Today most enterprises are undergoing massive shifts under the name digital transformation. Let’s say you successfully navigate this transformation. Will you be done? Of course not – change will be ongoing and even accelerating.
So, is it good enough to struggle through one transformation after another? Or is the more strategic decision to become better able to deal with such change – in other words, to be more agile?
TestLeft from @SmartBear | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #ContinuousIntegration
SmartBear Software has announced a new developer focused test automation tool, TestLeft. The tool enables developers working in an Agile and continuous delivery environment to create robust tests within IDEs, which helps reduce test creation and maintenance time.
“We are very excited about opportunities SmartBear’s TestLeft will bring to our testing organization,” said Brian Schaffer, Director Automated Testing at Interactive Intelligence. “Combining the best UI object recognition in the industry with extremely fast intelli-sense, the power of .NET framework and benefits of a strongly typed object oriented language will give us an opportunity to make our functional UI tests faster and more maintainable than ever before.”
Key Research Findings on Database Management | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Technical decisions around data persistence are hard, which is why we surveyed 583 IT Professionals on everything from current DBMS and ORM usage to modern database engines’ data structures and access patterns to storing data on a mobile device.
The two most mature commercial DBMS offerings (Oracle and MySQL) are used in production by 51% and 49% of respondents, respectively-significantly ahead of the third-ranked DBMS (SQL Server, at 34%). The top three, and the tight race between the top two, have not changed in years, among our survey respondents as well as on the DBMS ranking aggregator dbengines.com. The nearest NoSQL challenger, MongoDB, remains a distant fourth in production environments.
Study by @CloudPassage Finds U.S. Universities Failing in Cybersecurity Education | @CloudExpo #Cloud
CloudPassage has announced the results of a recent study analyzing cybersecurity education at undergraduate computer science and engineering programs at top American universities. According to the findings, not one of the top 10 U.S. computer science programs (as ranked by the U.S. News & World Report in 2015) requires a single cybersecurity course for graduation. In fact, only one of the top 36 U.S. computer science programs requires a security course for graduation: the computer science program at University of Michigan.
There’s No C in DevOps | @DevOpsSummit @XebiaLabs #DevOps #Microservices
These days I mostly make my living as a consultant. Consultants in general are probably not the best loved group in the world. It is common to think of consultants wafting-in to your organization, telling you things that you already know and advising you to “change your culture”, whatever that means. Subsequently they depart, no-doubt with a fat fee, and leave you as you were before with the same problems and no progress made.
Bosch rumoured to be discussing stake in HERE
German engineering giant Bosch is reportedly in talks to take a stake in high-definition digital maps company HERE, according to multiple sources.
HERE, which has been in operations for more than 25 years, has been the focus of healthy media attention in recent weeks as numerous tech companies have been linked to stakes within the company. Last year a consortium of German car manufacturers, including Daimler and BMW, acquired the business from Nokia for €2.5 billion with the aim of sourcing an alternative digital mapping offering from Google, for autonomous car initiatives.
Aside from engineering companies such as Bosch, the consortium has also been rumoured to be negotiating with various cloud providers, including Amazon and Microsoft. While rumours have focused on the consortium attempting to reduce financial exposure, a partner such as Amazon or Microsoft who could provide access to vast computing power, could be useful addition in efforts to establish the realities of the connected car.
HERE has claimed that its mapping systems can be identified in four out of five in-car navigation systems in North America and Europe, and recently extended its technology to the third-party developers in the Samsung connected car ecosystem.
While the move takes Bosch away from its traditional base of automotive components, it does build on moves made by the company in recent months to diversify its business offering. Last month the company announced the launch of Bosch IoT Cloud entering the company into the IoT race. The IoT cloud initiative comprises technical infrastructure as well as platform and software offerings, and claims to cover the full IoT proposition, from the device to the cloud.
“As of today, we offer all the ace cards for the connected world from a single source,” said Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner at the time of the launch. “The Bosch IoT Cloud is the final piece of the puzzle that completes our software expertise. We are now a full service provider for connectivity and the Internet of Things.”
A stake in mapping company HERE could add further weight to Bosch’s ambitions to diversify its business offering and grow within the software market.
Public cloud spend to increase by 14.1% in 2016
Research firm IDC have released findings which demonstrate healthy growth in the cloud market throughout 2016.
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker estimates spending on public cloud infrastructure is to increase by 14.1% over the course of the 12 months to $24.4 billion, and spending on private cloud platforms could be up 11.1% to $13.9 billion.
“For the majority of corporate and public organizations, IT is not a core business but rather an enabler for their core businesses and operations,” said Natalya Yezhkova, Research Director for the storage systems group at IDC. “Expansion of cloud offerings creates new opportunities for these businesses to focus efforts on core competences while leveraging the flexibility of service-based IT.”
Total spend for IT infrastructure products is expected to increase by 18.9% over the course 2016 to reach $38.2 billion, though it is still yet to surpass traditional, non-cloud, environments, which will decrease by 4%. Non-cloud platforms will still account for the majority of enterprise IT spend, accounting for 62.8%. From a cloud-deployment product perspective Ethernet switching spend will increase by 26.8%, with investments in servers and storage to grow at 12.4% and 11.3%, respectively.
The report also detailed vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products over the course of 2015, which grew 21.9% to $29 billion. Revenues for Q4 grew at a slower rate, 15.7%, but still accounted for $8.2 billion, with public cloud grabbing the lion’s share $4.9 billion. Japan saw the largest margin of growth, 50%, whereas Central and Eastern Europe declined 9.3% seemingly owing to political and economic turmoil, which could be linked to a reduction in IT spend.
“The cloud IT infrastructure market continues to see strong double-digit growth with faster gains coming from public cloud infrastructure demand,” said Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Computing Platforms at IDC. “End customers are modernizing their infrastructures along specific workload, performance, and TCO requirements, with a general tendency to move into 3rd Platform, next-gen technologies.
“Public cloud as-a-service offerings also continue to mature and grow in number, allowing customers to increasingly use sophisticated, mixed strategies for their deployment profiles. While the ice was broken a long time ago for public cloud services, the continued evolution of the enterprise IT customer means that public cloud acceptance and adoption will continue on a steady pace into the next decade.”
HPE continued as market leader for cloud IT infrastructure vendor revenues bringing in around $4.55 billion over the course of 2015, increasing its market share from 15% to 15.7%. Dell, Cisco, EMC and IBM completed the top 5, with only IBM dropping market share over the period. The company’s market share decreased 24.6% to roughly $1.24 billion, down from 6.9% to 4.3% of the overall segment.
Huawei launches All-Cloud strategy
Huawei has launched its All-Cloud strategy the Huawei Global Analyst Summit 2016, as a means to capitalize on digital capitalization trends.
The new strategy builds on the ROADS experience model – Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY, and Social – which was launch at the same event 12 months ago. While the ROADS framework focuses on delivering improved user experience, All-Cloud centres on network modernization and aims to enable digital transformation within enterprise. The new campaigns have been billed under the tagline of “Growing together through digitalization and building a better connected world”.
“Global digitalization is accelerating, and this is improving efficiency and user experience in many areas, including vertical industries, public services, and every aspect of our lives. Our Global Connectivity Index (GCI) 2016 reveals that global connectivity improved by 5% in 2015,” said Deputy Chairman of the Board Eric Xu. “We can work together in the areas of enhancing connectivity, enabling the digital transformation of vertical industries, improving the connectivity experience and expanding access under all scenarios, and to accelerate global digitalization.”
“In the All IP era, we proposed our Single strategy, which effectively supported the development of operator customers,” said Xu. “Nowadays, as we face the digital transformation of different industries, we advocate full cloudification to build efficient networks and agile competitiveness. Driven by end users’ needs for a better experience, Huawei proactively advocates the All Cloud strategy, promotes network modernization, and works to enable digital transformation across industries, thus meeting end user needs to enable customer success.”
The All-Cloud proposition is built on a data centre-centric architecture, with all network functions, services and applications will run in the cloud data centre. The company has claimed that through a unified and open architecture, it will be able to meet customers’ needs for business transformation on all cloud platforms, public, private, industry, and hybrid.
Within the company’s carrier business, the team plan of developing cloud-based IoT, video services, and service platforms, to win new business, but will also promote the cloudification of operations systems.
“Network Functions Virtualization standardizes and virtualizes equipment and hardware on ICT networks,” said Xu. “However, even with NFV, we still adopt a traditional method for managing the software architecture and operations model. If we can move another step forward and use the cloudification concept to make network software fully distributed and automated, we can realize Network Functions Cloudification (NFC).”
In the enterprise unit, cloud computing, SDN, and big data technologies will form the central pillars of marketing messages. The company has seemingly prioritized digital transformation as a means for enterprise to transform towards agile and smart operations.
On the company’s blog it highlighted that the transformation will take place over three stages. “First, Huawei will need to encourage enterprises to move their IT systems to the cloud to fully utilize resources and improve efficiency. Second, Huawei will accelerate the pace of transforming enterprise networks into SDN, and then use a unified SDN controller to centrally integrate telecom, enterprise, and DC networks and achieve agile operations throughout the entire process. Third, Huawei will enable smart enterprises with Big Data.”
IDC: Global cloud infrastructure market hit £20bn in 2015 – with HPE at the top
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The global cloud infrastructure market has grown 22% year on year to hit a $29 billion (£20.4bn) value in 2015 with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) at the top of the tree, according to the latest research note from IDC.
The findings, which appear in the analyst house’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, sees HPE atop the list of infrastructure vendors, with fourth quarter revenues of $1.3bn (£915m) representing a 15.8% overall market share. Dell (10.2%), Cisco (9.7%) – jointly given the silver medal by IDC because of how close their propositions are – EMC (9.2%) and IBM (4.3%) comprise the top five.
All leading firms saw their revenues increase year over year, and all apart from IBM saw that growth in double digits. Cisco (35.5% revenue growth) saw greatest expansion, ahead of Dell (26.7%), EMC (19.7%) and HPE (17.2%). Quarterly revenues for 4Q15 were at $8.2bn, up 15% from 4Q14’s $7.1bn.
In terms of specific regions, cloud infrastructure vendors saw greatest success in Japan, with sales rising 50% year over year in 4Q15. Asia Pacific – excluding Japan – was similarly popular (38.7%), followed by Western Europe (30.5%), Canada (23.5%) and the United States, with its mature and saturated market, trailing although showing 6.6% revenue growth.
“The cloud IT infrastructure market continues to see strong double digit growth with faster gains coming from public cloud infrastructure demand,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director for computing platforms, adding: “While the ice was broken a long time ago for public cloud services, the continued evolution of the enterprise IT customer means that public cloud acceptance and adoption will continue on a steady pace into the next decade.”
Critical assessment of the changes in the market has been cautiously positive. HP’s decision, first announced in 2014 and finalised a year later, to split its business into two, one for enterprise and one for printing and personal, means HPE’s shares have of late gained “solid momentum”, according to financial research house Zacks.
Regarding the acquisition of EMC by Dell for an eye-watering $67bn in October, including VCE and VMware among others, many were happy to stick the boot in, with one writer describing such companies as “the walking dead”. Dell has shuffled the pack for its hyperconverged infrastructure products, but it is the combination of Dell and EMC’s market share (19.9%) which could be a game changer. The IDC forecast correlates similarly with Synergy Research figures on the cloud infrastructure equipment market; back in September the analyst firm announced HP had finally overtaken Cisco due to its investment in the server and storage space.
The Advantages of #DigitalTransformation | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #BigData
Those that lead are able to collect and analyze data that followers can’t. Think about the first climber to reach the top of the mountain, they have a new and different view slower followers don’t. If you believe, as I do, that understanding data is the secret sauce of the digitally transformed enterprise, then having data not available to your competitors is a treasure!