More than 400 distinct cloud applications delivered malware in 2022, nearly triple the amount seen in the prior year, according to research conducted by Netskope, a specialist in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). The company’s researchers also found that 30% of all cloud malware downloads in 2022 originated from Microsoft OneDrive. Cloud apps are widely… Read more »
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Confluent, a data streaming specialist, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Immerok, a contributor to Apache Flink – a powerful technology for building stream processing applications and one of the most popular Apache open source projects. Immerok has developed a cloud-native, fully managed Flink service for customers looking to process data streams at a… Read more »
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Customer intelligence company Acxiom has joined the Salesforce AppExchange Genie Collection, empowering brands to better understand their customers, drive personalisation at scale and unlock new opportunities that accelerate business growth. Brands today are expected to know their customers, anticipate their needs, and engage in ways that are personalised, relevant, and contextual. A data-first approach is… Read more »
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Netskope, a specialist in secure access service edge (SASE), has unveiled new research that shows how the prevalence of cloud applications is changing the way threat actors are using phishing attack delivery methods to steal data. The Netskope Cloud and Threat Report: Phishing details trends in phishing delivery methods such as fake login pages and… Read more »
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Chef has launched a new open source project called Habitat, which it claims introduces a new approach for application automation.
The team claim Habitat is a unique piece of software which enables applications to be freed from dependency on a company’s infrastructure. When applications are wrapped in Habitat the runtime environment is no longer the focus and does not constrain the application itself. Due to this USP applications can run across numerous environments such as containers, PaaS, cloud infrastructure and on premise data centres, but also has the intelligence to self-organize and self-configure, the company claims.
“We must free the application from its dependency on infrastructure to truly achieve the promise of DevOps,” said Adam Jacob, CTO at Chef. “There is so much open source software to be written in the world and we’re very excited to release Habitat into the wild. We believe application-centric automation can give modern development teams what they really want — to build new apps, not muck around in the plumbing.”
Chef would generally be considered a challenger to the technology industry’s giants having only been founded in 2008, though the company has made positive strides in recent years specializing in the DevOps and containers arenas, two of the more prominent growth areas. Although both of these areas are prominent in marketing campaigns and conference presentations, applications into the real-world have been more difficult.
The Habitat product is built on the idea that infrastructure dictated the design of an application. Chef claims by making the application and its automation the unit of deployment, developers can focus on business value and planning features that will make their products stand out rather than on the constraints of infrastructure and particular runtime environments.
“The launch of Habitat is a significant moment for both Chef and the entire DevOps community in the UK and EMEA,” said Joe Pynadath, GM of EMEA for Chef Software, Chef. “It marks our next evolution and will provide an absolutely transformative, paradigm shift to how our community and customers can approach application management and automation. An approach that puts the application first and makes them independent of their underlying infrastructure. I am extremely excited to see the positive impact that our Chef community and customers throughout Europe will gain from this revolutionary technology.”
Parallels is to sell its cloud management technology Odin Service Automation to IT distributor Ingram Micro for an undisclosed sum in a deal expected to close by 2016.
The deal includes intellectual property and the Odin brand. Odin publishes a range of cloud applications that includes web server management, server virtualisation, provisioning and billing automation. It is used by 10,000 service providers who sell applications to their small and medium sized business clients. According to Parallels around the services reach a subscriber base of 10 million SMEs.
IT distributor Ingram Micro has been a customer of Parallels since 2014 when it began using the Odin system as a cloud distribution service, allowing it to repackage applications to its channel partners who then white label them, resell them or manage them for clients. Ingram’s partner base includes resellers, managed service providers, system integrators and hosting provider customers.
Ingram branded its Odin-enabled cloud brokering service as the Cloud Marketplace.
The sell off will enable parent company Parallels Holdings to concentrate on its core business and divest itself of a commodity, according to its CEO Birger Steen. “Now we can sharpen our focus as a company and continue to deliver market leading products under the Parallels, Plesk and Virtuozzo brands.”
Parallels’ solutions business unit will continue to operate as a standalone company. Its Plesk web management business unit will operate as a standalone company under the Plesk brand. The Virtuozzo business unit, which develops container virtualization technology, will operate as a standalone company. All three business units will continue to be owned and controlled by Parallels Holdings Limited.
It looks good for Ingram but not for Parallels, according to one analyst. “I was surprised when Parallels spun off Odin as a separate company, I felt it had some real value,” said Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom, “Ingram looks like it has gained control of a system that helps it deliver its own products to the channel and allow it to become a cloud aggregator.”
Where this deal leaves Parallels is more of an issue, said Longbottom. “It missed the boat when Docker made more noise on containers, leaving Virtuozzo in the mud. It has not managed to make enough noise for people to know that it is there, trusting instead on word of mouth and just being known. I think that Ingram comes out well from this. Meanwhile, watch out for others buying up the rest of Parallels.”
As you may know, GreenPages recently launched our Transformation Services Group, a new practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing.
This move was designed to allow us to help companies think beyond the near-term and to cast a vision for the business. As we look at the market, we see a need to help organizations take a more revolutionary and accelerated approach to embracing what we call “New World” IT architectures. While this is something we have been helping companies with for many years, we now believe that this is a logical evolution of our business that builds on our legacy of delivering high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.
When we think about some of the great work we have done over the years, many examples come to mind. One of these is a complex project we completed for The Channel Company, that helped them truly transform their business. Coming off a management buyout from its parent company, UBM, The Channel Company was tasked with having to migrate off the parent company’s centralized IT infrastructure under a very tight timeline.
Faced with this situation, the company was presented with a very compelling question: “If you had the opportunity to start from scratch, to transform your IT department, resources and strategy what would you do?”
Essentially, as a result of their situation, The Channel Company had the opportunity to leapfrog traditional approaches. They had the opportunity to become more agile, and more responsive. And, more importantly, they took it!
As opposed to simply moving to a traditional baseline on-prem solution, The Channel Company saw this as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink its entire IT strategy and chose GreenPages to help lead them through the process.
Through a systematic approach and advanced methodology, we were able to help The Channel Company achieve its aggressive objectives. Specifically, in less than six months, we led a transformation project that entailed the installation of new applications, and a migration of the company’s entire infrastructure to the cloud. This included moving six independent office locations from a shared infrastructure to a brand-new cloud platform supporting their employees, as well as new cloud-based office and ERP applications.
In addition to achieving the independence and technical autonomy The Channel Company needed, the savings benefits and operational efficiencies achieved were truly transformational from a business standpoint.
It is these types of success stories that drove us to formalize our Transformation Services Group. We have seen first-hand the benefits that organizations can achieve by transforming inflexible siloed IT environments into agile organizations, and we’re proud to be able to offer the expertise and end-to-end capabilities required to help customers achieve true business transformation.
In our view, the need for business agility and innovation has never been greater. The question is no longer “is transformation necessary?” but rather “if you had the opportunity to start from scratch and achieve business transformation, would you take it?”
If you’re interested in hearing more about how GreenPages has helped companies like The Channel Company transform their IT operations, please reach out.
By Ron Dupler, CEO
How do you view your organization’s applications and IT services? At GreenPages, we often suggest that organizations begin to conceptualize IT services as corporate IT evolves from a technology provider to an innovation center. Now, there are ways to establish and maintain a service portfolio through ITBM (IT Business Management or IT Financial Management) systems, but these are often out of reach for customers less than enterprise level. However, you can conceptualize IT services by looking at your applications from five different perspectives. Let’s use Microsoft Exchange as an example.
Exchange is an enterprise application that provides email and calendaring. If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that you own servers that host the various components that comprise Exchange. One way to think about cloud is to identify the Exchange servers, their operating systems, the application version, performance requirements, etc. and identify a “place in the cloud” where you can procure servers of similar specifications and migrate the instances. I consider this as the infrastructure perspective. When it comes to cloud computing, this is perhaps the least important.
To take full advantage of cloud computing, understand your applications and IT services from a few additional perspectives:
Hopefully, after looking at these different perspectives, you’ll see Exchange as part of an IT service that fits this description:
“In operation for over 20 years, E-Communications is a business service that allows each of our 1,200 employees to communicate through email, coordinate meetings, find coworkers’ contact information, and organize tasks using their PC, Mac, mobile device, or home computer 24x7x365. The service is supported by Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, which both run under VMware vSphere. The service requires 1 full-time administrator who added 12 new users and logged 157 support tickets in 2014. In 2014, charges for software maintenance, personnel, infrastructure depreciation, and outside support services totaled $87,456. A software upgrade is planned for 2015. Users do not generally complain about the performance of the service, other than the size of their mailbox quotas (which are limited to 10GB per user). The company as a whole plans to offer telecommuting packages to more than 250 employees in 2015.”
Armed with this understanding of your IT service that includes Exchange, you might take the following action:
Of course, not every application is easily identifiable as belonging to an IT service. The functionality or financial aspects of IT services are often difficult to quantify. However, at GreenPages, especially when looking at cloud computing options, we recommend examining all of your applications through these five perspectives. For this reason, GreenPages has embedded this process in a piece of software that can quickly build your services portfolio and recommend optimizations based on current offerings available – such as Microsoft Office 365.
What are your thoughts?
You can hear more from John in his eBook, “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department“
By John Dixon, Director of Cloud Services
This post was written by ConnectEdu CTO Rick Blaisdell and was originally posted on http://www.rickscloud.com/the-internet-of-things-theres-no-stopping-it/ . You can follow Rick on Twitter @RickBlaisdell
“The Internet of things is coming, be the disrupter or prepare to be disrupted. There’s no stopping it” said Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, during this year’ Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The term “Internet of Things”(IoT) emerged as a buzzword over the last year to describe the phenomenon of network-connected sensors incorporated into devices that in the past were standalone appliances. Basically, the Internet of things is a scenario in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to automatically transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
There are many specialists that say just about every business will become an IoT business, and the benefits are so profound that it is inevitable that this will happen. By connecting devices over the Internet and wirelessly over mobile networks, companies can manage a wide range of new services for their customers. This is why Google announced in January that it would pay more than $3 billion for Nest’s smart thermostat and smoke alarm technology.
The numbers being forecasted for the Internet of Things are truly spectacular. BI Intelligence finds that the number of everyday and enterprise devices that will soon be connected to the Internet — from parking meters to home thermostats — will be huge: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018, roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCs combined.
In the consumer space, many products and services have already crossed over into the IoT, including kitchen and home appliances, lighting and heating products, and insurance company-issued car monitoring devices that allow motorists to pay insurance only for the amount of driving they do.
Here are some of the top business-to-business and government applications for the IoT:
Connected advertising and marketing – How would Internet-connected billboards look like? This will sure be one of the top three IoT categories, along with smart factories, and telecommuting support systems.
Intelligent traffic management systems – Machina research sees $100 billion in revenue by 2020 for applications such as toll-taking and congestion penalties. A related revenue source will be smart parking-space management, expected to drive $30 billion in revenue.
Waste management systems – According to BI’s research, in Cincinnati, residential waste volume fell 17% and recycling volume grew by 49% through use of a “pay as you throw” program that used IoT technology to monitor those who exceed waste limits.
Smart electricity grids that adjust rates for peak energy usage – These will represent savings of $200 billion to $500 billion per year by 2025, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
Finally, what we need to keep in mind is that the Internet of Things is a vision, it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start.
Photo credit: www.switchscribe.com
The time is here for bloggers across the internet to make their tech predictions for 2014 and beyond (we have made some ourselves around storage and cloud). In this post, a couple of our authors have weighed in to grade predictions made by others across the web.
Prioritizing Management Tool Consolidation vs. New Acquisitions
Enterprise customers will want to invest in new tools only when necessary. They should look for solutions that can address several of their needs so that they do not have to acquire multiple tools and integrate them. The ability to cover multiple areas of management (performance, configuration and availability) to support multiple technologies (e.g., application tiers) and to operate across multiple platforms (Unix, Windows, virtual) will be important criteria for enterprises to assess what management tools will work for them. (eweek)
Agree – I have been saying this for a while. If you want a new tool, get rid of 5 and consolidate and use what you have now or get one that really works. (Randy Becker)
Bigger big data spending
IDC predicts spending of more than $14 billion on big data technologies and services or 30% growth year-over-year, “as demand for big data analytics skills continues to outstrip supply.” The cloud will play a bigger role with IDC predicting a race to develop cloud-based platforms capable of streaming data in real time. There will be increased use by enterprises of externally-sourced data and applications and “data brokers will proliferate.” IDC predicts explosive growth in big data analytics services, with the number of providers to triple in three years. 2014 spending on these services will exceed $4.5 billion, growing by 21%. (Forbes)
Absolutely agree with this. Companies of all sizes are constantly looking to garner more intelligence from the data they have. Even here at GreenPages we have our own big data issues and will continue to invest in these solutions to solve our own internal business needs. (Chris Ward)
Enterprises Will Shift From Silo to Collaborative Management
In 2014, IT organizations will continue to feel increased pressure from their lines of business. Collaborative management will be a key theme, and organizations will be looking to provide a greater degree of performance visibility across their individual silo tiers to the help desk, so it is easier and faster to troubleshoot problems and identify the tier that is responsible for a problem. (eweek)
Agree – cross domain technology experts are key! (Randy Becker)
New IT Will Create New Opportunities
Mobility, bring-your-own device (BYOD) and virtual desktops will all continue to gain a foothold in the enterprise. The success of these new technologies will be closely tied to the performance that users can experience when using these technologies. Performance management will grow in importance in these areas, providing scope for innovation and new solutions in the areas of mobility management, VDI management and so on. (eweek)
Disagree – This is backwards. The business is driving change and accountability. It is not IT that creates new opportunities – it is the business demanding apps that work and perform for the people using them. (Randy Becker)
Here comes the Internet of Things
By 2020, the Internet of Things will generate 30 billion autonomously connected end points and $8.9 trillion in revenues. IDC predicts that in 2014 we will see new partnerships among IT vendors, service providers, and semiconductor vendors that will address this market. Again, China will be a key player: The average Chinese home in 2030 will have 40–50 intelligent devices/sensors, generating 200TB of data annually. (Forbes)
Totally agree with this one. Everything and everybody is eventually going to be connected. I wish I were building a new home right now because there are so many cool things you can do by having numerous household items connected. I also love it because I know that in 10 years when my daughter turns 16 that I’ll no doubt know in real-time where she is and what she is doing. However, I doubt she’ll appreciate the ‘coolness’ of that. Although very cool, this concept does introduce some very real challenges around management of all of these devices. Think about 30 billion devices connected to the net…. We might actually have to start learning about IPv6 soon… (Chris Ward)
Cloud service providers will increasingly drive the IT market
As cloud-dedicated datacenters grow in number and importance, the market for server, storage, and networking components “will increasingly be driven by cloud service providers, who have traditionally favored highly componentized and commoditized designs.” The incumbent IT hardware vendors will be forced to adopt a “cloud-first” strategy, IDC predicts. 25–30% of server shipments will go to datacenters managed by service providers, growing to 43% by 2017. (Forbes)
Not sure I agree with this one for 2014 but I do agree with it in the longer term. As more and more applications/systems get migrated to public cloud providers, that means less and less hardware/software purchased directly from end user customers and thus more consolidation at the cloud providers. This could be a catch 22 for a lot of the traditional IT vendors like HP and Dell. When’s the last time you walked into an Amazon or Google datacenter and saw racks and racks of HP or Dell gear? Probably not too recently as these providers tend to ‘roll their own’ from a hardware perspective. One thing is for sure…this will get very interesting over the next 24 to 36 months… (Chris Ward)
End-User Experience Will Determine Success
Businesses will expect IT to find problems before their users do, pinpoint the root cause of the problem and solve the problem as early as possible. IT organizations will seek solutions that will allow them to provide great user experience and productivity. (eweek)
Agree – 100% on this one. Need a good POC and Pilot that is well managed with clear goals and objectives. (Randy Becker)
Amazon (and possibly Google) to take on traditional IT suppliers
Amazon Web Services’ “avalanche of platform-as-a-service offerings for developers and higher value services for businesses” will force traditional IT suppliers to “urgently reconfigure themselves.” Google, IDC predicts, will join in the fight, as it realizes “it is at risk of being boxed out of a market where it should be vying for leadership.” (Forbes)
I agree with this one to an extent. Amazon has certainly captured a good share of the market in two categories, developers and large scale-out applications and I see them continuing to have dominance in these 2 spaces. However, anyone who thinks that customers are forklift moving traditional production business applications from the datacenter to the public cloud/Amazon should really get out in the field and talk to CIOs and IT admins as this simply isn’t happening. I’ve had numerous conversations with our own customers around this topic, and when you do the math it just doesn’t make sense in most cases – assuming the customer has an existing investment in hardware/software and some form of datacenter to house it. That said, where I have seen an uptake of Amazon and other public cloud providers is from startups or companies that are being spun out of a larger parent. Bottom line, Amazon and others will absolutely compete with traditional IT suppliers, just not in a ubiquitous manner. (Chris Ward)
The digitization of all industries
By 2018, 1/3 of share leaders in virtually all industries will be “Amazoned” by new and incumbent players. “A key to competing in these disrupted and reinvented industries,” IDC says, “will be to create industry-focused innovation platforms (like GE’s Predix) that attract and enable large communities of innovators – dozens to hundreds will emerge in the next several years.” Concomitant with this digitization of everything trend, “the IT buyer profile continues to shift to business executives. In 2014, and through 2017, IT spending by groups outside of IT departments will grow at more than 6% per year.” (Forbes)
I would have to agree with this one as well. The underlying message here is that IT spending decisions continue to shift away from IT and into the hands of the business. I have seen this happening more and more over the past couple of years and can’t help but believe it will continue in that direction at a rapid pace. (Chris Ward)
What do you think about these predictions? What about Chris and Randy’s take on them?
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