Category Archives: applications

Vodafone Ireland turns to Amdocs to drive enhanced customer experience

Vodafone Ireland has chosen Amdocs, a provider of software and services to communications and media companies, to transition its infrastructure and application workloads to the cloud, enabling an enhanced customer experience and rapid adoption of the latest 5G innovations. Under the agreement, Amdocs Customer Experience Suite (CES) will migrate from Vodafone Ireland on-premise to the… Read more »

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F5 launches distributed cloud app infrastructure protection

F5 has launched the F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP), a cloud workload protection solution that expands application observability and protection to cloud-native infrastructures. Powered by technology acquired with Threat Stack, AIP is the newest addition to the F5 Distributed Cloud Services portfolio of cloud-native SaaS-based application security and delivery services. Organisations of all… Read more »

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Malware-delivering cloud apps almost tripled in 2022

More than 400 distinct cloud applications delivered malware in 2022, nearly triple the amount seen in the prior year, according to research conducted by Netskope, a specialist in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). The company’s researchers also found that 30% of all cloud malware downloads in 2022 originated from Microsoft OneDrive. Cloud apps are widely… Read more »

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Confluent acquires Immerok to develop cloud native Apache Flink offering

Confluent, a data streaming specialist, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Immerok, a contributor to Apache Flink – a powerful technology for building stream processing applications and one of the most popular Apache open source projects. Immerok has developed a cloud-native, fully managed Flink service for customers looking to process data streams at a… Read more »

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Acxiom joins Salesforce AppExchange to transform personalised experiences

Customer intelligence company Acxiom has joined the Salesforce AppExchange Genie Collection, empowering brands to better understand their customers, drive personalisation at scale and unlock new opportunities that accelerate business growth. Brands today are expected to know their customers, anticipate their needs, and engage in ways that are personalised, relevant, and contextual. A data-first approach is… Read more »

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Next generation of phishing attacks uses unexpected delivery methods to steal data

Netskope, a specialist in secure access service edge (SASE), has unveiled new research that shows how the prevalence of cloud applications is changing the way threat actors are using phishing attack delivery methods to steal data.  The Netskope Cloud and Threat Report: Phishing details trends in phishing delivery methods such as fake login pages and… Read more »

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Chef boosts application IQ with Habitat launch

artificial intelligence, communication and futuristicChef has launched a new open source project called Habitat, which it claims introduces a new approach for application automation.

The team claim Habitat is a unique piece of software which enables applications to be freed from dependency on a company’s infrastructure. When applications are wrapped in Habitat the runtime environment is no longer the focus and does not constrain the application itself. Due to this USP applications can run across numerous environments such as containers, PaaS, cloud infrastructure and on premise data centres, but also has the intelligence to self-organize and self-configure, the company claims.

“We must free the application from its dependency on infrastructure to truly achieve the promise of DevOps,” said Adam Jacob, CTO at Chef. “There is so much open source software to be written in the world and we’re very excited to release Habitat into the wild. We believe application-centric automation can give modern development teams what they really want — to build new apps, not muck around in the plumbing.”

Chef would generally be considered a challenger to the technology industry’s giants having only been founded in 2008, though the company has made positive strides in recent years specializing in the DevOps and containers arenas, two of the more prominent growth areas. Although both of these areas are prominent in marketing campaigns and conference presentations, applications into the real-world have been more difficult.

The Habitat product is built on the idea that infrastructure dictated the design of an application. Chef claims by making the application and its automation the unit of deployment, developers can focus on business value and planning features that will make their products stand out rather than on the constraints of infrastructure and particular runtime environments.

“The launch of Habitat is a significant moment for both Chef and the entire DevOps community in the UK and EMEA,” said Joe Pynadath, ‎GM of EMEA for Chef Software, Chef. “It marks our next evolution and will provide an absolutely transformative, paradigm shift to how our community and customers can approach application management and automation. An approach that puts the application first and makes them independent of their underlying infrastructure.  I am extremely excited to see the positive impact that our Chef community and customers throughout Europe will gain from this revolutionary technology.”

Ingram confirms Odin deal to boost cloud app channel

AppsParallels is to sell its cloud management technology Odin Service Automation to IT distributor Ingram Micro for an undisclosed sum in a deal expected to close by 2016.

The deal includes intellectual property and the Odin brand. Odin publishes a range of cloud applications that includes web server management, server virtualisation, provisioning and billing automation. It is used by 10,000 service providers who sell applications to their small and medium sized business clients. According to Parallels around the services reach a subscriber base of 10 million SMEs.

IT distributor Ingram Micro has been a customer of Parallels since 2014 when it began using the Odin system as a cloud distribution service, allowing it to repackage applications to its channel partners who then white label them, resell them or manage them for clients. Ingram’s partner base includes resellers, managed service providers, system integrators and hosting provider customers.

Ingram branded its Odin-enabled cloud brokering service as the Cloud Marketplace.

The sell off will enable parent company Parallels Holdings to concentrate on its core business and divest itself of a commodity, according to its CEO Birger Steen. “Now we can sharpen our focus as a company and continue to deliver market leading products under the Parallels, Plesk and Virtuozzo brands.”

Parallels’ solutions business unit will continue to operate as a standalone company. Its Plesk web management business unit will operate as a standalone company under the Plesk brand. The Virtuozzo business unit, which develops container virtualization technology, will operate as a standalone company. All three business units will continue to be owned and controlled by Parallels Holdings Limited.

It looks good for Ingram but not for Parallels, according to one analyst. “I was surprised when Parallels spun off Odin as a separate company, I felt it had some real value,” said Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom, “Ingram looks like it has gained control of a system that helps it deliver its own products to the channel and allow it to become a cloud aggregator.”

Where this deal leaves Parallels is more of an issue, said Longbottom. “It missed the boat when Docker made more noise on containers, leaving Virtuozzo in the mud. It has not managed to make enough noise for people to know that it is there, trusting instead on word of mouth and just being known. I think that Ingram comes out well from this. Meanwhile, watch out for others buying up the rest of Parallels.”

If You Could Transform Your IT Strategy, Would You?

GreenPages-Transformation-Services-LogoAs you may know, GreenPages recently launched our Transformation Services Group, a new practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing.

This move was designed to allow us to help companies think beyond the near-term and to cast a vision for the business.  As we look at the market, we see a need to help organizations take a more revolutionary and accelerated approach to embracing what we call “New World” IT architectures.  While this is something we have been helping companies with for many years, we now believe that this is a logical evolution of our business that builds on our legacy of delivering high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.

When we think about some of the great work we have done over the years, many examples come to mind.  One of these is a complex project we completed for The Channel Company, that helped them truly transform their business. Coming off a management buyout from its parent company, UBM, The Channel Company was tasked with having to migrate off the parent company’s centralized IT infrastructure under a very tight timeline.

Faced with this situation, the company was presented with a very compelling question: “If you had the opportunity to start from scratch, to transform your IT department, resources and strategy what would you do?”

Essentially, as a result of their situation, The Channel Company had the opportunity to leapfrog traditional approaches.  They had the opportunity to become more agile, and more responsive. And, more importantly, they took it!

As opposed to simply moving to a traditional baseline on-prem solution, The Channel Company saw this as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink its entire IT strategy and chose GreenPages to help lead them through the process.

Through a systematic approach and advanced methodology, we were able to help The Channel Company achieve its aggressive objectives.  Specifically, in less than six months, we led a transformation project that entailed the installation of new applications, and a migration of the company’s entire infrastructure to the cloud.  This included moving six independent office locations from a shared infrastructure to a brand-new cloud platform supporting their employees, as well as new cloud-based office and ERP applications.

In addition to achieving the independence and technical autonomy The Channel Company needed, the savings benefits and operational efficiencies achieved were truly transformational from a business standpoint.

It is these types of success stories that drove us to formalize our Transformation Services Group. We have seen first-hand the benefits that organizations can achieve by transforming inflexible siloed IT environments into agile organizations, and we’re proud to be able to offer the expertise and end-to-end capabilities required to help customers achieve true business transformation.

In our view, the need for business agility and innovation has never been greater. The question is no longer “is transformation necessary?” but rather  “if you had the opportunity to start from scratch and achieve business transformation, would you take it?”

If you’re interested in hearing more about how GreenPages has helped companies like The Channel Company transform their IT operations, please reach out.

 

By Ron Dupler, CEO

5 Ways to Understand Your Applications and IT Services

How do you view your organization’s applications and IT services? At GreenPages, we often suggest that organizations begin to conceptualize IT services as corporate IT evolves from a technology provider to an innovation center. Now, there are ways to establish and maintain a service portfolio through ITBM (IT Business Management or IT Financial Management) systems, but these are often out of reach for customers less than enterprise level. However, you can conceptualize IT services by looking at your applications from five different perspectives. Let’s use Microsoft Exchange as an example.

applications and IT servicesExchange is an enterprise application that provides email and calendaring. If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that you own servers that host the various components that comprise Exchange. One way to think about cloud is to identify the Exchange servers, their operating systems, the application version, performance requirements, etc. and identify a “place in the cloud” where you can procure servers of similar specifications and migrate the instances. I consider this as the infrastructure perspective. When it comes to cloud computing, this is perhaps the least important.

 

To take full advantage of cloud computing, understand your applications and IT services from a few additional perspectives:

  1. Functional
  2. Financial
  3. Operational (including lifecycle)
  4. Organizational
  5. Use-case

 

Hopefully, after looking at these different perspectives, you’ll see Exchange as part of an IT service that fits this description:

“In operation for over 20 years, E-Communications is a business service that allows each of our 1,200 employees to communicate through email, coordinate meetings, find coworkers’ contact information, and organize tasks using their PC, Mac, mobile device, or home computer 24x7x365. The service is supported by Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, which both run under VMware vSphere. The service requires 1 full-time administrator who added 12 new users and logged 157 support tickets in 2014. In 2014, charges for software maintenance, personnel, infrastructure depreciation, and outside support services totaled $87,456. A software upgrade is planned for 2015. Users do not generally complain about the performance of the service, other than the size of their mailbox quotas (which are limited to 10GB per user). The company as a whole plans to offer telecommuting packages to more than 250 employees in 2015.”

Armed with this understanding of your IT service that includes Exchange, you might take the following action:

  1. Fund an Office365 migration with capital you had allocated for the Exchange upgrade project
  2. Provide copies of Office applications to telecommuters (without additional charge)
  3. Expand the mailbox quota from 10GB to 50GB
  4. Repurpose your Exchange admin to help telecommuters establish their home offices in 2015
  5. Reduce your spend on E-Communications by more than 50% (from $72.88/user to $35.00/user)

 

Of course, not every application is easily identifiable as belonging to an IT service. The functionality or financial aspects of IT services are often difficult to quantify. However, at GreenPages, especially when looking at cloud computing options, we recommend examining all of your applications through these five perspectives. For this reason, GreenPages has embedded this process in a piece of software that can quickly build your services portfolio and recommend optimizations based on current offerings available – such as Microsoft Office 365.

What are your thoughts?

You can hear more from John in his eBook, “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department

By John Dixon, Director of Cloud Services