Category Archives: News & Analysis

Big Data, HANA, News & Analysis, Quentin Clark, SAP, Stacey Allaster, tennis, WTA

WTA, SAP team on tennis analytics using HANA cloud

SAP and the WTA are partnering to develop a cloud-based analytics service for tennis players and coaches

SAP and the WTA are partnering to develop a cloud-based analytics service for tennis players and coaches

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and SAP have partnered to develop tennis analytics software for players and coaches based on SAP HANA.

The cloud-based analytics platform will offer players and coaches side-by-side comparisons of the full list of match stats for both players, updated in near real-time; scoring data that analyses player’s service performance, success rate in closing out a game while serving and number of break points saved; and tracking data showing player’s serve direction and placement on the court, contact point for returning a serve and placement of rally shots.

The organisations said players and coaches will be able to access the analytics platform from WTA-authorised tablets.

“The WTA and SAP Tennis Analytics is a game-changer that will not only enhance our athletes’ preparation and performance but also the fans’ experiences when watching women’s tennis,” said Stacey Allaster, chief executive and chairman of the WTA.

“Analyzing data is fundamental to player and coach development, and this state-of-the-art technology, which more and more of our performers are now using, will take our sport to a new and exciting level and lead the way in sports technology,” she said.

Quentin Clark, chief technology officer and member of the global managing board, SAP said: “Our relationship with the WTA is another example of how SAP collaborates with partners to create ground-breaking solutions that change the way athletes utilize data and information to optimise their performance.”

SAP has partnered with a number of sports association in recent years. Earlier this year it partnered with the National Hockey League (NHL) to roll out a co-designed cloud-based platform which the two organisations said would help bring vast amounts of official NHL statistical information directly to the website in real time.

Cloud Storage, Funding, News & Analysis, Storage, Tintri, Virtualisation

Storage tech provider Tintri bags $125m to take on EMC, NetApp

Tintri secured $125m in series F funding this week

Tintri secured $125m in series F funding this week

Storage specialist Tintri has secured $125m in a funding round the company said would go towards accelerating development of its virtualised storage solution.

The latest funding round, led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk with participation from Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Menlo Ventures and NEA brings the total investment secured by Tintri since its founding in 2008 to $260m.

Tintri specialises in storage hardware optimised to serve up data for individual virtual machines. The company’s storage servers blend both HDD and SSD tech in order to optimise hot and cold storage and access, making storage more performant by making it smarter.

“The storage industry is going through a dramatic transformation. Virtualization and cloud are forces for change—and conventional DAS, NAS and SAN storage is struggling to keep pace. That’s why our message of VM-aware storage (VAS) is winning in the marketplace,” said Ken Klein, chairman and chief executive for Tintri.

“This funding fuels our mission—we’ll be growing our global footprint and raising visibility of the business benefits of storage built specifically for virtualized enterprises.”

The company’s virtualisation-aware storage wares have enjoyed some solid traction among some of the world’s largest companies and service providers including Chevron, GE, the EIB, NTT, SK Telecom and Rogers Communications.

GE, Harel Kodesh, Internet of Things, IoT, Jeffrey Immelt, News & Analysis, Pitney Bowes, Predix

GE reveals Predix-based cloud for industrial Internet of Things applications

GE is launching a cloud service aimed at industrial IoT

GE is launching a cloud service aimed at industrial IoT

GE has launched a cloud service based on its industrial equipment monitoring and analytics platform, Predix, which it is aiming at industrial IoT applications in most of the verticals it already serves – aviation, manufacturing, automotive, energy and healthcare.

The cloud service will hoover up and analyse data generated by IoT sensors embedded in industrial equipment and can use the insights to optimise operations and proactively manage the equipment’s health by suggesting tailored maintenance regimes, whether an energy infrastructure asset or a jet engine.

While GE has offered these kinds of services for years this is the first time it has decided to offer them directly via the cloud to customers. The company is pitching Predix as an on-demand “cloud platform for the industrial internet.”

“Cloud computing has enabled incredible innovation across the consumer world. With Predix Cloud, GE is providing a new level of service and results across the industrial world,” said Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of GE.

“A more digital hospital means better, faster healthcare. A more digital manufacturing plant means more products are made faster. A more digital oil company means better asset management and more productivity at every well. We look forward to partnering with our customers to develop customized solutions that will help transform their business,” he said.

The service includes a range of tools to help customers manage security, compliance and data governance, and GE claims that it can integrate seamless with other services running in on a broad range of cloud platforms.

“A cloud built exclusively to capture and analyse machine data will make unforeseen problems and missed opportunities increasingly a complication of the past,” said Harel Kodesh, vice president, general manager of Predix at GE Software. “GE’s Predix Cloud will unlock an industrial app economy that delivers more value to machines, fleets and factories – and enable a thriving developer community to collaborate and rapidly deploy industrial applications in a highly protected environment.”

The reveal comes less than a month after what was effectively a softer Predix launch. In July GE announced it is partnering with Pitney Bowes to develop a custom asset performance management (APM) application that analyses the data Pitney Bowes generates from its production mailing and shipping machines to improve the efficiency of its equipment. That partnership saw the companies adapt GE’s Predix software analytics platform to its mail handing and shipping environment.

Both companies have already partnered with one another elsewhere in the IoT ecosystem. Pitney Bowes and GE are members of the Industrial Internet Consortium, a membership group of telcos, research institutes and technology manufacturers formed last year and focused on developing interoperability standards and common architectures to bridge smart devices, machines, mobile devices and the data they create.

Enterprise IT, HMRC, Kalbir Sohi, News & Analysis

HMRC embraces PaaS, moves tax platform to the cloud

HMRC is building out a PaaS and cloud strategy to support its digital services agenda

HMRC is building out a PaaS and cloud strategy to support its digital services agenda

In a bid to offer a set of new and redesigned digital services HMRC is moving its tax platform to the cloud and rolling out automated infrastructure to support its internal platform as a service (PaaS).

“In HMRC we are scaling up our cloud infrastructure as we prepare to deliver more new and redesigned digital services. These services sit on the “Tax Platform”, our internal platform as a service,” explained Kalbir Sohi, an Infrastructure Digital Service Manager at HMRC.

“Over the last two years developing the Tax Platform we’ve been automating the creation of infrastructure to ensure consistency and quality in our infrastructure by defining it in code and decreasing the amount of time that people in our team spend doing repetitive manual tasks like provisioning and configuring servers.”

In a bid to ease vendor lock-in the organisation has been using a range of open source tools including Puppet, git and VCloud Tools to build and scale the infrastructure over the past two years; it’s also contributing code back to the codebases where relevant.

“We are committed to both using open source products and contributing back to the community to improve them based on what we are doing. This should help us to avoid being tied to one specific supplier or technology but will also allow us to contribute to some of the interesting and novel cloud tools that are emerging — hopefully making these tools more useable for organisations like HMRC,” Sohi explained.

The Tax Platform is designed to make building, testing, deploying and running microservice-based web applications very easy, and is intended to help HMRC embrace a cloud service brokerage model it said would help ease digital service delivery internally and externally.

The organisation’s next step is to focus on scripting networking, storage and compute automation into the platform, and selecting the open source tools to help make its cloud brokerage ecosystem more robust for those maintaining the platform.

“Having access to fast, repeatable, efficient infrastructure will change the way that teams approach building and running the HMRC services that do not fit the platform as a service model. We are changing much more than this too. We are taking a new approach to infrastructure which will shape how we organise ourselves to deliver services in the future. At the heart of this is designing for, and testing with our users.”

1010data, Big Data, Bright House Networks, Condé Nast, M&A, News & Analysis, Reddit

Media giant hoovers up analytics specialist for $500m

Advance is buying 1010data for $500m

Advance is buying 1010data for $500m

Advance/Newhouse, the parent company of Advance Publications – owner or majority stakeholder in some of the world’s largest digital publications including Condé Nast and Reddit – announced this week it has acquired analytics and data warehouse specialist 1010data for $500m.

Advance said it intends to help scale 101data’s operations globally, with the capital being used to invest strongly in sales, marketing and engineering efforts.

“Advance believes that 1010data has a compelling vision for helping businesses unlock their true potential through data. It has created a truly innovative approach that is speeding this transition across industries,” said Nomi Bergman, president of Advance’s cable television affiliate, Bright House Networks, and a new member of 1010data’s Board.

“We believe that in the 21st century data and analytics platforms will be a core building block of all businesses. The opportunities that lie ahead for 1010data are boundless, and through our acquisition of 1010data, we are excited to partner with the company’s management team and provide the resources it needs to capitalize on all of them,” Bergman said.

1010data offers big data discovery and data sharing platforms as well as an integrated big data cloud service that can be used to analyse large datasets; it can also be plugged in to third party big data applications and mash up data from a range of sources.

The company claims to have over 750 customers across a range of sectors including telecoms, manufacturing and engineering.

Sandy Steier, co-founder and chief executive of 1010data said: “Advance is the perfect partner to help us maximize our growth potential as they fully recognize how revolutionary and impactful our technology can be. Becoming a part of Advance ensures that there will be no disruption to our customers, our employees or our business while enabling our organization to scale at an even faster rate. We are very excited about being able to leverage Advance’s significant resources to deliver an even better solution for our customers.”

AWS, developer, DigitalOcean, Funding, Khosla Ventures, News & Analysis, Nitin Gupta

Koding bags $10m to boost cloud-native IDE

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Independent development environment provider Koding closed $10m in series B funding this week in a round led by Khosla Ventures.

Koding offers a platform that aims to bridge user-friendly collaboration features with a robust, device-agnostic development platform, and the service is hosted directly on AWS and DigitalOcean infrastructure.

500 Startups and existing investors Matrix Partners and RTP Ventures also participated in the funding round, which brings the total amount secured by the company since its founding to just under $30m.

As part of the most recent round, Ari Zilka, a partner at Khosla Ventures and formerly chief technology officer at big data specialist Hortonworks, will join the company’s board.

“The cloud-based development environment has dramatically shifted how software engineers write code and collaborate. The cloud provides an immersive environment that increases productivity without requiring any installation,” explained Nitin Gupta, Koding’s chief business officer in a recent blog post.

“Already, we have over a million software developers using Koding who, in aggregate, have written over a billion lines of code, spun up millions of virtual machines and consumed over eight petabytes of storage. Our recently forged partnerships with developer focused companies like DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS) help get Koding into the hands of even more developers worldwide.”

The company said it plans to use the funding to double down on developing its Koding for Teams offering, which brings new capabilities that allow developers to more easily on-board team members and build internal development communities across heterogeneous developer organisations.

Asia Pacific, Big Data, Kate McKenzie, Melissa Ries, News & Analysis, Pivotal, telstra

Pivotal teams with Telstra on enterprise big data

Telstra and Pivotal are teaming up to push Cloud Foundry and big data services in Australia

Telstra and Pivotal are teaming up to push Cloud Foundry and big data services in Australia

Pivotal announced a partnership with Australian telco Telstra that will see the two firms jointly marketing Pivotal’s big data development services to Telstra enterprise customers.

Pivotal will also offer enterprise customers training at its newly established Pivotal Labs office in Sydney, Australia, its 16th globally.

The company said the move would help it reach a broader enterprise customer base in the region by leveraging Telstra’s existing local relationships and experience in the ICT sector.

“The arrival of Pivotal Labs in Australia presents a great opportunity for local organisations. Pivotal Labs will quickly become a software innovation hub for Australia’s largest enterprises in all industries to transform into great software companies – taking digital disruption to the next level,” said Melissa Ries, vice president and general manager APJ, Pivotal.

“Pivotal has a great relationship with Telstra, which is built on a foundation of shared visions. With Telstra’s involvement in the Cloud Foundry Foundation and our joint venture, we’re partnering to help Telstra’s customers transform into great software companies.”

The companies said that by using tools like Pivotal CF, the Cloud Foundry-based platform as a service (PaaS), and Pivotal Big Data Suite (BDS), enterprise customers will be able to improve how they develop their web and mobile services.

Kate McKenzie, chief operations officer at Telstra said: “In conjunction with our new Gurrowa Innovation Lab, Pivotal Labs will enhance our innovation offering for our customers and create a pipeline of skills to grow our development capabilities. Innovation at Telstra is about helping our customers get the best out of technology for the future and ultimately providing access to the best networks from which they can innovate, and the partnership will allow us to do just that.”

Adam Marshall, BCC, British Chambers of Commerce, Enterprise IT, Europe, News & Analysis

UK SME cloud adoption swells on flexible working growth

UK SMEs are turning to the cloud to support their flexible working needs

UK SMEs are turning to the cloud to support their flexible working needs

UK SMEs are upping their use of cloud services in a bid to cater to more flexible working practices, recently released research from the BT Business and the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) suggests.

According to a survey of over 300 decision makers working in small and medium-sized business in the UK, nine out of ten (91 per cent) of companies have at least one member of staff working from home, and a fifth of businesses (19 per cent) said more than half of their workforce working away from their main office location.

The BCC said the results are directly linked to growing cloud service use. About 69 per cent of businesses use cloud-based applications, and more than half (53 per cent) saying that they are critical to effective remote working.

As one might have guessed, internet connectivity was also rated quite highly on the list of core elements required to effectively facilitate flexible working (63 per cent), and smartphones are seen as the technology that has made the biggest difference to businesses in the last 12 months (according to 68 per cent of respondents).

“It is vital to ensure that UK businesses have access to world-class digital infrastructure if they are to maintain their competitiveness in a global marketplace,” said Adam Marshall, executive director of policy and external affairs, BCC.

“Cloud and mobile technologies are becoming increasingly important as firms expand into new markets and explore new ways of working – especially overseas. It is encouraging to see that so many British firms are adapting their working practices to take advantage of these developments,” he added.

Legislation that came into effect last summer means employees in the UK with over 26 weeks service are eligible to request flexible working hours, allowing more employees to set up home offices and work remotely. Research from the Office for National Statistics found that in the first three months of 2014, 4.2 million staff across the country worked from home, equating to 13.9 per cent of the workforce, a figure that is only set to grow since the law’s passing.

Alibaba, Aliyun, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jian Wang, News & Analysis

Alibaba looks to quantum computing for next-gen cloud

Aliyun is looking at fostering quantum computing skills and technology, potentially for future applications in its cloud

Aliyun is looking at fostering quantum computing skills and technology, potentially for future applications in its cloud

Alibaba’s cloud computing unit Aliyun has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) that will see the two set up a quantum computing lab to study the technology’s applications in security, networking and cloud computing.

The lab will focus on experimenting with quantum theory in a bid to develop novel security technologies for e-commerce and datacentres (including, potentially, its own) and bolstering computing performance.

“The CAS – Alibaba Quantum Computing Laboratory will undertake frontier research on systems that appear the most promising in realizing the practical applications of quantum computing,” said Jianwei Pan, executive vice president of University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and a CAS member.

“The laboratory will combine the technical advantages of Aliyun in classical calculation algorithms, structures and cloud computing with those of CAS in quantum computing, quantum analog computing and quantum artificial intelligence, so as to break the bottlenecks of Moore’s Law and classical computing,” Pan said.

The organisations said they want the lab to become a hub for international research in quantum computing and help create local talent in quantum computing.

Jian Wang, chief technology officer of Alibaba Group said: “This investment in the development and application of quantum computing reflects the scale and clarity of our long-term vision to collaborate with partners in an ecosystem model towards the sustained development of the economy and society.”

“New discoveries in information security and computing capacity based on quantum computing could be as significant in the future as big data technologies are today,” he added.

Quantum computing offers a number of benefits – the biggest being its theoretical ability to crunch eye-watering amounts of data extremely quickly, which means security monitoring and defence as well as big data and HPC are looking like the best applications for the technology so far. But quantum computing in practice is still quite nascent and confronted by a range of challenges – cost, lack of software, lack of commercial availability, lack of standards at the processor level are some of the biggest.

Asia Pacific, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, NTT Com

NTT Com sets up IoT practice

NTT Com is setting up an IoT practice

NTT Com is setting up an IoT practice

NTT Com is setting up an office to target the development, sales and marketing of Internet of Things solutions.

The ICT-focused subsidiary of NTT Group said it will leverage its expertise in cloud computing, software development and telecoms to design and sell IoT solutions to clients, solutions that make use of the company’s 130 cloud datacentres and global network.

It plans to offer a one-stop application platform that can store, analyse and visualise data generated from IoT sensors.

The company is already working with a number of companies in Japan and Indonesia on a series of IoT trials.

In August this year for instance it announced a partnership with Kanazawa Nishi Hospital in Japan to test sensors deployed in electric appliances to help monitor elderly people living alone. In April it announced a partnership with TOCHU Corporation to test a smart streetlighting network at a complex in Indonesia to help optimise power consumption.