Apple, Apple Pay, blockchain, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Santander

Santander implements Blockchain in international payments app

Santander Apple PaySantander has claimed it is now the first UK bank to use Blockchain technologies transfer live international payments between £10 and £10,000 24 hours a day.

The implementation is currently being rolled out as a staff pilot, though the team have not announced when it will be available for customers to use. Blockchain technologies are beginning to gain more traction in the cloud world, as it can enable faster and more accurate transfer of data and value.

“The need for finance has evolved from providing a physical Pound in your pocket or card in your purse, where you pay at a till, to being seamlessly integrated into a new, always on, connected lifestyle,” said Sigga Sigurdardottir, Head of Customer and Innovation at Santander.

“At Santander we work hard to ensure our banking is simple, personal and fair and believe new Blockchain technology will play a transformational role in the way we achieve our goals and better serve our customers, adding value by creating more choice and convenience.”

The new app connects to Apple Pay, where users can confirm payments using Touch ID. The Blockchain technology underpinning the app is provided by Ripple, which has been the recipient of investment through Santander Innoventures, the company’s global corporate venture capital fund, focused on early stage FinTech investments.

“As an early adopter and pioneer in the banking industry, Santander is the first bank in the world to transfer real funds externally. In doing so, they are creating a new, exemplary standard of service,” said Chris Larsen, CEO at Ripple.

acquisition, Artificial intelligence, Intel, Internet of Things, IoT, Machine learning, News & Analysis

Intel continues to innovate through Itseez acquisition

IntelIntel has continued its strides into the IoT market through the acquisition of Itseez, a computer vision and machine learning company.

Itseez, which was founded by two former Intel employees, specializes in computer vision algorithms and implementations, which can be used for a number of different applications, including autonomous driving, digital security and surveillance, and industrial inspection. The Itseez inclusion bolsters Intel’s capabilities to develop technology which electronically perceive and understand images.

“As the Internet of Things evolves, we see three distinct phases emerging,” said Doug Davis, GM for the Internet of Things Group at Intel. “The first is to make everyday objects smart – this is well underway with everything from smart toothbrushes to smart car seats now available. The second is to connect the unconnected, with new devices connecting to the cloud and enabling new revenue, services and savings. New devices like cars and watches are being designed with connectivity and intelligence built into the device.

“The third is just emerging when devices will require constant connectivity and will need the intelligence to make real-time decisions based on their surroundings. This is the ‘autonomous era’, and machine learning and computer vision will become critical for all kinds of machines – cars among them.”

The acquisition bolsters Intel’s capabilities in the potentially lucrative IoT segment, as the company continues its efforts to diversify its reach and enter into new growth markets. Last month, CEO Brian Krzanich outlined the organizations new strategy which is split into five sections; cloud technology, IoT, memory and programmable solutions, 5G and developing new technologies under the concept of Moore’s law. Efforts have focused around changing the perception of Intel from a PCs and mobile devices brand, to one which is built on a foundation of emerging technologies.

Intel’s move would appear to have made the decision of innovation through acquisition is a safer bet than organic, in-house innovation. There have been a small number of examples of organic diversification; Apple’s iPhone is one example, though the safer bet to move away from core competence is through acquisition.

Intel has dipped its toe into organic diversification, as it attempted to develop a portfolio of chips for mobile devices, though this would generally not be considered a successful venture, similar to Google’s continued efforts to organically grow into social, which could be seen as stuttering. On the contrary, Google’s advertising revenues now account for $67.39 billion (2015), with its platform being built almost entirely on acquisitions. The AdSense and Adwords services have been built and bolstered through various purchases including Applied Semantics ($102 million in 2003), dMarc Broadcasting ($102 million in 2006), DoubleClick ($3.1 billion in 2007), AdMob ($750 million in 2009) and Admeld ($400 million in 2011).

While diversification through acquisition can be seen as the safer, more practical and efficient means to move into new markets, it is by no means a guaranteed strategy. Intel’s strategy could be seen as a sensible option as there are far more examples off successful diversification through acquisition compared to organic growth. The jury is still out on Intel’s position in the IoT market but there are backing the tried and tested route to diversification.

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Why the PaaS market is not quite what it seems

(c)iStock.com/peshkov

According to research from Gartner, the platform as a service (PaaS) market crossed the $4 billion mark in 2015. Clearly, the growing maturity of PaaS offerings is reflected in its continuing double-digit annual growth with more than 130 vendors across 15 different categories of specialised PaaS services now vying for a piece of the action.

Of course, PaaS was always going to be the next big thing. In 2013, Gartner boldly predicted that by 2017, “75% of new SaaS offerings will be developed using a generally available application PaaS software or service.” With the target date of this prediction only six months away, it’s now clear the thinking was too optimistic for the pace of maturity the PaaS market has experienced, despite its impressive momentum. But that’s not to say that PaaS couldn’t still be the next big thing.

The problem is, like so many industries and companies, delivering value is never as easy as it seems. From my vantage point as chairman of a company that works in the PaaS space, solving the value problem is something we strive to do every day. When PaaS vendors start solving this value problem, companies will finally catch the promise of the space and then, and only then, will customers come flocking.

One of the first big hurdles that stands in the way of the PaaS market rising to its potential is understanding the customer need. This sounds so simple but from my time overseeing Morpheus Data, I’ve witnessed how so few players actually take ample time to do this. Customer needs are diverse, and the challenges are real. At Morpheus Data, our sales team is seeing a definite trend toward CIOs/CTOs who are frustrated with current DevOps offerings. Life doesn’t have to be a series of “no pain, no gain” purchase decisions. PaaS should deliver the gain without the pain.

Common frustrations we often hear include slow provisioning – applications should take minutes, not hours to deploy; cloud lock; broken promises – everyone claims they’re ‘infrastructure and cloud agnostic’, so who actually delivers? – and soaring costs. It’s not uncommon to hear of millions being spent to halfway set up and partially run programs. Think of it – millions spent on software before you know it works; sounds like the early CRM implementations that Salesforce solved, and the current ERP implementations that perhaps only NetSuite has solved.

Complex implementations like Mesosphere, VMware, Cloud Foundry and the many varieties of OpenStack require endless professional services support to install and maintain and are subject to service interruptions and cloud lock. To illustrate a specific pain point, Morpheus Data client Spireon, one of the largest mobile resource management companies in the industry, had its DevOps engineers spending months developing Chef scripts to automate the company’s hybrid cloud infrastructure. With Morpheus, Spireon was able to accomplish this in one day and bring everything into a single interface. The ability to promote from dev to test to production in a repeatable fashion is important to any DevOps team, and understanding customer needs is the first step in helping them maintain consistency and achieve value across complex computing environments.

Today’s technology changes daily and it’s not enough for vendors to simply keep up, they need to stay ahead of the curve. Companies are increasingly demanding their IT departments build a culture and work processes that allow them to deploy and manage their business applications with ease across any premise or cloud infrastructure. The companies that navigate this treacherous landscape are the ones that will reap substantial rewards.

The market is progressing and more and more vendors will assure that their offerings seamlessly work on premise and/or with multiple cloud or hybrid environments. Actions speak louder than words – if your POC doesn’t deliver the benefits you were promised, don’t walk, run!

application server challenges, application server delivery solutions, application server problems, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server

Application Server Challenges? Try App Delivery Solutions

Application Server Delivery Solutions The advent of cloud computing has reinvented business procedures. Gone are the days when employees were tied to their desks. Today, resources are shared with end users in countless ways. Application servers make this transition easier. According to Radian Insights, the application server market is expected to be worth $23.1 billion […]

The post Application Server Challenges? Try App Delivery Solutions appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Big Data, cyber security, data analytics, Digital Transformation, Opinion, Public Sector, PwC

What did we learn from PwC’s local government survey?

City HallPwC has recently released findings from its annual survey, The Local State We’re In, which assesses the challenges facing local government and their responses to them, as well as looking at public opinion on the organizations capabilities.

Here, we’ve pulled out four of the lessons we learnt from the report:

Data Analytics is top of the agenda for CEOs and Local Government Leaders

A healthy 91% of the Chief Execs surveyed confirmed Data Analytics was an area which they were well equipped. This in fact was the most popular answer for this specific question, as other areas such as business intelligence (59%), supply chain management (55%) and information governance & records management (40%) fared less so.

While it is encouraging the leaders are confident in their team’s ability to perform in the data analytics world, the research also stated local government’s use of structured and unstructured data varies quite considerably. 71% of the Chief Execs agreed they were using structured data (e.g. information in government controlled databases), whereas this number drops to 33% when unstructured data (e.g. social media and data generated through search engines) is the focal point of the question.

As the consumer continues its drive towards digital and the connected world, the level of insight which can be derived through unstructured data, social media in particular, will continue to increase. Back in 1998 Merrill Lynch said 80-90% of all potentially usable business information may originate in unstructured form. This rule of thumb is not based on primary or any quantitative research, but is still accepted by some in the industry. Even if this number has dropped, there is a vast amount of information and insight which is being missed by the local government.

But data driven decision making isn’t

Throughout the industry, data driven decision making has been seen as one of the hottest growing trends, and also as the prelude to the introduction of artificial intelligence.

Despite the media attention such ideas are receiving, it would appear these trends are not translating through to local government. Only 41% of the respondents said their organization is using data analytics to inform decision making and strategy. It would appear local government is quite effective (or at least confident) at managing data, but not so much at using it for insight.

Digital Device Tablet Laptop Connection Networking Technology ConceptPublic is not confident in local government’s ability to embrace digital

Although leadership within the local authorities themselves are happy with the manner in which their organization has embraced digital, this confidence is not reflected by the general public.

76% of Chief Execs who participated in the research are confident in their own digital strategies, however only 23% of the general public are confident in the council’s ability to manage the transition through to digital. This is down from 28% in the same survey during 2015 and 29% in 2014. The findings could demonstrate the rigidity of government bodies, especially at a local level, as it would appear the evolution of emerging technologies is outstripping local government’s ability to incorporate these new ideas and tools.

There is also quite a significant difference in how the public and the Chief Execs view cyber security. While only 17% of the Chief Execs believe their organization is at risk from cyber threats, 70% of the general public are not confident local government will be able to manage and share their personal information appropriately. 2016 has already seen a number of high profile data breaches which could have an impact on the opinions of the general public. If tech savvy enterprise organizations such as TalkTalk cannot defend themselves, it may be perceived that public sector organizations are less likely to do so.

However, local government does have the backing from the public to invest in digital

The general public would not appear to currently have great confidence in the local government’s current ability to embrace the digital age however they have seemingly given their blessing for the local government to continue investments.

39% of the general public who completed the survey highlighted their preference for engagement with local government would be through a digital platform, as opposed to the 24% who would prefer the telephone and 28% who would rather engage in person. Unfortunately, while digital is the most popular option for engaging, only 37% were satisfied with the current digital access to local government, down from 38% in last year’s research.

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Announcing @Supermicro_SMCI to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York | #Cloud

SYS-CON Events announced today that Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in Embedded and IoT solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI), the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology, is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions® for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/Big Data, HPC and Embedded Systems worldwide. Supermicro is committed to protecting the environment through its “We Keep IT Green®” initiative and provides customers with the most energy-efficient, environmentally friendly solutions available on the market.

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NetApp takes Q4 hit but predicts turnaround in 2018

Kurian

NetApp CEO George Kurian

NetApp has reported yearly decline during the Q4 earnings call, though CEO George Kurian remains positive the company will return to moderated revenue growth in 2018.

Revenue for Q4 was $1.38 billion, down from the $1.425 billion mid-year estimations, as the company reported an $8 million loss. Q3 saw the company report a profit of $135 million, whereas Q4 2015 saw the team account for $153 million profit. Year-on-year annual figures were also down 9% to $5.6 billion, with profits also decreasing to $229 million from $560 million in 2015, a decrease of 59%. Although investors have not reacted positively to the news, the $842 million acquisition of Solidfire hit the books during the period, taking some of the light off the company’s performance.

“As we discussed last quarter, we’re making fundamental changes to return the Company to revenue growth with improved profitability, cash flow, and shareholder returns,” said Kurian. “To deliver on this commitment, we’re executing a comprehensive and sustained transformation.”

The company has been undertaking a wide-ranging transformation project in recent months, moving the focus away from the traditional portfolio, which declined roughly 40% year-on-year, and towards the strategic growth initiatives, which grew 21% year-on-year. The strategic initiatives now account for 53% of net product revenue.

Priorities for the business will continue to focus around the delivery of the strategic initiatives including cluster data ONTAP, branded E-Series and All-Flash-Arrays, as well as the introduction of the next generation of ONTAP in the coming weeks. The team claim the new offering will simplify customers IT transformations to modern data centres and hybrid cloud environments, while also giving the customer greater flexibility when it comes to engineered systems, software defined storage, or cloud.

Kurian stated during the call he expects another tough year for fiscal 2017, though the company should be in a position to turn the corner in fiscal 2018, prioritizing the hybrid cloud market, as well as streamlining costs within the organization.

“When I took over as CEO, NetApp was dealing with several internal challenges,” said Kurian. “We were late to the All-Flash-Array market. We were not prepared to assist our installed base of customers in migrating to clustered ONTAP, and we had limited traction in the hybrid cloud.

“Heading into fiscal year ’17, our momentum with customers is accelerating. Data is at the heart of our customers IT transformation efforts and this is where NetApp has a profoundly important role to play. Our strategic relevance to customer’s digital transformation roadmaps is evidenced by the growth of our strategic solutions. We’re making meaningful progress, but still have work ahead of us and remain focused on execution. I remain highly confident in NetApp’s potential.”

Under Kurian’s leadership, NetApp has seemingly been forced into a wide-ranging transformation project to remain relevant in current and future market conditions. By self-admission, NetApp was not ready for the cloud-orientated world, and too focused on legacy products; however the team have outlined the organization’s roadmap to drive the company back into the positive.

Firstly, the team are positioning the clustered ONTAP offerings, as well as SolidFire to reinforce the company’s position as a supplier of technology to the cloud, both service providers and enterprise organizations who are managing private cloud environments. Kurian claims the company leads the way for enterprise storage and data management technology in the open stack cloud deployments.

Within the hyper scale segment, the company reported healthy growth for product offerings which combine hyper scale and cloud computing environments. Kurian noted while it is early days, the company are making progress in carving out market share in the segment.

Finally, Kurian highlighted there are have been a number of examples throughout the year of companies transitioning data back to on premise platforms from public cloud environments. The team believe the current offering positions them well in the market to capture those workloads as they transition.

Although Kurian has put a positive spin on year-on-year declines, outlining in depth the company’s strategy to return to prominence within the newly defined market, the market has reacted slightly differently. Shares fell almost 7% in afterhours trading.

AI, Artificial intelligence, China, Dell, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

Dell targets SMBs in China with launch of new company

Location China. Green pin on the map.Dell has prioritized growing its presence within the Chinese market targeting SMBs and public sector organizations, according to China Daily.

Speaking at the China Big Data Industry Summit in Guiyang, Dell CEO Michael Dell announced the launch of a new company, alongside its local partner, to gain traction within the lucrative market. Guizhou YottaCloud Technology will now act as a means for Dell to access the local market, prioritizing small and medium-sized enterprises and local governments in the first instance.

“China will play an increasingly important role in the big data era and the United States-based tech giant will speed up efforts to develop new products for the market,” said Dell at the conference.

Dell is one of a number of organizations who have prioritized local partnerships in the Chinese market, as locals tend to favour Chinese businesses and technologies over foreign counterparts, quoting security as the main driver. The country itself is a big draw for Dell as a business, representing its second largest market worldwide, only behind the US. The company also highlighted in September it plans to invest $125 billion in the Chinese market over the next five years, with cloud computing being the focal point.

Last year Dell launched it’s ‘In China for China’ strategy, which not only included the above investments, but also a drive from its Venture Capital arm in China to encourage entrepreneurialism, expanding its R&D function in the country, as well as establishing an artificial intelligence and advanced computing joint-lab, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The AI research will focus on the areas of cognitive function simulation, deep learning and brain computer simulation.

“The Internet is the new engine for China’s future economic growth and has unlimited potential,” said Dell in September. “Being an innovative and efficient technology company, Dell will embrace the principle of ‘In China, for China’ and closely integrate Dell China strategies with national policies in order to support Chinese technological innovation, economic development and industrial transformation.”

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451 Research argues ‘race to the bottom’ in cloud is a red herring

(c)iStock.com/saadrox321

The cloud services sector is still a long way off from being a commodity market, according to the latest note from analyst house 451 Research.

The results, which have been published in the firm’s latest Cloud Price Index (CPI), show the ‘race to the bottom’ in cloud pricing, as exemplified by continued price cuts from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and others, is something of a misnomer and that the supply of higher value services will be key to long term growth for vendors. Despite this, the researchers argue VM pricing went down 12% on average over the past 18 months, while NoSQL, load balancing, and bandwidth among others remained stable.

As a result, 451 has come up with the ‘cloud commodity score’ (CCS) metric, which measures customers’ sensitivity to price by region. The researchers found that the US was the region most likely to have market share driven by cheaper prices, yet argued Europe and APAC present more opportunities to vendors because the markets are ‘fractured’.

“Despite all the noise about cloud becoming a commodity, our research demonstrates a very limited relationship between price and market share,” said Owen Rogers, 451 Research digital economics unit research director. “Cloud is a long way from being a commodity. In fact, the real drama is the race to the top rather than the race to the bottom.”

This publication has examined the supposed disparity between the major cloud players and how their pricing stacks up. Research from Cloud Spectator back in March found 1&1 to be the best ranked European cloud provider, based on performance as well as price, well ahead of Google, Azure, and AWS. Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator, told this publication that smaller players have an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at more competitive prices.

cyber security, Intel, News & Analysis, Threat Detection

CIOs prioritize collaboration to increase security – Intel

a safe place to workIntel Security has released new findings which claims CIOs are targeting collaboration as a means to shore up defences against cyber threats.

Respondents to the survey believe their own organizations could be between 38-100% more secure if threat management and incident response personnel and systems could simply collaborate better. The team believe collaboration is one area which is often overlooked, with decision maker’s often favouring new threat detection or prevention tools, though security operations’ effectiveness can be increased through better collaboration between silos within the organization.

“Threat management contributions are almost evenly spread among different roles, but there are some notable areas of specialization,” the company stated in its “How Collaboration Can Optimize Security Operations” report. “Every handoff or transition can add significant operational overhead—along with the potential for confusion and chaos and delays in responding. But, on the upside, there is also huge potential for collaboration and increased efficiencies.”

The report states CIOs are still prioritizing new tools as a means to shore up their own perimeters, though collaborations technologies were not far behind in the rankings. 40% of the respondents highlighted their spend would be prioritized on better detection tools, 33% pointed towards preventative tools and 32% said improved collaboration between SOC analysts, incident responders and endpoint administrators.

One of the main challenges for these organizations is the process, accuracy and trust in communication. For a number of organizations data is shared manually and potentially reprocessed several times, increasing the possibility of inaccuracy. Automated collaboration tools ensure data is shared quickly and accurately through an array of different functions and responsibilities. “Trust arises from good communication, transparency, and accountability, all of which engender confidence in the outcome,” the report states.

The number of tools being used within these organizations is also a challenge, as data is often transferred between or collected centrally manually. The average number tools companies use to investigate and close an incident is four, though 20% of the respondents said they can use up to 20 different products to achieve the same aims, further increasing the challenge. Though larger and more geographically diverse organizations will by definition use more tools, the same principles of collaboration and automation apply, and in theory could increase the security of an organizations perimeter.

“Tougher new EU data privacy regulations, which are currently in the process of being modernized, will be implemented in 2017,” said Raj Samani, EMEA CTO for Intel Security, in the report. “Organizations will be legally required to implement a security architecture that ensures a secure and trustworthy digital exchange of data throughout the EU. Data privacy needs to be assured at every level and across the entire infrastructure. In light of that, improved incident investigation and response processes that bring together collaborative tools and teams are imperative.”

While most organizations are answering the threat of more advanced cyber threats with the implementation of more advanced defence solutions, collaboration is an area which could be seen as a complementary means. Collaboration can contribute to real-time visibility for various teams, improve execution capabilities, as well as speed of response.

The cloud news categorized.