MapR Technologies, a data management platform provider, has announced an equity round of $56 million (£42.5m) from existing investors.

The company said it would use the money to “continue product innovation of the industry’s first modern enterprise platform for all data, accelerate country and regional growth to fulfil the demand for the MapR Converged Data Platform throughout APAC and Europe, and bolster MapR’s thriving global partner community.” According to CrunchBase, the latest funding round puts the company at $250m of venture capital raised after six rounds.

This comes amidst what MapR called an ‘outstanding’ financial quarter, with more than 100% year over year growth in new subscription billings and 70% annual billings growth year over year.

Highlights for the company in the most recent quarter included a partnership with big data integration vendor Talend to help organisations meet GDPR requirements, as well as a collaboration with NTT DATA Business Solutions Asia Pacific around SAP deployments.

“Our customers and partners continue to be at the forefront of this 30 year re-platforming the industry is going through today,” said Matt Mills, MapR CEO in a statement. “We are working closely with them to ensure their success and helping them to execute on their digital transformation and data strategies.

“Our performance in recent quarters and the additional equity from our existing investors are proof points that we are successfully executing on our strategy as we continue to be heads-down and focused,” Mills added.

Speaking to The Register in June, Mills said the company’s trajectory was towards IPO but without specific timeframes at that moment. An interesting example of a competitor in this space is Cloudera – MapR was called out as a competitor of Cloudera’s in the open source space in the former’s IPO filing – who went public in April this year. As this publication reported last week, Cloudera’s latest financials beat expectations, with total revenues hitting $89.8m for the most recent quarter.

As companies make a move for their initial public offering (IPO), the investor page goes up, the bell gets rung on the NYSE, and, perhaps most importantly, their financial results have to be displayed for all to see.

Cloudera and Okta, two companies who declared their intentions to go public within weeks of each other in April, have announced their second quarter 2018 financial results, with both companies beating expectations.

Cloudera, a big data software provider, announced total revenues of $89.8 million (£68.1m) for the quarter ending July 31, a claimed 39% increase from this time last year, while identity management provider Okta offered total revenues of $61 million (£46.2m), an increase of 62.9% year on year.

Speaking to analysts following the results, Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, discussed machine learning and artificial intelligence as key to the company’s future, citing a recent quote from The Economist around data being the world’s most valuable resource ahead of oil.

“The organisations that extract the most value from that raw resource will be the winners in a new data-driven economy,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Cloudera’s modern platform for machine learning analytics provides a flexible enterprise grade environment for organisations to harvest the value of data of all types, whether in the cloud or on-premises.

“Cloudera’s customers have been building machine learning analytics applications on our platform for years,” added Reilly. “Today, we have hundreds of large enterprises’ introduction of those applications, fundamentally improving the way they grow, connect and protect their businesses. We love those applications…they are simply ravenous for data.”

For Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, the company’s ‘born in the cloud’ approach means the company is ‘on the right side of history’ in the shift to greater devices, greater complexity, and greater security headaches. “We believe we are in the driver’s seat as this transformation unfolds, and Okta continues to set the standard for managing identity in the extended enterprise and transforming the customer experience,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

With the AI side in mind, it was also revealed that Cloudera will acquire Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company. In a post titled ‘To the Future…’, by founder Hilary Mason, said the company and the industry was ‘just getting started’ around machine learning opportunities.

“We’re delighted to join forces with a company that drives progress in the foundational technologies our work relies on,” wrote Mason. “By joining Cloudera, we will be able to bring the opportunities discovered in our research to life in new ways, at the scale of the Cloudera platform.”

You can read Cloudera’s financials here and Okta’s here.

Google has launched Interconnect Dedicated, a new service which aims to help organisations establish a private network connection direct to its cloud.

The service differs from its previous interconnect operation – now called Carrier Peering – with the direct link, while it differs from Google Cloud VPN, which securely connects on-premises networks to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) virtual private cloud (VPC) network, through having a minimum deployment per location of 10 Gbps in bandwidth.

Interconnect Dedicated offers up to 80 Gbps – eight times the 10 Gbps increments, or in other words, selecting one to eight circuits from Google’s Cloud Console – and is available in up to 17 locations across four continents.

In the documentation, Google describes four benefits of Interconnect Dedicated, including the scalability factor. The company adds the cost of egress traffic from the VPC network to the on-premises network will be reduced – a dedicated connection is ‘generally’ the least expensive method with a high volume of traffic to and from Google’s network – while internal IP addresses are directly accessible from the on-premises network and there are less points of failure where traffic might get disrupted.

As is usually the case, a customer gets wheeled out to note the benefits of the product; in this case, it is real-time analytics firm Metamarkets. “Accessing GCP with high bandwidth, low latency, and consistent network connectivity is critical for our business objectives,” said Nhan Phan, Metamarkets VP engineering in a statement. “Google’s Dedicated Interconnect allows us to successfully achieve higher reliability, higher throughput and lower latency while reducing the total cost of ownership by more than 60%, compared to solutions over the public internet.”

Google’s cloud announcements have been coming at pace of late. Two weeks ago, the company unveiled variable networking tiers, claimed at the time to be the first from a major public cloud provider. According to Google’s most recent financial results, the company tripled the number of its big cloud deals, rated at $500,000 or more.

You can read the full blog post explaining Interconnect Dedicated here.

Main picture credit: Google

Confused about the extent of the DevOps landscape? Fear not – a new map issued by business automation software provider categorises more than 150 products to help organisations compose a ‘coherent continuous delivery (CD) toolchain’.

The interactive map, as becomes clear on first glance, takes its cue from various subway systems around the world, which makes for a clearer look than the classic marketing technology landscape supergraphic, the most recent of which came in at a mind-boggling 5,381 solutions.

From cloud infrastructure and platform as a service, to NoSQL database providers, to messaging and collaboration, 19 ‘lines’ are provided, with a link to their website and a short description of what they do.

If the product is one Automic supports, such as VMware’s vCloud Air, there is a link to the marketplace page – you didn’t think this was truly altruistic, did you? – but as the company explains, there is a need to simply what is an ever-expanding market.

“Making sense of the huge variety and number of tools available for the modern software development process can be confusing,” said Chris Boorman, CMO of Automic in a statement. “The Continuous Delivery Map clarifies the role each of these tools plays within a CD context, and demonstrates how orchestration, which is at the heart of this guide, is critical to a successful modern software delivery practice.”

Plenty of research has reached this publication around how the benefits of DevOps are alluring to organisations, but not being fully acted upon. ‘More of the same’ was the headline of a piece back in March, when automation software provider Quali trawled around AWS re:Invent, Cisco Live, VMWorld, and more to discuss strategy with delegates. More than half (54%) of those polled said they had no access to self-service infrastructure, with the most cited tools being Jenkins, on the continuous integration line, and Docker, on the ‘containerology’ line.

Automic was acquired by CA Technologies in December last year for €600 million, with the latter’s various products, from Flowdock, to TDM, to Agile Central, pervading the map.

You can explore and take a look at the map here.

More and more companies are trying to get a foothold in China as part of their international expansion – and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) is one, having worked with managed cloud services provider Datapipe to enter the Chinese market using Alibaba Cloud.

Datapipe has been working with Alibaba as a global managed service provider of its cloud arm since 2016, and was also named the leading Asia Pacific managed cloud company by Frost & Sullivan. For BMJ, the concept was straightforward, needing a partner on the ground in China with knowledge of the market to take advantage of Alibaba’s local public cloud infrastructure.

“We have now fully realised the strategy that we first mapped out two years ago, when we started our cloud journey,” said Alex Hooper, BMJ head of operations. “In the first year, we were able to fully virtualise our infrastructure using Datapipe’s private cloud, and in the process, move to a new, agile way of working. In this second year, we have embraced public cloud and taken our services over to China.”

This is not the BMJ’s first dalliance with Datapipe; the company had previously used the managed service provider to help refresh its legacy technology stack, moving from one release a month on average to up to four times a day, with Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer, describing the working relationships between dev, ops, test and business needs as ‘unrecognisable’ from before.

As regular readers of this publication will be aware, Alibaba is making concerted cloud strides. Last month, with the publication of its financial results, CEO Daniel Zhang said its cloud business “continues to enjoy high growth at scale” and the recent passing of the one million customer mark is “merely a starting point.”

Writing for this publication last month, Alibaba Cloud noted the importance of not falling into various traps when moving into the Chinese market. “China is a highly competitive market, and consumers expect a smooth and secure online experience,” the company wrote. “The flexibility, scalability and security offered by the cloud provides an optimal solution to boost your website in China’s competitive online space.”

You can find out more about Datapipe’s integration with Alibaba Cloud here.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced it is to acquire Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) to extend its cloud consulting presence and beef up its hybrid IT capabilities.

Cloud Technology Partners, whose SVPs include renowned thought-leader David Linthicum, have specialisms in a variety of environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the company announced it had achieved AWS security competency in June – and Google Cloud’s application development specialisation. The company was last month also placed in Fifty Five and Five’s Inbound Marketing Excellence report for the second year running, indicating its renown in the Microsoft partner network.

For HPE, the rationale is straightforward, with CTP moving into HPE Pointnext, the company’s consultancy unit previously known as Enterprise Services. “CTP’s consulting, design and operational advisory services for cloud environments will strengthen our hybrid IT consulting expertise in a fast growing market,” Ana Pinczuk, SVP and GM for HPE Pointnext, explained in a blog post.

“Together, we will be even better positioned to capitalise on this market trend,” Pinczuk added. “The CTP team has built strong customer momentum and will be able to accelerate that momentum by leveraging HPE’s global brand and go-to-market.”

As HPE explained, CTP helps enterprise clients on a three-pronged cloud journey, from migration – determining which applications are optimal for both public and private clouds – to innovation, through technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and machine learning, and operation.

HPE cited a McKinsey study from February which found that spending on hybrid IT consulting and cloud native developments is at approximately $6 billion today, growing at more than 18%. Speaking to The Cube at HPE Discover in June, Pinczuk explained the opportunity ahead. “Nobody owns ‘advise and transform’,” she said. “Nobody owns the whole digital transformation journey. The opportunity there greatly outweighs the constraints that we have in that space.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Huawei’s Connect event kicked off earlier today – and the announcements flowed at a pace with its cloud offering front and centre of the majority of the news.

First off was the announcement of a partnership between the Chinese giant and Microsoft with Redmond’s apps being released on Huawei’s platform as part of an ‘in-depth cooperation on the public cloud.’

The two companies signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to seal the deal whereby more Microsoft enterprise-level products will be brought online.

“Huawei Cloud looks forward to cooperating with Microsoft to build an open and win-win ecosystem,” said Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei’s cloud BU and IT product line. “The signing of this MoU marks the start of strategic cooperation between the two companies.” Alain Crozier, CEO of Microsoft China, added: “Our increased collaboration will drive innovation as we build a seamless platform to benefit customers through industry-leading technology.”

Next up on the agenda – with the event theme as ‘grow with the cloud’ – was around assuring customers that Huawei has, and will continue to make, investments in the public cloud domain.

Huawei believes there will be five major global clouds – and it wants a piece of the pie, with Guo Ping, Huawei rotating CEO, citing the Matthew effect – the idea of ‘the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer’ – as reason for keeping up with the Joneses.

“The cloud is a cornerstone of the intelligent world,” he told attendees. “Society is experiencing a tangible Matthew effect in digital technology development. Because of this, as well as economies of scale in investment, clouds around the world will begin to converge – becoming more and more centralised.

“In the future, we predict there will be five major clouds in the world,” Guo added. “Huawei will work with our partners to build one of those five clouds, and we’ve got the technology and know-how to do it.”

Alongside this was the debut of Huawei’s ‘innovative enterprise intelligence’ (EI) solution, which aims to beef up enterprise cloud deployments with a bit of AI. To put this more specifically, these include machine learning, deep learning and graph analysis platforms, API services such as visual and voice recognition, as well as scenarios specific to particular industries.

A real-life example of this in action – the EI today made its international debut – is around logistics. Through EI, Huawei can offer a logistics company the best containers for packing, as well as a 3D view of each container thus improving efficiency. Data analysis can be used to clear customs at the first hurdle, as well as improve warehouse space efficiency by up to 10%.

“The best cloud must be able to deliver the services that customers need, and AI needs to create more value for enterprises,” said Zheng. “We’re positioning Huawei Cloud as an enabler of the intelligent world. It provides AI, IoT, computing, and storage capabilities that provide enterprises with more innovative, intelligent cloud services.”

You can take a look at the full list of Huawei Connect announcements here.

Picture credit: “Huawei”, by “Kārlis Dambrāns“, used under CC BY 2.0 / Modified from original 

A new piece of research from MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory (CSAIL) has proffered a new system for data centre caching using flash memory – potentially meaning more energy efficient and economical computing.

According to the researchers, the system they created, dubbed BlueCache, is able to keep up with requests flooding the data centre by ‘pipelining’, allowing the next instructions to be fetched while the processor performs arithmetic operations.

This helps shore up the traditional flaw in flash memory when compared to RAM, in terms of speed. As slow as flash is relative to dynamic RAM (DRAM), users ‘won’t notice the difference between a request that takes .0002 seconds to process… and one that takes .0004 seconds because it involves a flash query’, as MIT puts it. Per gigabyte of memory, flash consumes approximately 5% as much energy as RAM, and costs about one tenth as much.

Despite this, even through pipelining, the researchers had to deploy some ‘clever engineering tricks’ to make flash caching able to compete with DRAM caching, with BlueCache ending up 4.2 times as fast as a default flash-based cache server. This included adding a few megabytes of DRAM to each million megabytes of flash, making the detection of cache misses more efficient.

“The viability of this type of system extends beyond caching, since many data-intensive applications use a [key value]-based software stack, which the MIT team has proven can now be eliminated,” said Vijay Balakrishnan, director of the data centre performance and ecosystem program at Samsung Semiconductor’s Memory Solutions Lab.

“By integrating programmable chips with flash and rewriting the software stack, they have demonstrated that a fully scalable, performance-enhancing storage technology, like the one described in the paper, can greatly improve upon prevailing architectures,” Balakrishnan added.

You can read the full MIT post here.

“Cloud computing platform as a service, recently adopted by the New York Times (6, 3, 6)”

The New York Times has announced it has moved its games platform to Google App Engine from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Having first published its daily crossword in 1942, the NYTimes built its first website in 1996, with the digital daily crossword starting life as a web-based Java applet. Since then, the publisher has overseen growth into a suite of mobile apps and a website with more than 300,000 paid subscribers. The further introduction of a free daily mini crossword three years ago put ‘a lot of strain’ on the company’s architecture, according to JP Robinson, NYTimes principal software engineer.

“As the crossword grew in popularity, our architecture started to hit its scaling limitations for handling game traffic,” explained Robinson in a post announcing the move. “Due to the inelastic architecture of our legacy system, we needed to have the systems scaled up to handle our peak traffic at 10pm when the daily puzzle is published.

“The legacy stack leaned on technologies that required some level of human interaction and could take hours to scale up and down. We needed to scale within minutes,” he added. “The system is generally at that peak traffic for only a few minutes a day, so this setup was very costly for the New York Times games team.”

Among the features of Google App Engine that Robinson and the games team have taken advantage of is combined access and app logging – helping simplify debugging – API security and autoscaling, although noting the 10pm daily peak caused problems at first.

Robinson added that while the migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was undertaken seven months ago, all games API traffic now goes through App Engine, with 90% of traffic served purely by App Engine services and GCP databases. The publisher also claims it has cut infrastructure costs by half as a result of the move.

AWS has been creating some interesting headlines of its own in recent weeks. As this publication has previously reported, in June Walmart told technology companies and vendors to move off Amazon’s cloud or risk losing the retail giant’s business. Last month, columnist David Auslander argued that the potential winners in such a move could be Microsoft and Google, AWS’ primary rivals in cloud infrastructure, adding that while AWS remains the “clear leader” in public cloud provisioning, it “also makes them the hunted.”

Since then, Walmart’s anti-Amazon feeling has become more pronounced. According to a note from Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research – first spotted by Barron’s – Walmart should expect to go “full steam” on NVIDIA, utilising its graphics chips to create its own NVDA GPU Clusters on ‘Walmart Cloud’, or, rather, OneOps, which the company acquired in 2013. Similarly, Walmart last month announced it was teaming up with Google for voice-enabled commerce – again with Amazon in its sights.

Despite all this, of course, Amazon remains by far and away the market leader. AWS hit $4.1 billion in revenue for its most recent quarter, and cited Discovery Communications, Ancestry California Polytechnic State University as among its latest customer wins, the latter two going ‘all-in’ on the Amazon cloud.

You can read the full NYTimes blog post here.

Box has announced revenues up 28% year over year beating analyst expectations, with the company “well-positioned” to hit its $1 billion revenue target.

Total second quarter revenues for the cloud storage provider were at $122.9 million (£95.1m), with revenue for the six months ended July 31 at $240.1m. Billings for Q218 were at $139.5m, up 31% from this time last year.

Despite this, shares went down in the immediate aftermath of earnings being revealed, albeit having recovered somewhat at the time of publication. The company’s results showed it moved to cash flow negative $14.7m for the most recent quarter.

The company’s highlights this quarter include growing to more than 76,000 businesses as paying customers, including the Metropolitan Police and United Talent Agency, the launch of Box Drive, looking towards firms retiring legacy network file share infrastructure, as well as an expanded partnership with Microsoft focused on machine learning.

Speaking to analysts following the announcement, Box CEO Aaron Levie focused on the latter as a strategic trend for the company moving forward, citing the company’s integration with Google Cloud Vision for advanced image recognition capabilities as key to the move.

“We believe AI is the most important technology trend since the cloud, and has the potential to completely change the way that we work,” said Levie, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “To leverage the strength of AI in machine learning, technology providers need three key assets…you need a lot of data…you need the ability to be able to use and learn from that data…and you need frequent activity to be able to train your systems at scale.

“At Box, we are fortunate to have all three, with one of the largest corporate repositories of content in the world,” he added. “This materially separates Box from traditional on-premises content management and storage providers. In this context, our new integration with Google Vision is just the beginning.”

Box was last month also named as a leader in Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for content collaboration platforms, previously enterprise file sync and share (EFSS).