acquisition, M&A, News & Analysis

Maintel announces acquisition of Azzurri Communications

GrowthSystems integrator Maintel announced it has entered into a conditional agreement to acquire Azzurri Communications.

The acquisition of Azzurri Communications, which offers communication services including telephony, mobile services, document management, is part of a larger push for Maintel market position. The company highlighted that the deal is a strong component in its strategy to grow and diversify its revenue base.

“Azzurri Communications is a highly respected business with a complementary product offering and target market, which will provide enhanced scale and visibility for the combined group,” said Eddie Buxton, CEO at Maintel. “This acquisition will accelerate Maintel’s shift into hosted cloud and data, ensuring we are well positioned to take advantage of these high growth areas of the unified communications market. It will also build scale in managed services, continuing the shift in our business mix, which we have been driving following previous acquisitions.”

The acquisition will broaden Maintel’s offering to include a network services division, a mobile division, managed services, and technology and professional services. “With the acquisition of Azzurri, Maintel will also gain a new set of highly skilled and professional team members. We are looking forward to welcoming Azzurri employees to the group,” said Buxton.

Alongside the announcement, Maintel’s also reported a 21% increase in revenues for 2015, up to £50.6m. As part of the company’s growth strategy, it also acquired Datapoint and Proximity Communications in recent months.

“We are really pleased at the prospect of joining Maintel because this enables the combined business to offer its customers a broader range of services,” Chris Jagusz, CEO of Azzurri Communications. “Our employees will benefit too by being part of one of the most significant players in our market.”

News & Analysis

Duo security and Teneo introduce new authentication system for employee mobility

Security concept with padlock icon on digital screenDuo security and Teneo have teamed up to create cloud-based two-factor authentication to simplify employee’s access to work networks through their smart phone.

The new system will enable businesses to deploy a one-tap authentication via smartphones rather than using separate ID key fobs. Teneo will provide the Duo cloud solution to customer organisations worldwide as a managed service, with employees simply downloading the Duo Security mobile app to their

“Duo is an easy step to securing corporate access across all users, in any environment,” said Henry Seddon, VP EMEA at Duo Security. “Easy and effective solutions are key to ensuring trusted access across an entire organisation.”

Duo Security’s two-factor authentication solution works across a wide variety of PCs, Macs, laptops and mobile devices as well as Apple iOS, Google Android and Blackberry operating systems, providing a more flexible two-factor network authentication system.

“Duo Security ties in with Teneo’s ethos of bringing to market smarter software offerings that make business-critical tasks like security simpler and intuitive for IT teams and employees alike,” said Marc Sollars, CTO of Teneo. “Even now, many data security set-ups are difficult and represent a kind of rules-based drag on workplace productivity. Duo Security gives forward-thinking customers a simple way to make network access much easier and beef up their overall network security. This ‘one tap’ authentication will become crucial as today’s businesses become ever-more dependent on mobile devices and applications to compete”

Recent research has highlighted to the community that security continues to be an issue for enterprise, as employees would appear to be indifferent to security protocols. As the employees themselves are seemingly one of the greatest threats to the organization, making any security standards as simple as possible would appear to be a sensible strategy in shoring up an organizations perimeter.

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Announcing @DcDnews “Media Sponsor” | @CloudExpo #IoT #DataCenter

SYS-CON Events announced today that DatacenterDynamics has been named “Media Sponsor” of 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.
DatacenterDynamics is a brand of DCD Group, a global B2B media and publishing company that develops products to help senior professionals in the world’s most ICT dependent organizations make risk-based infrastructure and capacity decisions.

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The Textbook Definition of #ContinuousDelivery | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps

To paraphrase Kent Beck: software delivers no value apart from runtime. Ideas take physical form in hardware, virtualized only part of the way down, and someone other than the developers makes the ideas manifest. So then: ops folks are the crop’s caretakers; developers design the seeds.

Well, of course this isn’t true. Developers don’t turn pie-in-the-sky math into socially constructive math that sysadmins then make useful. No: developers write code that makes things happen. We care about runtime just as much as ops, so we need to know how our software is helping people in reality—and how it can do a better job—in order for us to refine both the ideas and the implementation.
So cycle-time shortening—the metric of continuous delivery, and one of the Twelve Principles of Agile Software—is equally about users and makers. Working software delivered sooner is better for users than equally working software delivered later. And informative feedback gleaned more quickly from real-world use is better for developers than equally informative feedback gathered more slowly. Your customers’ problem space measures your software’s value better than your requirements specification ever could. Calibrate against that space as often as you can.

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You Need DevOps By @DMacVittie | @DevOpsSummit @StackIQ #DevOps

For those unfamiliar, as a developer working in marketing for an infrastructure automation company, I have tried to clarify the different versions of DevOps by capitalizing the part that benefits in a given DevOps scenario. In this case we’re talking about operations improvements. While devs – particularly those involved in automation or DevOps will find it interesting, it really talks to growing issues Operations are finding.
The problem is right in front of us, we’re confronting it every day, and yet, a ton of us aren’t fixing it for our organizations, we’re merely kicking the ball down the road.

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[session] Bring Added Value to Your Software Product By @MobiDev_ | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Every successful software product evolves from an idea to an enterprise system. Notably, the same way is passed by the product owner’s company.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Oleksii Ostroverkhyi, CCO at MobiDev, will provide a generalized overview of the evolution of a software product, the product owner, the needs that arise at various stages of this process, and the value brought by a software development partner to the product owner as a response to these needs.

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Big Data, IBM Watson, Machine learning, News & Analysis, Pfizer

Pfizer utilizes IBM Watson for Parkinson’s research

healthcare ITIBM and Pfizer have announced a research collaboration with the intention of improving how clinicians deliver care to Parkinson’s patients.

The collaboration will be built on a system of sensors, mobile devices, and IBM Watson’s machine learning capabilities, to provide real-time disease symptom information to clinicians and researchers. The team aim to gain a better understanding as to how the disease progresses as well as how patients react to certain medications, to design future clinical trials and also speed up the development of new therapies.

“We have an opportunity to potentially redefine how we think about patient outcomes and 24/7 monitoring, by combining Pfizer’s scientific, medical and regulatory expertise with IBM’s ability to integrate and interpret complex data in innovative ways,” said Mikael Dolsten, President of Pfizer Worldwide R&D.

According to the World Health Organization, neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s affect almost one billion families around the world, Approximately 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease each year according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, and an estimated seven to 10 million people suffer from the disease globally.

“The key to our success will be to deliver a reliable, scalable system of measurement and analysis that would help inform our clinical programs across important areas of unmet medical need, potentially accelerating the drug development and regulatory approval processes and helping us to get better therapies to patients, faster,” said Dolsten.

The collaboration seeks to create a holistic view of a patient’s well-being by seeking to accurately measure a variety of health indicators. Data generated through the system could also arm researchers with the insights and real-world evidence needed to help accelerate potential new and better therapies.

“With the proliferation of digital health information, one area that remains elusive is the collection of real-time physiological data to support disease management,” said Arvind Krishna, SVP at IBM Research. “We are testing ways to create a system that passively collects data with little to no burden on the patient, and to provide doctors and researchers with objective, real-time insights that we believe could fundamentally change the way patients are monitored and treated.”

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[session] Configuring Database as a Service with SoftLayer and Bluemix By @SoftLayer | @CloudExpo @IBMBluemix #Cloud

Following the notion of “The cloud” as a model and not a place, learn how to extend your SoftLayer infrastructure to utilize the PaaS offerings of Bluemix. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Ryan Tiffany, a Sales Engineer at SoftLayer, an IBM Company, will utilize both the command line and GUI portals and show you how to order a SoftLayer server and configure a front end application to use the Database as a Service offering from Bluemix.

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How Intel’s acquisition of Altera could transform IoT and the data centre

(c)iStock.com/Jason Doiy

After a relatively quiet transaction that began on June 1 2015, in December Intel officially acquired the Altera Corporation and reformed it as an internal department dubbed “Intel Programmable Solutions Group.”

This acquisition represents a crucial step in the industry-wide transition towards data centre architectures that allow faster processing and lower latency. Altera’s Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide a critical building block in the link between data intake and the rapid, efficient processing demanded by virtualisation, analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) sensor arrays and other computing-intensive use cases.

Bringing on the Altera team internally means that Intel can now develop sophisticated processing architectures and ICs that embed FPGA capability within to unlock powerful parallel processing capabilities. Applications and systems vendors who wish to stay on the cutting edge of these developments can read on to learn more about what these advancements may bring and how to leverage the full extent of functionality with a value-added system integration partner like UNICOM Engineering.

Taking a tour of an Altera FPGA

As processing loads place increasing demands on CPUs, companies like Intel look for solutions to maximise simultaneous computing loads, with an aim towards near-parallel processing for intensive operation. Since CPUs are technically restricted to working on one linear process at a time, Intel has invested countless time and capital in R&D to make computations as close to parallel as possible. Hyperthreading and NVDIMM DDR4 RAM processing all pursue this goal, as does the development of GPGPU technology.

FPGAs bypass many of the complications associated with these advances precisely because they are programmable for specific tasks versus general workloads. Each FPGA array consists of an IC containing clusters of logic cells. These cells are configurable in a nearly infinite number of gated combinations, allowing for the streamlining of one specific logic process or the flexibility to reconfigure logic pathways on the fly. Perhaps most importantly, FPGAs can sequester specific clusters of logic cells to allow for true parallel computing.

Combined with Intel’s latest CPU architecture, FPGAs can allow for rapid linking between two CPUs or within virtualised machine systems. Eventually, the hope is that CPUs and FPGAs can be co-packaged on the same IC ecosystem, integrating the two seamlessly through intermittent clusters of logic cells spread throughout the CPU and local IC.

When fully realised, this technology has the potential for rapid virtualization of multiple VMs through one CPU while simultaneously running Network Function Virtualization (NFV)which is touted as the future of network security and stability.

Put simply, the dynamic capabilities that FPGA technology contains could help reinvent the processor and, subsequently, the data centre as we know it.

Increasing speed to market while decreasing R&D investment

Making the most out of FPGA/CPU combinations will not be an easy technological hurdle for the average applications developer to clear. Once they have a stable build of their intended product, they will need to build-test and modify it to make best use of all the new levels of computing functionality at their disposal.

Since this secondary development period introduces an excessive amount of time and risk, developers could instead build on Intel through the expertise of UNICOM Engineering. Read our recent blog post to learn more about how UNICOM Engineering can help induct you into the emerging world of ultra-low-latency computing.

News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace

Rackspace launches ‘cloud in a box’ offering for any data centre

Open gift boxRackspace has announced the launch of OpenStack Everywhere, delivering OpenStack as a managed service in any data centre the customer chooses.

Backing OpenStack as the preferred private cloud platform for enterprise, the company has built its new offering on the assumption that the complexity and cost of hiring talent to deploy and operate will boost demand for OpenStack as a managed service.

“Companies realise they can free up money and resources for more strategic business investments when they turn their IT capital expenses into operating expenses,” said Darrin Hanson, GM of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. “When OpenStack is consumed as a managed service, businesses can remove non-core operations, reduce software licensing, and minimise infrastructure acquisition and IT operations costs.”

In previous years, organizations wanting to enter into the OpenStack world would have had to front hardware and infrastructure costs, as well as hire experts for deployment and continuous management. The new product offers Rackspace support, on OpenStack, in a private cloud environment; the customer provides the floor space, power and cooling systems, but Rackspace does everything else.

The new ‘cloud in a box’ enables Rackspace to provide an integrated software, hardware and services product, which can be deployed in any data centre around the world. “Take for example I’m the IT Director for a German company who has a subsidiary in Italy,” said Frank Weyns, Director, OpenStack International at Rackspace “I want to give them local cloud capabilities, but ensure they are using the same technology as the subsidiaries in the UK and America. We can ship a complete hardware, software and services package to Italy, which operates on the same cloud platform as the rest of the business worldwide”

While the complexity of the cloud is no longer a particular challenge, Frank highlighted the main hurdle surrounding cloud computing, in particular OpenStack, is the internal resources. Now OpenStack is moving from the early adopter through to mass market stage, uptake is moving from the IT industry through to other verticals that wouldn’t necessarily have the same expertise internally. The demand for OpenStack may be present for these organizations, however the internal man power to successfully manage the platform at production level isn’t always there.

“The biggest hurdle for these companies to consume cloud, public, private or any cloud, is knowledge. Knowledge about the cloud, but also their internal resource,” said Weyns. “Using the cloud is not difficult; having a team which can manage the cloud 24/7 in a production environment is very different from a PoC however. This is the main reason we have created Rackspace in a box using OpenStack. We can deliver a product to any customer, irrelevant of where they are in their cloud journey, which works in production.

“The biggest concern now is how a business can remain true to their core operations. If you’re not an IT business, say you’re a bank or a car manufacturer, how can you ensure that you are operating in the cloud 24/7 without worrying about downtime or effective management of the technology? You probably won’t have the expertise in-house. This is a major barrier to adoption, and this is where Rackspace can help.”

The cloud news categorized.