HPE has launched a new product to help communications services providers (CSPs) get more value from 5G by offering edge services to enterprises.

Edge Orchestrator is a SaaS-based offering that focuses on situations where low latency is key.

During a press conference, Phil Mottram, vice president and general manager of the HPE’s Communications and Media Solutions business, told reporters that the company believes “the value proposition for 5G will all be firmly rooted in the enterprise space”.

“We believe that consumer customers won’t be paying any more for [telcos’] services just to get a faster download of a video – there’s only so fast you can watch a video,” Mottram said. “But all of the revenue opportunities and upside opportunities for  carriers will firmly come in the enterprise new services space.”

This is far from a unique position – indeed, even before 5G standards were set, many future-gazers predicted it would be more useful in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios in particular where low latency is key, such as in fully-autonomous cars.

While we wait for such futuristic technology to arrive, however, HPE has decided to make use of existing and emerging technology and needs. Edge Orchestrator, the company says, allows telcos to deliver new services in the form of apps at the edge of the network to enterprise customers and in doing so effectively monetise apps.

Specifically, Edge Orchestrator brings together edge compute, edge communications and edge applications and allows carriers to offer them as a single, self-service proposition to enterprise customers and other service providers that might want to deploy them.

“HPE Edge Orchestrator will be the functionality which actually takes all these components, wraps it up together and makes it available to the enterprises,” said Rolf Eberhardt, head of orchestration at HPE.

“We want to make the CSP able to efficiently allow enterprises to deploy their own applications at their own locations and connect them over connectivity services provided by the CSP back to their … data centres and to deploy these applications close to the end customers,” he continued. 

“We believe there are two benefits to this. First of all, the CSPs have the trust of the customers [and] they provide also the connectivity at the location, and second for the enterprise customers, they are able to, on the one hand, deploy quickly and efficiently in the edge space without having to do a major investment on their own and they can being all the functionality together into a one-stop.”

As it stands, Edge Orchestrator, which will be available from 31 July,  is only being sold to telcos and only as a service – there are no plans to sell through the channel or direct to customers. And while it may be 5G-focused on the surface, for now HPE proposes telcos offer these additional services through more established network technologies like 4G, LTE and Wi-Fi, then introducing 5G later as part of its portfolio.

The announcement, which comes just before the start of the company’s virtual HPE Discover 2020 conference, builds on an earlier announcement, made in March, where the company added “5G as a service” to its GreenLake portfolio. 

It also follows an announcement from the company’s networking business, Aruba, that it’s pivoting towards a more edge-focused approach to business.

​Appian has unveiled three new apps intended to help organisations better weather the storm created by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The three apps, COVID-19 Response, Paycheck Protection Program and Workforce Safety & Readiness, were all built and released over the course of the fast two months and address different aspects of the challenges businesses are facing right now.

Speaking at the opening day keynote of the company’s now virtual annual conference, CEO Matt Caulkins said COVID-19 Response, which was launched in March, “is about responding to [the disease] and tracking the health of an employer’s workforce”.

“Everything about this application is free – the software is free, the intellectual property is free, the installation, the web hosting, the support and services, everything is completely free,” said Calkins, adding that it quickly became the most popular launch in the history of the company.

“It was taken up really well by our customer base, we had 500 downloads in the first few days, and then soon it was over 1,000,” he said.

Paycheck Protection Program, launched in April, focuses on helping banks process one the US government’s key financial responses to the coronavirus pandemic: small business loans.

“My favourite thing about this application is the way it showcases the power of automation. It uses artificial intelligence to read loan applications and then it uses robotic process automation to upload them to a government portal and it uses people to manage compliance,” said Calkins.

“This is the North Star of automation, it’s the combination of human workers and digital workers in the same workflow. It’s exactly what the automation industry is aiming for.”

Finally, Workforce Safety & Readiness helps organisations prepare for the reopening of their offices as the pandemic starts to subside.

“The purpose of the application is to get your employees back to work safely, carefully, and cautiously and we do that by considering more information than we would have if you just told people to come back if they met CDC (Centres for Disease Control) guidelines,” explained Calkins. 

“Instead, we’re going to take a lot of things into account – how many workers should really be in each facility in your organisation and which workers should they be on day one? And on day 10? And on day 50?” he continued.

“We’re going to take into account a lot of additional factors in the name of safety, such as how many people live in their household and how old are those people? Who do they come to work in the same office with, to be sure that we don’t have them both come in on the same day? Can their job be done at a distance effectively?

“All this information is stored in a HIPAA-certified cloud and it’s exceptionally easy to use. Users log in every morning  on any device to update their health, answer a few questions  and then they’re told whether they should come to work today and what days they should plan to come to work.”

All three apps are available immediately.

​Tech giant Nvidia is set to gobble up networking software firm Cumulus Networks in a bid to further enhance its data centre credentials.

Cumulus, which was founded in 2010, is an open source-focused firm that specialises in helping organisations optimise their data centre networking stack through its Linux distribution for network switches, as well as various network management tools.

While its bread and butter is software, it does also have its own hardware offering in the shape of the Cumulus Express data centre switch.

The acquisition is part of Nvidia’s continued drive into the enterprise and cloud market. While the company is probably best known for its graphics processing units (GPUs), initiatives like its EGX edge computing platform and its collaboration with King’s College London to develop AI technology that can detect cancer in scan images have seen it become a serious data centre player as well.

Further smoothing the way to this purchase is the fact Cumulus already had a partnership with high-performance networking firm Mellanox, which Nvidia formally acquired last month after announcing the merger in March last year. 

Underlining the importance of this partnership in Nvidia’s decision to make the acquisition, Amit Katz, VP of Ethernet Switch at Mellanox, said: “In March 2016, Mellanox announced a partnership with Cumulus and started shipping combined offerings.

“Today, the ONIE environment Cumulus created is a software foundation for Mellanox’s bare-metal switches. Together, we built DENT, a distributed Linux software framework for retail and other enterprises at the edge of the network. And our Onyx operating system continues to expand, especially in Ethernet Storage Fabrics (ESF).”

No financial details of the deal have been announced, although it’s likely to be significant, given Cumulus has raised $134 million in funding over the past 10 years.

​Dell EMC has taken the wraps off PowerStore, a new line of mid-range servers that bring Dell and EMC technologies together in a single appliance, on what would have been the first day of parent company Dell Technologies’ annual conference.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the launch, Travis Vigil, SVP of product management at Dell EMC, said it was the first new product introduced since the 2016 merger between Dell and EMC that used expertise from across both sides of the storage and server business, as well as from other arms – notably VMware.

Caitlin Gordon, VP of marketing at Dell EMC Storage, added that the company has been working on this project for “a number of years”.

Explaining the development of PowerStore, Gordon pointed to the fact that data has never been more valuable for businesses than it is today, but noted that it’s also incredibly diverse and difficult to manage. At the same time, organisations are also under pressure to carry out digital transformation, which IT is expected to support.

“What we found in our conversations with customers over the last number of years is they felt like their infrastructure investments require them to prioritise either the needs of their data, or the needs of their operating model in their operations,”” she said.

Upon realising there was nothing in the Dell Technologies portfolio – nor, the company claims, anything in the market more generally – that met that dual need in a single server, the decision was taken to build a new product “from the ground up”.

Scalable, programmable, autonomous

PowerStore is an Active-Active HA dual node appliance, with end-to-end NVMe and the ability to support either NVMe-based flash or dual-ported Optane storage class memory (SCM) drives from Intel. This, Dell claims, makes it 7x faster with 3x lower latency than its previous lead mid-range all-flash product.

The company also says that PowerStore can support any workload, traditional or modern, including containers, files, and virtualised or physical apps and databases. It also offers the ability to scale up and scale out up to 2.8 petabytes effective and 11.3 petabytes effective per cluster respectively, as well as having always-on inline deduplication.

It also has built-in machine learning to help optimise system performance, cloudIQ storage monitoring software and is programmable, allowing administrators to treat the infrastructure “as code”.

PowerStore is available immediately. 

Foreign exchange firm Travelex has taken itself offline after discovering that a “software virus” had compromised its systems.

The incident, which is ongoing at the time of writing, began on New Year’s Eve 2019. The company said in a statement that while there’s no indication any customers’ personal data has been accessed, it took the decision to close down its systems “as a precautionary measure in order to protect data and prevent the spread of the virus”.

It added that its physical branches will continue trading, but foreign exchange services will be carried out manually.

The company has said it has deployed teams of IT specialists as well as external cyber security consultants to “isolate the virus and restore the affected systems”. This, however, is cold comfort for customers, some of whom claim to have been left with no access to money while abroad.

Recommendations to visit Mastercard’s Cash Passport service, which underwrites Travelex’s currency cards, seem to be fruitless as well.

The incident has implications beyond Travelex as well. HSBC and Virgin Money, which both use Travelex for their currency exchange services, are both displaying a notice saying their online services are unavailable due to “planned maintenance”.

Tesco Bank, meanwhile, simply says it can’t offer online foreign currency services and advises users to head into its branches.

The severity of the attack and whether a full data breach has occurred is currently unclear. However, a spokesperson for the UK’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) confirmed to IT Pro this morning that it had not received a report from Travelex.

IT Pro has contacted Travelex for further clarification, but hadn’t received a response at the time of publication.

GreenLake, HPE’s as a service initiative, now has a new component: GreenLake Central.

The product is designed to offer IT departments a similar experience controlling and provisioning on-premises and hybrid IT as they would expect when using a public cloud service.

GreenLake Central, like many of the other offerings that fall under the GreenLake “as a service” umbrella, was created in response to the acknowledgement that public cloud doesn’t serve all requirements, particularly in large enterprises.

“Part of what we are seeing within hybrid is that our clients have moved all the easy stuff off to public cloud, and there’s been a bit of a stall, especially for a bunch of the legacy applications, whether that’s because of regulatory issues, or data gravity issues, or application dependency complexity type issues,” Erik Vogel, global vice president for customer experience for HPE GreenLake, told Cloud Pro.

“What we’re providing… is a consistent experience. We’ve taken the traditional GreenLake and really enhanced it to look and feel like the public cloud. So we have now shifted that into making it making Greenlake operate in a way that our customers are used to getting from AWS or Azure,” he added.

HPE has also incorporated some additional capabilities, such as delivering “EC2-like functionality” to provision and de-provision capacity within a customer’s own data centre on top of their GreenLake Flex Capacity environment.

It has also bundled in some managed service capabilities to help manage a hybrid IT environment. This includes, for example, controlling cost and compliance, capacity management, and public cloud management.

“Very soon we’ll be offering the ability to point and click and add more capacity,” Vogel added. “So if they want to increase the capacity within their environment, rather than having to pick up the phone and call a seller and go through that process, they will be able to drive those purchase acquisitions through a single click within the within the portal, again, being able to manage capacity, see their bills, see what they’re using effectively, what they’re not using effectively.”

GreenLake Central is in the process of being rolled out in beta to 150 customers, and will be generally available to all HPE GreenLake customers in the second half of 2020.

Microsoft has made several updates to its flagship Teams collaboration platform, including new third-party software integrations and improvements to calls and meetings.

A common complaint about enterprise collaboration and chat platforms – such as Slack, Facebook Workplace and others – is that they can be disruptive to workflow, with instant messaging fostering a feeling that users are obliged to provide an instant reply.

Microsoft seems to have taken this issue onboard with the September Teams update.

In a blog post, the company debuted selective muting for channels. Users can mute specific conversations within a given channel if they need to concentrate, with the ability to turn notifications back on when they’re ready. Similarly, if they’ve hidden or muted a channel, they can opt to receive notifications from a particular conversation in it without reactivating the entire thing.

There’s also new activity filters in Chat. For example, a user can search for a colleague’s name and they will be presented with every group and meeting they have in common, as well as one-to-one chats. They can then add additional filters, such as unread messages only. The same type of filtering can also be applied to group chats and the teams list.

There are also several new features in calling and meetings. Users can now send incoming calls directly to Cloud Voicemail, and also make calls through Chrome if they’re using Teams on the web rather than through the app.

There’s also the ability to start a meeting instantly, rather than schedule it ahead of time, and a lightweight ‘meeting join’ capability for people using Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.

There’s good news for Lucidchart users too, with the data visualisation company’s app now supporting messaging extensions, link unfurling and collaboration permissions in Teams. This builds upon last year’s release of a Lucidchart app that made document editing and sharing possible within Teams. More details on the enhancements can be found on the Microsoft Teams blog.

Notable by its absence, however, is cross channel posting. This was teased in July, with the promise it would be “coming soon”, however it seems that soon is not yet now.

VMware has surprised industry watchers by announcing it intends not only to buy Dell Technologies stablemate Pivotal, but also cyber security firm Carbon Black.

The virtualisation giant’s plans to absorb Pivotal were no secret – while the definitive agreement wasn’t announced until yesterday evening, the company had already let its intentions be known a week before. The news about Carbon Black, however, was rather more unforeseen.

In the company’s Q2 2020 earnings call, held on Thursday, CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke of three strengthening “secular trends” that drove the decision to make these acquisitions.

“First multicloud is the new model for enterprise IT,” said Gelsinger, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha, “second, digital transformation is driving accelerated pace of cloud native app development. Last, but not least, as businesses move applications to the cloud and access it over distributed networks and from a diversity of endpoints, security has become a significant challenge and priority.

“To address these trends, we are thrilled to announce our intent to acquire Pivotal and Carbon Black. It’s an exciting day for VMware as these acquisitions address critical priorities of CIOs and will meaningfully expand our ability to power our customers’ digital transformation.”

In many ways the less-expected Carbon Black deal is the most straightforward: VMware is one of the biggest cloud players, security is one of the biggest threats to all organisations and for $2.1 billion cash, the company gets all the customers, assets and talent of one of the few security firms that specialises in cloud-native endpoint security. Yes, VMware had (indeed, has) some of its own offerings, but Carbon Black’s use of AI and big data is significantly more advanced, so it’s easy to see why the decision to acquire was made.

The Pivotal acquisition, on the other hand, is somewhat more complex. In some ways, the acquisition is a homecoming given Pivotal was spun out of VMware and its then majority shareholder, EMC, in 2012. As EMC had retained a controlling share in Pivotal, when it was acquired by Dell some four years later, Pivotal became one of the seven arms that make up the company now known as Dell Technologies – with VMware making up a second.

At this point, it’s hard to know whether this is more to do with internal structure at Dell Technologies, industry machinations, or general technology, as there are good arguments for all three.

From the point of view of the customer, channel partners and the company itself, it does make sense to bring the two very cloud-focused branches of Dell Technologies together into a single unit. If organisations increasingly want to buy, sell and deliver cloud virtualisation and development offerings bundled together, why not have a single point of origin?

The deal also means the parent company has increased its stake in VMware to 81.09%, however – although Gelsinger has dismissed the idea that this is part of any plan to fully subsume the veteran virtualisation player, telling CNBC: “Dell is extraordinarily supportive of an independent VMware.”

Expect to hear more about both acquisitions, maybe even with some CEO cameos, at VMworld 2019 next week.

News broke overnight that HPE has made yet another acquisition – its second this year – in the form of MapR’s assets (but not, it seems, MapR itself).

MapR, in case you’re not familiar with the company, is a big data and analytics specialist with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI). Founded 10 years ago, it has some impressive credentials – for example, in 2013 it broke the MinuteSort record on Google Compute Engine. However, it recently found itself in financial trouble, announcing in May 2019 that it would have to close if it couldn’t find additional funding by 3 July.

With HPE acquiring all its assets (existing technology, intellectual property, and expertise in AI and data management), MapR has for all intents and purposes ceased to exist, despite not being acquired as an entity. Given MapR’s money troubles, this isn’t really a surprising move on either part: HPE doesn’t take on any of MapR’s financial baggage and it’s a lot quicker to complete than a full acquisition, which would have taken many months securing approval from the various regulatory authorities around the world.

From a strategic point of view, buying MapR’s assets makes a great deal of sense for HPE. The company is putting huge emphasis on its AI and analytics credentials, as evidenced by the launch of its Primera storage appliance at its annual Discover conference in June this year. It’s also been working with Purdue University to try and solve the problem of world hunger.

In a statement announcing the acquisition, HPE said MapR’s assets will accelerate its Intelligent Data Platform capabilities.

“At HPE, we are working to simplify our customers’ and partners’ adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Phil Davis, president of Hybrid IT at HPE.

“MapR’s enterprise-grade file system and cloud-native storage services complement HPE’s BlueData container platform strategy and will allow us to provide a unique value proposition for customers.”

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, BlueData was a “Big Data-as-a-service” business that was acquired by HPE in November 2018. It, too, focused on analytics and machine learning, albeit in containers, rather than computing clusters as MapR’s technology does.

Speaking of computing clusters and other recent HPE acquisitions, there’s perhaps something going unsaid in last night’s announcement.

A computing cluster can be quite small – small enough for use by SMBs, for example. But the term is more frequently associated with large data centres and, specifically, supercomputers (aka high-performance computing or HPC).

It’s worth noting, then, that while MapR’s being rolled into the Intelligent Data Platform unit and treated very much as a software play, HPE’s most recent acquisition prior to this was Cray – the venerable supercomputing firm. This followed the summer 2016 acquisition of SGI, another big name in HPC.

It’s yet to become completely clear what HPE’s supercomputing strategy is, but it would seem remiss if these two units don’t end up working closely together.

Is this the last purchase of 2019 for HPE? We’re more than halfway through the year, but there’s plenty of AI prospects, in particular, to go around so we may yet see a mid-autumn spending spree.

IBM has wasted no time incorporating Red Hat into its portfolio, announcing today that its full software offering has been “transformed… to be cloud-native”.

This, the company claims, will allow customers to build mission-critical apps once and then run them on most public clouds, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and, of course, its own IBM Cloud.

The move comes just three weeks after IBM was given regulatory approval to acquire open source stalwart Red Hat and it’s no coincidence that this initiative is “optimised” to run on the OpenShift containerisation platform.

In its cloud-native form, IBM’s software will be offered as pre-integrated, containerised modules called IBM Cloud Paks.

The first five of these Paks – for Data, for Applications, for Integration, for Automation, and for Multicloud Management – are available today. More will be forthcoming, it seems, but no timeframe or number has yet been given.

In addition to Cloud Paks, IBM made three other Red Hat-centred announcements today.

The first is Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, a “flexible, fully-managed service” that the company claims will “help enterprises modernise and migrate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure”.

The second is the news that Red Hat OpenShift is now available for IBM Z and LinuxONE, having previously only been available on Power Systems and Storage.

Finally, there are new consultancy and technology services available from IBM for Red Hat.

Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software at IBM, said: “This will further position IBM as an industry leader in the more than $1 trillion dollar hybrid cloud opportunity.

“We are providing the essential tools we think enterprises need to make their multi-year journey to cloud on common, open standards that can reach across clouds, across applications and across vendors with Red Hat.”