(c)iStock.com/MaboHH

With the latest VMworld event kicking off in Las Vegas, end user computing giant VMware came prepared with a litany of news releases. Yet the news was more of an update than anything completely new; an extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy, as well as the continuation of a partnership with IBM.

Back in February last year, this reporter penned a piece arguing why VMware hadn’t left it too late with its hybrid push. The new release of the VMware Cloud Foundation, utilising what it calls ‘cross-cloud architecture’ which allows users to manage applications running in private and public clouds and across multiple vendors, promises “huge strides in helping customers transform into digital businesses.”

“All business is digital business,” said Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO in the opening keynote. “There is no longer a meaningful distinction – and every industry and every core business process is becoming driven by digital, being driven by the cloud.”

This discussion was précised by a series of stats – essentially, the history of cloud computing as VMware saw it – as well as a spot of future-gazing. We didn’t go as far back as the AT&T video from 1993 which was certainly one of the earliest instances of the word ‘cloud’ in its current technological guise, but we did hear a snippet of speech from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt dating from 2006, where VMware argued that 98% of workloads ran on traditional IT – the 2% which didn’t was “largely” from Salesforce. Fast forward to 2016 and that number stands at 73%, with 15% and 12% for public and private cloud respectively.

According to VMware, 2021 will be the year when 50% of workloads will be in the cloud, and 2030 the year when public cloud will reach the dominant share. The number of workloads – defined as an operating system instance – will go up from 29 million in 2006 to almost 600 million by 2030.

VMware’s vision for the leading and lacking businesses. Picture credit: VMware

For the time being, however, we have VMware Cloud Foundation. The press material describes it as a release which “offers a new ‘as a service’ option that delivers the full power of the SDDC (software-defined data centre) in a hybrid cloud environment.”

In other words, VMware aims to be an enabler for businesses running on other, more populous clouds. This is why the future stats, and the message VMware is pushing, is important. If public cloud is expected to become the primary destination for workloads by 2030, then this enterprise as a middleman has a defined shelf life.

Related to this was the partner news, which primarily came through an update on VMware’s work with IBM. Since the partnership was announced in February this year, the companies say that more than 500 new clients are running VMware’s software on IBM’s cloud. The three marquee customers named were Marriott International, Clarient Global LLC, and Monitise. “Our collaboration with VMware is becoming the glue for many organisations to scale and create new business opportunities while making the most of their existing IT investments in a hybrid cloud,” said Robert LeBlanc, SVP IBM’s cloud operation in a statement.

The final aspect of the opening day to note, again looking into the future, was a short chat between Gelsinger and Michael Dell, who spoke of the importance of VMware’s open ecosystem moving forward and a shared focus on making the customer cloud architecture journey easier. Dell, of course, announced its intent to acquire EMC, incorporating into it not only VMware but Pivotal, VCE, ERS, and Virtustream, in October last year.

You can find the main VMware announcements here.

The traditional workplace consisting of fixed cubicles where day in and day out employees come and work normal business hours is gone and new generation of “Untethered Workplace” where there is no fixed slots for any employee and ideally the workplace has the capacity of only a subset of total employees will be the future.
Digital enterprises are here to stay and more and more startups and even traditional enterprises are transforming them selves towards new ways of working. The office space in a traditional sense is not only expensive from real estate and maintenance point of view, but also that the new generation of employees are not really tied to one city or one work place rather they are working from any where, any time. Enterprise mobility has firmly taken roots such that most employees feel comfortable by accessing their business applications from outside the office boundaries to become more agile and responsive.

read more

“Going mobile” seems to be the mantra of modern day enterprises, with 63 percent of them firmly believing that mobility leads to competitive advantage. Their belief is not without cause, as a recent survey by Nielson reports that 93 percent of consumers who research products via mobile go on to make the purchase, while 55 percent of them make the purchase within an hour. If this wasn’t reason enough for businesses to jump on the mobility bandwagon, high operational efficiency coupled with increased employee productivity and customer loyalty paint a compelling picture.

read more

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Managed cloud services provider Rackspace is to be acquired by private equity company Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion (£3.26bn), it has been announced.

“This is a big day for Rackspace,” wrote Taylor Rhodes, Rackspace CEO, in a blog post. “We expect that this transaction will help us better serve our customers in 120 countries, who now include more than half of the Fortune 100.

“It will allow us additional flexibility to enhance the multi-cloud services that today’s customers demand, and to seize the big opportunity that we face as the world’s #1 managed cloud company,” Rhodes added.

The deal’s total $4.3bn value includes the assumption of $43 million of net cash, with shares going at $32.00 each, representing a 38% premium as of August 3 – which Rackspace notes was the last trading day “prior to news reports speculating about a potential transaction.”

Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace, said the move was a result of “diligent analysis and thoughtful strategic deliberations” by the board across many months. “We are confident that as a private company, Rackspace will be best positioned to capitalise on our early leadership of the fast-growing managed cloud services industry,” he said.

As the press material inferred, speculation has been rife for most of the previous month around Rackspace’s future.

Earlier in August, the company sold its Cloud Sites business unit to Michigan-based hosting provider Liquid Web. Speaking to analysts a few days before around Rackspace’s latest financial results – 277 customers on its AWS service over the past nine months with 60% choosing the higher tier option the highlight – Rhodes refused to comment on speculation, but noted that 2017 IT spending growth would “almost certainly” be negative – with Gartner statistics on the Brexit EU referendum vote cited as a possible reason – and that selling “non-core” Cloud Sites would give the company “more focus.”

This story however goes back a bit further. Back in 2014, the company did an abrupt about-turn after considering various M&A options before deciding to carry on alone. Rhodes was named CEO at the same time; Weston had stepped into the breach following the retirement of Lanham Napier six months earlier.

Ian Moyse, a cloud industry leader – and formerly senior sales exec at Rackspace – said the news came as no surprise, and sounded a cautious note around its AWS and Azure services. “Those at the top will have felt pressures to do something different and separate themselves from the shackles of current measurements,” he told CloudTech. “This will give them some breathing space to reshape their market position, but they are going to have to sell an awful lot more of these cheaper third party services at lower resale margins to get anywhere near the results of their past.

“The next 24 months is going to be key to Rackspace to reposition itself in the lucrative cloud and IoT markets,” he added.

Traditional on-premises data centers have long been the domain of modern data platforms like Apache Hadoop, meaning companies who build their business on public cloud were challenged to run Big Data processing and analytics at scale. But recent advancements in Hadoop performance, security, and most importantly cloud-native integrations, are giving organizations the ability to truly gain value from all their data.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, David Tishgart, Director of Product Marketing at Cloudera, will cover the ins and outs of Hadoop, and how it can help cloud-based businesses.

read more

Web-scale IT is a pattern of global-class computing that delivers the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting by reimagining positions across several dimensions. The unprecedented explosion of Big Data and cloud services is driving the development of new storage architectures to store the information produced by this web-scale trend. It is becoming increasingly clear that even a linear growth trajectory for storage is insufficient to deliver the quantity of storage needed for data produced by the Internet of Things. Current architectures have bottlenecks that, while merely inconvenient for legacy data, are simply unacceptable for the scale of storage needed today.

read more

(c)iStock.com/ismagilov

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has today released a mammoth document detailing the 100 best practices in big data security – running the gamut from traditional cybersecurity measures to cutting edge cryptographic technologies.

The document discusses each tip at more of a cursory than comprehensive level, offering a few sentences on why and how organisations should implement them. The report goes through 10 areas with 10 tips for each, from real-time security and compliance monitoring to secure data storage, and endpoint monitoring.

One of the more interesting areas of the report focuses on cryptographic technologies for big data. “Rather than burdensome requirements, there is an increased perception that cryptographic technologies are harbingers of trusted utility for impending advances in information technology,” the report authors explain. “There is a realisation across the industry that cryptographic technologies are imperative for cloud storage and big data.”

As a result, key tips are shared, from constructing a system to search and filter for encrypted data, to implementing identity-based encryption – avoiding issues with public key crypto systems – to utilising ‘oblivious RAM’. By shuffling the memory location after data is accessed, not even cloud service providers can tell which data is which, therefore hiding the access pattern.

“This is an important initiative for the cloud community as new security challenges have arisen from the coupling of big data with public cloud environments,” said J.R. Santos, CSA EVP research. “As big data expands through streaming cloud technology, traditional security mechanisms tailored to secure small-scale, static data on firewalled and semi-isolated networks are inadequate.

“Security and privacy issues are magnified by this volume, variety and velocity of big data. This handbook serves as a comprehensive list of best practices for companies to use when securing big data,” Santos added.

You can read the full report here (registration optional).

(c)iStock.com/4774344sean

EMC has announced the general availability of its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 4.0 product, a new hybrid cloud offering aiming to help customers advance their cloud journey, as well as given more information on Native Hybrid Cloud.

“Understanding the needs of organisations to transform a more modern, automated, self-service IT environment, EMC continues to develop and deliver innovations into its cloud platforms that are designed, supported and sustained as one to help customers simplify and accelerate their digital business initiatives,” the press material notes.

The company is also set to launch Native Hybrid Cloud in September, which is built on hyperconverged VCE VxRail appliances. The product is designed to smart small and quickly scale and provide a platform to give organisations a ‘flexible, cost effective and optimised hybrid cloud platform for cloud native application development’.

The new products make note of EMC, VMware and VCE technologies. “EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud are the fastest, surest path to the cloud based on the unrivalled level of collaboration between EMC and VMware,” said Peter Cutts, EMC VP solutions. “They enable our customers to shift their focus from building infrastructure to delivering innovative new services that differentiate their business.

“Today’s announcements emphasise our commitment to developing hybrid cloud platforms that ignite our customers’ IT transformations and simplify and accelerate their path to becoming a digital-driven business.”

“Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud are built on a foundation of proven VMware technologies,” said Loretta Brown, vice president of federation at VMware. “With the vRealize Cloud Management platform, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud delivers customers the cloud consumption experience and agility they need to make their transformational cloud journey.

“These platforms accelerate IT’s ability to deliver a software-defined environment that is ready to support the needs of both traditional and cloud-native applications,” added Brown.

EMC was bought by Dell for $67 billion (£43.7bn) in October last year.