There are many reasons why Mac® devices are proliferating in organizations. Many say this is due to the fact that users practiced bring your own device (BYOD), bringing their private MacBook® computers into the office. Additionally, some think that employees asked for Apple® devices because it was in-line with their private preference or fitted in […]
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It’s certainly a sign that the cloud industry is seriously mature – when we’re not just talking about multiple clouds, but multiple cloud management providers.
ParkMyCloud and CloudHealth Technologies, two companies in the cloud optimisation and management space, have announced an extension of their partnership with multi-cloud in mind.
The integrated product aims to offer the best of both companies’ offerings. SmartParkingTM, part of ParkMyCloud which offers recommendations to optimise the ‘on’ and ‘off’ time of resources, is now manageable through the CloudHealth platform, alongside the latter’s recommendations to optimise public and private cloud resources.
The partnership was first announced at the start of this year with automation being the name of the game in terms of the contribution ParkMyCloud brought. One early customer who was utilising both successfully was Connotate, an AI startup that automates web data collection and monitoring, who was able to reduce costs by up to 65% automatically, as well as automated AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform scheduling in 15 minutes.
Writing exclusively for this publication in July, Jay Chapel, co-founder and CEO of ParkMyCloud, cited on-demand instances and VMs, relational databases, load balancers, and containers as the four cloud resources most likely to squeeze budgets without due care and attention.
“Most non-production resources can be parked about 65% of the time – that is, parked 12 hours per day and all day on weekends,” wrote Chapel. “Many of the companies I talk to are paying their cloud providers an average list price of $220 per month for their instances. If you’re currently paying $220 per month for an instance and leaving it running all the time, that means you’re wasting $143 per instance per month.
“Maybe that doesn’t sound like much – but if that’s the case for 10 instances, you’re wasting $1.430 per month,” added Chapel. “One hundred instances? You’re up to a bill of $14,300 for time you’re not using.
“That’s just a simple micro example – at a macro level, that’s literally billions of dollars in wasted cloud spend.”
The move also marks the first business CloudHealth has announced since it was acquired by VMware at the end of last month.
These and many other fascinating insights are from CB Insight’s report, Google Strategy Teardown (PDF, 49 pp., opt-in). The report explores how Alphabet, Google’s parent company is relying on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to capture new streams of revenue in enterprise cloud computing and services. Also, the report looks at how Alphabet can combine search, AI, and machine learning to revolutionise logistics, healthcare, and transportation. It’s a thorough teardown of Google’s potential acquisitions, strategic investments, and partnerships needed to maintain search dominance while driving revenue from new markets.
Key takeaways from the report include the following:
CB Insights found Google is experiencing rising TAC in their core ad and search businesses. With the strategic shift to mobile, Google will see TAC escalate even further. Their greatest potential for growth is infusing greater contextual intelligence and knowledge across the entire series of companies that comprise Alphabet, shown in the graphic below.
Gradient Ventures is an ROI fund focused on supporting the most talented founders building AI-powered companies. Former tech founders are leading Gradient Ventures, assisting in turning ideas into companies. Gradient Venture’s portfolio is shown below:
Amazon dominates R&D spending across the top five tech companies investments in R&D in 2017 with $22.6B. Facebook leads in percent of total sales invested in R&D with 19.1%.
Google’s approach to primary research in the fields of AI, machine learning, and deep learning is leading to a prolific amount of research being produced and published. Here’s the search engine for their publication database, which includes many fascinating studies for review. Part of Google Brain’s role is to work with other Alphabet subsidiaries to support and lead their AI and machine learning product initiatives. An example of this CB Insights mentions in the report is how Google Brain collaborated with autonomous driving division Waymo, where it has helped apply deep neural nets to vehicles’ pedestrian detection The team has also been successful in increasing the number of AI and machine learning patents, as CB Insight’s analysis below shows:
CB Insights has an Insights Trends tool that is designed to analyse unstructured text and find linguistics-based associations, models and statistical insights from them. Analysing Google earnings calls transcripts found AI and machine learning mentions are soaring during the last call.
Google acquired Xively in Q1 of this year followed by Cask Data and Velostrata in Q2. Google needs to continue acquiring cloud-based companies who can accelerate more customer wins in the enterprise and mid-tier, two areas Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure have strong momentum today.
92% of enterprises are using the public cloud today. As a result, simply being in the cloud is no longer enough to remain competitive. The benefit of reduced costs has normalized while the market forces are demanding more innovation at faster release cycles. Enter Cloud Native! Cloud Native enables a microservices driven architecture. The shift from monolithic to microservices yields a lot of benefits – but if not done right – can quickly outweigh the benefits. The effort required in monitoring, tracing, circuit breakers, routing, load balancing, etc. for thousands of microservices can become overwhelming. This talk will address strategies to run & manage microservices from 0 to 60 using Istio and other tools in a cloud native world.
Why do most internet of things (IoT) analytics operations occur in the cloud? The public cloud offers a centralised location for large amounts of affordable storage and computing power. But there are many instances in which it makes more sense to perform analytics closer to the thing or activity that is generating or collecting data – equipment deployed at customer sites.
This is particularly true in industrial and manufacturing environments, which are familiar with the challenges of managing massive amounts of unstructured data, but may lag when it comes to the virtualisation of IT infrastructure.
Advances in intelligent process manufacturing, factory automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning models all benefit from edge analytics implementations, yet will likely become islands of automation without a cohesive industrial cloud computing platform.
The industrial cloud covers everything from the factory floor to the industrial campus, and it is unifying the supply chain as companies employ a combination of digital business, product, manufacturing, asset, and logistics planning to streamline operations across both internal and external processes.
Industrial cloud applications make it easier to optimise asset and process allocations by modeling the physical world and use data and subsequent insights to enable new services or improve control over environmental, health, and safety issues.
The virtualisation of business-critical infrastructure is transforming the production and distribution of goods and services throughout the supply chain, as industrial organisations shift focus to hybrid cloud computing deployments that connect and integrate on-premise IT resources with public cloud resources.
According to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research, hybrid industrial cloud adoption will more than double over the next five years at a respectable 21.1 percent CAGR.
Initial IoT deployments in industrial markets reflect the sector's machine to machine (M2M) heritage: private cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The private IaaS model served as a solid starting point for many organisations that wanted the benefit of cloud scale, but with minimal interruption to normal IT operations.
The industrial cloud platform as a service (PaaS) model extended the functional capabilities of on-premise IaaS solutions by shifting commodity tasks – such as capacity planning, software maintenance, patching — to public cloud service providers. Software as a service (SaaS) took it a step further but in the form of managed services.
"Manufacturing and industrial organisations were not born from the same digital core as the people they employ or the products they produce," said Ryan Martin, principal analyst at ABI Research. "But they also harness some of the greatest potential thanks to massive amounts of untapped plant and process log data. Harvested with the right analytical tools and guidance, these data streams can deliver value greater than the sum of their parts."
The factory floor’s historical predisposition toward on-premise solutions has been supplanted by a campus-led approach underscored by a more recent push to connect HMI, SCADA, and control networks to higher-level enterprise systems, as well as the public cloud.
However, getting to the point where all these moving pieces come together in a real-world, production environment can be messy. Many operational technology (OT) devices come up short in key areas such as interoperability and security due to the prevalence of proprietary protocols in the legacy M2M market.
"Most OT systems depend on infrastructure with lifetimes measured in decades, while IT systems can be upgraded frequently at little or no cost," concludes Martin.
As a result, industrial and manufacturing markets typically employ a staged technology integration strategy that favors suppliers whose hardware, software, and services can be acquired incrementally, with minimal disruption to existing operations. The hybrid IT infrastructure models can fit very well in this operational environment.
Alibaba Cloud has confirmed it is setting up a data centre in the UK – after setting up a landing page with ‘London is calling’ as its headline.
The data centre, whose details can be found here, is set to have high availability of 99.99%, a cooling system configured with N+1 redundancy, as well as dual availability zones to avail stronger disaster recovery capabilities.
Prices for space are available at 5% off to early adopters, with 1 core CPU, 512 MB of memory and a 20 GB disk, at the lower end of the scale, costing $3.96 per instance per month with discount, and at the higher end 8 core CPU, 16 GB memory and 40 GB disk setting you back $153.86 per month. Instances are also available with MySQL 5.6/5.7.
Among the 15 products available to London customers are ECS Bare Metal Instances, first announced on the European market at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The rest are a mix of the usual suspects, alongside an Elastic GPU Service, and two container services – one focusing on Docker and the other on Kubernetes.
The company’s most recent momentum announcements had been around the Asia Pacific (APAC) market, with no fewer than nine products launched for the region last month, alongside a second infrastructure zone in Malaysia. As is to be expected, Alibaba’s presence in the region is strong, albeit with a predominant focus in China. According to figures from Synergy Research in June, Alibaba ranks second, behind AWS, in APAC, breaking the AWS-Microsoft-Google oligopoly worldwide.
Yet moves to take European market share have been similarly important for the company. Speaking to CloudTech in May, Yeming Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Europe, said ‘going global’ was a strategy which mirrored the whole of the Alibaba Group. Wang added that for many customers, Alibaba was being seen as a second or third cloud option, with the rise of multi-cloud strategies gaining prominence.
The launch of the London data centre comes amidst a report in The Information which alleges that Alibaba Cloud was scaling back its plans for US expansion. According to MarketWatch, the company has since rebuffed those claims. “Alibaba Cloud’s US strategy has always been primarily focused on working with US companies who need cloud services in China and Asia and helping Chinese companies with cloud services in the US, not competing head to head with local players,” the company said in a statement. “Our commitment to this market remains unchanged.”
Find out more about Alibaba’s London expansion here.
A decade ago, early adapters enthusiastically embraced cloud computing, but the larger business world waited skeptically with questions such as ‘how safe is this?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘Will it really improve productivity?’ ‘Will it give me a competitive edge?’
Today, there is still some hesitation around migrating to the cloud. Because the cloud is still considered fairly new technology, there hasn’t been an established trust in it yet. Some organisations maintain the “don’t fix what’s not broken” mentality, arguing that on-premise infrastructure has worked effectively. Others are generally uncomfortable with having major pieces of the business running in the cloud. And the potential security risks in transferring data between on-premise and public clouds concern nearly everyone.
Yet more organisations are moving to the cloud because of the increasingly apparent benefits: greater reliability, in-depth analytics, mobility and cost-savings (usually). As the “2018 State of the Cloud” report by RightScale found: “When comparing cloud adoption in large and small companies, it is interesting to note that for the first time in 2018, a larger portion of enterprise respondents are in the two most mature stages.”
So, your organisation is now on the bandwagon and needs to build out a cloud infrastructure. Where do you begin?
A recent Forrester study found that only four percent of organisations run their applications exclusively in the public cloud. Seventy-seven percent are using multiple (hybrid) types of clouds, both on-premises (private) and off-premises (public). Gartner expects almost half of all business users to move their core collaboration and communications systems to public clouds by the end of this year, and more than seventy percent of businesses will be substantially provisioned with cloud office capabilities by 2021.
The up-front costs for setting up a private cloud may be too much for organisations with smaller budgets, which is why most organisations are adopting a hybrid cloud solution. Hybrid cloud technology allows for flexibility in the organisation without migrating everything to the public cloud and the ability to keep secure information on-premise. But hybrid cloud can also bring security risks, issues with legacy systems and budget challenges.
Migration to the cloud will change organisations’ IT role in many ways:
Once your company has migrated, you may not notice the complexities in managing the cloud right away. But they are there: lack of visibility into usage and expenses, assets, costs and usage and other processes. Most companies don’t realise the need to bring in a management system until costs and applications have gotten out of control.
An example: companies that are used to having bills in the hundreds of dollars may suddenly start seeing costs coming in at $40,000 a month. Bills and Invoices will be difficult to understand. Unbudgeted costs may be incurred. Forecasting will be more difficult. It can get overwhelming quickly.
The best way to manage it before it gets to that point is including a cloud expense management (CEM) system in place upon migration (or as early as possible). A good CEM will not only manage expenses and financials but will:
Gartner predicts that by 2020 organisations that lack cost optimisation processes will on average overspend by forty percent in the public clouds. Thus, your organisation could benefit significantly through a partnership with a managed services provider that knows expense management and can provide additional services to address needs outside of what the CEM system. This includes – among others — negotiating contracts and ensuring that you’re being charged correctly; providing analysis of your spending; looking for cost savings; and integrate other internal systems to work with the CEM system.
An IT expense management partner who understands these complexities can assist enterprises in driving value and improving governance of these rapidly growing expense categories. Getting ahead of the complexities the cloud brings with a CEM program will not only manage expenses but to increase the visibility into usage and costs to optimise the benefits the cloud can bring to your organisation.
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In July 2018, Broadcom announced its plan to acquire CA Technologies for almost $19 billion. While analysts have furiously debated the merits of a chip manufacturer buying an enterprise software company, the CA acquisition heralds a momentous shift in the $25 billion IT operations management (ITOM) software market.
For more than two decades, four technology vendors – BMC, CA, IBM and HP – have dominated the ITOM software market. In 2012, these big four collectively accounted for 55% of the ITOM software industry. By 2017, their market share had declined to less than 30% (Gartner).
More crucially, the CA acquisition means that the big four as you’ve known them no longer exist. Here is how the big four lost their way – and why IT leaders need to start working with a new breed of insurgents that are transforming IT operations management.
A decade ago, most ITOM startups expected to scale and then sell out to a big four provider at some point in their journey. Today, most startups begin with a business plan that’s all about stealing market share from a big four product suite. Here’s a synopsis of where these four companies stand today.
BMC: BMC Software started life as a mainframe management tools company in 1980. By 2013, it was clear that the company had run out of steam. BMC’s annual revenues from 2010-2013 showed a tepid CAGR growth of 0.78% – $1.91bn in 2010 versus $1.97bn in 2013. In May 2013, private equity players Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital acquired a majority stake in BMC for $6.9bn. Five years later, another private equity firm, KKR, agreed to buy BMC from its previous investors for $8.5bn. In 2018, BMC’s annual revenues were still stuck at $2bn, despite significant product and go-to-market investments over the last five years.
CA Technologies: CA was the dominant mainframe utility software company of the 1980s. A serial acquirer, CA was well known for buying companies and milking customers for maintenance fees. In recent years, CA experienced the same problems of stagnant products and stalled growth. The company registered a negative CAGR of 0.18%, with revenues marginally declining from $4.26bn in 2015 to $4.23bn in 2018. With all options exhausted, CA sold itself to Broadcom last month.
IBM: IBM Tivoli started in 1989 as a systems management vendor for IBM mainframe hardware. In 1996, IBM bought out Tivoli and folded over thirty acquisitions into the Tivoli division. By 2012, IBM Tivoli was the leading ITOM software player with $3.2bn in annual revenues. However, IBM made few actual investments in upgrading the Tivoli architecture to meet the demands of a new generation of ITOM buyers. In 2016, IBM signed a 15-year deal with HCL Technologies for offloading the development and maintenance of Tivoli products. Today, the best mention you get to the venerable Tivoli brand on IBM’s website is deep in its Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure division.
HP: HP launched its OpenView family of IT management tools in the early 1990s. After acquiring Peregrine, Mercury Interactive, and Opsware in the last decade, HP grew its OpenView portfolio to more than $1bn in annual revenues. However, with all the troubles that HP experienced after the Autonomy deal, it sold its entire ITOM software portfolio to Micro Focus in 2016. Reacting to the HPE-Micro Focus $8.8bn merger, The Register pointed out that “Micro Focus is considered by some to be something of a retirement home for software businesses that have seen better days.”
So why did the big four players lose their way? A distinct absence of innovation, a strong dependence on legacy portfolios and maintenance revenues, and unwieldy product suites sealed the fate of the big four. Here are our top three reasons for their decline:
Reason #1: Acquisitions are not a substitute for organic innovation
A big reason for the fall of the legacy ITOM software providers was an over-reliance on acquisitions. The big four executives spent all their time pursuing deals and acquiring the hottest technology startups – instead of keeping their product stacks modern and relevant. The playbook was simple: fold the latest acquisition into an existing division and incentivise armies of salespeople to bundle and sell the new solution. Here’s a quick timeline of some notable acquisitions made by the big four since 2000:
Reason #2: How legacy software and maintenance fees propped up big four revenues
If there’s one technology that embodies legacy, it is mainframes. The dirty secret of the big four was their addiction to mainframe monitoring and management for revenue generation. If you look at CA’s revenues (excluding services) in 2018, mainframe solutions accounted for 55% of revenues and 64% of segment operating margins. In contrast, enterprise solutions drove only 45% of revenues and just 9% of its segment operating margins. Similarly, for BMC, mainframe tools brought in 43% of overall revenues in 2013 – the last year in which the company reported financial results before selling itself.
Another factor that prevented the big four from embracing innovation, in the form of SaaS delivery models, is maintenance fees. At BMC, maintenance revenues accounted for 52% ($1.12bn), 50% ($1.08bn), and 50% ($1.02bn) of overall revenues in 2013, 2012 and 2011. Micro Focus made 67% ($720.7m) and 66% ($754.5m) of its revenues from maintenance fees in 2017 and 2016.
Reason #3: Big four suites: Bloated, disjointed, and out of touch with market realities
When you analyse any big four solution, you find suites like HP OpenView are built on legacy tools like Operations Manager i and Network Node Manager i. Even BMC’s recent Cognitive Service Management sits on age-old solutions like Remedy and Discovery. The big four resorted to buying and folding different products into their ITOM portfolios to keep flagship suites like Tivoli and TrueSight relevant. Sales teams then sold the mantra of a single pane of glass for enhanced visibility and control across your IT infrastructure.
Most big four suites would take several quarters to implement, along with the need for expensive third-party professional services. Besides the time and cost overruns, the process of consolidating disparate products into a single framework was a Herculean challenge. Most big four suite implementations failed to deliver the efficiency, simplicity, and scalability that was originally promised during the sale.
What’s next for DevOps and IT operations teams? New players have emerged to fill the vacuum created by the exit of the big four. Cutting-edge, cloud-based technologies are taking the place of tool suites. And business consolidation, including the likes of Splunk/VictorOps, VMware/CloudHealth, are presenting new challengers to old technology. The future is agile, modular and flexible. As business blazes a new trail forward, it’s time for technology to transform along with it.
Tresorit, a European provider of cloud security and collaboration software, has announced it has raised €11.5 million (£10.4m) in series B funding to help accelerate growth and scale marketing and sales operations.
The company, which sits in the enterprise file and sync space, offers products focused at the legal, healthcare and HR departments around encrypted storage and secure file sharing, as well as GDPR-compliant solutions. Tresorit already has more than 17,000 customers, with recurring revenue growing on average by three times each year for the past three years.
Funding for the series B, which takes the company’s total funding to €15m, included contributions from 3TS Capital Partners, who led the round, and PorfoLion.
Like others in the space, such as Egnyte, Tresorit’s particular focus on the enterprise side of the market – and with one eye looking at the continually rising number of data breaches – has stood the company in good stead.
The company said it saw growing interest in its service particularly in the months leading up to GDPR. “More and more businesses realise that the cloud is a convenient way to store and share files, but are afraid to make the switch due to security and compliance concerns,” Tresorit spokesperson Katalin Jakucs told CloudTech. “With security guaranteed by Tresorit’s end-to-end encryption and various data control features, businesses don’t have to worry about achieving compliance in the cloud.”
Writing in a blog post following the announcement, Tresorit CEO Istvan Lam said future plans included product enhancements, such as control features and password recovery, as well as the launch of Tresorit Send, a standalone file sharing offering. “With the help of the new investment, we aim to enable many more organisations to keep control over their data online,” wrote Lam.
“Tresorit’s service is critically important for customers in light of the growing number of data breaches reported on a daily basis,” said Jozsef Kover, partner at 3TS in a statement. “The management team has a clear vision on how the company will further expand its reach, especially among enterprise and SMB clients.
“The company has already established itself as a leader in its market and is experiencing strong, consistent growth,” added Kover. “We look forward to support the management on their journey to further expansion and global scale.”
Kover will join the board of Tresorit as part of the move.