Category Archives: Vendor

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.

News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenPower, OpenStack, SuperVessel, Terri Virnig, Tsinghua University, Vendor, Wei Xu

IBM releases tool to advance cloud app development on OpenPower, OpenStack

IBM has announced a service to help other develop and test OpenPower-based apps

IBM has announced a service to help other develop and test OpenPower-based apps

IBM announced the launch of SuperVessel, an open access cloud service developed by the company’s China-based research outfit and designed for developing and testing cloud services based on the OpenPower architecture.

The service, developed by Beijing’s IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs, is open to business partners, application developers and university students for testing and piloting emerging applications that use deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things.

The cloud service is based on the latest Power8 processors (with FPGAs and GPU-based acceleration) and uses OpenStack to orchestrate the underlying cloud resources. The SuperVessel service is sliced up into various “labs”, each focusing on a specific area, and is initially launching with four: Big Data, Internet of Things, Acceleration and Virtualization.

“With the SuperVessel open computing platform, students can experience cutting-edge technologies and turn their fancy ideas into reality. It also helps make our teaching content closer to real life,” said Tsinghua University faculty member Wei Xu. “We want to make better use of SuperVessel in many areas, such as on-line education.”

Terri Virnig, IBM Vice President of Power Ecosystem and Strategy said: “SuperVessel is a significant contribution by IBM Research and Development to OpenPower. Combining advanced technologies from IBM R&D labs and business partners, SuperVessel is becoming the industry’s leading OpenPower research and development environment. It is a way IBM commits to and supports OpenPower ecosystem development, talent growth and research innovation.”

The move is part of a broader effort to cultivate mindshare around IBM’s Power architecture, which it opensourced two years ago; it’s positioning the architecture as an ideal platform for cloud and big data services. Since the launch of the OpenPower Foundation, the group tasked with coordinating development with Power, it has also been actively working with vendors and cloud service provider to mashup a range of open source technologies – for instance, getting OpenStack to work on OpenPower and Open Compute-based hardware.

Converged Infrastructure, Datacentre, HP, News & Analysis, Paul Morgan, Vendor

HP targets hybrid cloud users with CloudSystem, Helion updates

HP has updated its CloudSystem converged infrastructure offerings

HP has updated its CloudSystem converged infrastructure offerings

HP has updated its CloudSystem platform to include its distribution of OpenStack in a converged private cloud offering. Paul Morgan, HP’s cloud head in EMEA told BCN the company is looking to broaden its support for hybrid cloud deployments.

The HP Helion CloudSystem includes all of HP’s Helion software including CloudSystem (its own private cloud software), Helion OpenStack, Helion Development Platform (it’s Cloud Foundry distribution) and HP Helion Eucalyptus (for AWS workload portability).

The offering comes in two flavours: the CS200-HC, which is being pitched as an entry-level hyper converged system aimed at SMBs and enterprises and can scale up to 32 nodes (pricing will be announced later this year but Morgan suggested the cost would float around the $2,000 mark for three years with support and maintenance); and the CS700x/700, which is cabinet-sized, aimed at larger enterprises and can scale up to 100 blade servers.

The software loaded on top comes in two versions: Foundation, which includes the Development Pack and OpenStack; and Enterprise, which ships with everything the Foundation package offers as well as OneView, Matrix, and Eucalyptus service templates, and includes more robust architecting and publishing capabilities.

The company said it has expanded support for HyperV, enhanced VMware networking, and added a number of OpenStack ancillary services under the hood including Heat (for orchestration) and Horizon (for dashboarding). It’s also added OneView – its converged infrastructure operations management software – to the mix.

“We definitely think that down the road many of the applications and workloads we see today will be hosted in the public cloud,” Morgan explained. “But in reality many of those applications don’t move over so easily. The cloud journey really does start with hybrid, which is where we think we can add value.”

Morgan said that converged offerings can help IT departments save big because they improve automation and deliver orchestration and automation without needing to radically change applications. He added that some of its customers have saved upwards of 30 to 40 per cent using its CloudSystem offerings.

“That’s where these converged offerings can play a role – in delivering all of the agility and cost savings cloud brings and which enterprises are looking for when they refresh their hardware, but not necessarily forcing them to rush off and overhaul the application landscape at the same time.”

blade server, Datacentre, Marc Rouanne, Networking, News & Analysis, NFV, Open Source, OpenStack, Phil Twist, Vendor

Nokia eyes the cloud infrastructure market with OpenStack, VMware-based servers

Nokia is offering up its own blade servers to the telco world

Nokia is offering up its own blade servers to the telco world

Nokia Networks revealed its AirFrame datacentre solutions this week, high-density blade servers running a combination of OpenStack and VMware software and designed to support Nokia’s virtualised network services for telcos.

“We are taking on the IT-telco convergence with a new solution to challenge the traditional IT approach of the datacentre,” said Marc Rouanne, executive vice president, Mobile Broadband at Nokia Networks.

“This newest solution brings telcos carrier-grade high availability, security-focused reliability as well as low latency, while leveraging the company’s deep networks expertise and strong business with operators to address an increasingly cloud-focused market valued in the tens of billions of euros.”

The servers, which come pre-integrated with Nokia’s own switches, are based on Intel’s x86 chips and run OpenStack as well as VMware, and can be managed using Nokia’s purpose-built cloud management solution. The platforms are ETSI NFV / OPNFV-certified, so they can run Nokia’s own VNFs as well as those developed by certified third parties.

The company’s orchestration software can also manage the split between both virtualised and network legacy functions in either centralised or distributed network architectures.

Phil Twist, vice president of Portfolio Marketing at Nokia Networks told BCN the company designed the servers specifically for the telco world, adding things like iNICs and accelerators to handle the security, encryption, virtual routing, digital signal processing (acceleration for radio) that otherwise would tie up processor capacity in a telco network.

But he also said the servers could be leveraged for standing up its own cloud services, or for the wider scale-out market.

“Our immediate ambition is clear: to offer a better alternative for the build-out of telco clouds optimized for that world.  But of course operators have other in-house IT requirements which could be hosted on this same cloud, and indeed they could then offer cloud services to their enterprise customers on this same cloud,” he explained.

“We could potentially build our own cloud to host SaaS propositions to our customers, or in theory potentially offer the servers for enterprise applications but that’s not our initial focus,” he added.

Though Twist didn’t confirm whether this was indeed Nokia’s first big move towards the broader IT infrastructure market outside networking, the announcement does mean the company will be brought into much closer competition with both familiar (Ericsson, Cisco) and less familiar (HP) incumbents offering their own OpenStack-integrated cloud kit.

Datacentre, GPU, Hardware, News & Analysis, Nvidia, Vendor, Virtualisation

Nvidia: ‘Cloud to generate $1bn for the firm in a few years’

Nvidia's chief exec believes cloud will generate over $1bn for the firm in just a few years

Nvidia’s chief exec believes cloud will generate over $1bn annually for the firm in just a few years

Chip maker and GPU specialist Nvidia Corp said it expects cloud computing to generate over $1bn in revenues for the firm in the next few years, according to a report from Reuters.

Speaking to reporters at Computex Nvidia’s chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang also said the company expects cloud revenues to grow between 60 and 70 per cent each year.

A number of cloud service providers have borrowed from the high performance computing world to add GPU acceleration to their services in a bid to cope with diminishing returns on CPU performance.

HPC and cloud revenue at Nvidia was $79m for the recently reported Q1 2016, up 57 per cent year-on-year, and the company has over the past year or so announced some large deals with companies like Baidu, Facebook, Flickr, Microsoft and Twitter, largely around its Tesla and GRID offerings.

Last year it also struck a deal with AWS to add GPU-accelerated instances to its growing roster of services.

Nvidia has said much of its growth in recent quarters has come from datacentre, cloud, gaming and automotive, and that its deals with virtualisation incumbents VMware and Citrix are helping to give it a strong boost in the enterprise. Speaking to journalists and analysts in February this year Huang said its deal with VMware alone means about 80 per cent of the world’s enterprises now support its GRID GPU virtualisation technology.

Audi, connected car, Huawei, M2M, News & Analysis, Vendor, Volkswagen

Huawei’s details connected car partnerships with Audi, Volkswagen

Huawei is pushing forward with a number of connected car partnerships this week

Huawei is pushing forward with a number of connected car partnerships this week

Chinese networking giant Huawei is going big on the connected car market this week with the announcement of partnerships with German car makers Audi and Volkswagen, reports Telecoms.com.

This week’s news specifically concerns Volkswagen, with the demonstration at CES Asia of some MirrorLink-based technology that enables smartphones apps to be used on the vehicle-mounted systems. While this sort of thing has been around for a while, it seems that Huawei is facilitating the integration of MirrorLink technology in VW cars, all of which will feature it by next year.

“Our cooperation with Huawei will seamlessly blend the capabilities of users’ smartphones with the systems in their cars,” said Sven Patuschka, executive vice president for R&D of Volkswagen Group China. “All content on the phone will be shown in real time on the car’s infotainment touch screen. The result is smart and convenient interaction between phone and car.”

Earlier this week at the same show Huawei unveiled an R&D partnership with Audi, but this time focused on “interconnected car technology”, which seems to mean embedded modems.

“We see the unlimited opportunities available in the interconnected car market and we are excited about our partnership with Audi Group,” said Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei Consumer Business Group. “By partnering with industry-leading automobile companies like Audi, Huawei aims to bring the best interconnection services and solutions to the next generation of cars, while actively promoting interaction between cars, smartphones, wearables and people, creating a seamless communication experience and driving environment.”

The connected car has long been viewed as the next major opportunity for the tech industry, but it has been slow to develop. One of the main reasons is the relatively long lead times in the automotive industry, which means bets have to be made on embedded technology standards that may be obsolete by the time the car comes to market. The answer, of course, is open standards, but as ever we have to wait for the proprietary land-grab to exhaust itself first.

Visit Connected Cars 15 to find out all about connected car business models and technologies.

Akamai, Asia Pacific, China Unicom, Networks, News & Analysis, Noam Freedman, Telco Cloud, Vendor

Akamai, China Unicom strike cloud deal

China Unicom may be using the Akamai deal to bolster its appeal outside China

China Unicom may be using the Akamai deal to bolster its appeal outside China

China Unicom and Akamai have announced a partnership that will see the two companies integrate their cloud services and content delivery network, respectively.

The deal between China Unicom’s cloud division CU Cloud and Akamai will see the former offer the latter’s full portfolio of content delivery, web performance and security offerings, a move CU Cloud said will improve global access to its growing suite of cloud services.

Akamai’s turnkey CDN technology will also underpin global delivery of its cloud services, CU Cloud said.

“China Unicom is a major carrier in China, serving the global internet market,” said Noam Freedman, senior vice president of Akamai’s global networks division. “We’re excited to be partnering with CU cloud to tap into the fast-growing China cloud and CDN market. Akamai sees increased demand for delivering content to Chinese internet users from global customers. With this strategic partnership, we believe Akamai is best positioned to serve this growing need.”

China Unicom has for the past few years targeted cloud services fairly aggressively. In 2013 it was revealed the company was teaming up with a other incumbents including China Mobile and China Telecom on the construction of massive cloud computing datacentres, with total investment from all three operators topping $3bn.

It has also partnered with other local specialists like Huawei and Pacnet on cloud infrastructure and service development.

The latest move may be a sign that China Unicom has set its sights beyond the local market and wants to compete with other increasingly global cloud providers with roots in China – like Alibaba and Pacnet, which have also bolstered global access to their platforms in a bid to cater mainly to large Chinese multinationals.

451 Research, Citrix, enterprise mobility management, Jesse Lipson, Mobile, News & Analysis, Scott Ottaway, Software as a service, Vendor

Citrix pitches Workspace Cloud for hybrid cloud service delivery

Citrix is aiming its solutions at hybrid cloud users

Citrix is aiming its solutions at hybrid cloud users

Citrix has unveiled Workspace Cloud, a set of cloud-based tools aimed at bridging the application deployment and management gap between on-premise and cloud infrastructure.

The solution, based on XenApp, XenMobile and XenDesktop technology, is basically an integrated and consolidated set of existing Citrix tools used to stream virtual apps to and manage mobile devices, and share content across devices and services – whether that data is located on-premise or in a cloud platform.

The company is pitching it as a “new control pane” for data across any device, and any infrastructure.

“Citrix Workspace Cloud is the future of on-demand IT. People want access to all their apps and data, and this no longer equates to a desktop. Citrix has created the fastest and easiest way to deploy new resources, simplified infrastructure management, and provided freedom of choice in selecting the right hosting and delivery model,” said Jesse Lipson, vice president and general manager, cloud services at Citrix.

Scott Ottaway, vice president at 451 Research said Citrix’s move to consolidate and integrate it offerings comes at a time when enterprises are struggling to bridge this gap between securing and managing content between a combination of on-premise and cloud platforms.

“When it comes to end-user computing, Enterprise IT is at a cross-roads with multiple challenges around device management complexity, data and application security, and requirements to deliver consumer-like, consistent experiences across any device,” Ottaway said.

“And IT leaders have more pressure than ever to achieve rapid time to market with new IT services, especially new mobile applications,” he said, adding that ensuring infrastructure agnosticism and reducing vendor lock-in will be essential for solutions vendors like Citrix moving forward.

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.

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.

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