Ten years ago, when I drove on Winchester Avenue in Los Gatos, I saw this new company called Netflix that was renting DVDs of movies. You didn’t have to go to a store, but could sign up for home delivery service of DVDs. Now Netflix is building a much bigger headquarters near its old site. It is a huge success story – a disruption to the home entertainment business. When it decided to switch to “streaming only” a few years back, there were lot of doubters. But that’s all in the past. It is a global company now with huge success as a business.
Anything AWS can do: Microsoft announces new Azure VM price cuts
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Microsoft has announced price reductions of up to 17% on its Azure D-series Dv2 virtual machines, in an evident play against Amazon Web Services (AWS) following its own price cuts.
Just how evident this latest move is occurs when Microsoft cloud platform director of marketing Nicole Herskowitz calls AWS out. In a blog post, Herskowitz writes: “It is worthwhile to note that the Azure Dv2 instances – unlike AWS EC2 instances – have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge. This means you get even more value from Azure.”
Customers using Linux instances will get a better deal, with reductions on the D1-D5 v2s at 14% for Linux and 10% for Windows Server, and 17% and 13% respectively for the D11-D14 v2 machines.
Microsoft also took the opportunity to push further messages on how it differentiates from AWS, almost universally agreed to be the market leader in the infrastructure as a service space. Herskowitz argued the Redmond giant gives lower price points than Amazon for customers with enterprise agreements, as well as billing by the minute, as opposed to per hour.
The announcement from Microsoft completes the trio; after AWS announced its 51st price cut on EC2, Google responded by describing Amazon’s model as “an unpleasant surprise”. The AWS reductions apply to C4, M4 and R3 instances running Linux across eight regions overall.
A report from Tariff Consultancy found that while enterprise cloud computing prices had dropped by two thirds on average since 2014, overall pricing was beginning to even out. Yet Herskowitz argued price was not the only reason customers, citing Towers Watson, BMW, and Jet.com, preferred Microsoft. “Customers are using Azure for the value it brings,” she wrote. “Customers are using Azure for its hybrid capabilities that enable existing on-premises environments to seamlessly bridge with the public cloud – a reality for the vast majority of organisations.”
The price reductions will roll out in early February, with more details available here.
IoT in Product Development | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings
For manufacturers, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a jumping-off point for innovation, jobs, and revenue creation. But to adequately seize the opportunity, manufacturers must design devices that are interconnected, can continually sense their environment and process huge amounts of data.
As a first step, manufacturers must embrace a new product development ecosystem in order to support these products.
Oracle creating 1,400 new cloud jobs in EMEA
Oracle has announced aggressive expansion plans with a recruitment drive for junior and senior sales staff to be based in six cities across EMEA.
The cloud software giant is now actively headhunting for 1,400 new cloud sales staff to work out of sales HQs in Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Malaga and Prague. Oracle will be investing in two new cloud sales centres in Amsterdam and Cairo and new offices opening this year in Dubai, Dublin and Prague.
The new initiative follows a multi-billion dollar investment in a new portfolio of cloud computing services which Oracle claiming it now has ‘everything from secure computing infrastructure to enterprise cloud applications’. It currently offers 600 cloud applications to complement its on-premise hardware and software offerings. As enterprises move to hybrid cloud computing models, Oracle says it is now placed to help them manage their overall enterprise computing environment while simplifying the potentially difficult transition to the cloud.
Oracle claims that in the six months since June 2015 it has added nearly 1,500 new software as a service (SaaS) customers and 2,100 platform as a service (PaaS) customers.
Oracle president Loic Le Guisquet, said that though these are ‘exciting times’ for the software giant it will be very cautious about who it selects. “I want socially savvy, switched on individuals who can help customers respond to the digital imperative and make their businesses future proof,” said Le Guisquet, “we’re looking for people who want to be relevant to the biggest trends shaping business and technology.”
Experienced cloud sales staff may soon come at a premium as Oracle admitted it may try to attract staff from other operators. “Recruits may well come from a sales organization within another cloud technology provider,” said a spokesperson.
Other stated targets will be “people with experience in the lines of business we sell to like finance, marketing and HR,” according to Oracle.
Digital health startup Babylon gets £24m to develop medical AI
UK-based digital health service Babylon Health has raised $25m in a Series A funding round led by Swedish investment group AB Kinnevik. The venture capital advance is a record amount for a European cloud based health start up.
Babylon will use the cash to expand beyond its current online patient base of 250,000 UK users to deliver preventative medicine and sick care across EMEA. Since its launch in February 2015, the service has expanded to Ireland and there are plans for an East African service for 2016. Businesses such as Citigroup, Sky and MasterCard offer it to their staff as an employee benefit and it’s used by health insurance providers Mercer, Bupa and Aviva. It claims it’s at an early stage of partnering with the NHS to make its services available to the broader UK population.
The platform uses machine learning to analyse genetics, environment, behaviour, biology and key body functions. It uses this information as a form of preventative medicine, encouraging users to stay healthy through timely personalised health advice. It now plans an additional service which aims to help monitor and manage course completion when medicine is prescribed and to assesses the effectiveness of the treatment. Babylon has demonstrated a working prototype of this additional app, which is due for launch in 2016.
Partners in the venture include investment company BXR Group, Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and Hoxton Ventures, the fund established to bridge European companies to Silicon Valley. According to the FT.Com Babylon is valued at £100m.
In January another UK based online health start up, PushDoctor, announced it had raised $8.2million round of Series A financing from Oxford Capital, Draper Esprit and Partech Ventures.
AWS adds hydro-powered Canadian region to its estate
AWS has announced it will open a new carbon-neutral Canadian region to its estate as well as running a new free test drive service for cloud service buyers.
AWS chief technology evangelist Jeff Barr announced on the AWS official blog that a new AWS region in Montreal, Canada will run on hydro power.
The addition of data centre facilities in the Canada-Montreal region means that AWS partners and customers can run workloads and store data in Canada. AWS has four regions in North America but they are all in the United States, with coverage in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California),US West (Oregon), and AWS GovCloud (US). There is also an additional region for Ohio planned for some time in 2016. The Ohio and Montreal additions will give AWS 14 Availability Zones in North America.
AWS’s data centre estate now comprises 32 Availability Zones across 12 geographic regions worldwide, according to the AWS Global Infrastructure page. Another 5 AWS regions (and 11 Availability Zones) are in the pipeline including new sites in China and India. These will come online “throughout the next year” said Barr.
The Montreal facilities are not exclusive to Canadian customers and partners and open to all existing AWS customers who want to process and store data in Canada, said Barr.
Meanwhile, AWS announced a collaboration with data platform provider MapR to create a ‘try before you buy’ service. Through AWS facilities MapR is to offer free test drives of the Dataguise DgSecure, HPE Vertica, Apache Drill and TIBCO Spotfire services that it runs from its integrated Spark/Hadoop systems.
The AWS Test Drives for Big Data will provide private IT sandbox environments with preconfigured servers so that cloud service shoppers can launch, login and learn about popular third-party big data IT services as they research their buying options. MapR claims that it has made the system so easy that the whole process, from launching to learning, can be achieved within an hour using its step-by-step lab manual and video. The test drives are powered by AWS CloudFormation.
MapR is currently the only Hadoop distribution on the AWS Cloud that is available as an option on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), AWS Marketplace and now via AWS Test Drive.
Enabling IoT | @ThingsExpo @RedHatNews #IoT #M2M #ML #InternetOfThings
The IoT’s basic concept of collecting data from as many sources possible to drive better decision making, create process innovation and realize additional revenue has been in use at large enterprises with deep pockets for decades. So what has changed?
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Prasanna Sivaramakrishnan, Solutions Architect at Red Hat, discussed the impact commodity hardware, ubiquitous connectivity, and innovations in open source software are having on the connected universe of people, things and information in the IoT.
Evolving DevOps Tools By @eCubeSystems | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Robert Doyle, Chief Technology Architect at eCube Systems, will examine the issues and need for an agile infrastructure and show the advantages of capturing developer knowledge in an exportable file for migration into production. He will introduce the use of NXTmonitor, a next generation DevOps tool that captures application environments, dependencies and start/stop procedures in a portable configuration file with an easy-to-use GUI.
In addition to capturing configuration information between Development, Test and Production, the case study shows how NXTmonitor can create dependencies, automate health scripts and scalable performance groups to handle peak production loads.
IoT Trends in 2016 and Beyond | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings
Over the past couple of years IoT has become the most hyped word around the world, and rightly so because we all know IoT is here to stay.
So what is IoT?
IoT stands for the Internet of Things. It refers to the devices that are connected through the internet. The basic concept is connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet, devices such as cell phones, wearable devices, coffee machines, connected homes even your refrigerator and all those things you can think of.
We have collected a list of factors that will demonstrate how rapidly this sector is growing, and some mind-boggling numbers to prove that IoT (Internet of Things) is here to stay for a very long time.
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