With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend 21st Cloud Expo October 31 – November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, and June 12-14, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.
Introducing #DigitalTransformation Track at @CloudExpo | #AI #DX #IoT #FinTech #SmartCities
Digital transformation is changing the face of business. The IDC predicts that enterprises will commit to a massive new scale of digital transformation, to stake out leadership positions in the “digital transformation economy.” Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, Oct 31-Nov 2, will find fresh new content in a new track called Enterprise Cloud & Digital Transformation.
Salesforce cloud economy set to create 3.3 million jobs worldwide by 2022
When Salesforce was founded by two ex-Oracle executives in 1999, not only would the software landscape be changed, but a new economy would form underneath it.
A new report from IDC puts the number of jobs created by Salesforce and its ecosystem at 3.3 million worldwide between the end of 2016 and 2022.
The Salesforce ecosystem, the analyst firm asserts, is almost four times as big as Salesforce itself, as organisations who spend on cloud computing products also need to layout on ancillary services. In the six year period until 2022, the finance sector is expected to see the greatest gains, with $164 billion in new business revenue and 585,000 new jobs, with manufacturing, at $159bn new revenue and 638,000 new jobs, not far behind.
Not surprisingly, the US is far in front in terms of business revenue created, as well as on top for direct jobs created. Yet India, with almost 724,000, is the clear leader in terms of indirect jobs created; positions available by spending in the general economy by people filling the direct jobs.
The report also assessed the overall impact of cloud computing in the economy and job creation, giving best practice tips to organisations utilising or interested in cloud. IDC says the payoff to the larger organisation is much greater than the impact to the IT organisation “just as digital transformation is more than an IT function”, while the variety of cloud apps and development platforms available today mean most processes and workflows can be migrated to the cloud.
“IDC’s forecasts show a significant payback from investments in cloud computing out to 2022,” the report notes. “But even by then, spending on public cloud computing will be less than 13% of spending on IT. We are still on the ground floor of cloud computing, with lots of headroom for more payback.
“Salesforce and its ecosystem are well positioned to help customers take advantage of that headroom.”
Commenting on the report, Tyler Prince, Salesforce executive president of worldwide alliances and go to market innovation, wrote: “Last year, IDC forecasted the Salesforce Economy would create 1.9 million jobs and $389 billion in new revenues by 2020. We are encouraged by this huge increase from last year, and the strong momentum from the community of Salesforce customers, partners and developers who power the Salesforce Economy.”
Alongside the report, Salesforce also announced updates to AppExchange, the company’s enterprise cloud marketplace. New features include intelligent search, personalised recommendations, and embedded learning with Trailhead, the company’s education platform.
Cisco Buying Broadsoft
Cisco systems, one of the giants in the world of IT, has announced that it is buying Broadsoft Inc for $1.9 million in cash. This translates to about $55 per share for Broadsoft’s investors, thereby marking an almost two percent increase over the closing price of Broadsoft’s shares on Friday.
Broadsoft is based in Gaithersburg, Maryland and it specializes in providing telecommunication services like phone, audio, video conferencing, and virtual meeting rooms. This company’s primary focus is on small and medium customers who can’t afford an overhaul of their existing infrastructure. This niche area of small and medium business is one of the reasons for Cisco’s acquisition.
In addition, Broadsoft has many software tools that are used by large cable and telecommunication providers, and Cisco believes these tools will come handy as it expands to cater to a network-intensive world.
Cisco, based in San Jose California, is changing its strategy to meet the new needs of its business environment. According to the company’s spokesperson, more businesses want to have a complete contact center that they can deploy in the cloud. Though Cisco is ready for this change, it still makes sense to have collaboration tools from smaller companies like Broadsoft.
This move also signals a push away from its traditional switching and routing business. In fact, this move can give Cisco access to small and medium-sized business markets that need an integrated mobile, video, voice and other forms of communication.
To top it, most of Cisco’s products such as WebEx are based on premises, which means, they have to be installed manually. On the other hand, Broadsoft’s products are cloud-based, so Cisco can make the most of them without going through the cycle of development.
For all these reasons, it’s a good move by Cisco and it got a big thumbs up from its investors right away, as the share prices rose by one percent.
This deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2018, after which broadsoft’s employees will be a part of Cisco’s unified communications technology group.
The post Cisco Buying Broadsoft appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
From grassroots to the cloud: How SD-WAN can provide a solution
Air travel: what a gift to global business! Any executive from any country can leap onto a plane and, within a few hours, be busy in any overseas commercial centre or branch office. Only it is not quite like that.
The fact is that, for all the wonders of modern aviation’s high-speed links between major airports across the globe, the typical journey between a distant branch office and the nearest airport (at both ends) can be so tiresome and unpredictable that frustrating and unproductive hours can be wasted. Few faces light up at the prospect of a meeting overseas.
Today’s business networks are similar. Global service providers’ subsea and overland links have shrunk the world, delivering business class cloud connectivity to every major commercial, financial or government centre. It would be an absolute gift to any global enterprise – if only every sub office had equal and convenient access to those same cloud services. The reality is that cloud business applications are mostly accessed over the “best effort” Internet and not every office can depend on reliable QoS. Cloud computing, compared with on-premise solutions, can become as frustrating as that rush hour journey to the airport.
One solution to the nightmare car journey might be to take a train to the airport where possible. It reduces unpredictability but is less flexible and can be expensive. This is like paying for direct connection to the cloud via a private network: you get a better service, but lose some of the cost and flexibility advantages that make it worth migrating to the cloud.
So let us dream a little. If only road traffic could be perfectly managed in real time – with on-going traffic monitoring and flexible real-time re-routing and re-allocation of lanes and routes. Then car journeys would be faster, less frustrating, and a lot more predictable. Sending out truck roll teams to change the signs and re-route traffic would simply add more traffic to the chaos, so the solution would require a Traffic Control Plane separate from the actual Traffic. But, provided an intelligent central controller could monitor every junction and flip switches to optimise traffic flow in real time, the commuter benefits would be enormous.
Establishing such a road network would be very expensive and it would take years of installation and fine-tuning – but some say it will eventually be inevitable. This has, however, already been achieved on data networks. It is called Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and basically it means imposing a separate Control Plane on which data traffic in the network can be continuously monitored, analysed by a central controller and the flow optimised by controlling the network’s switches. SDN means that the configuration and policy of the network is dynamically programmable to respond rapidly to changes. SDN has revolutionised local area networks and data centre connectivity and is already extending to wider areas.
The SD-WAN
SD–WAN (Software-Defined Wide-Area Networks) applies SDN principles to the practical realities of the Wide Area Network – such as minimising delays over long distances between nodes, and providing predictable service quality over less predictable links.
When the network can extend across thousands of miles, the SD-WAN will make local forwarding decisions based on observed local conditions, such as link quality and throughput. The central controller implements software forwarding based not only on centralised policy objectives but also real-time network quality. The routing, priority and security for any application data flow is therefore independent of the actual network transport – whether wired Ethernet, MPLS, wireless, cellular, or a public Internet link. For a SD-WAN the SDN central controller concept is extended to allow continued operation with or without instructions from the controller – this ensures maximum uptime, optimized data delivery, and supports application service level guarantees.
There are other challenges that are addressed by SD-WANs, such as the implementation of Rest APIs to allow the controllers to interact with far-flung nodes and services. Above all, there is the challenge of less standardisation in the WAN space, so a lot of work is still being done to allow interoperability between different vendors’ equipment, and to allow the use of virtual machine hosting on common off-the-shelf hardware.
What does SD–WAN mean for business?
Scattered offices do not all enjoy equal access to the Internet. They often have to take advantage of whatever is available at relatively short notice. MPLS is nice, but more agile technologies such as Internet broadband, wireless and LTE may be quicker to install and often at much lower cost. SD-WAN can integrate any number of such links seamlessly to provide better bandwidth and reliability to the branch office, while maintaining required levels of security regardless of the underlying link structure.
This is a practical, cost-effective way to extend the full benefits of cloud computing to the very edges of an enterprise. It makes it quick and easy to integrate new network services, virtualize services, load-share over multiple different links, simplify configuration and policy management, and optimize application performance.
It is like the idealised national road network imagined earlier – except that it is becoming a reality and not just a dream. SD-WAN ensures reliable, high quality transport from the remotest or least well served branch office to the “airport”, where data streams connect to global long haul networks offering fast, reliable connectivity to and from cloud providers. Effectively, the SD-WAN assures application performance over the “last mile” transport, and the Service Provider network is then responsible for application performance over the long haul transport to the cloud service.
The traffic on a suitable service provider network can be classified according to the enterprise’s own business policies, then individual data streams can be split into sub-streams without duplication, so that the data sub-streams can be routed across diverse data paths in a similar way that mobile networks optimise communication. Each sub-stream can be individually encrypted according to the service policy and routed to an independent data control node. These assignments are then dynamically shaped, in real-time, according to the service’s required QoE policies. The service provider gateway decrypts each sub-stream, re-assembles them into the full data stream and passes the data direct to the cloud provider.
Conclusion
IDC has predicted that 80% of new applications will be deployed in the cloud by 2030 and that public cloud will reach $141 billion by 2019. Many enterprises, however, find that their applications suffer poor or locally inconsistent performance when running in the cloud. Corporate IT needs an easier way to ensure control, security, performance and quality of experience for critical cloud applications, while allocating lower priority for merely recreational or non-business critical applications.
What is needed is an established system of distributed gateways at the front doorstep of all the major cloud service providers. It must offer the sort of optimised business service described above, and it should work with a company that offers corresponding SD–WAN optimisation of the last mile via – no matter what type of access is available to branch offices. A SD-WAN service provider should also be able to host their own multi-tenant and multi-segment gateways which dynamically enables their edge devices on the customer premises allow the customer to make or upgrade their own cloud connection at short notice, while being confident of excellent user experience, predictable performance, security and reliability. These service provider gateways should also federate with SD-WAN system of distributed gateways.
Extending the service provider’s capillary reach in this way, brings superb business services to every branch office. Straight from the cloud to grass roots users.
[session] Continuous Deep Learning for Visual Systems | @CloudExpo @CalSci #AI #ML #DL #Cloud
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, James Henry, Co-CEO/CTO of Calgary Scientific Inc., will introduce you to the challenges, solutions and benefits of training AI systems to solve visual problems with an emphasis on improving AIs with continuous training in the field. He will explore applications in several industries and discuss technologies that allow the deployment of advanced visualization solutions to the cloud.
[session] Cloud DevOps with a Visual Model | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DevOps #Automation
As people view cloud as a preferred option to build IT systems, the size of the cloud-based system is getting bigger and more complex. As the system gets bigger, more people need to collaborate from design to management. As more people collaborate to create a bigger system, the need for a systematic approach to automate the process is required. Just as in software, cloud now needs DevOps.
In this session, the audience can see how people can solve this issue with a visual model. Visual models have existed for a long time. It is easy to perceive and understand, so people set various standards around the various models. And it’s ideal for cloud DevOps, just like CAD is for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).
Why worldwide IT spending will hit $120 billion by 2021
More CIOs are investing in business technology that improves their organisation's resilience to cyber threats. Worldwide spending on IT security-related hardware, software, and services is forecast to reach $119.9 billion in 2021, according to the latest global market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).
With nearly every industry investing in IT security solutions, enterprise spending will achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6 percent over the 2016-2021 forecast period. Worldwide spending on security products and services will total $83.5 billion in 2017, an increase of 10.3 percent over 2016.
IT security market development
"Three overarching trends are driving security spending: a dynamic threat landscape, increasing regulatory pressures, and architectural changes spurred by digital transformation initiatives," said Sean Pike, vice president at IDC. "While IDC expects spending to continue growing, organisations are actively searching for product and service efficiencies that maximise spend in order to fully address such complex challenges."
IDC expects security spending to be somewhat evenly spread across four industry sectors in 2017: distribution and services ($19.7 billion), public sector ($18.6 billion), manufacturing and resources ($16.4 billion), and financial ($16.3 billion).
By 2021, however, the financial sector is forecast to move ahead of manufacturing and resources due to a 2016-2021 CAGR of 10.2 percent. Similarly, public sector security spending will nearly pull even with distribution and services by 2021 with a CAGR of 10.3 percent. The fastest growing sector over the five-year forecast period will be infrastructure with a CAGR of 11.8 percent.
On a global basis, banks, discrete manufacturers, and federal or central government agencies will spend the most on security products and services throughout the forecast period. Combined, these three industries will contribute to 30 percent of the worldwide total spending in 2017.
In addition to being among the industries spending the most on security solutions in 2017, federal or central government and banking will be two of the industries that will see the fastest growth in security spending over the five-year forecast, with CAGRs of 10.9 and 10.7 percent, respectively.
The industry that will see the fastest growth is telecommunications, with a CAGR of 12.6 percent. This growth will enable telecommunications to become the fourth largest industry in terms of total security spend in 2021, moving ahead of the process manufacturing and professional services industries.
More than 80 percent of security spending in 2017 will go to services and software. Services spending will be led by two of the largest technology categories – managed security services ($15.25 billion) and integration services ($12.5 billion).
Software spending will be focused on three categories – endpoint security, identity and access management, and security and vulnerability management – that will make up more than 75 percent of the software total this year.
Hardware spending will be significantly smaller throughout the forecast, dominated by network security solutions ($13.7 billion in 2017). In addition to being the two largest technology categories, managed security services and network security will also be the fastest growing categories during the 2016-2021 forecast with CAGRs of 14.3 and 11.4 percent, respectively.
Outlook for IT security market growth
The largest market for security products and services on a geographic basis will be North America with total spending of $37.8 billion this year. The second largest geographic market will be Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at $26.2 billion followed by Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) at $11.5 billion.
APeJ will see the fastest growth in security spending over the forecast period with a five-year CAGR of 19.9 percent. Within the region, China and Malaysia will see particularly strong growth with five-year CAGRs of 25.3 and 20.1 percent, respectively. Latin America is also expected to outperform the overall market with a CAGR of 10.4 percent.
[session] @Nordstrom’s #DigitalTransformation | @CloudExpo #DevOps #AI #DX
Nordstrom is transforming the way that they do business and the cloud is the key to enabling speed and hyper personalized customer experiences. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ken Schow, VP of Engineering at Nordstrom, will discuss some of the key learnings and common pitfalls of large enterprises moving to the cloud. This includes strategies around choosing a cloud provider(s), architecture, and lessons learned. In addition, he’ll go over some of the best practices for structured team migration and discuss ways to control cloud costs.
Can IBM get back to the top again?
The changing landscape of the IT industry has changed the fortunes of many companies. While companies like AWS, Microsoft and Google have been able to cash in on the fortunes, others like IBM and HPE haven’t been so lucky. In fact, HPE recently closed its low-end cloud server business because it’s not profitable for the company any more.
As for IBM, the changes have been too hard. This company was deep-rooted in the traditional server and infrastructure business, so it has been tough to adapt to new technologies like AI and cloud that need a paradigm shift in the way the infrastructure is setup and handled.
Over the last 21 quarters, this almost-century-old company has seen falling year-on-year revenues. In fact, Warren Buffet, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway announced that in May of this year, the company sold about a third of its stake in the company. This alone amounted to around $13.5 billion.
To make up for this loss, the company has been aggressively pushing into the areas of cloud computing and AI, but is this a story of too little too late or can IBM get back to the top again?
Well, the latest results announced by the company on October 17th show that revenues have slipped again. However, the good news is that revenues fell lesser than expected. So, many supporters of the company including its management believe that the next quarter could see good returns. This positive statement by the company caused its shares to rise by 8.9 percent the following day, which is the biggest single day gain in the stock market since 2009.
These signs indicate that good things are yet to come for the company and after all, there is still some hope. This is not the first time that IBM had to make this strategic shift in its operations. After almost a near-death in 1990s after the collapse of mainframes, IBM continued to find its niche and stay on top of the technology sector. In fact, if you look back, you’ll see that it was one of the first companies to adapt to the Internet and back open-source software. It assured investors of good returns within five years and even spent billions of dollars in buyback programs. This strategy worked well for the company and its investors.
Likewise, this time too, we can expect IBM to bounce back because it is after all doing the right things. Though AWS, Microsoft and Google have a huge lead in the cloud services market, IBM is not too far behind. With such diligence, good strategy and wise managerial decisions, it can definitely bounce back.
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