Category Archives: News & Analysis

Bill Hilf, Cloud Foundry, Docker, Helion, HP, Linux containers, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Stackato, Xavier Poisson

HP to buy Stackato to boost hybrid cloud strategy

HP is buying Stackato to boost support for Linux containers

HP is buying Stackato to boost support for Linux containers

HP is to acquire ActiveState’s Stackato business for an undisclosed sum, which the company said would give a boost to its hybrid cloud strategy.

Like HP Helion Development Platform, Stackato’s platform as a service is built on Cloud Foundry and offers robust support for Docker, which is gaining the lion’s share of attention in the Linux container world. It offers deployments on a range of cloud infrastructure including AWS, VMware, OpenStack, HP Cloud and KVM.

HP said the move would strengthen its hybrid cloud strategy, which largely puts application catalogues, workload automation, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack front and centre.

“The Stackato PaaS solution strengthens the HP Helion portfolio and reinforces HP’s commitment to delivering customers open source solutions that help accelerate their transition to hybrid clouds,” said Bill Hilf, Senior Vice President, product and service management, HP Cloud. “The acquisition reinforces HP’s focus on driving Cloud Foundry as the open standard cloud native application platform.”

After the acquisition closes, which is expected to occur sometime in Q4 this year, HP will integrate Stackato into the Helion Development Platform.

The strong support for Linux containers will help HP build on its hybrid cloud strategy. Containers are useful in part because they are extremely portable and can run on pretty much any infrastructure, a useful feature when it comes to lifting and shifting workloads and application components in heterogeneous infrastructure environments. In an interview with BCN earlier this month Xavier Poisson, vice president of HP Helion in EMEA said Linux containers are increasingly at the core of cloud-native app development – so anything that can boost the company’s support of containers could make it more competitive.

Elastica, Google, Hacking, News & Analysis

Google Drive vulnerable to undetectable phishing campaign, experts claim

Hackers used Google Drive to mount a barely detectable phishing attack

Hackers used Google Drive to mount a barely detectable phishing attack

Google Drive has been subject to a phishing attack that used JavaScript code obfuscation and compromised websites in order to steal end-user account credentials using Google services.

Elastica researchers explained attackers deployed a JavaScript encoding mechanism to obfuscate web page code that could not be easily read, and used fake SSL credentials to gain entry to Google’s services. Attackers were able to reach a wide network of end-users by exploiting Google Drive to host malicious Web pages, where attack victims were directed.

The hackers used Gmail to distribute emails containing links to unauthorized web pages hosted on Google Drive, and then stored stolen credentials through a third-party domain.

Although the malicious pages were reported to Google, Elastica said they have yet to be removed.

“In this particular incident, attackers were able to circumvent tight security controls and target Google users specifically to gain access to a multitude of services associated with Google accounts,” said Aditya K Sood, architect of Elastica Cloud Threat Labs.

“While the cloud offers unprecedented benefits to its users, it is challenging the traditional security model and necessitating a modern, flexible security stack designed to provide protection in a perimeterless world.”

Because the pages were hosted on Google Drive, which uses SSL to encryption, standard security methods like IP blacklisting and intrusion detection weren’t effective.

Rehan Jalil, chief executive of Elastica said these issues will likely keep cropping up as cloud usage grows.

“Security and risk professionals are quickly learning that legacy security solutions are no longer effective for cloud applications,” Jalil said.

Africa, Funding, IBM, Kenya, Kenya Education Network, Meoli Kashorda, Naguib Attia, News & Analysis, public private partnership

IBM to invest $60m in Africa to expand cloud, analytics skills

IBM is investing $60m in Africa over three years to train students in cloud, big data and analytics

IBM is investing $60m in Africa over three years to train students in cloud, big data and analytics

IBM will invest $60m in Africa over three years to expand its technical academy and educational initiatives in the region. The company said it wants to bolster its investment in developing stronger regional capabilities in cloud services, big data and analytics.

In Kenya, where IBM’s Africa Research lab and Innovation Centres are based, the company is partnering with the Kenya Education Network (KENET) to deliver advanced certification courses in cloud and data sciences to faculty and students of 50 Kenyan universities linked by KENET’s broadband network.

The courses will be administered by IBM technical experts along with key faculty from participating universities.

“With a research laboratory, innovation centers, offices and other advanced facilities in more than 24 African countries, IBM has the highest concentration of technical talent on the African continent,” said Naguib Attia, IBM chief technology officer & vice president of technical leadership, MEA.

“As the leader in science and technology in Africa, we see it as IBM’s responsibility to make a strategic investment in skills development helping to lay the foundations of the Africa of tomorrow,” he said.

Attia said partners hope to reach up to 35,000 students by 2017.

Meoli Kashorda, executive director of Kenya Education Network said the certification program will provide university graduates with critical entry-level job skills in high demand by employers in Kenya and Africa more broadly.

“Both the African universities and leading private sector companies that are investing on the continent stand to benefit from this program,” he said.

The move comes just a few days after IBM unveiled a tech collaboration space in Nairobi, where the company hopes to facilitate tech partnerships between startups in the region. The space, which will make a range of IBM services like Bluemix and various cloud applications available to developers by offering credits, will open in August this year.

Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Richard Davies, Spring.io

Spring.io: Containers are great, but need to be simple to adopt

Spring.io offers containers as a service

Containers are all the rage but everyone does them differently

ElasticHosts founder Richard Davies launched another container-focused venture this week – Spring.io, a pay-as-you-use cloud service targeted primarily at Linux developers. Davies told BCN that while the volume around Docker and other container technologies is high, which is encouraging, their uptake will ultimately depend on how providers balance simplicity with performance.

Spring.io is a spinoff of Davies’ other venture, ElasticHosts, which still uses Linux containers but operates more like a traditional infrastructure as a service provider (customers need to subscribe to the service for set periods).

“We have been listening to the market and what we are hearing is that people are craving simplicity,” Davies said. “They just want to be able to sign up to a service without having to choose instance sizes or worry about over-paying, just as you would with your gas or electricity.”

The benefit containers offer over traditional virtualisation platforms is that they scale more closely in line with the resources an application needs, and they scale much more quickly. But most cloud services are provisioned in fixed virtual and / or physical increments that can only scale by adding or subtracting fixed-size VMs or hardware or both. This, Davies said, leads to massive amounts of waste in terms of asset utilisation (for the provider) and cost (for the consumer). It’s a ‘lost-lose’.

Spring.io uses the same underlying technologies as Docker and other Linux containers (cgroups, namespaces), but whereas they are mostly application containers with a focus on simplifying portability and managing dependencies in micro-services architecture, Springs.io offers operating system containers with a focus on usage-based billing and reactive auto-scaling.

Where most container as a service providers lean heavily upon scripting for scaling and deployment , or run containers within virtual machines, Springs.io supplies auto-scaling for load straight out of the box and requires no user API calls or JSON-juggling for their management or monitoring.

“Docker is exciting to developers struggling with shipping applications, we believe Springs.io is exciting to devops and sysadmins that want simple scaling for a reasonable price,” Davies.

Accenture (China), Beijing Advanced Digital Technology, Beijing Yucheng Technologies, Beiming Software, David He, Deloitte, Deloitte Business Advisory Services, DHC Software, Digital China System Integration Service, First Data, Huawei, Infosys Technologies, Micro Focus, News & Analysis, Vendor, Worldline Technologies, x86

Huawei, partners push cloud transformation for financial IT

He: Concentrating on core competencies

He: Concentrating on core competencies

As part of its expansion into IT services and the financial services markets, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has partnered with 11 banking IT solution providers to establish an open platform ecosystem for the finance industry, reports Banking Technology.

The collaboration was announced during Huawei’s Global Financial Services Industry Summit in Beijing last week. The launch partners are Accenture (China), Beijing Advanced Digital Technology, Beijing Yucheng Technologies, Beiming Software, DHC Software, Deloitte Business Advisory Services, Digital China System Integration Service, First Data, Infosys Technologies, Micro Focus, and Worldline Technologies.

David He, president of marketing and solution sales at Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, that that Huawei will focus on its core skills as a hardware platform provider, based around its BDII – Business-Driven ICT Infrastructure – approach.

“The new ecosystem is designed to address the IT transformation needs of financial organisations [and] promotes BDII within the financial industry by enabling our partners to focus on their core competencies,” said He. “For example, consulting firms, application vendors, and system integrators will be able to leverage their in-depth understanding and practical experience around industry applications, while Huawei, as a hardware platform provider, will focus on ICT infrastructure.”

Collaboration was one of the main themes of the event. During a keynote presentation, He said that collaboration and joint innovation between banks and vendors is essential to overcome the challenges faced by the financial services industry as it faces the dual threat of new digital and mobile technologies being harnessed by new, agile competitors.

The company also jointly published a white paper, Transformation and Reconstruction of Banks in the Digital Era, with Deloitte. In it, the two companies highlighted the need for banks to implement a digitalisation strategy supplemented by powerful and supportive systems, and IT capability construction.

The white paper argues a key component of the strategy is the transformation of cloud architecture, which enables banks to improve analysis efficiency, lower the cost of operations and innovation, and enhance data storage and disaster preparedness capabilities. In addition, big data strategies enable banks to quickly respond to real-time customer demands by analysing massive volumes of customer data. The transformation from multi-channel to omni-channel systems will also help banks provide consistent and seamless customer experiences.

By launching the open platform ecosystem for the finance industry, Huawei and its partners hope to help financial institutions migrate from closed to open IT architectures and enable enhanced customer experience and convenient service innovations in a safe and reliable operating environment.

As part of the collaboration, Huawei is working with other members of the ecosystem to launch a range of open platform-based solutions for the finance industry, including an online banking cloud (based on private cloud architecture for finance), a credit loan cloud, a direct banking cloud, a micro-and-small-loan service cloud, a core account cloud, a credit card core application cloud, as well as mobile teller and home banking capabilities. These solutions have helped companies including the Spanish Bolsas y Mercados Españoles exchange build a cloud-based equity trading system.

“Huawei facilitates IT architecture transformation within the finance industry by providing highly reliable x86 cluster systems to support core transaction systems, in addition to cloud architecture for finance that supports the transformation of the business and processes of banks,” said Wang Hongfeng, general manager, finance solutions, in Huawei’s EBG.. “Huawei also provides platform resources support through our open labs, innovation centres, authentication centres, and secondary development and remote support. Through cross-practice cooperation, Huawei hopes to speed up the evolution toward open platform architecture in the financial services industry.”

cloud adoption, Enterprise IT, Fruition Partners, ITSM, News & Analysis, Paul Cash

84% of UK CIOs say cloud reduces overall IT control – survey

UK CIOs are concerned cloud adoption is reducing their control over IT

UK CIOs are concerned cloud adoption is reducing their control over IT

A recent survey of 100 UK CIOs suggests close to nine in ten believe unsanctioned use of cloud services has created long term security risks for their organisations, and about 84 per cent believe cloud adoption reduces their organisation’s control over IT more broadly.

The survey, commissioned by Fruition Partners, looks specifically at IT service management (ITSM) trends in large UK companies (organisations with more than 1,000 employees).

The results suggest CIOs are still very concerned a lack of maturity around cloud service management and application support within enterprises is driving more ‘Shadow IT’ in their organisations.

About 60 per cent of respondents said there is an increasing culture of ‘Shadow IT’ in their organisations, and 79 per cent believe there are cloud services in use that IT does now know about.

Over three quarters (78 per cent) of CIOs stated that the rest of the business frequently does not seek their advice when it comes to the procurement of public cloud services, and about one in two CIOs believe their employees are side-stepping their own IT departments and going directly to cloud service providers for application support.

“CIOs need to remember that while the availability of public cloud services may mean they need to provide fewer IT services themselves, it doesn’t reduce the need for the management of those services. In fact, it’s arguable that the need for rigorous management actually increases. Of course you should expect public cloud services to work faultlessly, however you’d be crazy to blindly trust that they will, without managing and monitoring how those services are delivered to the business,” said Paul Cash, managing director of Fruition Partners UK.

Cash explained that regardless of the type of cloud service IT departments should still be managing them internally rather than “handing over all responsibility to cloud providers.”

“CIOs must make it easier for employees in other lines of business to work with the IT department to source the cloud services they want,” he said. “There are simple initial steps they can take to do this, such as creating and publishing a comprehensive service catalogue which is exposed to the entire business. A service catalogue that lists sanctioned public cloud services will reduce the impact of shadow IT and make it far easier for employees throughout the organisation to buy cloud services from the IT department – while ensuring that IT can control and manage the services that are implemented.”

AWS, Financial Results, Google, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

AWS rakes in $1.8bn in Q2 as ‘big four’ corner half the cloud services market

AWS is bringing in nearly $2bn in quarterly revenues

AWS is bringing in nearly $2bn in quarterly revenues

AWS revenue for the second quarter of this year topped $1.82bn, an increase of about 81 per cent year on year. The results come as other major IT service providers revealed strong cloud growth for the quarter.

Last quarter, the first time it pulled the curtain back on its cloud business, Amazon revealed AWS raked in $1.57bn in revenue. Operating income for Q2 increased 407 per cent to $391m.

Commenting on the results Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said “[we] continued to double down on our fastest growing geography — India, launched 350 significant AWS features and services so far this year, ahead of last year’s pace, introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms — enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40 per cent renewable energy.”

Speaking to analysts this week Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said the company is also getting more competitive on cost as it continues to optimise its services.

“We had over 350 significant new features and services and we believe that’s what resonates with customers. While pricing is certainly a factor we don’t believe it’s always the primary factor; in fact what we hear from our customers is that the ability to move faster and more agility is what they value,” he explained.

But he deflected questions about the capital intensity of the AWS business – which represent about 80 per cent of its overall capex.

Synergy Research Q2 Cloud Market Estimates“We do realise it’s a capital-intensive business and we have modelling that shows it’s going to be a very good business for us and that’s what we aim for as long-term return on invested capital and free cash flow. So, we’re certainly cognizant of the capital part of the calculation,” he said.

Amazon revealed the results as other large incumbents pulled back the curtain on their cloud performance. The second quarter saw Microsoft grow its cloud revenues 88 per cent and IBM 60 per cent.

But the results suggest some of the smaller cloud providers are being left in the dust. According to John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) are now approaching the $6bn, while trailing twelve-month revenues hitting close to $20bn. Synergy estimates AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google (the ‘big four’) control well over half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market.

“The cloud infrastructure services market is quite clearly bifurcating with a widening gap between the big four cloud providers and the rest of the service provider community,” Dinsdale explained. “Developing the necessary global hyperscale datacentre infrastructure along with the required marketing and operations support is simply beyond the reach of all but a very small number of players. This is not going to change.”

The good news for smaller and medium-sized cloud providers, he said, is that there does remain a wealth of opportunity for them to specialise in a particular niche industry or geography. At the moment the firm reckons North America accounts for over half of the worldwide cloud services market, followed by the EMEA and APAC regions.

Compose, Database, Derek Schoettle, IBM, Kurt Mackey, M&A, News & Analysis, NewSQL, NoSQL

IBM buys Compose to strengthen database as a service

IBM has acquired Compose, a DBaaS specialist

IBM has acquired Compose, a DBaaS specialist

IBM has acquired Compose, a database as a service provider specialising in NoSQL and NewSQL technologies.

Compose helps set up and manage databases running at pretty much any scale, deployed on all-SSD storage. The company’s platform supports most of the newer database technologies including MongoDB, Redis, Elastisearch, RethinkDB and PostgresSQL and is deployed on AWS, DigitalOcean and SoftLayer.

“Compose’s breadth of database offerings will expand IBM’s Bluemix platform for the many app developers seeking production-ready databases built on open source,” said Derek Schoettle, general manager, IBM Cloud Data Services.

“Compose furthers IBM’s commitment to ensuring developers have access to the right tools for the job by offering the broadest set of DBaaS service and the flexibility of hybrid cloud deployment,” Schoettle said.

Kurt Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Compose said: “By joining IBM, we will have an opportunity to accelerate the development of our database platform and offer even more services and support to developer teams. As developers, we know how hard it can be to manage databases at scale, which is exactly why we built Compose –to take that burden off of our customers and allow them to get back to the engineering they love.”

IBM said the move would give a big boost to its cloud data services division, where it’s seeing some solid traction; this week the company said its cloud data services, one of its big ‘strategic imperatives’, saw revenues swell 30 per cent year on year. And according to a report cited by the IT incumbent and produced by MarketsandMarkets, the cloud-based data services market is expected to swell from $1.07bn in 2014 to $14bn by 2019.

This is the latest in a series of database-centric acquisitions for IBM in recent years. In February last year the company acquired database as a service specialist Cloudant, which built a distributed, fault tolerant data layer on top of Apache CouchDB and offered it as a service largely focused on mobile and web app-generated data. Before that it also bought Daeja Image Systems, a UK-based company that provides rapid search capability for large image files spread over multiple databases.

Intel, Jason Waxman, Jonathan Bryce, NASA, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace, Scott Crenshaw

Rackspace, Intel to coordinate ‘world’s largest OpenStack dev team’

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world's largest OpenStack development team

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world’s largest OpenStack development team

Rackspace and Intel are teaming up to launch an OpenStack Innovation Centre aimed at bolstering upstream development of the cloud platform.

The centre, housed at Rackspace’s corporate HQ in San Antonio, Texas, will bring together technical specialists from Rackspace and Intel to co-develop new features and functions for OpenStack and fix bugs in the code base, with the fruits of their efforts being contributed back upstream.

The companies will also offer OpenStack training to engineers and developers; they claim the centre will house the world’s largest dedicated OpenStack development team.

“We are excited to collaborate with Intel and look forward to working with the OpenStack community to make the world’s leading open-source cloud operating system even stronger,” said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president of product and strategy at Rackspace.

“We don’t create proprietary OpenStack distributions.  Rackspace delivers its customers four-nines availability using entirely upstream trunk code. All of the Innovation Centre’s contributions will be made available freely, to everyone,” Crenshaw said.

Jason Waxman, vice president of the Cloud Platforms Group at Intel said: “This announcement demonstrates our continued support and commitment to open source projects. Our ongoing collaboration with Rackspace and the OpenStack community represents an ideal opportunity to accelerate the enterprise appeal of OpenStack.”

OpenStack, which this week celebrated its fifth anniversary, was founded by a few engineers from Rackspace and NASA but has since swelled to more than 520 member companies and 27,000 individual contributors globally. While the open source cloud platform is young, it has matured significantly during its brief existence and has become a defacto cloud standard embraced by many if not most of the big IT incumbents.

“The community’s goal is to foster collaboration and spur innovation that drives broad adoption,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The depth of experience and community engagement that Rackspace and Intel offer makes this an exciting project, as the code contributions and large-scale testing will benefit everyone who uses OpenStack.”

Enterprise IT, HANA, Lufthansa, News & Analysis, SAP

Lufthansa enlists SAP to help crunch IoT data

Lufthansa's IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa’s IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa Systems is using SAP HANA to bridge the gap between GIS systems and Internet of Things sensors to optimise flight operations.

The IT solutions-focused subsidiary of the German airline, a longtime customer and partner of SAP, said it is using HANA SPS10 to track flight operations and combine the data with information on changes in airport and meteorological conditions, and other fleet-related data monitored and analysed in real-time.

“Together with SAP, we built a prototype of a future operational database for commercial flight support,” said Christoph Krüger, lead architect, Lufthansa Systems.

“The spatial engine in SAP HANA has given us the ability to track thousands of flights per day on a rich 3D mapping interface that includes both spatial and temporal coordinates.”

“At the same time, we were able to uncover breakthrough application scenarios that would not have been possible.”

The company is using the solution to dispatch, monitor and visualise air traffic in a bid to optimise its operations.