Category Archives: News & Analysis

Colt, IT services, KVH, Managed services, News & Analysis, Rakesh Bhasin, Vendor

Colt bows to competition, exits IT services

Colt is bowing out of the increasingly saturated IT services market

Colt is bowing out of the increasingly saturated IT services market

In a bid to increase profitability Colt announced this week that the company would exit the IT services market and put greater focus on its “core” services including its network, voice and datacentre services.

The company said its “managed exit” from the IT services market would also allow it to focus on offering datacentre services (colocation, cloud) and optimise use of its assets.

“Our IT services business would continue to need considerable investment in the short-to-medium term in order to deliver profitability and we do not believe this business can compete and grow successfully with a level of risk that is acceptable,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

“Colt will continue to honour existing customer contracts through to termination, but will no longer seek new business.”

“The recent performance of IT Services has shown few signs of improving in accordance with the targets we set to deliver appropriate profit and cash returns in the medium term.”

The company anticipates the move will save about €25m annually, though it expects to incur cash and non-cash impairment charges of €45m to €55m and around €90m, respectively. Revenue from IT services is expected to decline €20m annually will become immaterial by 2018, it said.

“The fundamentals of our core network services and voice services businesses remain solid, and we are driving improvements in our datacentre services business. We are taking decisive action to become a more focused and disciplined organisation which we believe will accelerate the performance of our Core Business,” said Rakesh Bhasin, Colt chief executive.

“Overall, we believe the prospects for the Group are good and I am confident that, with the recent changes we have made within the senior management team, we will be able to deliver improved profitability and cash returns,” he added.

Colt still owns and will continue to operate its 22 carrier neutral datacentres in Europe and 7 in the Asia Pacific region (including those acquired through Japanese IT services provider KVH last year), though its goal of moving away from IT services may also mean a pivot towards becoming more of a systems integrator, which – like the IT services market – is quite competitive, and it isn’t entirely clear how the company intends to differentiate from other large incumbents in this space.

Andy Jassy, Asia Pacific, AWS, Datacentre, Gartner, India, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis

AWS to expand to India in 2016

AWS said India is the next big market for public cloud expansion

AWS said India is the next big market for public cloud expansion

Amazon unveiled plans this week to bring its Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to India by 2016 in a bid to expand into the quickly growing public cloud services market there.

AWS is already available in India and the company claims to have over 10,000 local customers using the platform, but the recently announced move would see the company set up its own infrastructure in-country rather than relying on delivering the services from nearby availability zones like Singapore.

The company says the move will likely improve the performance of the cloud services on offer to local organisations.

“Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS’s eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have,”said Andy Jassy, senior vice president, AWS.

“We’re excited to share that Indian customers will be able to use the world’s leading cloud computing platform in India in 2016 – and we believe India will be one of AWS’s largest regions over the long term.”

The India expansion comes at a time when the local market is maturing rapidly.

According to analyst and consulting house Gartner public cloud services revenue in India will reach $838m by the end of 2015, an increase of almost 33 per cent – making it one of the fastest growing markets for public cloud services in the world (global average growth rates sit in the mid-twenties range, depending on the analyst house). The firm believe many local organisations in India are shifting away from more traditional IT outsourcing and using public cloud services instead.

AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Lithium, Networks, News & Analysis, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Orange, Sarwar Raza, SDN, T-Mobile, Telefónica I+D, Virtualisation

OpenDaylight launches third open source SDN platform, announces advisory group

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

The OpenDaylight project has released the third version of its open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Lithium, as the organisation launches an advisory tasked with feeding technical insights learned through deployment back into the developer community.

The OpenDaylight Project is an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV).

The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software, the latest release of which has been dubbed Lithium, that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base,” Jacques said.

The organisation said Lithium boats a number of improvements over the previous release of its platform, Helium, like increased scalability, native support for OpenStack Neutron, new security, monitoring and automation features, support for more APIs and protocols including Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and OpenDaylight Project board member. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

The move comes the same week the project announced the formation of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group (AG), a group composed mostly of telcos tasked with providing technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community based on deployment experience.

The twelve founding members of the advisory group include researchers and specialists from China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefónica I+D, AT&T, Orange, and Comcast.

The organisation said the advisory group was set up to help provide technical and strategic guidance to the steering committee and developer community – in other words, to keep the open source platform from straying from the requirements of those deploying it.

Interestingly, apart from NASDAQ, enterprises seem relatively under-represented on the committee, which could see future iterations of OpenDaylight focus more heavily on those use cases – possibly over others more common in the enterprise.

Amit Walia, data privacy, Data security, Informatica, News & Analysis, Ponemon Institute

Close to 60 per cent of confidential cloud data can’t have risk levels assessed – research

UK IT professionals claim to be struggling with accurately assessing the risk of storing their confidential data in the cloud

UK IT professionals claim to be struggling with accurately assessing the risk of storing their confidential data in the cloud

Data from a recent Ponemon Institute survey commissioned by Informatica suggests UK enterprises are struggling to assess the risk associated with placing confidential data in the cloud, with respondents claiming they can’t determine the risk to 58 per cent of the confidential data they store in the cloud.

The problem seems particularly acute when it comes to cloud-based data specifically – enterprises said they faced the same challenge with 28 per cent of the sensitive information held on-premise.

The survey results, which include responses from 118 UK IT and IT security professionals with responsibility for data protection, hint at differences in the level of data management tool deployments for on-premise and cloud-based systems, which does seem to skew the results in terms of confidence in data risk allocation. About 46 per cent are using such tools for data on premise and 34 per cent for data in the cloud.

Still, less than half of respondents claimed to have common processes in place for discovering and classifying the sensitive or confidential data on-premise, and just a quarter said they have a process in place for data stored in the cloud.

About 54 per cent of respondents said they are not confident in their ability to proactively respond to a new threat in the cloud, and 30 per cent of the sensitive or confidential data located in the cloud is believed to be at risk according to respondents.

“The survey highlights that whilst organisations continue to fear cyberattacks, what really keeps them up at night is the unknown. Namely not knowing where data is and the associated risk to it,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute.

“Whilst businesses are more confident about having data on premise, the shift towards cloud computing is continuing to accelerate and organisations can’t afford to be held back by data security concerns. Instead, security practitioners need to get a handle on the classification of data so that they can feel more confident about the information that they are moving to the cloud. Regardless of whether information is held on premise or in the cloud, data governance protocols should be the same,” Ponemon said.

Informatica senior vice president and general manager, data integration and security Amit Walia said the results demonstrate the majority of organisations do not have a handle on their sensitive data, regardless of whether it exists on-premise or in the cloud.

He explained that as data volumes grow enterprises are leaning more on customised software and automated processes rather than manual processes to classify data risk and apply rules and policies, which is creating somewhat of a false perception when it comes to risk.

“Because businesses have less confidence in their understanding of sensitive data then they perceive more risk. To reduce threat exposure and improve breach resiliency, organisations need to invest in data centric security technologies, which enable businesses to enact the need-to-know data access policies that help limit the exposure of sensitive data,” Walia said.

IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, Lake George, News & Analysis, Rick Relyea, The Jefferson Project

IoT, big data used to make Lake George a model for water body preservation

IBM and the Jefferson Project have teamed up to use IoT and big data to monitor and analyse Lake George's health

IBM and the Jefferson Project have teamed up to use IoT and big data to monitor and analyse Lake George’s health

The Jefferson Project at Lake George, New York, a collaborative project between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, IBM Research and The FUND for Lake George is using Internet of Things sensors and big data analytics to create a model that can be used to help preserve a wide range of water sources.

Researchers have been monitoring the chemistry of algae in Lake George for the past 35 years to demonstrate how the lake is being affected by a range of inputs including pollution, tourism, and weather activity.

But the project has recently started a new phase which has seen IBM and Jefferson Project researchers put sophisticated underwater sonar-based sensors (powered by solar energy) to measure a range of data.

Those sensors are linked up to custom software deployed on IBM Blue Gene/ Q supercomputer and IBM Smarter Planet software deployed in a datacentre on the Rensselaer campus.

Rick Relyea, director of the Jefferson Project at Lake George said the IoT sensors have greatly improved data accuracy, which has allowed researchers to improve the models they generate from the patterns being observed.

“The Jefferson Project provides the unique opportunity for biologists and environmental scientists to work closely with engineers, physicists, computer scientists and meteorologists to understand large lakes at a level of detail and intensity that is simply unprecedented,” Relyea said.

“Together, we will make tremendous inroads into understanding how lakes naturally behave and how human activities alter biodiversity, the functioning of freshwater ecosystems, and overall water quality.”

The project researchers have already used the preliminary data generated by the sensors to create a range of models that can help predict the impact of weather events, salt run-off, and heavy tourism on water circulation and the water body’s chemistry, which Rylea said could be applied to many other bodies of water in a bid to improve their health.

“The major threats to Lake George are many of the same threats to lakes around the world. Too many nutrients coming in from either fertiliser or sewage. We have contaminants coming in, those may be pesticides, it may be road salts. We have development coming in changing the habitat around the lakes, changing how much water run-off there is. And we have invasive species coming in.”

health, Internet of Things, News & Analysis

Virgin Active urges cloud players to embrace ‘the database of you’

CWF VirginIn his keynote address at Cloud World Forum 2015, the CIO of fitness chain Virgin Active – Andy Caddy – urged cloud and big data companies to find better uses for the mountains of data people are accumulating about themselves.

Coining the term “the database of you”, Caddy said that in his capacity as the CIO of a health and fitness company with 1.4 million members in 270 clubs he is acutely aware of the desire for gym-goers to track their every waking movement and a bunch of other biometric data, such as heartrate, besides.

Caddy also thinks wearables such as fitness bands are at an early stage and, in reference to the recent IPO of fitness band company Fitbit, indicated he thought wearables were currently near the most hyped phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle. He reckons it will be a few years yet before the ‘winning design’ emerges, such as happened with smartphones and the touchscreen form factor that has changed little for the past eight years.

One result of all this hype, however, is that people are constantly generating data about themselves – around 31 datapoints per year for Virgin Active members. Caddy’s concern is they they’re currently not able to do much with it, beyond gloating about how much exercise they’ve done on social media.

When Caddy surveyed members, as part of his planning for a ‘connected club’ initiative, about what they want technology in a gym context to do for them they said they want it to be device agnostic, always on and provide useful feedback and advice, as opposed to raw data. Caddy concluded with a call to the tech industry to step up to the plate and give his members what they’re looking for. “We need someone to come in and do this stuff, because it’s just begging for it,” he said.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

IBM talks cloud innovation at CWF 2015

IBM CWFEnterprise tech giant IBM used its keynote presentation at Cloud World Forum 2015 to talk up the role of the digital economy, especially cloud tech, to drive innovation and disruption.

The speaker was Sandy Carter, GM of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM. The premise of her keynote was that the digital economy is driving innovation and chose five specific illustrations of this.

The first was the use of real-time data by Wimbledon.com, which for 50 weeks of the year is quiet, but then explodes when the tennis tournament is underway – 65 million page views last year. The point Carter wanted to make is that with the help of cloud solutions such as IBM’s Bluemix, which inevitably got frequent mentions, Wimbledon is able to not just scale up its resources but use analytics and even social media cues to anticipate demand in real-time.

The second example concerned IoT, via the example of German company Diabetizer, which uses wearables and the cloud to help people manage diabetes and to communicate with health professionals. The significance in this context was the point that IoT is essentially about data and what you do with it.

The remaining examples of cloud-enabled innovation focused on mobile, the hybrid cloud and a final rallying call for the Bluemix ecosystem. The general thread was that the flexibility, analytics and collaboration power (there was a nod to yesterday’s Box announcement) afforded by the cloud is the foundation of innovation today.

Box, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM and Box announce global enterprise cloud partnership

US enterprise tech giant IBM has revealed a new global partnership with cloud storage outfit Box to integrate their products and sell into vertically targeted enterprise markets.

More specifically the strategic alliance will combine Box’s cloud collaboration platform with a number of IBM solutions, including analytics, cloud and security. Both companies will sell the combined products.

“Today’s digital enterprises demand world-class technologies that transform how their organizations operate both internally and externally,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “This extensive alliance between Box and IBM opens up an exciting opportunity for both companies to reach new markets and deliver unified solutions and services that can redefine industries, advance secure collaboration and revolutionize enterprise mobility.”

“This partnership will transform the way work is done in industries and professions that shape our experience every day,” said Bob Picciano, SVP of IBM Analytics. “The impact will be felt by experts and professionals in industries such as healthcare, financial services, law, and engineering who are overwhelmed by today’s digital data and seek better solutions to manage large volumes of information more intelligently and securely. The integration of IBM and Box technologies, combined with our global cloud capabilities and the ability to enrich content with analytics, will help unlock actionable insights for use across the enterprise.”

The alliance will focus on three main areas: content management and social collaboration; enterprise cloud, security and consulting; and custom app development for industries. The general thread of the announcement seems to be a desire to bring cloud applications to regions and industries that are not currently making the most of them and is just the latest in a sequence of collaborations by both Box and IBM.

Financial Results, Larry Ellison, News & Analysis, Oracle, Quarterlies, quarterly results, Safra Catz, Salesforce

Oracle Q4 cloud revenues grow 29%, down 5% overall

Larry Ellison said the company's cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce's revenue this year

Larry Ellison said the company’s cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce’s revenue this year

Oracle Corporation has announced its 2015 fiscal Q4 quarterly earnings, unveiling impressive growth for its PaaS and SaaS business, which is up 29% on last year. The company posted overall revenue of $10.7 billion however, down 5% year on year.

After a bullish announcement of its Q3 results in March, where Oracle boss Larry Ellison publicly called out rival Salesforce, the software giant posted Software and Cloud business revenues at $8.4bn, down 6% year on year, while its SaaS and PaaS revenues came in at $416m.

Announcing the decline in revenues, Oracle was hasty to point the finger at the fluctuating strength of the US dollar against international exchange rates; it claimed total revenues would have been up 3%, software and cloud revenues up 2% and SaaS and PaaS growth 35% instead of 29% year on year, blaming the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz is expecting the growth of its SaaS and PaaS revenues to kick up a notch in fiscal year 2016.

“We sold an astonishing $426 million of new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud subscription revenue in Q4,” he said. “We expect our rapidly increasing cloud sales to quickly translate into significantly more revenue and profits for Oracle Corporation.” For example, SaaS and PaaS revenues grew at a 34% constant currency rate in our just completed Q4, but we expect that revenue growth rate to jump to around 60% in constant currency this new fiscal year.”

In highlighting his firm’s ambition for the coming fiscal year, Ellison again took the chance to name-check one of Oracle’s main competitors.

“We expect to book between $1.5 and $2.0 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year,” he said. “That means Oracle would sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than salesforce.com plans to sell in their current fiscal year – the only remaining question is how much more. Oracle’s planned SaaS and PaaS revenue growth is around 60% in constant currency; salesforce.com has a planned growth rate of around 20%. When you contrast those growth rates it becomes clear that Oracle is on its way to becoming the world’s largest enterprise cloud company.”

451 Research, Apple Watch, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, News & Analysis, wearable technology

Four-fold cellular IoT connections predicted by 2019

PrintIT analyst firm 451 Research has forecasted the growth of cellular network-based connections for IoT-devices as anticipation surrounding the tech continues to grow. It also reckons wearable tech as a major enterprise tool will become reality in the next 12 months.

According to the firm, the telecoms industry can expect a nigh on four-fold boom in cellular IoT connections between 2014 and 2019, growing from 252 million to 908 million globally. The firm reckons such growth comes down to several key factors, primarily the ease of access to and reduced costs of hardware and broadband for enterprise customers. Secondly, the maturation of cloud, data management and analytics platforms means machine-generated data can be hosted and utilised quicker than in previous years.

Finally, 451 also attributes increasing M&A activity as a positive influence on the developing IoT market, with the ongoing vendor land-grab driving advancements in technology.

“We continue to be bullish that ultimately the hype of IoT will be proven to be warranted back on business impact,” said Brian Partridge, 451’s research VP. “Over the forecast period we expect that M2M/IoT solution suppliers will find fertile ground in vertical markets such as retail and government that will adopt IoT/M2M to enable strategic digitization strategies such as smart cities and the use of digital signage, mobile point of sale, and connected kiosks to drive the transformation from brick and mortar to ‘click and mortar’.”

Simultaneously, Harbor Research has revealed some numbers forecasting the profitability of IoT applications, claiming 80% of IoT apps will be generating revenue for users within the next three years. At present, its survey suggest, 65% of apps are money making.

451 Research also looked into the use of wearable tech in the enterprise, and said that 39% of the IT decision-makers it quizzed will be deploying wearable tech solutions in the next six months, with another 24% following within a year. Of those deploying in the next six months, 81% identified smart watches as their wearable tech of choice.

“The release of Apple Watch has opened the flood gates governing wearables’ adoption,” said Ryan Martin, who’s an IoT and wearable tech analyst at 451. “Not now that the river is running, it’s less about where it will end and more about where – and when – to start. We expect wearable technology to deliver a key interface and input into the Industrial Internet of Things”.

To go alongside its research, 451 produced this handy market map for the IoT ecosystem.

 IoT Market Map 451