as he described how many pundits misunderstood Box’s business model. He told CNBC: “The thing that’s largely misunderstood about our business is we’re not in the consumer space. Box helps manage corporate data and corporate information for the world’s largest companies.”

He added: “We’re participating in a once in a lifetime transition from on premise computing to cloud computing. When people think, when the cost of storage goes down over time as an example, that doesn’t actually relate to our business because we give unlimited storage, and as the price of storage goes down that actually benefits our infrastructure costs.

“That’s one of the misunderstood dynamics of the business.”

Not everyone is in agreement, however. David Lavenda ,VP of product strategy at harmon.ie, described the IPO as “the end of Box.”

“What happened so far is no surprise,” he said. “The investors would have lined up folks before they pulled the trigger. It’s what happens down the road that counts.

“Continuing to invest in sales for a commodity offering doesn’t make sense,” Lavenda added. “If Box doesn’t buy companies or develop new products with these funds, it won’t maintain its valuation.”

Vineet Jain is the CEO of enterprise file share and sync provider Egnyte, considered more of a competitor to Box than its traditional rival, Dropbox. When the firm launched in Europe back in April, when initial rumours about Box’s IPO were rife, Jain told this publication that cloud valuations were “completely out of whack”, and “basic financial sense has to creep back in.”

He said: “Box will succeed on the low end of the market. Egnyte is positioned to succeed as the high end of the market, and of course Dropbox is poised to take on the consumer market.”

The enterprise focus, with big seat customers, is of course an evident one for Box. The company is far greater than a mere cloud storage player; content management and collaboration for mobile, as evinced in Box Notes, is significant.

Shares last closed at $22.60. Do you agree with these comments?

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A new report from government IT network MeriTalk has assessed how federal agencies are keen on the concept of cloud computing, but are reticent to migrate their full IT estate over for the moment.

This is not to say federal firms aren’t completely against the idea, however. Nearly one in five (19%) of the 150 respondents say they deliver more than a quarter of their agency’s IT services through the cloud. The most popular choice to move was email (50%), followed by web hosting (45%) and servers and storage (43%).

Perhaps not surprisingly, finance and accounting applications (33%) were the least likely to be moved over, alongside custom business apps (32%) and disaster recovery tools (31%).

It’s not just a case of wanting to move data over, however. About a third (32%) of agency data cannot be moved to the cloud due to security or data sovereignty issues, according to survey respondents. More than half of respondents (53%) say they are afraid to commit to a long term contract in case it holds their agency back from cloud adoption. The average federal cloud contract is 3.6 years.

What’s more interesting is more than one in five (23%) say they don’t want to give sensitive federal data over to even FedRAMP-certified cloud providers. If they’re unwilling to give data over to officially secure vendors, then who can they give it to?

The most damning statistic, however, is in overall satisfaction. Only 53% of agencies using cloud rate their experience as successful, leaving a lot to be desired.

Yet there’s hope. 67% of those polled who are open to using open source platforms believe data is safer in the cloud than in legacy systems, compared to 43% who aren’t using open source.

“Open source is not only driving much of the technology innovation in cloud, it is also enabling government agencies to answer their questions about cloud portability and integration,” said Mike Byrd, senior director of government channel sales at Red Hat in a statement.

“In this way, it is not surprising to me that the survey respondents who have embraced open source reported greater cloud success,” he added.

Some federal organisations have moved to the cloud with success in recent months, most notably the state of California, after IBM, AT&T and KPMG won the contrast. George Cruser, GM infrastructure for IBM Global Technology Services, told this publication one of the key tenets was for California to have full understanding, rather than just pure outsourcing.

You can read the full report, underwritten by Red Hat and Cisco, here.

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Having been ranked as one of the top cloud providers for uptime, new figures show Amazon Web Services (AWS) having a 41% reduction in performance issues quarter to quarter during 2014.

The figures, from CloudEndure, see AWS with 127 errors during Q114, a greater number than the following three quarters combined, with 43 in Q2, 37 in Q3, and 26 in Q4.

AWS EC2 was the most frequent faller in 2014, with 46 errors, compared to scalable DNS provider Route 53 (24), network monitoring service CloudWatch (20) and content delivery network CloudFront (20).

These numbers tie in nicely with CloudHarmony’s one year metrics released earlier in January. These numbers just recorded outages instead of errors, and found CloudFront and Route 53 with a clean bill of health, while EC2 had 12 outages over nine regions at an SLA of 99.9973%.

Picture credit: CloudEndure

By region, AWS’ data centres in North Virginia were hit hardest, with 64 errors in 2014, compared with 28 in Oregon and Sao Paolo, and 20 in Ireland. With new data centre regions springing up everywhere – most notably Frankfurt in October last year – 2015’s figures will certainly be interesting.

Ofir Ehrlich, co-founder at CloudEndure, notes the majority of these errors shouldn’t be a problem if your applications are architected correctly – such as running apps simultaneously in multiple regions, so if one does fall over then there is no impact.

In January the company looked at Microsoft’s 2014 figures and found significantly more Azure service interruptions in the final three quarters, with 28 in Q2. Survey data from Synergy in October saw Microsoft overtake the competition for second place in cloud infrastructure services. AWS, meanwhile, remains the standout performer in the cloud infrastructure space, while research from Skyhigh Networks showed how Amazon remains the most popular enterprise cloud service.

Read the full blog here.

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The Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) has called for feedback on IBM and SAP’s software licensing practices, after an open letter was sent to Oracle addressing its concerns.

CloudTech broke the news that IBM and SAP were the next two vendors in the firing line earlier this month. The CCL hopes to present findings and recommendations at a roundtable on February 2.

Potential issues include complexity brought about by changing terms and conditions, forced product bundling, as well as a lack of clarification over licensing terminology and metrics, according to the CCL.

“After Oracle, our members overwhelmingly called out IBM and SAP as the next most prolific auditors and vendors commonly associated with testing vendor-customer relationships,” said Mark Flynn, CCL chief executive. “The issues raised by customers of IBM and SAP are not too dissimilar to those raised with other vendors.

“We will be looking into these issues and any others that our members highlight in the coming months, and hope that by exposing bad practice we can continue to work towards a more harmonious software licensing environment for vendors and customers alike,” he added.

The CCL released its report on Oracle in November, finding the majority of customers have an “arms length, impoverished” relationship with the tech giant. Among the recommendations were to ensure there is only one corporate voice, to invest in a well organised knowledge base, and to provide better business communications.

CCL chairman Martin Thompson insisted that the spotlight had not moved away from Oracle, saying the not-for-profit will continue to work with the Redwood firm as well as scrutinising IBM and SAP.

IBM and SAP both released financial results earlier this month, with both companies looking to shift its core revenue streams away from traditional software and into cloud. IBM hit $7bn of cloud revenue in 2014 but saw net income fall 7% year on year, while SAP’s cloud subscriptions and support went up 45% but at the same time shifting its 2017 operating profit goals to the right.

Anybody looking to send feedback should look here for IBM and here for SAP. CloudTech has contacted IBM and SAP and will update this story in due course.