Category Archives: News & Analysis

Big Data, Ernst & Young, Hortonworks, Mitch Ferguson, News & Analysis, Scott H. Schlesinger

EY, Hortonworks ink big data deal

Ernst & Young and Hortonworks are partnering on Hadoop

Ernst & Young and Hortonworks are partnering on Hadoop

Global consulting giant Ernst & Young and Hortonworks have inked a deal that will see the two companies partner on helping joint clients overcome their big data challenges.

The deal will see Hortonworks extend its big data platform together with EY’s data and information management professional services. Specifically, the two companies plan to guide clients on how to leverage big data technologies like Hadoop to overcome key data storage and batch analysis challenges.

“Many leading organizations are drowning in data, yet they lack the ability to analyze and drive value from the vast amount of information at their disposal,” said Scott H. Schlesinger, principle, Ernst & Young LLP and EY Americas IT Advisory. “The alliance will enable EY and Hortonworks to assist organizations in driving value from their existing technology.”

Mitch Ferguson, vice president of business development at Hortonworks said: “This alliance will strengthen EY’s ability to implement enterprise-level big data software, including HDP, to turn data into an asset, further addressing the business and technology needs of organizations.”

EasyJet, HSBC, Lacoste, M&A, marketing cloud, Maxymiser, News & Analysis, Oracle, Software as a service, Thomas Kurian, Tim Brown

Oracle boost marketing cloud biz with Maxymiser acquisition

Oracle is buying Maxymiser to boost its marketing capabilities

Oracle is buying Maxymiser to boost its marketing capabilities

Oracle has acquired Maxymiser, a provider of cloud-based marketing tools, for an undisclosed sum. The company said the acquisition will bolster its marketing cloud portfolio.

Founded in 2006, Maxymiser has over 400 employees and offers a range of cloud-based marketing tools that help its users improve customer experience and user retention through omnichannel analysis and marketing automation. Some of its higher profile customers include EasyJet, HSBC and French clothing retailer Lacoste.

Its offerings will be integrated into the Orcale Marketing Cloud, which is itself made up of a range of tools formerly acquired by the firm (Eloqua and Responsys for instance), following the acquisition.

“Companies are increasingly seeking innovative ways to differentiate their brands while increasing both ROI and loyalty based on optimized customer experiences,” said Thomas Kurian, president, product development, Oracle. “Together with Maxymiser, Oracle Marketing Cloud enables enterprises to stop guessing and start delivering what customers want across all digital channels and devices.”

Tim Brown, chief executive officer, Maxymiser said: “Our mission is to empower enterprises to use data science to systematically test, discover, and predict what customers want and deliver uniquely tailored experiences. We are excited to join Oracle and bring these capabilities to help extend Oracle Marketing Cloud.”

Over the years many large incumbents like Oracle and SAP as well as newer upstarts like Salesforce have moved quickly to strengthen their position in marketing automation through acquisition. In April this year NetSuite acquired Bronto Software, a provider of cloud-based marketing automation software for omnichannel commerce, in a deal worth about $200m.

Alex Freedland, August Capital, Diane Bryant, Ericsson, Funding, Insight Venture Partners, Intel, Mirantis, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, SAP Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, WestSummit Capital.

Intel, Ericsson bet $100m on Mirantis and OpenStack

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has secured $100m in new funding this week in a round led by Intel Capital, with the companies also announcing deepened collaboration in the cloud arena.

The latest round, which comes less than a year after Mirantis secured $100m in series B funds from investors, also included participation from new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis said the cash will be used to bolster its partnerships with vendors and other organisations innovating with OpenStack.

“With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software. Mirantis’ goal is to make OpenStack the best way to deliver cloud software, surpassing any proprietary solutions,” said Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis.

“Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster. Mirantis is the only vendor 100 per cent committed to only OpenStack,” Freedland said.

At the same time, Intel and Mirantis announced the two companies would deepen their partnership and work together on Intel’s Clouds for All initiative, a series of partnerships with ISVs announced earlier this summer which are intended to accelerate cloud interoperability and boost deployments.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel.

“As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds,” Bryant said.

Financial Results, HP, Meg Whitman, News & Analysis

HP suffers across the board as Enterprise Group flatlines

HP had a tough Q3 2015

HP had a tough Q3 2015

HP reported heavy losses when it revealed its third quarter 2015 financial results this week, with the enterprise IT giant raking in net revenues of $25.3bn, down 8 per cent year on year.

PC revenues were down 13 per cent year on year, printing revenue down 9 per cent and software down 6 per cent. In cloud, it’s as-a-service business was down 4 per cent.

The company’s enterprise services group also took a big tumble, with revenues dropping 11 per cent, infrastructure technology outsourcing declining 11 per cent, and application and business services revenues dropping 7 per cent.

The results were well below analyst expectations.

“HP delivered results in the third quarter that reflect very strong performance in our Enterprise Group and substantial progress in turning around Enterprise Services,” said Meg Whitman, chairman, president and chief executive officer, HP. “I am very pleased that we have continued to deliver the results we said we would, while remaining on track to execute one of the largest and most complex separations ever undertaken.”

In a call with analysts this week Whitman tried to allay any fears of its stated strategic direction – the company is on track to split up later this year – and said it saw growth in key pockets of SaaS solutions, but that this growth was offset by weaker big data and IT management revenues.

“We remained focused on aligning our portfolio to the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise strategy and driving software-led integrated solutions across EG and ES while addressing the challenges around the market shift to SaaS and internal execution challenges,” she said.

“We’ve also refined our go-to-market over a longer period of time. And part of the challenge we had prior to me was the fact that we changed our go-to-market so many times. Every CEO had a different idea about how to go to market. We just locked on one and we’re driving it.”

“There might be things we can do to optimize, but we’ve got a strategy and we’re driving it. And I think that’s given the sales force and customers a lot of confidence. And we’ve all been out with a lot of customers. The first couple years was more internally focused. We’ve been out with customers. I would say our customer and partner confidence is at an all-time high. And the backlog, by the way, going into fourth quarter is the highest backlog I’ve had since I’ve been at the company. So all signs are good, but we remain on constant alert,” she added.

Amazon, AWS, Chef, Infrastructure as a Service, Intel, News & Analysis, Werner Vogels

AWS goes hipster, plans pop-up shop in London

AWS is opening a pop-up shop in London following other openings in San Fran and NYC

AWS is opening a pop-up shop in London following other openings in San Fran and NYC

Amazon Web Services has announced plans to take its AWS Pop-up Loft programme to London in early September in a bid to reach out to local UK startups.

The temporary shops will be a place where developers, engineers and entrepreneurs can come to learn about AWS services, get trained up on the company’ services, meet clients, and receive guidance on cloud migration.

The company has opened similar pop-up shops in in San Francisco and New York City, but the most recently announced shop, which is due to open September 10, is the company’s first crack at it outside the US.

The UK is a hotbed of innovation and London is one of the main places where we see talented, ambitious entrepreneurs coming together to test ideas and start new businesses that leverage cloud computing,” said Werner Vogels, chief technical officer and vice president, Amazon.com.

“With the AWS Pop-up Loft in London we will be bringing together a host of AWS resources, and some of the brightest and most creative minds in the industry, to help startups across the UK. We look forward to working alongside the next generation of UK businesses and helping them to reach their full potential,” Vogels said.

Intel and Chef will also be supporting the pop-up shop.

Patrick Bliemer, managing director, Intel Northern Europe said: “The startup community is a fundamental driver of technology innovations fuelling the rapid growth of the digital services economy. Intel is excited to be working closely with AWS on the AWS Pop-up Loft program to help enable environments around the world where users have access to the tools and expert guidance they need to bring new ideas and innovations to market.”

Big Data, Cancer, Eric Dishman, Healthcare, Intel, Knight Cancer Institute, News & Analysis, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Vendor

Intel partners with OHSU in using cloud, big data to cure cancer

Intel is working with the OHSU to develop a secure, federate cloud service for healthcare practitioners treating cancer

Intel is working with the OHSU to develop a secure, federate cloud service for healthcare practitioners treating cancer

Intel is testing a cloud-based platform as a service in conjunction with the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) that can help diagnose and treat individuals for cancer based on their genetic pre-dispositions.

The organisations want to develop a cloud service that can be used by healthcare practitioners to soak up a range of data including genetic information, data about a patient’s environment and lifestyle to deliver tailored cancer treatment plans quickly to those in need.

“The Collaborative Cancer Cloud is a precision medicine analytics platform that allows institutions to securely share patient genomic, imaging and clinical data for potentially lifesaving discoveries. It will enable large amounts of data from sites all around the world to be analyzed in a distributed way, while preserving the privacy and security of that patient data at each site,” explained Eric Dishman director of proactive health research at Intel.

“The end goal is to empower researchers and doctors to help patients receive a diagnosis based on their genome and potentially arm clinicians with the data needed for a targeted treatment plan. By 2020, we envision this happening in 24 hours — All in One Day. The focus is to help cancer centres worldwide—and eventually centers for other diseases—securely share their private clinical and research data with one another to generate larger datasets to benefit research and inform the specific treatment of their individual patients.”

Initially, Intel and the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) will launch the Collaborative Cancer Cloud, but the organisations expect two more institutions will be on board by 2016.

From there, Intel said, the organisations hope to federate the cloud service with other healthcare service providers, and open it up for use to treat other diseases like Alzheimer’s.

“In the same timeframe, we also intend to deliver open source code contributions to ensure the broadest developer base possible is working on delivering interoperable solutions. Open sourcing this code will drive both interoperability across different clouds, and allow analytics across a broader set of data – resulting in better insights for personalized care,” Dishman said.

Accenture, Enterprise IT, ERP, Maureen Costello, NetSuite, News & Analysis

Thames Tideway Tunnel taps Accenture in NetSuite deal

Accenture claims this is the first implementation of a multi-tenant cloud-based ERP system at a regulated utility in the UK

Accenture claims this is the first implementation of a multi-tenant cloud-based ERP system at a regulated utility in the UK

Thames Tideway Tunnel, the project company set up to manage London’s “super-sewer” overflow reduction project, has deployed NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP platform in a bid to reduce costs and drive flexibility in its financial and project planning operations.

The company, which is due to start construction on a super sewer system to tackle sewage overflowing into the River Thames, said it required a flexible, low-cost IT systems implementation to support its core financial and project planning operations.

It enlisted Accenture to help deploy NetSuite OneWorld across the organisation.

“An agile and intuitive back-office IT system is critical for effective management and delivery of large-scale infrastructure projects,” said Robin Johns, head of Information Systems at Thames Tideway Tunnel.

“We selected Accenture to help us with this implementation based on its extensive experience with NetSuite cloud ERP technology and complex system integrations. We also chose Accenture for its ability to offer practical solutions to deliver an IT platform that will help facilitate financing and construction of the super sewer, while keeping costs down for customers,” Johns said.

Maureen Costello, managing director of Accenture’s utilities practice in the UK and Ireland said this is the first implementation of a multi-tenant cloud-based ERP system at a regulated utility in the UK.

It “demonstrates the company’s innovative approach and commitment to efficiently manage the delivery of this capital project,” Costello said.

Adam Wray, Basho, Big Data, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, NoSQL, Riak

Basho, Cisco integrate Riak KV and Apache Mesos to strengthen IoT automation

Basho and Cisco have integrated Riak and Mesos

Basho and Cisco have integrated Riak and Mesos

Cisco and Basho have successfully demoed the Riak key value store running on Apache Mesos, an open source technology that makes running diverse, complex distributed applications and workloads easier.

Basho helped create and commercialise the Riak NoSQL database and worked with Cisco to pair Mesos with Riak’s own automation and orchestration technology, which the companies said would help support next gen big data and internet of things (IoT) workloads.

“Enabling Riak KV with Mesos on Intercloud, we can seamlessly and efficiently manage the cloud resources required by a globally scalable NoSQL database, allowing us to provide the back-end for large-scale data processing, web, mobile and Internet-of-Things applications,” said Ken Owens, chief technology officer for Cisco Intercloud Services.

“We’re making it easier for customers to develop and deploy highly complex, distributed applications for big data and IoT. This integration will accelerate developers’ ability to create innovative new cloud services for the Intercloud.”

Apache Mesos provides resource scheduling for workloads spread across distributed – and critically, heterogeneous – environments, which is why it’s emerging as a fairly important tool for IoT developers.

So far Cisco and Basho have only integrated Basho’s commercial Riak offering, Riak KV, with Mesos, but Basho is developing an open source integration with Mesos that will also be commercialized around a supported enterprise offering.

“By adding the distributed scheduler from Mesos, we’re effectively taking the infrastructure component away from the equation,” Adam Wray, Basho’s chief executive officer told BCN. “Now you don’t have to worry about the availability of servers – you literally have an on-demand model with Mesos, so people can scale up and down based on the workloads for any number of datacentres.”

“This is what true integration of a distributed data tier with a distributed infrastructure tier looks like, being applied at an enterprise scale.”

Wray added that while the current deal with Cisco isn’t a reselling agree we can expect Basho to be talking about large OEM deals in the future, especially as IoT picks up.

Dana Kammersgard, Datacentre, Dot Hill, M&A, News & Analysis, Phil Brace, Seagate, Storage

Seagate buys Dot Hill to bolster cloud cred

Seagate hasn't made too many cloud-focused acquisitions

Seagate hasn’t made too many cloud-focused acquisitions

Seagate announced plans to acquire storage software and hardware vendor Dot Hill Systems for $694m, which the company said would help bolster its cloud portfolio of products.

Dot Hill specialises in SAN technology and offers a range of storage array-based systems integrated with its storage and data management software, which are tailored primarily to the needs of cloud and virtualised workloads.

“Dot Hill’s innovative storage systems and IP portfolio are a strategic addition to our storage technology portfolio, enabling us to accelerate the growth of Seagate’s OEM-focused cloud storage system and solutions business,” said Phil Brace, president of Cloud Systems and Electronics Solutions at Seagate.

“We are focused on providing the highest quality storage systems for our OEM customers and Dot Hill’s storage solutions will enable us to advance our strategic efforts.  We look forward to welcoming Dot Hill’s strong team, which has proven experience in developing and delivering best-in-class storage solutions that are trusted by the world’s leading IT manufacturers and their channel partners,” Brace added.

The move will see Seagate pay $9.75 per Dot Hill share, totaling about $694m. Seagate said following the acquisition it will integrate Dot Hill’s portfolio into its cloud systems and electronics business.

“Seagate has a strong reputation in enterprise storage and is focused on building out its best-in-class storage system capabilities, making them the right home for the talented Dot Hill team,” said Dana Kammersgard, chief executive officer of Dot Hill.  “Dot Hill’s customers will benefit from leveraging Seagate’s leading technology and infrastructure to accelerate the delivery of advanced solutions.”

This is the latest cloud-centric acquisition for Seagate since it bought Exabyte last year.

ClearScale, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Onstream, Pavel Pragin

ClearScale, Onstream partner on IoT intelligence cloud service

ClearScale and Onstream are partnering on an IoT cloud service

ClearScale and Onstream are partnering on an IoT cloud service

Device intelligence automation specialist Onstream is partnering with ClearScale to develop a cloud-based IoT service for smart devices.

Onstream offers a connected device framework that aims to bring data processing closer to the smart devices and sensors generating the data, without having to do much re-coding or bespoke integration between those devices and a centralised repository or application.

The aim of the service is to make device intelligence gathering easier in a distributed infrastructure environment, a need that will likely grow as the volume of data IoT services generate continues to increase.

The companies said the cloud-based implementation of Onstream’s service, called ‘Mesosphere’ (not to be confused with Apache Mesos-based Mesosphere), will allow users to more easily extend the framework to their own customers’ devices.

The service is hosted on AWS infrastructure; ClearScale is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and has worked with companies like Samsung, Aetna and Shinola Detroit to create its cloud integration platform using Docker, open source Samza data stream processing and Amazon EC2 Container Service.

“Onstream is a very innovative company. They wanted to use the best technology to achieve low latency and fast processing for their new framework,” said Pavel Pragin, chief executive of ClearScale. “Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) had just been made generally available, and Onstream was an early adopter. ECS has been instrumental in automating the deployment of Docker containers.”