Uncategorized

SaaS provider Apttus raises $108m series C funding, takes aggressive approach

(c)iStock.com/RyanKing999

Software as a service (SaaS) provider Apttus has secured $108 million (£70.4m) in series C funding, just seven months after its previous funding round.

Apttus delivers SaaS apps providing an unbroken funnel throughout the sales process, with the company claiming to pioneer the ‘quote to cash’ cycle, which is an end to end process covering an entire sales lifecycle in the cloud. The latest cash injection comes after a $37m round in September 2013 and $41m in February this year, with the investors this time round include Iconiq Capital, K1 Capital, KIA, and Salesforce Ventures.

Securing more than $100m such a short time after a previous round naturally indicates a fast growing company, yet the company shunned venture capital for the first seven years of its existence.  Now, having earned a unicorn valuation the company is going for the jugular, as Apttus CEO Kirk Krappe explains. “It’s about market opportunity, pure and simple,” he tells CloudTech. “Hiring one salesperson means bringing on more engineers, a BDR (business development representative) to develop leads, and more.

“Our current customers represent about 1% of our target accounts, and if we’re going to maximise our potential, it was time to expand, via funding.”

The link with Salesforce is key, as Apttus is delivered on the Salesforce1 platform. According to Krappe, the funding round is a ‘tremendous show of support’ from the cloud software giant – which is also a customer of Apttus – adding: “Apttus and Salesforce are in sync – where their process ends, the quote to cash cycle begins.”

A key sign of Apttus’ expansion is through its workforce; the California-based firm began 2015 with 500 employees, is now at 900 and aims to end the year at 1400. Apttus has also opened offices in London, Sydney and Chicago, with another in Japan on the way. Krappe explains: “That kind of growth does not come without a unique set of growing pains. The next 12 months will be about getting our team and workforce ready for the next step, whatever or whenever it may be.”

Regarding that next step, Apttus is understandably remaining tight lipped. After the last funding round, many in the media speculated whether Apttus would go to IPO or be acquired, possibly by Salesforce. Krappe notes the company is under no pressure from investors, saying: “There are no definite plans as far as a liquidity event – it simply could go either way.”

Americas, Datacentre, Dell, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, VMware, VMworld

Dell tells VMworld how it simplified the cloud

Dell serversDell claims it will demystify the cloud for enterprise buyers with a raft of new products and services, which it unveiled at VMworld in San Francisco.

A new release of Dell’s Active System Manager will deepen integration with the product portfolio of virtualisation vendor VMware, it claimed, making it easier to automate the management of public and private cloud computing, and hybrids of the two.

“Dell’s portfolio helps customers to design, deploy and manage hybrid clouds from the device to the data centre to meet each customer’s unique journey to a hybrid cloud,” said Jim Ganthier, VP and GM of Engineered Solutions and Cloud, Dell.

Converting public cloud deployments to hybrid cloud environments brings financial returns that have been verified by several independent studies, according to Dell. “Dell’s innovations and our VMware partnership can deliver the business results and outcomes,” said Ganthier.

Meanwhile, an updated version of its Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL Horizon Edition will shrink workloads on virtual desktops and applications by up to 80 per cent, Dell claimed. This would cut the price of management and hosting. A new thin client operating system, Wyse ThinOS 8.1, will tighten security and make support easier, it claimed. Another improvement comes from the new version of Wyse Cloud Client Manager (CCM), which extends management to bring millions of Windows Embedded Standard (WES) and SUSE Linux thin clients under the umbrella of its management platforms.

Dell is working with VMware to make virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) easy to create and run, claimed Steve Lalla, Dell’s VP of commercial client software. “Collaboration enables us to deliver these solutions to our customers within VMware Horizon environments,” said Lalla.

One of the productivity shortcuts created by active system manager (ASM) is that any business analyst or IT architect can use templates and automation methods to speed up processes such as requests, approvals, help desk and self-service. The saving of time and manual effort and improved responsiveness and consistency will create rapid payback, claimed Dell.

Dell also claimed it has been ‘deeply involved’ in the joint development – with VMware – of EVO SDDC, which aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify the building of large scale software defined data centres. Dell’s EVO SDDC offerings will align closely with VMware’s general availability in the first half of 2016, said Dell.

EMC, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Virtualisation, VMware

VMware opens up at VMworld San Francisco

VMWare campus logoVirtualisation pioneer VMware has unveiled a raft of new services tailored for hybrid cloud services and open systems at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco.

VMware announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0, the company’s second release of its distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software. The new release, based on OpenStack Kilo, will be available on September 30.

“Customers can now upgrade from version one to version two in a more operationally efficient manner and even roll back if anything goes wrong,” said VMware product line manager Arvind Soni.

The move could be seen as a U-turn by VMware, whose revenue streams come from sales of its vSphere virtualization software. The most recent annual VMware report warned that “open source technologies for virtualization, containerization, and cloud platforms such as Xen, KVM, Docker, Rocket, and OpenStack provide significant pricing competition and let competing vendors [use] OpenStack to compete directly with our SDDC initiative.”

However, with OpenStack distributions available from Canonical, HP, Huawei and Oracle – and investment in OpenStack companies from Intel, IBM and other major players, VMware has announced continued support. In October 2014 parent company EMC bought three OpenStack start ups – Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning – to provide a variety of cloud services which adhere to the increasingly popular open standard.

Meanwhile, testing and running disaster recovery plans will be quicker, promises VMWare, now its vCloud Air service has a new cloud-based Site Recovery Manager. The service is now offered on a pay-per-use basis, replacing the more expensive annual subscriptions.

In the event of a disaster recovery event or test, fees will be charged for each virtual machine protected and the storage they consume, said VMware.

Storage could get cheaper as VMware has introduced vCloud Air Object Storage on the Google Cloud Platform. The debut product from VMware’s new Google reseller relationship will be available from September 30th, which will also see an alternative offering launched: vCloud Air Object Storage service, powered by EMC.

The start of the fourth financial quarter should also see VMware release its new vCloud Air SQL database as a service, as the virtualisation vendor looking to match the breadth of features offered the cloud industry’s top service providers.

With a new Hybrid Cloud Manager, VMware aims to help clients to migrate workloads, extend the range of their data centres and fine tune the process of juggling resources between private and public clouds. The management takes place through the interface of VMware’s vSphere Web Client, and will support the migration of virtual machines.

ANZ, Asia Pacific, banking, development, IBM, News & Analysis, Research

IBM signs cloud development agreement with ANZ bank

ANZ has signed a five-year, A$450 million (£208 million) strategic agreement with IBM, the centrepiece of which is the establishment of a cloud-based Innovation Lab based on IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform-as-a-service, reports Banking Technology.

The lab will allow the Bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services at “a fraction of the time and cost previously taken”.

As well as the Innovation Lab and cloud capabilities, the agreement includes access to IBM’s software portfolio and core systems infrastructure. The IBM agreement will provide common platforms across ANZ’s network as it continues to grow as a super-regional bank and will allow the bank to deliver a “more integrated and innovative banking experience for digital customers”.

IBM will deploy its newest z13 mainframe and Power8 infrastructure as part of ANZ’s private cloud environment. The infrastructure will provide the bank with the reliability, security and resiliency needed to service the needs of mobile customers across the bank’s network. IBM integration, content management, data, analytics and cloud software will support ANZ’s core banking and infrastructure needs.

“Understanding our customers’ needs and preferences around mobile and digital banking is critical to our business and to providing a superior customer experience,” said Scott Collary, ANZ’s chief information officer. “We therefore need to ensure we’re meeting these needs in an innovative, consistent and seamless way and with this partnership with IBM, we’re working to achieve this goal.”

IBM has been a strategic partner of ANZ for more than 40 years said Scott Barlow, IBM client director for ANZ Bank: “This new agreement continues to build on this by enabling ANZ access to an arsenal of leading edge technology to provide the agility, speed and innovation essential in the rapidly changing financial services marketplace.”

Interoute, Webinars

Webinar | How to integrate the cloud into your existing IT estate

Interoute_webinar_640x170

 

All businesses are being encouraged to move to the cloud or ‘go digital’, but the reality is that most IT departments have a slew of applications and an established estate. How can the cloud and this existing estate work together?

This webinar brought to you by Business Cloud News and Interoute will take you though some of the typical deployments that we’re seeing with customers’ existing IT estates and the problems they are facing. We will then walk through some of the tools we’ve developed allow you to connect your existing infrastructure to the cloud, enabling you to have a fully integrated estate of old and new.

The key piece to any technical transformation of business is integration and control, an all-encompassing base strategy of consolidation, renewal and integration of old & new. You need to establish a bimodal model of IT, and this session will show you how.

  • Analyse and profile existing IT estates
  • IaaS, PaaS, and what they mean
  • How do your users access your services
  • How to build a platform to link all of your IT
  • How the Interoute platform can help you integrate everything, without changing everything

Speaker: 

William Morrish, Director, Cloud Services, Interoute

William has been working within the network and hosting industry for over 18 years fulfilling roles from technical design to customer sales engagement. He now runs Interoute’s IaaS product globally for sales & marketing.

This webinar will take place on Tuesday 15th September at 4pm UK time.

CLICK HERE to register >

Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Quick Look, Quick Look for Windows, Windows, Windows 10

Quick Look for Windows in Parallels Desktop 11

One of my all-time favorite features of my Mac is really small, and often overlooked when it comes to talking about the advantages of owning one—Quick Look! What’s Quick Look? Most Apple aficionados out there already know what Quick Look is, but I’ll give a brief overview for anyone out there new to Mac. Quick […]

The post Quick Look for Windows in Parallels Desktop 11 appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Parallels Business Solutions, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition, Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition, run windows on mac, Windows on mac

Business Cloud Support in Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Business Edition

Here at Parallels, we know that one of the major issues companies and their employees face today is the issue of choice. Windows or Mac? Android or iOS? Star Trek or Star Wars? Just kidding. (Definitely Star Wars.) In all seriousness, we get how the amount of choice can steal productivity from your employees. That’s […]

The post Business Cloud Support in Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Business Edition appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Best Apps, Best iOS Apps, must-have apps, Parallels Access, Remote access, Remote Desktop

All the Must-Have Apps: Your Picks!

Recently, we shared our must-have apps and asked you to share yours. Here’s what you came up with: Most Popular: Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, Pinterest, and Tumblr No surprise here—social apps help keep us connected to family, friends, and our ever-evolving technological world. Regardless of whether you think you need a smartphone or not, these apps have […]

The post All the Must-Have Apps: Your Picks! appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Uncategorized

FAA moves to the cloud through CSC, Microsoft and Amazon in potential $1bn contract

(c)iStock.com/guvendemir

CSC has announced the procurement of a contract with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worth $108 million (£70.4m) alongside Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other business partners.

The contract, potentially worth $1 billion over 10 years, will see the FAA move to a hybrid cloud environment, with CSC consolidating data centres and migrating data and systems across using the CSC Agility Platform cloud management tool.

The news was initially broken by Washington Technology, with the report noting that other companies involved in the team include EMC and Equinix. The FAA posted an official announcement noting the contract was awarded on August 26.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the importance of such contracts to cloud providers. The CIA’s cloud computing contract, awarded in 2013 and reportedly worth $600m, went to Amazon Web Services despite an appeal from IBM amid complaints that AWS’ bid was $50m more expensive, and that the procedures used to rank Amazon’s proposal as technically superior were wide of the mark. In February 2015, the AWS CIA cloud had achieved ‘final operational capability’.

Winning lucrative public sector contracts are also seen as vindication of a cloud provider’s security accreditation –in particular the stringent FedRAMP certification. AWS got its FedRAMP wings in June 2013, while Microsoft followed suit in October that year.

CSC president and chief executive Mike Lawrie said: “CSC and our alliance partners are demonstrating the unique value that we as a team can bring to deliver an innovative, next-gen IT cloud solution that drives the FAA’s mission forward.” He added: “We are in a unique position to help meet the agency’s operational and budgetary challenges over the life of the program.”

In statements, Amazon noted the acceleration of government cloud adoption while advocating its own compliance standards including FedRAMP, ITAR and SRG, while Microsoft argued the contract win ‘builds nicely’ on additionally moving the FAA to Office 365 for greater productivity.

The cloud news categorized.