Category Archives: News & Analysis

Crowdstrike, Funding, Google, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Security as a service firm Crowdstrike bags $100 from Google, Rackspace

CrowdStrike secured $100m in funding this week from Rackspace, Google among others

CrowdStrike secured $100m in funding this week from Rackspace, Google among others

Security SaaS provider CrowdStrike completed a $100m round of funding led by Google and Rackspace this week, which the company said would be used to bolster its international expansion.

The funding round, in which Accel and Warburg Pincus also participated, brings the total investment secured by the firm to $156m.

CrowdStrike offers a range of threat intelligence, endpoint protections and cybersecurity services including a cloud-based software offering and a security operations centre -as-a-service.

The company, of which Rackspace is a customer, claims to have trebled billings revenue and employees year on year.

“It’s extremely gratifying to bring in a high-caliber investor like Google Capital which shares our passion for innovation and sees the opportunity to completely transform the security industry,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

“As we continue to experience hyper-growth, this capital injection will help us firmly establish our SaaS-based endpoint protection platform as the leading solution to address today’s sophisticated attacks and will allow CrowdStrike to further accelerate our domestic and international expansion.”

The cloud-based security services market is growing along with enterprise adoption of cloud services in part because they can be deployed more quickly and flexibly than on-premise solutions, and because the architectures tend to be quite complimentary. Large cloud providers also see value in funding them because security services are quite capitally and operationally expensive – they require huge investments in code, infrastructure, monitoring and support staff – which means it’s challenging for these large IaaS providers to offer these services themselves. According to MarketsandMarkets the cloud security market is forecast to grow nearly 16 per cent CAGR from $4.2bn in 2014 to $8.7bn in 2019.

Datacentre, Digital Realty, M&A, News & Analysis, Telx

Digital Realty to double datacentre footprint with Telx acquisition

Digital Realty is acquiring Telx to bolster its US datacentre footprint

Digital Realty is acquiring Telx to bolster its US datacentre footprint

Digital Realty is to acquire cloud and colocation solutions specialist Telx for $1.9bn in a move the company said would double its datacentre footprint in the US.

Telx is a direct competitor of Equinix and offers a combination of interconnection, cloud and colocation services to enterprises and IT service providers and as of March this year the company managed 1.3 million square feet in 20 facilities across the US – 11 of which are already being leased from Digital Realty.

“This transformative transaction is consistent with our strategy of sourcing strategic and complementary assets to strengthen and diversify Digital Realty’s datacentre portfolio and expand our product mix and presence in the attractive colocation and interconnection space,” said William Stein, Digital Realty’s chief executive officer.

“Telx’s well-established colocation and interconnection businesses provide access to two rapidly-growing segments with long-standing customer relationships in top-tier metropolitan areas such as New York and Silicon Valley.”

“The fact that more than half of Telx’s 20 facilities are run out of Digital Realty properties further highlights the strategic fit as well as the potential incremental revenue opportunities we expect to be able to pursue as one company on a global basis.  This transaction advances our objective of ensuring that Digital Realty’s suite of products and services is able to best serve our customers’ current and future datacentre needs,” Stein added.

Chris Downie, chief executive officer of Telx said: “The combination of Telx’s colocation and interconnection capabilities with Digital Realty’s expansive wholesale platform provides greater flexibility and optionality for our customers and creates a global solutions provider covering wholesale customer applications and smaller performance-oriented deployments in select high-growth urban submarkets across the US.”

The transaction is due to close later this year.

Adobe, Flash, Mozilla, News & Analysis, Steve Jobs, Twitter

Adobe under renewed pressure to kill Flash following security issues

Much of the world's digital video content is still served up on Flash

Much of the world’s digital video content is still served up on Flash

Adobe Flash, the video and graphics platform that was once almost ubiquitous across computing devices is coming under increasing pressure after a series of security vulnerabilities, reports Telecoms.com.

Such has been the severity of these vulnerabilities that Mozilla has added all versions of Flash to the block list for the Firefox Browser. In addition the new Chief Security Officer of Facebook used Twitter to call for Adobe to announce an end-of-life date for Flash.

This probably marks the end game for a piece of software that was once considered central to the consumption of multimedia content, both on PC and mobile. The first and probably most damaging Emperor’s New Clothes moment was in 2010 when the late Apple boss Steve Jobs addressed a furore around Apple’s diminishing support for Flash.

An Adobe-affiliated blogger has even gone so far as to demand Apple screw itself, and Jobs saw fit to put the Apple view forward.  Among Jobs’ criticisms of Flash was its security, saying: “Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.”

A couple of years later Android followed suit and the industry on the whole has been looking to reduce its exposure to Flash ever since, with tech such as HTML5 being of significant assistance in this regard. The writing appears to be on the wall for Flash, and it will be interesting to see if Adobe is capable of pulling the plug on it in a sensible and dignified way.

cloud spend, IDC, Infrastructure as a Service, Michal Vesely, News & Analysis

EMEA cloud infrastructure spending swells 16% in Q1 2015

Spending on cloud as a proportion of overall IT expenditure is growing at healthy rates

Spending on cloud as a proportion of overall IT expenditure is growing at healthy rates

Cloud-related IT infrastructure spending in the EMEA region grew 16 per cent year on year to reach $1.01bn in the first quarter of this year, representing just under 20 per cent of the overall IT infrastructure spend according to analyst house IDC.

Spending on IT infrastructure (servers, disk storage, and Ethernet switches) for public cloud accounts for about 8 per cent and private cloud 11 per cent of the overall spend; the firm previously estimated that growth in spending on public cloud would outpace private cloud spending by nearly 10 percentage points (25 and 16 per cent, respectively).

Michal Vesely, research analyst, european infrastructure at IDC said much of the expenditure in Western Europe was fuelled mainly by public cloud and large-scale datacentre installations.

“Private cloud expenditure, especially on premises, on the other hand, is more directly connected to regular IT investments by enterprises,” he explained. “Private cloud spending saw a slower pace as users assess their storage, as well as integrated and hyperconverged systems, strategies. Once decisions are made, we expect another major push in the forthcoming period.”

The firm also said unstable macroeconomic conditions in Southern and Western Europe haven’t adversely impacted spending trends , although on-premise deployments seem to be growing at a slower rate – in part due to an increased shift to cloud. According to the analyst house this shift is in full swing. In April the firm forecast that cloud will make up nearly half of all IT infrastructure spending in four years.

Ericsson, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, research and development, SDN, Valter D’Avino

Ericsson sets up cloud lab in Germany

Ericsson is boosting R&D in cloud

Ericsson is boosting R&D in cloud

Ericsson has set up a lab that will see it work with operators and enterprises to demo, test and verify cloud-based services. The move comes just two months after the networking vendor set up a similar lab in Italy.

The company said the lab will focus on helping customers develop cloud migration, governance, security and data integrity competencies. It plans to offer access to in-house cloud technology experts as well as its growing portfolio of cloud technology.

”By developing these cloud solutions in cooperation with our customers, we will provide them the opportunity to speed up the deployment of cloud technology,” said Valter D’Avino, Ericsson’s head of Western & Central Europe.

“This means we will more quickly experience the benefits of cloud, such as shorter time to market for new services within Internet of Things for example, and a more agile IT infrastructure.”

The move comes just a couple of months after Ericsson set up a similar lab in Rome, Italy, focused on stimulating development of multi-vendor SDN and NFV solutions that primarily address the needs of telcos.

The recently announced lab is part of a much broader shift into the enterprise ICT world and outside its traditional customer base.

Alcatel-Lucent, China Mobile, Datacentre, News & Analysis, SDN, Software Defined Networking, Sunil Khandekar, Telco Cloud

China Mobile revamps private cloud with Nuage SDN

China Mobile, Alcatel Lucent and their respective subsidiaries are working together on SDN in many contexts

China Mobile, Alcatel Lucent and their respective subsidiaries are working together on SDN in many contexts

China Mobile’s IT subsidiary Suzhou Software Technology Company has baked Nuage Networks’ software-defined networking technology into its private cloud architecture to enable federation across multiple China Mobile subsidiaries. The move comes the same week both parent companies – China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent – demoed a virtualised radio access network (RAN), a core network component.

The company deployed Nuage’s Virtualised Services Platform (VSP) and Virtual Services Assurance Platform (VSAP) for its internal private cloud platform in a bid to improve the scalability and flexibility of its infrastructure, and enable infrastructure federation between the company’s various subsidiaries.

Each subsidiary is allocated its own virtual private cloud with its own segmented chunk of the network, but enabling infrastructure federation between them means underutilised assets can be deployed in other parts of the company as needed.

“China Mobile is taking a visionary approach in designing and building its new DevOps private cloud architecture,” said Nuage networks chief executive officer Sunil Khandekar.

“By combining open source software with Nuage Networks VSP, China Mobile is replacing and surpassing its previous legacy architecture in terms of power, sophistication and choice. It will change the way China Mobile operates internally and, ultimately, the cloud services they can provide to customers,” Khandekar said.

The move comes the same week China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent trialled what the companies claimed to be the industry’s first virtualised RAN, which for an operator with over 800 million subscribers has the potential to deliver significant new efficiencies across its datacentres if deployed at scale.

Azure, Channel, Managed services, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Scott Guthrie, Taylor Rhodes

Rackspace to offer support for, resell Microsoft Azure

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft's public and private cloud technology

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft’s public and private cloud technology

In another move aimed at shifting its business towards managed (cloud) services Rackspace this week announced it will extend its ‘fanatical support’ services to Microsoft Azure public and private cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace said customers will be able to buy either bundled Azure infrastructure with support, or just support services. The offerings will be available first in the US, with plans for an international rollout “through early 2016.”

“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, chief executive at Rackspace.

“We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack,” Rhodes said.

Rackspace already offers a range of Microsoft-based managed services and support but the latest move will see the company double down on the service component for the newly re-architected Azure Stack, including Microsoft’s own public cloud.

The move is also yet another step in Rackspace’s broader transformation from a pure-play hosting and cloud provider towards a managed services and managed cloud company.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group said: “Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace’s industry-leading support to Microsoft’s deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win-win for customers. With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”

Anand Krishnan, Appointment, Canonical, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Ubuntu

Canonical appoints ex-Microsoft UK dev lead as EVP of cloud

Krishnan will lead Canonical's cloud efforts

Krishnan will lead Canonical’s cloud efforts

Canonical has appointed former Microsoft exec Anand Krishnan to the role of executive vice president for cloud, where he will lead most of the company’s cloud-related efforts globally including business-development, marketing, engineering and customer delivery activities.

Krishnan most recently served as UK General Manager for Microsoft’s Developer Platform division where he was responsible in part for scaling the Azure business, which by most measures seems to be growing at record pace. Before joining Microsoft in 2004 he spent about five years at Trilogy, a Texas-based software firm specialising in lead generation solutions for the automotive, insurance and telecoms sectors.

“Great businesses make an extraordinary difference to the customers they serve. Canonical has the products and the momentum to do exactly that,” Krishnan said.

“I couldn’t be more excited to be joining the team at this time and helping shape the next phase of our journey”

Canonical has in recent months moved to bolster its cloud strategy with BootSack, its managed private cloud offering, and its own distribution of OpenStack. Its Linux distro Ubuntu is the most popular OS in use on AWS EC2 (though other Linux incumbents have questioned those claims), and it also recently launched Ubuntu Core, a slimmed-down, re-architected version of the Ubuntu operating system that borrows from heavily from the Linux container (isolated frameworks) and mobile (transactional updates) worlds.

Big Data, Database, Delphix, Funding, News & Analysis, NewSQL, SQL

Data-as-a-service specialist Delphix scores $75m in latest round

Delphix secured $75m in its latest funding round this week

Delphix secured $75m in its latest funding round this week

Data-as-a-service specialist Delphix announced this week that the company has concluded a $75m funding round that will be used by the company to bolster its cloud and security capabilities.

The funding round, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, brings the total amount secured by the company to just over $119m since its 2008 founding.

Delphix offers what is increasingly referred to as data-as-a-service, though a more accurate way of describing it does is offer data compression and replication-as-a-service, or the ability to virtualise, secure, optimise and move large databases – whether from an application like an ERP or a data warehouse – from on-premise to the cloud and back again.

It offers broad support for most database technologies including Oracle, Oracle RAC, Oracle Exadata, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, SAP ASE, PostgreSQL, and a range of other SQL and NewSQL technologies.

The company said the additional funding will be used to expand its marketing activities and “aggressively invest” in cloud, analytics and data security technologies in a bid to expand its service capabilities.

“Applications have become a highly contested battleground for businesses across all industries,” said Jedidiah Yueh, Delphix founder and chief executive.

“Data as a Service helps our customers complete application releases and cloud migrations in half the time, by making data fast, light, and unbreakable—a huge competitive advantage,” he said.

Angela Hammack, ERP, Georgia, HCM, John Webb, News & Analysis, Workday

Workday plans pivot toward healthcare

Workday is targeting healthcare for its next big rollout

Workday is targeting the healthcare sector for its next big service rollout

Workday is looking to extend its human capital management and financial services applications to the healthcare sector and plans to launch as early as September this year.

The company said it will combine its financial management and HCM cloud services with Workday Inventory, a recently launched supply chain management tool, and tailor the combined platform specifically for the needs of healthcare providers.

“Healthcare providers are dealing with a significant amount of complexity. New regulations, industry consolidation, and a shifting patient relationship, are changing the way they manage their organizations,” said John Webb, vice president, industry strategy and alliances, Workday.

“With Workday, healthcare providers will have the people, financial, and supply chain insights they need, all in in one system built on a flexible foundation from which they can continually adapt and grow in a dynamic industry,” Webb said.

The company is working with healthcare providers on developing niche-specific capabilities, and has already announced a partnership with the Community Health Services of Georgia, a non-profit coordinating long-term care services in the State of Georgia and existing Workday customer to expand the platform’s feature set.

“Our world today is more complex than ever before. New regulations resulting from the Affordable Care Act, evolving patient dynamics, ambitious growth plans, and increased competition for talent, are creating new challenges for our organization and workforce,” said Angela Hammack, vice president, special projects, Community Health Services of Georgia.

“By partnering with Workday, we will be able to help design a system that not only meets our future needs, but one that truly addresses the challenges facing healthcare providers today. As an existing Workday customer, we’ve already benefited from the power of one system, and can only imagine the possibilities that come with collaborating on new features and applications that help support our whole ecosystem,” Hammack said.

Like many niche sectors healthcare is dominated by just a handful of IT vendors, but in recent months big cloud vendors like Box, IBM and Google have all moved to increase their visibility in the sector through partnership, acquisition, and the development of industry-tailored offerings.