Archivo de la categoría: Enterprise IT

Azure, Capgemini, Consulting, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Capgemini recruits Microsoft Azure in cloud service expansion push

CloudCapgemini has added Microsoft to its cloud services programme as it seeks to give a broader range of cloud services to more clients. Microsoft is the first in a number of vendors that CapGemini is seeking to add to its cloud service portfolio, it said.

Under the new Capgemini Cloud Choice with Microsoft scheme it will offer cloud advice, managed platforms and ‘applied integrated innovation’ services. Initiatives include OneShare, which speeds the testing and development of Microsoft Azure systems and offers to control costs through usage monitoring and resource scheduling.

A second mooted offering is SkySight, which is described as an ‘Azure-like’ private cloud which aims to help enterprises to speed up the installation of new applications. Capemini says it will help clients get value for money on managed services and fine-tune the configuration process.

A third scheme will create industry-focused IP offerings, such as a system tailored to the specific needs of the banking sector, based on the experiences of Capgemini’s own in house banking specialists. The domain expertise will be offered in all major industries, including pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and the health sector.

The cloud offering will cover all solutions encompassed within hybrid, public, hosted and private cloud services using Azure.

As part of the offering, Capgemini will align activities with independent software vendors and start-ups to create new ways of delivering integrated solutions. New ventures and start-ups will also benefit from the offering, Capgemini says, as partners will become a focal point for integrating new innovations into the Capgemini solutions portfolio.

The expansion comes after Capgemini subsidiary Sogeti reported that it managed to cut the costs of one client, Dutch postal service PostNL, by 20 per cent by migrating its IT services onto the cloud with Microsoft Azure.

“Capgemini helped us to define our roadmap to migrate more than 40 applications and now operates its Cloud Platform for us,” said Marcel Krom, CIO at PostNL. “We have reduced costs and gained flexibility in handling volume variances.”

Bistip, Cloud South East Asia, Content & Applications, Enterprise IT, Interviews, Opinion, social marketplace

How the cloud enables the Bistip social marketplace to scale efficiently

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABCN has partnered with the Cloud South East Asia event to interview some of its speakers. In this interview we speak to Rohit Kanwar, CEO of Indonesian social marketplace service Bistip.

Cloud South East Asia: Who are Bistip and how are you shaking up the Indonesian market?

Rohit Kanwar:  Bistip is Peer to Peer market place for social delivery through which item seekers and travellers are connected. Bistip travellers can post their trips in the platform visible to everyone and item seekers offer them extra money for bringing them their desired items. Currently Bistip has close to 35,000 customers and more than 100,000 web visits per month.

We are analogous in the logistics industry, like Uber or AirBnB.  Social couriers existed in most of the Asian countries before, but they were limited to close friends and families. However, with the adoption of smartphone and cloud based technologies it’s faster and easier to scale and roll out services to more people now.

Indonesians love buying high value goods, which are often expensive to purchase locally; with the help of Bistip they are now accustomed to getting “Anything from anywhere globally ” within Indonesia, at affordable prices.  Our mission is reduce overseas travel cost by providing travellers with extra money. We are adding 1000 customers per month, with a revenue over 250K USD and plan to achieve 1 million registered customers by 2017.

How is technology helping you grow and reach new customers?

Our customer acquisition strategy is 100% digitally focussed; we are also using online advertising tools to reach out to new customers. We are actively using digital technology and analytics to reach our target audience and demography based on respective products. We also use social media listening technology to understand the sentiments of customers about our product and services. Modification of products based on customer insight helps us to reach new customers and better serves existing members.

What role does cloud computing play in your business?

All our web and app based platforms are on cloud based technology. Its subscription based model (Pay as you go) helps to scale up capacity in a cost effective way. Our Cloud vendors provide us with features such as managed services, Web Performance dashboards and analytics integrated platforms, which enable us to focus on our Business KPIs instead of day to day network operations. Cloud base technology is a boom to start-ups as it reduces high capex spending on IT infrastructure.

How do you think established, global technology vendors are supporting start-up companies in Indonesia?

Indonesia currently has 70 million smartphones and more than 100 million Internet users.  Jakarta generates more tweets than any other city in the world. There is huge paradigm shift among technology vendors towards Indonesia due to the growing, successful start-up ecosystem in the country. Global technology vendors such as Google, Cloudera, IBM, Microsoft, etc. are showing a keen interest in understanding business requirement for start-ups.

Tech Vendors have dedicated support teams assisting start-up companies with solving their problems. Global technology vendors regularly arrange boot camps, Hackathons and networking seminars in the country in order to support start-ups with fund raising and other mentorship activities.   A few technology vendors have venture funds to support start-ups as well.  Overall the atmosphere and ecosystem is developing faster than ever before in Indonesia.

What is next for Bistip?

Bistip is coming up with a mobile application, along with new features and services, to reduce the shipping time and provide more security to our customers. It will also have an integrated payment system. Bistip aims to achieve 1 million customers by end of 2017.

Bistip is also exploring the opportunity to start operations in other countries. We have signed two partnerships with Uber in Indonesia, Aramex and are likely to sign a few more with online travel portal and retail stores in the near future. We are also in final level talks with a VC for raising further funds. Hopefully our execution plans will follow our strategy and we can provide our travellers with more benefits and our buyers with a better service.

 

Learn more about how the cloud is developing in South East Asia by attending Cloud South East Asia on 7th & 8th October 2015 at Connexion @ Nexus, KL, Malaysia.

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Ctera, Data management, Enterprise IT, HP, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

Ctera now integrated with HP’s hybrid cloud manager

Cloud storageCtera Networks says it has integrated its storage and data management systems with HP’s cloud service automation (HP CSA) as it seeks way to simplify the management of enterprise file services across hybrid clouds.

The HP CSA ‘architecture’ now officially recognises and includes Ctera’s Enterprise File Services platform. The logic of the collaboration is that as the HP service helps companies build private and hybrid clouds they will need tighter data management in order to deliver new services to enterprise users, according to the vendors.

Ctera, which specialises in remote site storage, data protection, file synchronisation, file sharing and mobile collaboration services, has moved to make it easier to get those services on HP’s systems. According to Ctera, the new services can now be run on any organization’s HP CSA managed private or virtual private cloud infrastructure.

Enterprises that embrace the cloud need to modernise their file services and IT delivery models, according to Jeff Denworth, Ctera’s marketing SVP. The new addition of Ctera to HP CSA means they can easily manage file services from a single control point and quickly roll out the apps using a self-service portal, Denworth said.

“HP CSA helps IT managers become organisational heroes by accelerating the deployment of private and hybrid clouds and IT services,” said Denworth. The partnership with HP will result in a ‘broad suite’ of file services, increased agility and cheaper hybrid cloud services, according to Denworth.

The partnership should make things simpler for cloud managers, who are being forced to take on several roles, according to Atul Garg, HP’s general manager of cloud automation. “Today’s IT teams are becoming cloud services brokers, managing various products and services across hybrid environments and fundamentally changing how they deliver value to the broader organisation,” said Garg. Now file services can be deployed easily to tens of thousands of users, said Garg.

CIO, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Research, Support

Support for the cloud is over priced, say disillusioned CIOs

SupportThe vast majority of businesses now use cloud computing but most feel ripped off, according to a study.

Research firm Vanson Bourne has canvassed a sample of 200 chief information officers (CIOs) for their feedback on cloud computing. The results show that almost all (186 out of 200) use the cloud in some form. However, almost as many of them (160 of the 200 CIOs) agreed that ‘ripped off’ was the multiple choice answer that best described their feelings over support services.

If the survey was statistically significant and was representative of industry wide sentiment, then 80 per cent of British businesses feel they are paying a high premium for basic support on their cloud services. While the penetration of cloud computing is high, with 93 per cent of businesses now using ‘some form’ of the service, some 84 per cent of the total sample said that it has not met their expectations on reducing support.

The most common problems presented by the survey were: slow response times to customer service queries (which was identified by 47 per cent of the sample), call handlers lacking technical knowledge (41 per cent), over-use of automated phone lines (33 per cent), complicated escalation processes (28 per cent) and a lack of 24/7 cover (19 per cent).

The results suggest that support from service providers is poor, according to Richard Davies, CEO of service provider ElasticHosts, which sponsored the independent study.

Companies adopt cloud in order to remove the headache of managing IT and the burden on in-house IT staff, so they expect to provide less support themselves, Davies said. For precisely that reason, the cloud service provider must not run a skeleton support service, Davies argued. Too often, according to Davies, companies have to pay a high premium to get the same level of service they got from their internal support.

“When using any service, you want to be able to ask questions, whether to learn how to configure a server or to query a bill. You should be able to do this without having to pay a hefty premium,” said Davies.

Asking a cloud service a technical question frequently involves a long wait and a call that is re-routed through an automated service. Ultimately a human call handler will admit they don’t know the answer, according to Davies.

“The industry should be doing more to help customers,” said Davies, “the first contact for support should be an engineer with strong technical understanding of the service.”

Cisco, Datacentre, Enterprise IT, HP, News & Analysis

HP overtakes Cisco in cloud infrastructure equipment leadership battle

ServersHP is now the top selling supplier to the cloud infrastructure equipment market, having sat on the shoulder of market leader Cisco throughout 2013 and 2014, according to a study by the Synergy Research Group.

The research group’s sales figures for the two vendors showed them to be tied in the first quarter of 2015, but by Q2 HP had opened a lead after achieving much stronger sequential revenue growth. The two leading vendors are both achieving ‘stellar revenue growth’ in the burgeoning market, according to Synergy. However, while HP maintained a 13 per cent worldwide market share in Q2, Cisco’s share dropped by half a percentage point. The two front runners are followed by Microsoft, Dell, IBM, EMC, VMware, Lenovo and Oracle.

In the public cloud infrastructure equipment market Cisco still has a ‘commanding lead’, but HP has a clear lead in private cloud. Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including hardware and software, are now running at $16 billion per quarter, having grown 25 per cent year on year.

HP leads the cloud infrastructure competition because of its dominance in the cloud server sector and its strong contention in storage, according to Synergy. Cisco’s challenge is upheld by its domination of networking, with support from its rapid ascension in the server market. Microsoft owes its high ranking to the success of its server operating system and virtualization applications. In the chasing pack, Dell and IBM both maintain strong positions with a respectable presence in a range of cloud technology markets.

Servers, operating systems, storage and networking combined account for 89 per cent of the cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy’s figures. The balance of the market revenues are made from cloud security, cloud management and virtualization applications.

“The public cloud services market is clearly booming and driving heavy investment in cloud infrastructure, while a rapid transition to cloud is also in full swing in the enterprise IT market,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst. “The good news for all vendors is that this huge market is growing rapidly and in aggregate the two leaders only account for a quarter of it – much the same as they did a year ago.”

Yesterday cloud service provider Ormuco, an HP Helion Network charter member, appointed Norwich based MigSolv as its UK data centre partner, adding another HP installation to the cloud infrastructure.

Enterprise IT, insidesales.com, neuralytics, News & Analysis, predictive cloud, sales

InsideSales.com announces world’s first predictive cloud for sales

A new cloud system driven by a neuralytics predictive engine could help users to use the intelligence gathered from 100 billion sales interactions.

The Predictive Cloud, from InsideSales.com, uses the knowledge of self-learning machines gathered from multiple sources across the globe to improve applications, business processes and sales practices, it maker claims.

Predictive analytics can be used as a platform, as a service or as a sales acceleration application, according to InsideSales. Independent software vendors (ISVs) can use Predictive-as-a-Platform using an open application programming interface to add predictive functions to their own apps. Users of Predictive-as-a-Service can get up to speed more rapidly through cloud delivery, says the vendor. The Sales Acceleration apps aim to improve sales communications, email and web tracking, predictive forecasting, lead and opportunity scoring, sales gamification and sales hiring.

The vision for the Predictive Cloud dates back to the founding of the company in 2004 according to founder Dave Elkington, InsideSales CEO. The rationale was to create a system that intelligently analyses billions of data points instantly. Having performed this instant analysis, it then recommends the optimal next steps for almost any application or business process. After building on this foundation, InsideSales plans to apply predictive technology beyond the realm of sales organisations, so it can deliver benefits to sectors such as government, healthcare and retail. Eventually predictive analytics could be used in any industry, said Elkington: “We are building an Amazon-style recommendation engine for business.”

InsideSales.com has partnered with Cloudbilt, the makers of MapAnything, CloudCraze, Demandbase, Dynamic Signal, Eventboard and LogMeIn.

“At this extreme scale, data science is critical in matching the right product to the right customer,” said Larry D’Angelo, senior sales VP at LogMeIn. “Predictive Cloud is taking analytics to a new level that can boost sales productivity.”

In May 2015 InsideSales closed a $60 million funding round led by Salesforce.

The system is due to be showcased at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on September 15th.

Predictive analytics could be the key to sales acceleration, according to Forrester Research’s principal analyst Kate Leggett. Speeding a prospect through the sales funnel will be driven by prescriptive insights, Leggett predicted in Forrester’s July 2015 report, CRM Sales Automation Software for Every User. “The insights driven by predictive analytics layer on domain-specific business logic resulting in context-specific, actionable prompts for individual salespeople,” Leggett reported.

Cloud computing, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, training

APMG launches end user cloud computing foundation certification scheme

Skills and trainingCloud industry expert Bernard Golden has created a vendor-independent course to help people and businesses make the transition to cloud-based services.

Golden developed the course for APMG International which has launched a new end user cloud computing certification scheme. The aim is to give the workforce the cloud skills needed to support the migration to cloud-based computing.

The course, Cloud Computing Foundation Certification, is designed to give an impartial and objective overview as an introduction to cloud computing. This is necessary, according to Golden, before any organisations can move to the cloud successfully.

The certification was developed in response to the mounting need for businesses to understand and prepare for the move to cloud. The course is aimed at all enterprise IT employees, from finance to operations, and sets out to outline the fundamentals of cloud computing. It will then move on to explain the benefits, challenges and pros and cons of rival delivery models.

The most important aspect, according to the author, is to create a cloud computing action plan for course participants. The ultimate proof of the course will be the successful adoption of cloud computing, according to Golden, APMG’s Chief Examiner.

“With cloud computing fast becoming the de facto platform for enterprise computing, the failure to understand its fundamentals poses a real danger,” said Golden. Failure will affect both the productivity of businesses and the employment prospects of the staff within them, he warned.

Though the benefits of moving an organisation’s data to the cloud – from potential cost savings to increased flexibility – are well documented, the execution is not, according to Golden. It is this gap in understanding that he intends to address, he said.

“The fact is that the majority of deployments aren’t as simple as just flicking a switch – you need to fully comprehend the security, technical and regulatory implications to make cloud a success, which is why training and certification are critical,” said Golden.

Many cloud computing training courses tend to be heavily weighted in favour of one vendor, which ultimately provides a skewed view, Golden claimed.

“This course has been designed to provide a vendor neutral knowledge base to provide an objective education about the topic,” said Golden, who promised there would be no ‘abstract knowledge without practical application’. Students will learn concepts and tools that can be applied immediately in the working environment, said Golden.

“For cloud projects to succeed they need to gain acceptance within businesses,” said Richard Pharro, CEO of APMG.

cloud backup, Enterprise IT, Fujitsu, News & Analysis

New Fujitsu data protection appliance backs up hybrid IT

FujitsuFujitsu has announced its new Rapid Recovery Appliance, which it claimed will make it easier to install a cloud backup as a service (BaaS) offering. The new appliance will make Fujitsu’s globally available Fujitsu Cloud BaaS more resilient and secure, it claimed.

The pre-configured system is designed to be installed on the customer’s premises in order to give users of hybrid IT systems greater control over their data protection processes. The new system will solve the logistical problems created by the mixture of internal IT and external cloud services that many companies now have, according to Fujitsu.

The system should combine the benefits of a backup and recovery appliance with the convenience of cloud-computing’s ‘pay-as-you-grow’ pricing policies and data security. According to Fujitsu, it makes an enterprise’s data both secure and readily recoverable, wherever it resides.

The new Fujitsu BaaS automatically replicates data to the secure cloud for offsite data protection. It facilitates the rapid recovery of recent local backup data through the use of Fujitsu’s cloud-based backup data and retrieval services. The system uses deduplication technology from Seagate and compression techniques to minimise the cost of transferring large volumes of data across the cloud.

Fujitsu Cloud BaaS will use 256-bit AES encryption to convert data both in-flight and at-rest in both the onsite appliance backup vault and the cloud backup vault. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance also provides automated, continuous cloud replication, helping to cut the costs and resources needed to maintain system integrity.

The pre-configured system will cut the storage footprint and minimise the bandwidth costs associated with cloud backup, said Fujitsu’s Global Offering Manager James Jefferd. The main business benefit, he said, is that it simplifies and speeds up a process that hybrid clouds could make more complicated for end users.

“With the trend toward a cloud service delivery model, IT buyers want easy-to-integrate cloud offerings that combine the benefits of cloud with existing assets,” said Jefferd. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance can replace traditional on-site, tape-based backup with an easy to use flexible system, he said.

Gartner analyst Dave Russell predicted it would be good for remote-office and departmental computing environments. “Most organisations cite concerns over security as their top cloud issue. The greater issue is often latency, so a disk-to-disk-to-cloud model is emerging,” said Russell.

cloud transition, Enterprise IT, Europe, News & Analysis, study, UK

Cloud strategy still tentative for many UK corporations – study

IT managers and CIOs should not feel they’ve missed the boat as the majority of enterprises have only just started their cloud journey, according to a new enterprise study.

If a study of 200 senior IT managers in large public and private sector organisations is an accurate reflection of the nation’s IT, only 3 per cent of enterprises have arrived at their final cloud destination. Not far from half (41 per cent) of IT managers surveyed were categorised as ‘still taking their first tentative steps towards cloud’ by the survey conductor Vanson Bourne. The study, run on behalf of UK cloud services provider Redcentric, also identified another significantly large group (32 per cent) that said they’re only half way to their cloud destination.

The study also identified the five types of personality trait that emerge among IT managers and CIOs as the pressure to adopt cloud technology builds. Five genres of manager were identified – in ascending order of caution – as Experimenters, Evolutionaries, Accelerators, Progressives and Cautionaries.

The relative proportions of these self-identified personality types did not always match the spread of cloud installations, however. Four per cent of cloud managers identified themselves as ‘risk-taking experimenters’ who were ‘willing to accept the ups and downs of moving to the cloud and not entirely sure the direction they will take’. This roughly equated to the proportion of managers (3%) who were satisfied they had completed their cloud journey.

Equal numbers of IT mangers and CIOs saw themselves as Accelerators (16%) who want to move to the cloud as fast as possible and Progressives (16%) who want to use cloud to make bold business changes. Taken together, these categories indicate that 32 per cent of the study group are frustrated in their ambitions for the cloud. This matched exactly the number (32 per cent) of companies that have yet to reach the half way point of their cloud migration.

The majority of the study group (50 per cent) identified themselves as Evolutionary and stated that they take a steady approach where cloud is a natural progression for the business.

There is a significant group of Cautionaries (15 per cent) who are most cynical about cloud overall. However, only 3 per cent of the group have not embarked on cloud projects, which indicates that 12 per cent of IT managers and CIOs have embarked on a cloud migration without having any faith in the technology.

“We wanted to help UK organisations understand where they are and where their journey is likely to take them next,” said Redcentric sales director Andy Mills, “The findings show there is huge untapped potential still to explore.”

Americas, Datacentre, Dell, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, VMware, VMworld

Dell tells VMworld how it simplified the cloud

Dell serversDell claims it will demystify the cloud for enterprise buyers with a raft of new products and services, which it unveiled at VMworld in San Francisco.

A new release of Dell’s Active System Manager will deepen integration with the product portfolio of virtualisation vendor VMware, it claimed, making it easier to automate the management of public and private cloud computing, and hybrids of the two.

“Dell’s portfolio helps customers to design, deploy and manage hybrid clouds from the device to the data centre to meet each customer’s unique journey to a hybrid cloud,” said Jim Ganthier, VP and GM of Engineered Solutions and Cloud, Dell.

Converting public cloud deployments to hybrid cloud environments brings financial returns that have been verified by several independent studies, according to Dell. “Dell’s innovations and our VMware partnership can deliver the business results and outcomes,” said Ganthier.

Meanwhile, an updated version of its Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL Horizon Edition will shrink workloads on virtual desktops and applications by up to 80 per cent, Dell claimed. This would cut the price of management and hosting. A new thin client operating system, Wyse ThinOS 8.1, will tighten security and make support easier, it claimed. Another improvement comes from the new version of Wyse Cloud Client Manager (CCM), which extends management to bring millions of Windows Embedded Standard (WES) and SUSE Linux thin clients under the umbrella of its management platforms.

Dell is working with VMware to make virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) easy to create and run, claimed Steve Lalla, Dell’s VP of commercial client software. “Collaboration enables us to deliver these solutions to our customers within VMware Horizon environments,” said Lalla.

One of the productivity shortcuts created by active system manager (ASM) is that any business analyst or IT architect can use templates and automation methods to speed up processes such as requests, approvals, help desk and self-service. The saving of time and manual effort and improved responsiveness and consistency will create rapid payback, claimed Dell.

Dell also claimed it has been ‘deeply involved’ in the joint development – with VMware – of EVO SDDC, which aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify the building of large scale software defined data centres. Dell’s EVO SDDC offerings will align closely with VMware’s general availability in the first half of 2016, said Dell.