Category Archives: News & Analysis

Accenture, Enterprise IT, HfS Research, IT as a Service, ITaaS, Michael Corcoran, News & Analysis, Phil Fersht

Accenture: For most enterprises, IT-as-a-Service will have to wait

Enterprises are slow to adopt ITaaS

Enterprises are slow to adopt ITaaS

Enterprises are looking to adopt IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) models and modernise their digital systems in a bid to become more competitive, but recently published research suggests most aren’t budging on their existing strategies. Michael Corcoran, senior managing director, global growth and strategy at Accenture, the firm that commissioned the research, told BCN that leaning more on cloud services, using analytics and becoming more automated could help them speed up the transition.

The transition to ITaaS is up there with DevOps and Agile when it comes to cultural and organisational modernisation and service improvement. It implies IT moving from being a monolithic procurement centre to a dynamic internal service provider, something most big organisations need to do in order to more effectively compete in digital.

Accenture and HfS Research surveyed 716 enterprise service buyers and found that 53 per cent of senior executives view ITaaS as critical for their organisation, yet 68 per cent of respondents said their core enterprise processes will not be delivered as-a-service for five or more years.

The research suggests this may be partly due to differing opinions or objectives within the organisations polled. More than half of service buyer senior leaders view aaS as critical and 61 per cent are ready to replace legacy providers in order to achieve their desired outcomes. But the same can’t be said for middle manager and delivery staff: just 29 per cent see the value of aaS in the same way.

“Many enterprise operations executives and service providers must make intrinsic changes to how they operate to stay relevant in an uncertain and challenging future,” said Phil Fersht, chief executive and founder, HfS Research. “It’s the forward-thinking service buyers and providers who set out their vision and path forward for sourcing with defined business outcomes aligned to the as-a-service ideals, that will achieve success. The conservative among us who refuse to accept these times of unprecedented, disruptive transition will be competitively challenged.”

Corcoran told BCN that much of the onus is on service providers, which need to invest in developing as-a-service capabilities. But enterprises also need to deploy the right mix of technologies and invest in the right skills to make the transition happen.

“By effectively moving to the cloud and applying the right digital technology, automation, artificial intelligence and analytics to unlock competitive advantage from data, and utilizing talent smartly, companies are in a better position to innovate faster, create new services and drive business outcomes that positively impact their top and bottom-line,” Corcoran explained.

“49 per cent of today’s enterprise buyers expect to move to a “wide-scale transformation of business processes enabled by new technology tools/platforms” in just two years. So it’s clear that many operational leaders are recognizing the need to steer their enterprises away from legacy delivery models and move towards the cloud and its material business outcomes.”

centurylink, Chef, Docker, Jared Wray, News & Analysis, Open Source, VMware, vSphere

CenturyLink open sources more cloud tech

CenturyLink has open sourced a batch of cloud tools

CenturyLink has open sourced a batch of cloud tools

CenturyLink has open sourced a number of tools aimed at improving provisioning for Chef on VMware infrastructure as well as Docker deployment, orchestration and monitoring.

Among the projects open sourced by the company include a Chef provisioning driver for vSphere, Lorry.io – a tool for creating, composing and validating Docker images, and imagelayers.io – a tool that helps improve Docker image visualisation in order to help give developers more visibility into their workloads.

“The embrace of open-source technologies within the enterprise continues to rise, and we are proud to be huge open-source advocates and contributors at CenturyLink,” said Jared Wray, senior vice president of platforms at CenturyLink.

“We believe it’s critical to be active in the open-source community, building flexible and feature-rich tools that enable new possibilities for developers.”

While CenturyLink’s cloud platform is proprietary and developed in house Wray has repeatedly said open source technologies form an essential part of the cloud ecosystem – Wray himself was a big contributor to Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS tool, when developing Iron Foundry.

The company has also previously open sourced other tools, too. Last summer it punted a Docker management platform it calls Panamax into the open source world, a platform is designed to ease the development and deployment of any application sitting within a Docker environment. It has also open sourced a number of tools designed to help developers assess the total cost of ownership of multiple cloud platforms.

Cisco, Frost Data Capital, Internet of Things, IoT, Jeff Scheel, John Vigouroux, News & Analysis, startups, Symantec

Symantec, Frost Data Capital to incubate startups solving IoT security challenges

Symantec and FDC are to incubate ten IoT security startups per year

Symantec and FDC are to incubate ten IoT security startups per year

Symantec is teaming up with venture capital firm Frost Data Capital to incubate startups primarily developing solutions to secure the Internet of Things.

The companies initially plan to create and seed up to ten early-stage startups with funding, resources and expertise, with Symantec offerings access to its own security technologies and Frost Data Capital its data analytics platforms.

“We’re taking a fresh look at driving innovation in the market and this partnership will enable Symantec to transform raw ideas and concepts into meaningful security companies,” said Jeff Scheel, senior vice president, strategy, alliances and corporate development at Symantec. “By collaborating with Frost Data Capital, we create an environment primed to incubate new, innovative and disruptive startups in cyber security – especially in the realm of IoT technologies where verticals like process control, automotive, health care and energy require specialized skills.”

The goal is to encourage development of threat detection analytics services capable of being applied in IoT architectures, where data volume and velocity can be particularly acute challenges when it comes to security and performance.

“We’re seeing a huge opportunity in the IoT security market,” said John Vigouroux, managing partner and president of Frost Data Capital. “We’re excited to work with Symantec to bring cutting-edge, relevant security analytics solutions to market rapidly, in order to prevent next generation cyber attacks on corporate infrastructures. Symantec brings to the table world-class security technology, global presence and strategic relationships that will be instrumental to launching these startups.”

Symantec and FDC are not the only firms looking to incubate startups with a view towards developing IoT solutions that complement their own offerings. Cisco recently announced significant efforts to incubate French and UK startups innovating in the area of IoT networks, while Intel and Deutsche Telekom unveiled similar moves in Europe last year.

Adallom, M&A, Microsoft, Middle East, News & Analysis

Microsoft buys Islraeli security startup Adallom for $320, plans Israel cybersecurity centre – report

Microsoft has reportedly acquired Adallom for $320m in a cloud security push

Microsoft has reportedly acquired Adallom for $320m in a cloud security push

Microsoft has apparently added Israeli cloud security startup Adallom to its arsenal, with multiple reports claiming the software company paid nearly $320m for the firm. The reports also suggest Microsoft is planning to open a cyber security centre in the region using some of the local talent it has acquired.

Adallom has not confirmed the acquisition, while Microsoft spokespeople told BCN that the company has “nothing to share” about the reports.

Adallom (an abbreviation of the Hebrew saying “ad halom,” which means “up to here” or “the last line of defence”) is a security service that integrates with the authentication chain of a range of SaaS applications and lets IT administrators monitor usage for every user on each device.

The software works with a conjunction of end-point and network security solutions and has a built-in, self-learning engine that analyses user activity on SaaS applications and assesses the riskiness of each transaction in real-time, alerting administrators when activity becomes too risky for an organisation given its security policies.

The company, which has its headquarters in California and a research and development outfit in Israel, was founded by cybersecurity veterans Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik in 2012.

The acquisition, first reported by Israeli business paper Globes, comes over half a year after its last security purchase; according to that report Microsoft plans to put Adallom and a number of other Israeli startups at the core of a new cybersecurity centre in Israel, a thriving hub from cybersecurity startups.

In November last year Microsoft ended months of speculation when it confirmed it bought another Israel-based security startup, Aorato, which offered software that tracks user behaviour when accessing applications linked to Active Directory, both in the cloud and on premise.

Bluefin, consultancy, HANA, James Appleby, Krishnakumar Natarajan, M&A, Mindtree, News & Analysis, SAP

IT consultancy Mindtree buys Bluefin to bolster SAP expertise

Mindtree has acquired Bluefin to bolster its SAP cred

Mindtree has acquired Bluefin to bolster its SAP cred

Mindtree has acquired Bluefin Solutions, an IT consultancy with particular expertise in SAP software, for an undisclosed sum. Krishnakumar Natarajan, chief executive and managing director of  Mindtree told BCN the move will help boost its European presence and its competencies around IoT, in-memory computing, and mobile.

Headquartered in the UK, Bluefin delivers a range of IT consultancy services with a specialisation in SAP technology, and Natarajan said the acquisition will bolster its reach in traditional European enterprises and public sector organisations, and create opportunities to bring its HANA cloud expertise to the US.

“SAP is not only a powerhouse of innovation, it is the commercial backbone of many of the largest global enterprises,” Natarajan said. “Mindtree and Bluefin can now offer unique integrated front-end, back-end and support services with unrivalled expertise on a global scale. This is essential to truly global organisations looking to use technology to digitize the entire value chain.

James Appleby, group chief executive of Bluefin Solutions told BCN that while its clients continue to look to it for expertise in many traditional areas where SAP has some tech leverage – BI, EPM, CRM, trade investment solutions – its clients are increasingly looking to take those platforms to the cloud, a strong growth area for the company.

“One of our most interesting client-observations is in the UK Public Sector, where the coincidental timing of government cut backs and the maturing of new technologies has been a disruptive force of innovation, particularly around citizen engagement, willingness to share and the opportunities offered by cloud,” he said.

“We certainly see an increased uptake of SaaS solutions in large enterprises with C4C really only taking off in the last 12 months in a meaningful way.  IaaS is now the default choice in many organisations for non-productive solutions and the decisions organisations are taking regarding HANA will increase the uptake of IaaS both as a platform for productive and non-productive use.”

He explained SAP’s HANA Enterprise Cloud had some teething problems at first, which wasn’t helped by the way the firm priced its consumption-based licensing, but that its PaaS – HANA Cloud Platform – remains massively underexploited in today’s market.

“Currently we are seeing it being used to extend SaaS applications but it is a powerful modern platform which could deliver much more for clients in terms of value,” he said.

Andrew Cope, Internet of Things Telecoms, IoT, KT, News & Analysis, Nokia, Yun Kyoung-Lim

KT, Nokia launch Internet of Things lab

KT and Nokia said the lab will be a testing ground for IoT innovators

KT and Nokia said the lab will be a testing ground for IoT innovators

Korean telco KT, alongside Nokia Networks, has announced the launch of the country’s first dedicated lab for progressing the development of the internet of things, making good on its MoU pledge at MWC earlier this year, reports Telecoms.com.

Nokia Networks has slated the lab to be the bedrock of its targeted “Programmable World” project by utilising the convergence of IT and telecoms. It claims small and medium-sized IoT firms looking for advice, expertise and an environment in which to test new products and ideas will be able to make the best use of the lab.

The launch of the lab shows the progress being made in the IoT space, after KT and Nokia signed a memorandum of understanding to develop an IoT lab facility at Mobile World Congress in March. Andrew Cope, Nokia’s head of Korea, said LTE-M (the LTE network enabling M2M communications) is a key basis of the lab’s capabilities, and displayed his pleasure in having the lab ready so soon after the MoU announcement at MWC.

“Executing upon an agreement signed at MWC15, Nokia Networks and KT have taken another step forward on an exciting journey that will culminate in the creation of the ‘Programmable World’ in Korea and beyond,” he said. “After showcasing the world’s first LTE-M for interconnection of sensors, we have now created Korea’s first IoT lab – a solid-point of our commitment to standardise LTE-M and create a strong and sustainable ecosystem.”

Yun Kyoung-Lim, KT’s head of future convergence said the lab’s approach to collaboration in IoT is essential to its development and to seeing its potential realised.

“Together with Nokia Networks, we are leveraging upon the convergence of IT and Telecommunications to hasten our transformation into an ICT powerhouse,” he said. “Furthermore, this lab is a strong iteration of our vision to become the number one player in Korea’s IOT market. Our efforts are aimed at encouraging greater participation by domestic companies, which are a crucial factor in driving the change towards a creative IoT-based economy.”

Big Data, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, natural conservation, News & Analysis

The Natural Capital project deploys cloud, big data to better quantify the value of nature

Microsoft is teaming up with several US universities to use cloud and big data technologies to forward natural conservation efforts

Microsoft is teaming up with several US universities to use cloud and big data technologies to forward natural conservation efforts

The Natural Capital Project, a ten-year partnership between Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund and the University of Minnesota to determine the economic value of natural landscapes is using Microsoft’s cloud and big data technologies to help analyse and visualise data that can help municipal policy-makers improve the environment in and around cities.

The recently announced partnership will see Microsoft offer up a range of technologies to help the project’s researchers better analyse the features impacting natural ecosystems surrounding cities, and quantify the impact of natural disasters, development or how other dependencies are brought to bear on those ecosystems.

Mary Ruckelshaus, managing director of the Natural Capital Project told BCN the project is important because it will help demonstrate both how people depend on the environment and increase awareness of their impact on nature.

“City dwellers depend on nature in many ways–wetlands, marshes, and dunes protect them and their property from coastal flooding, trees and other vegetation filter particulates for clean air, and green spaces reduce temperature stress and improve cognitive function and mental health, just to name a few,” she said.

The researchers will collect data from that broad set of sources including satellite imagery, remote sensors, and social media, and use Microsoft Azure to model the data and deliver the results to a range of mobile devices.

“Our focus with The Natural Capital Project is on enabling leaders in the public and private sector to have access to the best data, powerful analytic and visualization tools so that they can more deeply understand historical trends and patterns within the city or company, predict future situations, model “what-if” scenarios, and gain vital situational awareness from multiple data streams such as satellite imagery, social media and other public channels,” explained Josh Henretig, senior director of environmental sustainability at Microsoft.

“The increased prevalence and availability of data from satellite imagery, remote sensors, surveys and social media channels means that we can analyse, model and predict an extremely diverse set of properties associated with the ecosystems on which we depend,” he said.

Henretig explained to BCN that the Natural Capital Project is the first to try and quantify the economic and social value of natural capital, which means developing the required models and tools needed to complete the analysis will be a challenging undertaking in itself.

“That is a huge, complex undertaking, without any precedent to guide it. As a result, we face the challenge of driving awareness that these tools and this knowledge is available for leaders to draw from. In addition, the sheer diversity of global ecosystems, shared ecosystems, their states of health or decline and differing local and regional priorities make creating tools that can be adapted to assess a variety of circumstances quite a challenge.”

While Henretig acknowledge that it’s often hard for municipal policy-makers to make long-term environmental decisions when people are struggling with more immediate needs, he said the Project will help generate both vital data on the economic value of natural systems as well as suggestions for how they can move forward in policy terms.

“In partnership with cities, we are going to help turn this data—produced across multiple systems for, among other things, buildings, transportation, energy grids, and forests, streams and watersheds—into actionable information and solutions,” he said, adding that the company hopes to apply the models and techniques generated by the research partners to other cities.

Azure, Enterprise IT, Features, Google, HP, hybrid cloud, Interviews, Microsoft, News & Analysis, ovum, Rackspace, Roy Illsley

Hybrid cloud issues are cultural first, technical second – Ovum

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

This week has seen a number of hybrid cloud deals which would suggest the industry is making significant progress delivering the platforms, services and tools necessary to make hybrid cloud practical. But if anything they also serve as a reminder that IT will forever be multimodal which creates challenges that begin with people, not technology, explains Ovum’s principle analyst of infrastructure solutions Roy Illsley.

There has been no shortage of hybrid cloud deals this week.

Rackspace and Microsoft announced a deal that would see the hosting and cloud provider expand its Fanatical Support to Microsoft Azure-based hybrid cloud platforms.

Google both announced it would support Windows technologies on its cloud platform, and that it would formally sponsor the OpenStack foundation – a move aimed at supporting container portability between multiple cloud platforms.

HP announced it would expand its cloud partner programme to include CenturyLink, which runs much of its cloud platform on HP technology, in a move aimed at bolstering HP’s hybrid cloud business and CenturyLink’s customer reach.

But one of the more interesting hybrid cloud stories this week came from the enterprise side of the industry. Copper and gold producer Freeport-McMoRan announced it is embarking on a massive overhaul of its IT systems. In a bid to become more agile the firm said it would deploy its entire application estate on a combination of private and public cloud platforms – though, and somewhat ironically, the company said the entire project would wrap up in five years (which, being pragmatic about IT overhauls, could mean far later).

“The biggest challenge with hybrid cloud isn’t the technology per se – okay, so you need to be able to have one version of the truth, one place where you can manage most the platforms and applications, one place where to the best of your abilities you can orchestrate resources, and so forth,” Illsley explains.

Of course you need all of those things, he says. There will be some systems that won’t fit into that technology model, that will likely be left out (i.e. mainframes). But there are tools out there to fit current hybrid use cases.

“When most organisations ‘do’ hybrid cloud, they tend to choose where their workloads will sit depending on their performance needs, scaling needs, cost and application architecture – and then the workloads sit there, with very little live migration of VMs or containers. Managing them while they sit there isn’t the major pain point. It’s about the business processes; it’s the organisational and cultural shifts in the IT department that are required in order to manage IT in a multimodal world.”

“What’s happening in hybrid cloud isn’t terribly different from what’s happening with DevOps. You have developers and you have operations, and sandwiching them together in one unit doesn’t change the fact that they look at the world – and the day-to-day issues they need to manage or solve – in their own developer or operations-centric ways. In effect they’re still siloed.”

The way IT is financed can also create headaches for CIOs intent on delivering a hybrid cloud strategy. Typically IT is funded in an ‘everyone pitches into the pot’ sort of way, but one of the things that led to the rise of cloud in the first place is line of businesses allocating their own budgets and going out to procure their own services.

“This can cause both a systems challenge – shadow IT and the security, visibility and management issues that come with that – and a cultural challenge, one where LOB heads see little need to fund a central organisation that is deemed too slow or inflexible to respond to customer needs. So as a result, the central pot doesn’t grow.”

While vendors continue to ease hybrid cloud headaches on the technology front with resource and financial (i.e. chargeback) management tools, app stores or catalogues, and standardised platforms that bridge the on-prem and public cloud divide, it’s less likely the cultural challenges associated with hybrid cloud will find any straightforward solutions in the short term.

“It will be like this for the next ten or fifteen years at least. And the way CIOs work with the rest of the business as well as the IT department will define how successful that hybrid strategy will be, and if you don’t do this well then whatever technologies you put in place will be totally redundant,” Illsley says.

centurylink, Channel, Eric Koach, HP, Infrastructure as a Service, James Parker, News & Analysis

HP, CenturyLink buddy-up on hybrid cloud

CenturyLink and HP are partnering on hybrid cloud

CenturyLink and HP are partnering on hybrid cloud

HP and CenturyLink announced a deal this week that will see HP resell CenturyLink’s cloud services to its partners as part of the HP PartnerOne programme.

As part of the deal HP customers will have access to the full range of CenturyLink services, which are built using HP technology, including managed hosting, colocation, storage, big data and cloud.

“CenturyLink solutions, powered by HP, provide compelling value for organizations seeking hybrid IT solutions,” said James Parker, senior vice president, partner, financial and international, at CenturyLink. “CenturyLink complements the HP portfolio with a breadth of hybrid solutions for enterprises, offering customers the ability to choose the services that make the most sense today, while retaining the flexibility to evolve as business demands shift.”

HP said the move will help CenturyLink expand its reach new customers, with HP exploiting new opportunities to build hybrid cloud solutions for existing customers.

“As businesses map out a path to the cloud, they need flexibility in how they consume and leverage IT services,” said Eric Koach, vice president of sales, Enterprise Group, central region, HP.

“HP cloud, software and infrastructure solutions help CenturyLink and HP enable clients to build, manage and secure a cloud environment aligned with their strategy, across infrastructure, information and critical applications,” Koach said.

Since splitting up HP has bifurcated its partner programmes into the PartnerOne programme for service providers and the Helion PartnerOne programme, the latter of which largely includes services providers building solutions on top of OpenStack or Cloud Foundry.

Deloitte, managed security, Managed services, Mike Denning, News & Analysis, Verizon

Verizon tries to woo CSOs with managed security offering

Verizon is boosting its managed security practice

Verizon is boosting its managed security practice

Verizon is throwing its hat into the managed security services ring this week, launching a managed cybersecurity and incident monitoring service targeted at large enterprises.

The Unified Security Services includes a pre-configured set of features managed by Verizon directly and designed to protect the network edge.

Verizon said it will provide service event monitoring, device alerting and 24/7 security support as well as patch management as part of the suite.

“With Unified Security Services, we have bundled together technology, human expertise and deployment services into one convenient offering,” said Mike Denning, vice president of Global Security at Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

“This solution is aimed at helping organizations — with little to no internal staff — better safeguard their networks, without adding complexity or more resources to their IT teams,” he said.

The suite will initially be rolled out in the US with plans to offer hosted versions globally in 2016.

The launch would suggest its partnership with Deloitte, announced in the Spring, is bearing fruit. In April the companies announced a partnership to deliver a comprehensive set of cybersecurity and risk-management solutions to enterprises.

As part of that deal Verizon said it would leverage its experience in digital forensics and managed services and Deloitte its cyber risk advisory services to deliver end-to-end incident response services.