Technological innovation drives every business, industry and sector – mostly positively, but not always. 2016 was no exception – from the first long-haul driverless cargo delivery to automated retail locations to the stiffening competition among ‘smart assistants’ we’re seeing big technological leaps at a breakneck pace.
At the same time, many of the enterprise trends of the last few years are continuing, such as traditional businesses leading big digital transformation and the move to public clouds, with the continued market dominance of Amazon’s $13B AWS business.
Announcing @TS_Embedded to Exhibit at @ThingsExpo | #IoT #AI #Embedded
SYS-CON Events announced today that Technologic Systems Inc., an embedded systems solutions company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Technologic Systems is an embedded systems company with headquarters in Fountain Hills, Arizona. They have been in business for 32 years, helping more than 8,000 OEM customers and building over a hundred COTS products that have never been discontinued. Technologic Systems’ product base consists of a wide variety of off-the-shelf PC/104 single board computers, computer-on-modules, touch panel computers, peripherals and industrial controllers. They also offer custom configurations and design services. Technologic Systems specializes in the ARM and X86 architectures, FPGA IP-core design, and open-source software support based on Linux, Android, and Windows, providing advanced custom solutions using hardware-software co-design strategies.
Microsoft Office 365 wins cloud game in Europe
(c)iStock/MrIncredible
Google is losing ground to Microsoft in the game of “cloud”.
The company – which broke the mould with a cloud-based office productivity pack, the G Suite – is behind Microsoft Office 365 in Europe. According to a research from data protection company Bitglass, adoption of the Microsoft suite in the region has more than doubled in the past year.
The study is based on analysis of 8,000 mail servers to determine the cloud apps being used in businesses.
Bitglass stated that, in the UK, adoption of Office 365 grew from 16.4% in 2015 to 35% in 2016, while G Suite’s adoption increased from 7.2% in 2015 to 18.7% in 2016.
In France, adoption of Office 365 grew from 22.4% in 2015 to 49.8% in 2016, while German adoption grew from 16.2% to 40%. French adoption of G Suite grew from 14.5% in 2015 to 32.3%, while in Germany the adoption of G Suite grew from 6.3% to 23.3%.
From an industry sector perspective, Google is said to have seen major wins in media companies previously, boasting businesses such as News Corp as early adopters. Google holds 31.7% share in media and 24.9% in technology, but Microsoft’s cloud-based Office Suite showed the larger share of adoption in all sectors.
Bitglass further reported that 49% of organisations with 1,000+ employees have deployed Office 365, while only 20% have deployed G Suite.
The study also found a higher cloud usage in large public companies than in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as higher rates of adoption for Office 365 than for G Suite.
Adoption of Office 365 has grown 9% among public companies to 55.4% on a year-over-year basis, while G Suite deployments is at a much slower rate in both public and private organisations.
Cisco to Stop Intercloud by March 2017
Cisco has announced that it will stop its Cisco Intercloud Services (CIS) in March 2017, and the existing workloads will be moved to other infrastructure. A spokesperson of the company confirmed that some may even be moved to the public cloud, depending on the nature of the workload, though it did not specify which public cloud will be chosen for this move.
This is a part of Cisco’s cloud strategy, and has been in the pipeline for some time now. In October, it announced a timeline to move its workloads to other private and public, and according to that document, the last date to order CIS through point-of-sale mechanism is March 31, 2017. It is not known if support for CIS would also end on the same date, or if there will be an extension based on a case-by-case basis. According to Kip Compton, Vice-President for Cloud Platform and Services, all clients on CIS would be fully migrated by the specified deadline.
Cisco has stated that it’s evolving customer demands have led the company to change its cloud strategy. According to a release, Cisco believes that the cloud industry has undergone massive transformation over the last two years, and many of its customers are looking to develop applications that would drive their digital transformations. In the light of these developments, the company believes its best to move away from CIS, and focus on other aspects of it cloud business. Some reports show that Cisco is planning to focus extensively on enterprise hybrid cloud and SP network virtualization, to ensure that its existing resources are being utilized to the optimum.
The concept of intercloud was introduced by Cisco in 2014, to make it easy for cloud providers to move their data between different clouds. This was hugely beneficial to many companies, as they could offer better service to their customers by moving workloads to clouds that were closer to the customers’ location.
CIS’ Intercloud comprises of computing, storage, and networking services, that are on par with some of the leading cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. CIS offered Virtual Machine instances that were optimized for general purpose workloads, as well as instances that were optimized for compute, storage, and memory. In addition, it gives customers a wide range of operating system choices that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Windows operating system. It is based on OpenStack – the open source cloud software.
It is worthy to note that HP also launched an intercloud service in the past and killed it, while Dell made plans to launch an Openstack-based cloud, but later moved away from it. Rackspace, the company that helped develop OpenStack, has stopped offering cloud services on it. All these companies have moved away from intercloud, as they believe that it does not play an important role in the cloud market at this point in time. In the future, if the cloud industry transforms to accept intercloud, then maybe they will start thinking about it again.
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Crossing the Line from Virtual to Real | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #AI #Sensors
I was on a high-rise construction site 34-floors above the city. I was talking to the construction crew when a fight broke out. There was an explosion and the floor collapsed. I removed the virtual reality (VR) goggles and laughed. It was so real. The VR solutions provided an incredible experience, almost like being there. As good as my experience was, it was not reality. It was a controlled pre-programmed experience – a notional idea. Today, however, VR and sensor technologies enable a notional idea to become reality – a Real-Reality.
[slides] Staying Secure & Organized in the Cloud | @CloudExpo @SearchYourCloud #Cloud #Security #Compliance
As companies adopt the cloud-to-streamline workflow, deployment hasn’t been very seamless because of IT concerns surrounding security risks. The cloud offers many benefits, but protecting and securing information can be tricky across multiple cloud providers and remains IT’s overall responsibility.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, addressed security compliance issues associated with cloud applications and how document-level encryption is critical for supplementing existing enterprise security solutions. He drew from case studies, outlined best practices for businesses and demoed how data can be transported and stored to and from the cloud already encrypted and securely accessed no matter where it’s stored.
[video] Technology Roadmaps with @ImpigerTech | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Mobile
“We’re a custom software development company. We do enterprise solutions, mobility and cloud,” explained Santosh Ahuja, Director of Architecture at Impiger Technologies, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
How to Use Microsoft Ink on a Mac
Parallels Desktop 12 Update 1 was released a few weeks ago. You can read about all the changes in this update here. In this blog post, I will discuss in some detail only one of the Update 1 features: even greater support for Microsoft Ink. As I wrote about in an earlier blog post, Ink […]
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Oracle’s Cloud Transition Path
Oracle is the perfect poster boy for the growing might of cloud computing. This tech stalwart is steadily moving its operations to the cloud, and is slowly moving away from selling its traditional on-premise licensed software. This transition is expected to reflect in its earnings too. In fact, many analysts are looking forward to the quarterly results that will be announced on December 15.
The street consensus is an earnings of $9.14 billion in revenue, that would lead to an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.60. They also expect Oracle to announce a positive outlook for the next quarter, and expect it to generate around $9.24 billion in revenue, amounting to an earnings per share of $0.64.
While it’s not a surprise to see tech companies growing and expanding their offerings, what’s special about Oracle is it’s move to the cloud. In many ways, this also reflects the growing might of the cloud industry at large.
NetSuite
A defining moment in Oracle’s cloud transition path came on November 7th of this year when it acquired a cloud based provider called NetSuite for a sum of $9.3 billion. NetSuite is a provider of customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software, and with this acquisition, Oracle took a big step forward into the world of cloud services. It’s worthy to note that Oracle’s co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison owned almost 40 percent in NetSuite.
Textura
Before NetSuite, Oracle acquired other companies in the cloud space as well. In May of 2016, it purchased Textura for a sum of $663 million. Textura is a cloud-based construction management company that handled around $3.4 billion in payments at the time of its acquisition. This company provided services to more than 6,000 companies in the construction sector by helping them manage projects within specified time and budget constraints, and also, by reducing risk for developers.
Opower
Oracle acquired Opower on May 2nd, 2016 for a sum of $532 million. Opower is a prominent player in the utilities market, with its offering of customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services for utility providers. This company has more than 100 clients, including some prominent names such as PG&E, Exelon, and National Grid. The big data platform of Opower is believed to store and analyze more than 600 billion meter readings from around 60 million end customers. The analysis from this data helps its clients to proactively meet regulations, and offer a digital experience for its end customers.
With these acquisitions, oracle expanded its reach across different sectors. In addition, many of Oracle’s services are moved to the cloud, so it was able to make a larger foray into cloud-based services. Some reports even show that the company is vying to become the first cloud provider to hit the $10 billion revenue mark in the Saas/ PaaS segment.
This ambition could become a reality soon, as the tech giant has overcome the initial bottlenecks that come with the acquisition of new companies. In this sense, the worst of cloud transition is behind Oracle now, and it can look forward to an exciting future in the cloud world!
The post Oracle’s Cloud Transition Path appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Microsoft’s Azure-powered IoT solutions transforming Indian manufacturing industry
(c)iStock/photogearch
Microsoft recently presented three most significant IoT solutions that are said to be transforming the Indian manufacturing industry. These cloud-based solutions offered by Precimetrix, Teramatrix and Covacsis are powered by Azure – the Microsoft Cloud – that helps create digital, intelligent and predictive factories.
The solutions are already deployed across India’s leading organisations like Hero Moto Corp, Samudra LED, KEC, VE Commercial Vehicles, Godrej, TAFE, Bajaj, among others. By leveraging Azure, Microsoft partners are able to address challenges like rapidly changing customer preferences, hardware evolutions and managing hyper business growth in the manufacturing space.
This is how the solutions help the manufacturing sector create digital factories:
Customer engagement is the backbone of digital transformation which allows building tailored customer experiences by harnessing data and drawing actionable insights to achieve a segment of one.
Covacsis offers a platform that provides a 360 visibility of the manufacturing floor in real-time. Real-time visibility is helping the KEC team analyse run time, cycle time, availability and OEE of the machines in real time, allowing them to optimise the productivity output and minimise operational costs.
Another key pillar for digital transformation is the ability to empower employees, providing tools and processes for greater collaboration, mobility and insight. Microsoft works with a lot of its partners to offer solutions that help organisations achieve more by designing a workplace that is intelligent, flexible, and secure. Some of these offerings are provided by partners like ZingHR, Vymo, Qustn, Knolskape, Symphony Summitt, among others.
Precimetrix offers IoT and analytics to enable real-time process management and actionable analytics to improve productivity, efficiency and compliance. Samudra’s central monitoring system, powered by Precimetrix, provides smart street lighting system for JPC which has enabled the following benefits:
- Overall minimum committed annual energy savings of 77.13% in comparison to baseline
- Zero Investment project even for new lights for first seven years.
- 77.13% savings in energy costs at an expense of only 22.87%.
- 30.06% is JMC’s share in energy savings
- Reduction in maintenance cost by ~61.18%
Teramatrix offers an IoT software platform that enables companies to connect with their fixed or mobile infrastructure and analyse the massive data streams emanating from them. The deployment of their solution at Hero Moto Corp resulted in 20% expected increase in direct and indirect manpower productivity by enabling 24×7 continuity of testing operations and remote management of testing equipment.