Category Archives: News & Analysis

Andrew Buchanan, Enterprise IT, Graeme Osborne, IBM, IBM Cloud, New Zealand, News & Analysis

NZ Ministry of Health taps IBM gov cloud

NZ's Ministry of Health is moving some of its core services onto IBM cloud

NZ’s Ministry of Health is moving some of its core services onto IBM cloud

New Zealand’s Ministry of Health has enlisted IBM to help the department set up a cloud-based system to support the country’s national healthcare IT infrastructure.

The Ministry manages a set of technical services that support both internal IT systems and national health systems including the National Health Payment System, which processes transactions for pharmacies and healthcare providers, and a National Health Index, which supports planning and coordination in health service delivery.

The deal will see the Ministry deploy all of its internal systems on IBM’s managed cloud infrastructure (hosted in-country) for a minimum of five years.

“The agreement is a key element in improving the Ministry of Health’s ability to deliver shared services for the sector, which enables secure access to personal health records for patients and their health care providers,” said Graeme Osborne, Director of the National Health IT Board. “Our aim is to improve productivity and patient safety, and enable new models of care through strategic technology investments.”

The move follows an pledge made by Health Benefits Limited, the crown company set up in 2010 to support health service provision, to consolidate the infrastructure of all twenty District Health Boards onto IBM’s cloud platform.

“We continue to invest in advanced technology infrastructure vital for New Zealand’s long-term economic growth. IBM’s cloud services offer customers like the Ministry of Health the most comprehensive enterprise-grade cloud environment in New Zealand and will support new, enhanced services for the public, suppliers and staff,” says Andrew Buchanan, cloud business leader, IBM New Zealand.

“This agreement further demonstrates our leadership and commitment to health care innovation,” Buchanan added.

CDN, Chris Luke, Comcast, Igor Marty, Lenovo, Neela Jacques, News & Analysis, OpenDaylight, SDN, Software Defined Networking

Comcast, Lenovo join OpenDaylight SDN effort

Comcast and Lenovo have thrown their weight behind the OpenDaylight Project

Comcast and Lenovo have thrown their weight behind the OpenDaylight Project

Comcast and Lenovo have thrown their hats into the OpenDaylight Project, 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 recent additions bring the OpenDaylight project, a Linux Foundation Colalborative Project, to just over the fifty member mark. The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software (Helium) that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“We’re seeing more end users starting to adopt OpenDaylight and participate in its development as the community sharpens its focus on stability, scalability, security and performance,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Comcast has been testing ODL and working with our community since launch and the team at Lenovo were heavily involved in ODL’s foundation through their roots at IBM. Our members see the long-term value of creating a rich ecosystem around open systems and OpenDaylight,” Jacques said.

Igor Marty, chief technology officer, Lenovo Worldwide SDN and NFV said: “We believe that the open approach is the faster way to deploy solutions, and what we’ve seen OpenDaylight achieve in just two years has been impressive. The OpenDaylight community is truly leading the path toward interoperability by integrating legacy and emerging southbound protocols and defining northbound APIs for orchestration.”

The move will no doubt give the project more credibility in both carrier and enterprise segments.

Since Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s low-end x86 server unit it has been pushing heavily to establish itself as a serious player among global enterprises, where open standards continue to gain favour when it comes to pretty much every layer of the technology stack.

Comcast is also placing SDN at the core of its long-term network strategy and has already partnered with CableLabs, a non-profit R&D outfit investigating technology innovation and jointly owned by operators globally, on developing southbound plugins for OpenDaylight’s architecture.

“Like many service providers, Comcast is motivated to reduce the operational complexity of our networks. In the near-term this involves significant improvements to network automation under what we call our Programmable Network Platform. This framework outlines a stack of behaviors and abstraction layers that software uses to interact with the network,” explained Chris Luke, senior principal engineer, Comcast and OpenDaylight Advisory Group member.

“Some of our key objectives are to simplify the handoffs from the OSS/BSS systems, empower engineers to rapidly develop and deploy new services and to improve the operational support model. It is our hope that by harmonizing on a common framework and useful abstractions, more application groups within the company will be able to make use of better intelligence and more easily interact with the network.”

Luke said the company already has several proof-of-concepts in place, including an app that provides network intelligence abstraction in a way that allows it to treat its internal network like a highly elastic CDN, and mechanisms to integrate overlay edge services with legacy network architectures like MPLS.

“When ODL was launched we were excited to see that the industry was moving to a supportable open source model for SDN. There were a growing number of proprietary SDN controllers at the time and that had service providers like us questioning the direction of the market and whether it made sense to us. We were pleased to see an open source platform come forward aiming to provide a neutral playing field with support for more than just OpenFlow.”

Accounting, News & Analysis, Sage, Salesforce, Software as a service, Stephen Kelly

Sage, Salesforce partner to offer cloud-based SME accounting solutions

Sage has developed a cloud-based offering for SMEs on the Salesforce platform

Sage has developed a cloud-based offering for SMEs on the Salesforce platform

Accounting software incumbent Sage has partnered with Salesforce to develop  business software based on the Salesforce’s cloud platform.

The two companies jointly developed Sage Life, which is being pitched as a set of cloud-based, mobile-enabled payroll and accounting tools for small businesses based on the Salesforce1 platform.

“Together with Salesforce, Sage is shaping the future of small business. Small business software no longer has to represent different systems or layers of complexity – it’ll be simple, collaborative, and real time,” Stephen Kelly, chief executive of Sage.

“With Sage Life, we are delivering social, mobile, cloud-based innovation, powered by real-time accounting. Now running a small business can be as easy as updating your Facebook status,” Kelly said.

The company said the software will help give small businesses a consolidated view of their customers, something often difficult to achieve given a fragmented technology landscape (SMEs don’t typically have the cash to spend on strong systems integration).

The move is a positive sign for Salesforce, which has attracted a wide range of new and legacy ISVs to its platform; Sage is quite popular in the UK (where it is based) and while it has its own cloud service in Sage One, developing a Salesforce-based alternative to its legacy solutions could broaden its reach.

The partnership comes as rumours surrounding Salesforce’s potential acquisition continue to swell. Salesforce has repeatedly declined rumours that it is working with financial advisors and fielding acquisition inquiries, with many betting that Microsoft may be one of the suitors in the running.

Apadmi, Enterprise IT, Internet of Things, Mobile, News & Analysis, Nick Black

Nearly half of Brits find wearables in the enterprise intrusive – study

How will wearables impact privacy in the enterprise?

How will wearables impact privacy in the enterprise?

A recently published study by UK mobile app developer Apadmi suggests UKers are deeply concerned about the privacy implications of wearable IP-connected technology in the workplace.

The study, which surveyed 500 adults living and working in the UK, found that 42 per cent of people in the UK thought that wearable technology posed a risk to their privacy, with only 18 per cent of respondents saying they didn’t feel it was a danger.

But there seemed to be a significant portion of respondents (40 per cent) that did not know whether wearable tech would pose a threat to their privacy.

“It’s obvious from our investigations that privacy is a very real issue for the wearable technology industry, although it’s by no means insurmountable,” said Nick Black, co-founder and director at Apadmi

“A lot of commentators are flagging up the potential privacy implications of devices that can record and relay so much data about an individual. And consumers appear to be taking note, with quite a few admitting that these concerns weigh on their mind when considering whether or not to buy wearable technology.”

Wearables have started to gain favour with some larger enterprises in the US and UK, particularly when it comes to tracking health and fitness. Some private health insurers for instance monitor fitness data as a way to incentivise fitness activity, which reduces the risk of health issues and can lead to lower premiums.

But opinion on the privacy implications of mandating wearables in the workplace seems to be quite strong. When asked how they would feel if their employer required them to use wearable technology as part of their role 25 per cent of respondents said they would consider changing jobs, and a further 24 per cent replied they would be happy to do this.

“We also need to draw attention to the fact that a huge number of people still don’t have a firm grasp of how wearable technology might impact upon privacy in the first place, as demonstrated by the significant number of ‘don’t know’ respondents in our survey. People are naturally apprehensive about what they don’t understand. But it’s interesting that those who go on to purchase a device are overwhelmingly happy with their decision and the benefits it has brought to their lives,” Black explained.

“With this in mind, wearable tech businesses and app developers need to educate prospective customers around privacy concerns to alleviate these fears. Many people still don’t fully understand the privacy issues around wearable technology or appreciate its potential to dramatically improve lives in areas such as health and social care.”

Despite the potential privacy implications many believe use of wearables in the enterprise will rapidly increase over the next few years. Salesforce for instance claims use of wearables in the enterprise will more than triple in the next two years, with smartwatches emerging as a popular candidate to deliver sales and customer service improvements.

The company’s own survey of over 1,400 working adults shows 79 per cent of adopters agree wearables will be strategic to their company’s future success; 76 per cent report improvements in business performance since deploying wearables in the enterprise; and 86 per cent of adopters’ organisations plan to increase their wearables spend over the next 12 months.

Alex Hilton, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, ovum, Ovum Industry Congress, Tim Jennings

Cloud adoption nudges past 80 per cent in the UK – survey

Cloud adoption is on the rise in the UK

Cloud adoption is on the rise in the UK

A recent survey of over 250 UK-based senior IT decision makers shows around 84 per cent are using cloud services, with at least 70 per cent of those organisations already using cloud expecting their adoption to increase over the next 12 months.

The survey, commissioned by UK cloud trade body the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), suggests cloud services have grown substantially in popularity over the past couple of years, with adoption growing 8 per cent over the past year and 75 per cent since 2010.

“Cloud computing has come a long way in just a few short years. When we commissioned our first major research project into the UK Cloud market in 2010, just 48 per cent of organisations had consciously adopted a cloud service,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive officer of the CIF.

“During this time, cloud has moved from the edge of the IT estate to its centre, and it is now largely regarded as just another way that we do IT. Importantly, it is, by and large, delivering the benefits the industry promised it would deliver,” he said.

The organisation believes the impending conclusion of official support for Windows Server 2003 will accelerate cloud adoption over the next year. But Hilton says that many are still a long way off from adopting all-cloud strategies, in part because of legacy.

“Although more organisations than ever are committing to a 100 per cent cloud environment, the vast majority are a long way from migrating their entire IT estates; just 15 per cent consider their primary IT model to now be cloud, and around half of businesses cannot foresee a time when they will move all of their IT to the cloud – instead managing a blend of IT delivery models.”

Some believe cloud adoption is largely being driven outside the IT department. According to Tim Jennings, chief IT analyst at Ovum, cloud often makes its entrance into organisations behind the back of IT.

“It’s less about cost savings and cloud enabling IT at the centre, and more about cloud enabling business processes,” said Jennings, who was speaking at the Ovum Industry Congress in London this week. “This change is firmly in place, and nowhere is this more prevalent than line of business uptake of software-as-a-service.”

“For IT then, the challenge comes back to the ‘Shadow IT’ dilemma – or how to offer a consolidated, continuous, secure set of services,” he added.

BlueMix, IBM, News & Analysis, PaaS, Platform as a service

IBM bolsters Bluemix with added services, Cloud Foundry Dojos

IBM is bolstering its Bluemix and Cloud Foundry initiatives

IBM is bolstering its Bluemix and Cloud Foundry initiatives

IBM has signed up a number of partners for its Bluemix platform that will see the company bolster the platform-as-a-service with and its Cloud Foundry efforts by establishing developer meeting spaces.

The company announced a public beta of a .NET runtime, which will enable Cloud Foundry developers to use Microsoft’s development technologies and develop .NET apps.

ThinkData Works’ data catalogue Namara.io, application KPI service Cupenya Insights, event processing service flowthings.io and push service Reappt were also added to Bluemix catalogue, as well as some new internally developed mobile and API management capabilities.

IBM also said it is supporting the expansion of Cloud Foundry Dojos, physical developer spaces designed to host developers looking to leverage the open source platform-as-a-service. The company said it will establish its first of a number of independent Cloud Foundry Dojos in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a bid to boost the number of – and mentor –Bluemix developers.

Having poured billions of dollars into cloud and PaaS, it’s clear IBM has high hopes for Bluemix. The company is putting Bluemix at the core of its Internet of Things strategy – it recently announced plans to carve out a section in Bluemix for specialist IoT services (IoT Zone) and a number of new IoT-focused cloud services available on the platform.

IBM claims Bluemix is the largest deployment of Cloud Foundry in the market today, though it hasn’t really clarified what “largest” means in this context; it’s equally unclear how Bluemix deployments compare with Pivotal CF and HP Helion among other commercial Cloud Foundry distributions.

Abdulla Al Habbai, Alibaba, Datacentre, Jack Ma, Meeras, News & Analysis, Vendor

Meeras, Alibaba form JV to target big data, cloud

Meeras and Alibaba are setting up an IT joint venture in Dubai

Meeras and Alibaba are setting up an IT joint venture in Dubai

Dubai-based investment company Meeras and Alibaba’s cloud computing plant to set up a joint venture firm specialising in systems integration with a focus on big data and cloud-based services.

The yet-to-be named joint venture, headquartered in Dubai, will focus on providing applications development services to private and public sector clients, which includes advising on service oriented architecture strategy and big data analytics application.

Meeras group chairman Abdulla Al Habbai said the move will complement other initiatives aimed at transforming Dubai into a smart city and ICT hub.

“We strongly believe that the new company will alter the information technology landscape of the region,” Al Habbai said. “Alibaba, our chosen partner has an excellent global track record of offering world-class services to clients. Together, we aim to raise industry standards and provide state-of-the-art technology solutions that contribute to translating the objectives of our visionary leadership.”

The joint venture will also see the construction of a local Tier III cloud datacentre to power some of the services the two companies create, as well as at a later point commercial and retail space in the vicinity, in a bid to attract startups and other firms to the region.

Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group said: “As the world evolves, I believe the information technology era is moving towards the data technology era. Dubai’s advanced infrastructure and economic strength is a good match for our technology edge, and with Meraas we will be able to provide local entrepreneurs with the vital infrastructure that will ignite innovation and help them to succeed.”

Alibaba said the move will also help the company capitalise on growth in local IT spending, with the company citing a recent IDC study that suggests regional IT spend reaching $270bn in 2015 and growing at around nine per cent annually, the second-fastest globally.

Backup, Disaster Recovery, Drew Gorton, M&A, News & Analysis, NodeSquirrel, Pantheon, Zack Rosen

WordPress whiz Pantheon buys NodeSquirrel in cloud backup play

Pantheon has acquired NodeSquirrel, a cloud backup tech specialist

Pantheon has acquired NodeSquirrel, a cloud backup tech specialist

Pantheon, a large website managemet platform for Drupal and WordPress-based sites has acquired NodeSquirrel, a hosting provider specialising in open source cloud-based data backup technology.

NodeSquirrel provides hosting and data backup and recovery services to over 300,000 websites, and the acquisition will see Pantheon offer NodeSquirrel to its own customers for free. Some of the core NodeSquirrel team will also join Pantheon following the acquisition.

“We have always had a big vision for what could be possible with NodeSquirrel. With Pantheon’s support, those dreams are going to become reality. Our shared vision of great, easy-to-use tools for developers and agencies makes this an incredible opportunity. We are excited to join the Pantheon team,” said Drew Gorton co-founder of NodeSquirrel.

The move will give NodeSquirrel scale and Pantheon a new value-adding service to offer to existing customers. The company also said it plans larger investments into data backup and restore technology designed to handle larger file footprints and incremental backup.

Zack Rosen, Pantheon co-founder and chief executive officer said: “It’s 2015 and people are still storing backups of their website locally. If anything happens, whether that is a security attack or a natural disaster, those websites are not protected. Secure, reliable offsite backups are a fundamental best practice.”

“Acquiring NodeSquirrel gives Pantheon the ability to make secure offsite backups freely available to every Drupal website on the planet,” Rosen added.

Cloud-based data backup and recovery services are being deployed more and more in a bid to complement both online and on-premise systems. Click here to learn more about how to use the cloud for backup.

Datacentre, Equinix, Interxion, M&A, News & Analysis, TelecityGroup

Equinix: Telecity acquisition is better alternative to Telecity, Interxion merger

Equinix said its acquisition of TelecityGroup would be better for shareholders than a Telecity-Interxion merger

Equinix said its acquisition of TelecityGroup would be better for shareholders than a Telecity-Interxion merger

Equinix confirmed it is currently in discussions which could lead to its acquisition of UK datacentre specialist TelecityGroup, a move it said would significantly enhance its standing in the region.

The American datacentre incumbent last week offered TelecityGroup £2.3bn in a cash-and-shares deal that would see Equinix acquire its assets, a move that would likely jeopardize a recent Telecity merger proposal with Interxion.

Telecity has a market cap of about £1.4bn with datacentres dotted around Northern Europe; Interxion is valued at £1.27bn and has close to 40 datacentres all over the Europe.

“The Board of Equinix believes that this opportunity represents attractive shareholder value creation potential for Equinix, complementing and extending Equinix’s geographic footprint in Europe and enabling increased network and cloud density to better serve customers,” the company said in a statement.

“In the United Kingdom, the acquisition of TelecityGroup would add capacity in Central London and Docklands that would complement the focus of Equinix’s current operations in Slough. Additionally, the acquisition would add capacity in several of Equinix’s current locations throughout Europe, and extend Equinix’s footprint into new locations with identified cloud and interconnection needs including Dublin, Helsinki, Istanbul, Milan, Stockholm and Warsaw.”

“In addition, the Board of Equinix believes that a potential transaction with TelecityGroup would create a more compelling combination than the proposed merger with Interxion Holding N.V. and would deliver greater value for TelecityGroup shareholders,” the company added.

Equinix, which has a month to firm up its final offer to Telecity, has well over 100 datacentres in about 15 countries, and most of those are concentrated in major metropolitan areas.

Boris Renski, Cloud Foundry, IaaS, James Watters, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, PaaS

Mirantis, Pivotal team up on OpenStack, Cloud Foundry integration

Mirantis and Pivotal are working to integrate their commercial deployments of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, respectively

Mirantis and Pivotal are working to integrate their commercial deployments of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, respectively

Pivotal and Mirantis announced this week that the two companies are teaming up to accelerate integration of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.

As part of the move Pivotal will support Pivotal CF, the company’s commercial distribution of the open source platform-as-a-service, on Mirantis’ distribution of OpenStack.

“Our joint customers are seeking open, bleeding-edge technologies to accelerate their software development and bring new products to market faster,” said James Watters, vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform Group at Pivotal.

“Now, with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Mirantis OpenStack, enterprises across various industries can rapidly deliver cloud-native, scalable applications to their customers with minimal risk and maximum ROI,” Watters said.

The move comes just one month after Mirantis announced it would join the Cloud Foundry Foundation in a bid to help drive integration between the two open source platforms. At the time, Alex Freedland, Mirantis co-founder and chairman said an essential part of rolling out software to help organisations build their own clouds includes making it as easy as possible to deploy and manage technologies “higher up the stack” like Cloud Foundry.

“Enterprises everywhere are adopting a new generation of tools, processes and platforms to help them compete more effectively,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis chief marketing officer and co-founder. “Mirantis and Pivotal have made Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployable on Mirantis OpenStack at the click of a button, powering continuous innovation.”

Joint customers can install Pivotal Cloud Foundry onto Mirantis OpenStack using the companies’ deployment guide, but the two companies are working towards adding a full Pivotal CF installation into the application catalogue of the next OpenStack release, Murano.