Category Archives: News & Analysis

Big Data, Crate, Google, News & Analysis, Tyler Randles

Google adds Crate to SQL services on GCE

Google has been on a big data push

Google has been on a big data push

Google has added open source distributed SQL data store Crate to the Google Compute Engine arsenal, the latest in a series of moves aimed at bolstering the company’s data services.

Crate is a distributed open source data store built on a high availability “shared-nothing” architecture that automatically shards and distributes data across all of nodes (and maintains several replicas for fault tolerance).

It uses SQL syntax but packs some NoSQL goodies as well (Elasticsearch, Presto, Lucene are among the components it implements).

“This means when a new node is added, the cluster automatically rebalances and can self-heal when a node is removed. All data is indexed, optimized, and compressed on ingest and is accessible using familiar SQL syntax through a RESTful API,” explained Tyler Randles, evangelist at Crate.

“Crate was built so developers won’t need to “glue” several technologies together to store documents or BLOBs, or support real-time search. It also helps dev-ops by eliminating the need for manual tuning, sharding, replication, and other operations required to keep a large data store in good health.”

The move is yet another attempt by Google to bolster its data services. Earlier this week the company revealed Bigtable, a fully managed NoSQL database service the company said combines its own internal database technology with open source Apache HBase APIs.

Last month the company announced the beta launch of Google Cloud Dataflow, a Java-based service that lets users build, deploy and run data processing pipelines for other applications like ETL, analytics, real-time computation, and process orchestration, while abstracting away all the other infrastructure bits like cluster management.

Alistair Blaxill, BYOD, Enterprise IT, Mobility, News & Analysis, Phoenix

BYOD threat larger than anticipated – survey

BYOD isn't being managed effectively by many IT departments

BYOD isn’t being managed effectively by many IT departments

Over half of UK workers over the age of 18 are using mobile devices and tablets in the workplace that are entirely unmanaged by their organisation’s IT department according to a recently published survey.

A survey of just over 1,000 UK workers commissioned by IT and managed services provider Phoenix shows the while over half (51 per cent) primarily use their own device in the workplace, close to 60 per cent of those workers do not involved their organisation’s IT support in setting up or managing their devices.

Phoenix managing director of partner business Alistair Blaxill said the results demonstrate UK organisations are much more exposed to cyberthreats than most appreciate.

“Mobility is one of the most significant driving forces for the IT sector and an increasing number of people want to be fully connected to work all of the time. However, the emergence of BYOD in the workplace is creating a real challenge for IT departments, with workers using their own unmanaged devices to access corporate networks and sensitive data,” Blaxill said.

“The findings of our survey underline this trend in the UK and it reinforces the need for businesses to stay on top of how employees access IT and ensure that they are appropriately protected.”

Blaxill said the best way to ensure IT can adequately protect these devices is by changing the way they interact with employees – and to speed up delivery of support services to incentivise bringing IT into the fold.

“Employees’ attitudes to IT support are changing and they want instant, real-time solutions to their device issues. Our survey tells us that just 23 per cent and 32 per cent of workers received their IT support either primarily face-to-face or a mix of face-to-face and remotely respectively. Savvy employers are now looking to provide workers with an IT support service that mirrors the personal experience they receive outside of work when resolving issues with their own personal devices.”

Airbus, Cisco, Defence, Eric Souleres, News & Analysis, Wendy Mars

Airbus, Cisco team up on SDN, IoT, cloud security

Airbus and Cisco are partnering to develop IT solutions for the defence sectors

Airbus and Cisco are partnering to develop IT solutions for the defence sectors

Airbus Defence and Space announced a partnership with Cisco this week that will see the two firms jointly develop solutions making use of a range of technologies for the security and defence sector.

The companies said they plan to combine their strengths in defence, security and satellite communications, software-defined networking, cybersecurity, mobility, cloud, data intelligence and Internet of Things to develop, market and sell IT solutions for the security and defence sector.

Eric Souleres, head of engineering, operations and quality of the communications, intelligence and security (CIS) unit at Airbus Defence and Space said: “This relationship is a significant step forward for both companies. By utilising both companies’ technology and expertise we will be able to develop and offer superior and ground-breaking products and solutions to our customers, and strengthen our respective strategies as system integrator and IT leader.”

As part of the agreement, Cisco will provide Airbus Defence and Space with its networking, design and engineering expertise as well as networking equipment and infrastructure. Airbus Defence and Space global sales and engineering teams will also receive training from Cisco solution architects and sales experts.

“Cisco and Airbus Defence and Space strongly believe that the network is key in driving innovation and delivering business outcomes to our customers,” said Wendy Mars, vice president, enterprise business group, Cisco EMEAR.

“The diversity of our talent and technology will help enable both companies to better address existing opportunities and create transformational solutions that will deliver competitive advantage in the defence, cyber security and the satellite communication industries,” Mars said.

Accenture, Emma McGuigan, M&A, Mark Wakelin, News & Analysis, Salesforce, Tquila

Accenture buys Salesforce specialist Tquila UK

Accenture has acquired Tquila, a Salesforce specialist

Accenture has acquired Tquila, a Salesforce specialist

Accenture has acquired Tquila UK, a Salesforce specialist and consulting outfit, in a bid to strengthen its ability to deliver software-as-a-service technologies and services to its customers.

Founded in 2010, Tquila, one of the largest independent Salesforce partners in Europe, provides software tools to help its clients monitor their use of Salesforce services. It also offers consulting services and helps its customers set up their Salesforce applications.

As part of the acquisition Tquila’s 100 staff will join Accenture, more than doubling the number of Salesforce specialists it claims to have in its UK arsenal.

Accenture said the acquisition will give it one of the largest fleets of Salesforce consultants in Europe.

“We have seen significant growth in SaaS as more companies adopt the cloud and digital strategies to collaborate better, drive greater operational efficiencies and accelerate the development of new products and services,” said Emma McGuigan, managing director, Accenture Technology, UK and Ireland.

“One key factor for our continued success in delivering Salesforce solutions depends on having the right skilled professionals to meet the growing demand. With Tquila on board we have the critical mass to more proactively target big opportunities both in the UK and Europe, which will extend our position in the region,” McGuigan said.

Mark Wakelin, chief executive of Tquila said: “Being able to offer deep technology skills coupled with industry-experience at scale is critical to getting ahead in the market. As one of the largest pure-play Salesforce partners in Europe, we have those skills, and Accenture has the scale. By joining Accenture, we can offer our Salesforce expertise and experience to an even wider range of clients.”

Accenture is among other SIs hedging its bets in the cloud space by getting in with the cloud-natives alongside familiar incumbents. Last month Oracle and Accenture announced the two were teaming to create a joint business unit that will help mutual customers move more quickly onto (mostly Oracle) cloud platforms.

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

Equinix makes £2.3bn bid for Telecity Group

Equinix has made a £2.3bn bid for Telecity Group

Equinix has made a £2.3bn bid for Telecity Group

Telecity Group said it has been approached by Equinix about a possible acquisition that could see it shell out close to £2.3bn in a cash-and-shares deal for the UK datacentre incumbent.

The Board of TelecityGroup today said it has received an approach from Equinix regarding a possible offer for TelecityGroup at £11.45 pence per share, with the consideration payable in a mixture of cash and Equinix stock. About 54 per cent of the consideration would be payable in cash and approximately 46 per cent in Equinix stock, which all told would cost nearly £2.3bn.

“Having carefully considered the Equinix proposal in the light of this exception, the Board of Telecity Group has determined that it is required by virtue of its fiduciary duties to enter into discussions with Equinix and has decided to permit Equinix to undertake a short period of due diligence,” the company said in a statement.

“At this stage, there can be no certainty that any offer will ultimately be made for Telecity Group, or as to the terms on which any offer would be made.”

Equinix has until early June to firm up its offer.

Selling itself at a time when Telecity is in a relatively strong position would be somewhat surprising, particularly given Telecity’s recent bid for Interxion. In February this year Telecity carved out a £1.3bn merger with Interxion.

If a palatable offer were made the move would give Equinix a reasonable boost in Europe. Telecity has a market cap of about £1.4bn with datacentres dotted around Northern Europe. But any deal with Telecity would likely jeopardize the merger proposal with Interxion, which is valued at £1.27bn and has close to 40 datacentres all over the Europe.

As Telecity pointed out, that merger agreement “prohibits either Interxion or TelecityGroup from soliciting alternative proposals and from discussing alternative proposals except in limited circumstances.”

Aaron Levie, Box, Financial Services, Lancaster University, News & Analysis, Rituals Cosmetics, Storage as a Service, the University of Dundee

Box touts new customers as the battle to differentiate continues

Box co-founder and chief executive Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London this week

Box co-founder and chief executive Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London this week

Cloud storage incumbent Box announced a slew of new customers this week as the company, which was recently taken public, continues to nudge its balance sheet into the black. Despite strong competition in the segment and the added pressure that comes with being a public company Box continues to differentiate from both traditional and non-traditional competition, said co-founder and chief executive officer Aaron Levie.

Box announced this week it had inked large deployment deals with home and body cosmetics brand Rituals Cosmetics, the University of Dundee and Lancaster University, which cumulatively total close to 50,000 new seats on the cloud storage and collaboration platform.

“You’re seeing all of this disruption from new devices, new employees entering the workforce, new ways of working, new customer and consumer expectations about how they want to interact with your services. Customers really have to go digital with their enterprises,” said Levie said.

“From the inside, companies need to get more collaborative, move more quickly, make decisions faster, be able to have better technology for the workforce. It also means you’re going to have all new digital experiences to create your products, and offer an omnichannel customer experience – if you’re in retail, healthcare, this will drive fundamentally new business models.”

The company said it now has over 34 million users and 45,000 organisations globally using its service, with those companies belonging to a broad range of sectors – transportation, logistics utilities, healthcare, retail, the charity sector, and many more.

It’s planning a big push into Europe. Its UK office its fastest growing outfit with over 140 employees, and it recently hired former Microsoft cloud sales exec Jeremy Grinbaum to lead the company’s commercial expansion efforts in France and southern Europe. It’s also looking to deploy international datacentres to power its services outside the US within the next 12 to 18 months.

One of the big areas it’s trying to break into is financial services. The company recently introduced Box for Financial Services as part of its Box for Industries offerings, a growing portfolio of vertically-integrated cloud-based storage and collaboration platforms that bake industry-specific data management, security capabilities and workflow management requirements right into the service.

“Financial services has been slower to adopt the cloud, mostly because of an unclear regulatory environment,” Levie told BCN. “We’ve been working with financial services customers around the regulatory and compliance aspect, and with our encryption key technology we’ve gotten much farther along in terms of giving financial services firms the ability to adhere to their data security controls.”

Levie said the company has recently had some fairly big wins in the financial services space – none that he can mention publicly yet, of course – but some of the company’s customers in the sector already include US AA, US Bank, and T. Rowe Price to name a few.

Box for Industries (it already offers Box for Healthcare and Box for Retail) is central to how the company intends to differentiate itself among a growing sea of competitors – that, and its security investments. Levie said Box is more enterprise-y than Dropbox, widely viewed as one of its largest competitors, and more vertically-integrated than UK-based Huddle. But when asked about competition from non-traditional competitors like banks, some of which are using their substantial datacentre, security and digital service UX investments to provide their own cloud-based storage services to customers, he said he sees Box as more of a partner than rival.

The company recently launched Box Developer Edition, a software development kit that lets partners and customers use APIs to integrate Box’s technology into their own applications, Levie said banks can become Box partners and effectively white label its offering.

“Box ends up being a natural back-end service in that process. So instead of them having to build out all of the infrastructure, manage all the systems and then essentially recreate what our hundreds of engineers are doing,” he said. “The value proposition for [banks] is going to be the digital experience that allows them to interact with their customers.”

Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Paul Wellman, SAP, SAP HANA, Steve Lucas, Vendor

SAP reveals HANA Cloud for Internet of Things

SAP is launching an IoT-centric version of its HANA cloud service

SAP is launching an IoT-centric version of the HANA Cloud platform

SAP this week pulled the curtain of a version of its HANA cloud platform tailored specifically to Internet of Things applications.

The company said the private cloud service, based on its in-memory compute platform HANA, will provide the foundation for its IoT application services – analytics, telematics, its connected car services and manufacturing offerings.

SAP hasn’t commented on whether it will open up the platform for non-SAP applications. But the company said the move means it now offers an end-to-end spectrum of IoT services.

“SAP is helping customers reimagine their business with the most comprehensive portfolio of Internet of Things solutions from core business operations to the edge of the network,” said Steve Lucas, president, platform solutions, SAP.

“With the launch of SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things, our customers and partners now have the ability to connect anything to any app or business process in their company and business network. This will achieve operational excellence and deliver new customer experiences, products and services,” Lucas said.

As a sweetener the company will throw in free and unlimited access (for a limited time) to SAP SQL Anywhere, the SAP’s embeddable database for IoT devices, when customers sign up to use the HANA Cloud IoT service.

Siemens and Tennant are already running production deployments on the platform.

Paul Wellman, chief information officer at Tennant said: “Using SAP HANA, Tennant is able to differentiate its solutions and remain competitive in the cleaning equipment business. Now our customers can measure usage across their fleet to drive operational consistency, track machines to better manage assets and leverage this business intelligence to achieve significant cost savings.”

SAP has moved to strengthen its position among IoT incumbents over the past six months, and the company  is no stranger to data management and processing within the context of ERP, telematics and M2M.

The German software giant recently joined the Industrial Internet Consortium, an Internet of Things-focused membership group of telcos, research institutes and technology manufacturers focused on developing interoperability standards and common architectures to bridge smart devices, machines, mobile devices and the data they create. It also recently signed a deal with Deutsche Telekom’s enterprise IT-focused subsidiary T-Systems to build a cloud-based IoT platform for the connected car and logistics sectors.

IoT-World-banner-small

Blake Chandlee, Deepak Advani, Facebook, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM, Facebook ink data-sharing marketing partnership

IBM and Facebook are teaming up on marketing cloud services

IBM and Facebook are teaming up on marketing cloud services

IBM and Facebook have inked a deal that will see IBM marketing cloud customers gain access to Facebook advertising data and capabilities.

The deal will see IBM offer access to Facebook data as part of its marketing cloud analytics services and combine IBM’s marketing cloud data with anonymised user data from Facebook’s 1.44 billion users in a bid to enable IBM clients to gain a more accurate profile of their potential customers.

“Our partnership with IBM will help top brands achieve personalisation at scale by using IBM’s marketing cloud to find and engage their target audiences on Facebook, as well as solve their vexing challenges by consulting with IBM Commerce THINKLab, ” said Blake Chandlee, vice president of partnerships for Facebook.  “We will also be working closely with IBM Commerce THINKLab to help deliver people-based marketing that’s optimized to achieve each brand’s business goals.”

The two companies also announced that Facebook will be the first company to join the recently announced IBM Commerce THINKLab, a research and collaboration environment where companies can work directly with brands to customise the user experience of their services.

Neither company has commented on the financial terms of the deal, but the move could give both companies a serious boost in their respective strategic initiatives – Facebook’s bid to monetise its data, and IBM’s to offer marketers among others compelling reasons to use its cloud services over Oracle’s or other competitors combining analytics and access to social media-born data.

“Brands understand the increasing need to provide customers with powerful and personalized experiences to nurture loyalty,” said Deepak Advani, general manager, IBM Commerce. “Through this collaboration, consumer product companies and retailers will be able to quickly and easily gain deeper insight into what their customers expect and provide them with compelling experiences that bridge the physical and virtual divide.”

Capgemini, Dominos, Enterprise IT, ERP, Kevin Vasconi, NetSuite, News & Analysis, Pizza

Dominos taps Capgemini, cloud to streamline ordering system

Dominos has worked with Capgemini on a number of IT-related initiatives

Dominos has worked with Capgemini on a number of IT-related initiatives

Dominos Pizza has enlisted outsourcing incumbent Capgemini to help implement a cloud-based equipment and supply ordering system in a move the compan said would make its online and phone ordering processes more efficient.

The system, built on the NetSuite SuiteCommerce platform, will replace its existing equipment and supply order management platform.

Dominos, which has over 1,000 independent franchises in North America alone, said the cloud-based platform is integrated with its franchisee support organisation, and will make franchisee ordering more efficient by streamlining the pizza-making process.

“As a leading global retailer in online transactions, we are well known for using innovative technologies to enhance our customer experience, but what we do for our franchisees is equally important,” said Kevin Vasconi, Domino’s Pizza executive vice president and chief information officer.

“With the help of Capgemini, we are significantly improving the efficiency, availability and functionality of our franchisee ordering system, ultimately providing an improved experience for our franchise partners and a platform for Domino’s to drive future growth opportunities,” he said.

Capgemini also worked with Dominos North America to integrate the NetSuite platform with its existing ERP platform and data warehouse, which the companies said will help Dominos sales representatives improve the accuracy and efficiency of phone orders, and better equip them to assist customers with online or phone inquires.

“We are proud to be a longstanding provider for Domino’s and are excited about our work together to further enhance their reputation as a digital leader in serving up technology innovations for  franchisees and customers,” said Ted Levine, global sector leader, consumer products & retail, Capgemini. “Our extensive experience as a leading systems integrator and deep experience in the restaurant industry segment enables us to help Domino’s improve operational effectiveness through technology.”

Amazon, AWS, Azure, Content & Applications, Microsoft, NetSuite, News & Analysis, Steve Guggenheimer, Vendor, Zach Nelson

NetSuite ditches AWS in Microsoft partnership

NetSuite and Microsoft are linking their cloud services, and NetSuite is moving its services onto Azure

NetSuite and Microsoft are linking their cloud services, and NetSuite is moving its services onto Azure

NetSuite has inked a deal with Microsoft in a move that will see the two companies link up the cloud-based financial and ERP platform with Microsoft Office, Windows and Azure.

As part of the deal the two companies have already integrated NetSuite and Azure Active Directory to enable single sign-on (SSO) for customers using NetSuite together with Azure AD, and in the coming months plan to drive further integration between NetSuite and Office 365 – for instance, to be able to do things like connect NetSuite data to Microsoft Excel and PowerBI in a more seamless way.

The partnership will also see NetSuite move its service off Amazon Web Services, a long-time partner of the firm, as well as take its on-premise deployments and move them into Azure, now its “preferred cloud” provider, by the end of the year.

“We’re at the ‘end of the beginning’ of the cloud, in that the cloud business model that NetSuite pioneered in 1998 is becoming the de facto standard for how fast-growth businesses are run,” said Zach Nelson, NetSuite chief executive.

“We’re thrilled to work with Microsoft to deliver a fluid cloud environment across the key NetSuite and Microsoft applications that companies and their employees rely on to continually improve their day-to-day operations and run their business better and more efficiently,” Nelson said.

Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of developer platform & evangelism and chief evangelist for Microsoft also commented on the deal: “I’m excited about NetSuite’s support for Azure Active Directory for single sign-on, cloud-to-cloud integration and increasing our collaboration across mobile and cloud solutions. Our joint vision is all about giving people the freedom to get more done through the broadening set of devices they interact with that in turn helps businesses innovate and grow.”