Archivo de la categoría: Enterprise IT

Enterprise IT, HANA, Lufthansa, News & Analysis, SAP

Lufthansa enlists SAP to help crunch IoT data

Lufthansa's IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa’s IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa Systems is using SAP HANA to bridge the gap between GIS systems and Internet of Things sensors to optimise flight operations.

The IT solutions-focused subsidiary of the German airline, a longtime customer and partner of SAP, said it is using HANA SPS10 to track flight operations and combine the data with information on changes in airport and meteorological conditions, and other fleet-related data monitored and analysed in real-time.

“Together with SAP, we built a prototype of a future operational database for commercial flight support,” said Christoph Krüger, lead architect, Lufthansa Systems.

“The spatial engine in SAP HANA has given us the ability to track thousands of flights per day on a rich 3D mapping interface that includes both spatial and temporal coordinates.”

“At the same time, we were able to uncover breakthrough application scenarios that would not have been possible.”

The company is using the solution to dispatch, monitor and visualise air traffic in a bid to optimise its operations.

Enterprise IT, GE, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Nokia, Office 365, Software as a service

Microsoft signs GE in massive cloud deal

General Electric has signed up to use Microsoft's cloud software

General Electric has signed up to use Microsoft’s cloud software

Microsoft announced this week that it has signed up long-time tech partner GE to its cloud-based productivity software in a multimillion dollar deal.

The move will see GE deploy Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite Office 365 to GE’s more than 300,000 employees in 170 countries.

Jamie Miller, senior vice president and chief information officer of GE said: “As we deepen our investments in employee productivity, Microsoft’s innovative approach to collaboration made Office 365 our first choice for providing scalable productivity tools to our employees worldwide.”

GE said it will integrate a number of its line of business applications with Office 365 and deploy cloud-based email and Skype for Business calling and meetings, real-time document co-authoring, and team collaboration.

“Microsoft and GE share many values in common — openness, transparency, data-driven intelligence and innovation — all of which are driving forces behind Microsoft’s own mission to help people and organizations achieve more,” said John Case, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office. “As one of the most innovative companies in the world, GE understands what it takes to unleash the potential of its employees. We’re delighted GE has selected Office 365 as the productivity and collaboration solution to empower its global workforce.”

GE and Microsoft are longtime technology partner. The two companies have even set up a joint venture together – Caradigm, a company that develops and sells a healthcare technology platform for clinical applications and population management.

Nevertheless, the deal comes at a critical time for the company and is in some ways a validation of Microsoft’s goal of turning its business around from a number of strategic stumbles and focusing on its core strengths in software and the cloud. Earlier this month the company reported it would write off its entire Nokia acquisition and shed about 7,800 jobs in the process, mostly from its phone business.

Accenture, Enterprise IT, HfS Research, IT as a Service, ITaaS, Michael Corcoran, News & Analysis, Phil Fersht

Accenture: For most enterprises, IT-as-a-Service will have to wait

Enterprises are slow to adopt ITaaS

Enterprises are slow to adopt ITaaS

Enterprises are looking to adopt IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) models and modernise their digital systems in a bid to become more competitive, but recently published research suggests most aren’t budging on their existing strategies. Michael Corcoran, senior managing director, global growth and strategy at Accenture, the firm that commissioned the research, told BCN that leaning more on cloud services, using analytics and becoming more automated could help them speed up the transition.

The transition to ITaaS is up there with DevOps and Agile when it comes to cultural and organisational modernisation and service improvement. It implies IT moving from being a monolithic procurement centre to a dynamic internal service provider, something most big organisations need to do in order to more effectively compete in digital.

Accenture and HfS Research surveyed 716 enterprise service buyers and found that 53 per cent of senior executives view ITaaS as critical for their organisation, yet 68 per cent of respondents said their core enterprise processes will not be delivered as-a-service for five or more years.

The research suggests this may be partly due to differing opinions or objectives within the organisations polled. More than half of service buyer senior leaders view aaS as critical and 61 per cent are ready to replace legacy providers in order to achieve their desired outcomes. But the same can’t be said for middle manager and delivery staff: just 29 per cent see the value of aaS in the same way.

“Many enterprise operations executives and service providers must make intrinsic changes to how they operate to stay relevant in an uncertain and challenging future,” said Phil Fersht, chief executive and founder, HfS Research. “It’s the forward-thinking service buyers and providers who set out their vision and path forward for sourcing with defined business outcomes aligned to the as-a-service ideals, that will achieve success. The conservative among us who refuse to accept these times of unprecedented, disruptive transition will be competitively challenged.”

Corcoran told BCN that much of the onus is on service providers, which need to invest in developing as-a-service capabilities. But enterprises also need to deploy the right mix of technologies and invest in the right skills to make the transition happen.

“By effectively moving to the cloud and applying the right digital technology, automation, artificial intelligence and analytics to unlock competitive advantage from data, and utilizing talent smartly, companies are in a better position to innovate faster, create new services and drive business outcomes that positively impact their top and bottom-line,” Corcoran explained.

“49 per cent of today’s enterprise buyers expect to move to a “wide-scale transformation of business processes enabled by new technology tools/platforms” in just two years. So it’s clear that many operational leaders are recognizing the need to steer their enterprises away from legacy delivery models and move towards the cloud and its material business outcomes.”

Big Data, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, natural conservation, News & Analysis

The Natural Capital project deploys cloud, big data to better quantify the value of nature

Microsoft is teaming up with several US universities to use cloud and big data technologies to forward natural conservation efforts

Microsoft is teaming up with several US universities to use cloud and big data technologies to forward natural conservation efforts

The Natural Capital Project, a ten-year partnership between Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund and the University of Minnesota to determine the economic value of natural landscapes is using Microsoft’s cloud and big data technologies to help analyse and visualise data that can help municipal policy-makers improve the environment in and around cities.

The recently announced partnership will see Microsoft offer up a range of technologies to help the project’s researchers better analyse the features impacting natural ecosystems surrounding cities, and quantify the impact of natural disasters, development or how other dependencies are brought to bear on those ecosystems.

Mary Ruckelshaus, managing director of the Natural Capital Project told BCN the project is important because it will help demonstrate both how people depend on the environment and increase awareness of their impact on nature.

“City dwellers depend on nature in many ways–wetlands, marshes, and dunes protect them and their property from coastal flooding, trees and other vegetation filter particulates for clean air, and green spaces reduce temperature stress and improve cognitive function and mental health, just to name a few,” she said.

The researchers will collect data from that broad set of sources including satellite imagery, remote sensors, and social media, and use Microsoft Azure to model the data and deliver the results to a range of mobile devices.

“Our focus with The Natural Capital Project is on enabling leaders in the public and private sector to have access to the best data, powerful analytic and visualization tools so that they can more deeply understand historical trends and patterns within the city or company, predict future situations, model “what-if” scenarios, and gain vital situational awareness from multiple data streams such as satellite imagery, social media and other public channels,” explained Josh Henretig, senior director of environmental sustainability at Microsoft.

“The increased prevalence and availability of data from satellite imagery, remote sensors, surveys and social media channels means that we can analyse, model and predict an extremely diverse set of properties associated with the ecosystems on which we depend,” he said.

Henretig explained to BCN that the Natural Capital Project is the first to try and quantify the economic and social value of natural capital, which means developing the required models and tools needed to complete the analysis will be a challenging undertaking in itself.

“That is a huge, complex undertaking, without any precedent to guide it. As a result, we face the challenge of driving awareness that these tools and this knowledge is available for leaders to draw from. In addition, the sheer diversity of global ecosystems, shared ecosystems, their states of health or decline and differing local and regional priorities make creating tools that can be adapted to assess a variety of circumstances quite a challenge.”

While Henretig acknowledge that it’s often hard for municipal policy-makers to make long-term environmental decisions when people are struggling with more immediate needs, he said the Project will help generate both vital data on the economic value of natural systems as well as suggestions for how they can move forward in policy terms.

“In partnership with cities, we are going to help turn this data—produced across multiple systems for, among other things, buildings, transportation, energy grids, and forests, streams and watersheds—into actionable information and solutions,” he said, adding that the company hopes to apply the models and techniques generated by the research partners to other cities.

Azure, Enterprise IT, Features, Google, HP, hybrid cloud, Interviews, Microsoft, News & Analysis, ovum, Rackspace, Roy Illsley

Hybrid cloud issues are cultural first, technical second – Ovum

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

This week has seen a number of hybrid cloud deals which would suggest the industry is making significant progress delivering the platforms, services and tools necessary to make hybrid cloud practical. But if anything they also serve as a reminder that IT will forever be multimodal which creates challenges that begin with people, not technology, explains Ovum’s principle analyst of infrastructure solutions Roy Illsley.

There has been no shortage of hybrid cloud deals this week.

Rackspace and Microsoft announced a deal that would see the hosting and cloud provider expand its Fanatical Support to Microsoft Azure-based hybrid cloud platforms.

Google both announced it would support Windows technologies on its cloud platform, and that it would formally sponsor the OpenStack foundation – a move aimed at supporting container portability between multiple cloud platforms.

HP announced it would expand its cloud partner programme to include CenturyLink, which runs much of its cloud platform on HP technology, in a move aimed at bolstering HP’s hybrid cloud business and CenturyLink’s customer reach.

But one of the more interesting hybrid cloud stories this week came from the enterprise side of the industry. Copper and gold producer Freeport-McMoRan announced it is embarking on a massive overhaul of its IT systems. In a bid to become more agile the firm said it would deploy its entire application estate on a combination of private and public cloud platforms – though, and somewhat ironically, the company said the entire project would wrap up in five years (which, being pragmatic about IT overhauls, could mean far later).

“The biggest challenge with hybrid cloud isn’t the technology per se – okay, so you need to be able to have one version of the truth, one place where you can manage most the platforms and applications, one place where to the best of your abilities you can orchestrate resources, and so forth,” Illsley explains.

Of course you need all of those things, he says. There will be some systems that won’t fit into that technology model, that will likely be left out (i.e. mainframes). But there are tools out there to fit current hybrid use cases.

“When most organisations ‘do’ hybrid cloud, they tend to choose where their workloads will sit depending on their performance needs, scaling needs, cost and application architecture – and then the workloads sit there, with very little live migration of VMs or containers. Managing them while they sit there isn’t the major pain point. It’s about the business processes; it’s the organisational and cultural shifts in the IT department that are required in order to manage IT in a multimodal world.”

“What’s happening in hybrid cloud isn’t terribly different from what’s happening with DevOps. You have developers and you have operations, and sandwiching them together in one unit doesn’t change the fact that they look at the world – and the day-to-day issues they need to manage or solve – in their own developer or operations-centric ways. In effect they’re still siloed.”

The way IT is financed can also create headaches for CIOs intent on delivering a hybrid cloud strategy. Typically IT is funded in an ‘everyone pitches into the pot’ sort of way, but one of the things that led to the rise of cloud in the first place is line of businesses allocating their own budgets and going out to procure their own services.

“This can cause both a systems challenge – shadow IT and the security, visibility and management issues that come with that – and a cultural challenge, one where LOB heads see little need to fund a central organisation that is deemed too slow or inflexible to respond to customer needs. So as a result, the central pot doesn’t grow.”

While vendors continue to ease hybrid cloud headaches on the technology front with resource and financial (i.e. chargeback) management tools, app stores or catalogues, and standardised platforms that bridge the on-prem and public cloud divide, it’s less likely the cultural challenges associated with hybrid cloud will find any straightforward solutions in the short term.

“It will be like this for the next ten or fifteen years at least. And the way CIOs work with the rest of the business as well as the IT department will define how successful that hybrid strategy will be, and if you don’t do this well then whatever technologies you put in place will be totally redundant,” Illsley says.

Accenture, Amy K. Dale, Avanade, Bertrand Odinet, Enterprise IT, Freeport-McMoRan, News & Analysis

Freeport-McMoRan moves its apps into hybrid cloud

Freeport-McMoRan has given itself five years to complete the cloud migration

Freeport-McMoRan has given itself five years to complete the cloud migration

Copper and gold producer Freeport-McMoRan is embarking on a five-year project aimed at migrating its core IT applications over to a hybrid cloud platform. The company said the move is aimed at helping it become more agile and reduce overall IT spending.

Freeport-McMoRan is migrating to a system developed by Accenture and based on Microsoft Azure; the company said its core applications will be deployed on a combination of private and public cloud platforms, with Avanade and Accenture offering up a series of tools helping the company automate and manage its workloads.

“This program brings innovation and cloud economics to bear as we work to become more agile, drive increased revenue, and continue our focus on items that impact mine production,” said Bertrand Odinet, vice president and chief information officer of Freeport-McMoRan.

“By partnering with Accenture, we will gain the ability to grow our service portfolio and scale our IT services in line with our global business requirements,” Odinet said.

Amy K. Dale, managing director and client account lead, Accenture said: “We are collaborating with Freeport-McMoRan to help them evolve to an everything ‘as-a-service’ model, giving them the ability to easily provision new capabilities, reduce risk associated with vendor ‘lock-in’ and enable them to scale their IT services up and down as needed.”

Freeport-McMoRan is the latest natural resource firm to move its core applications into the cloud. In April this year Rio Tinto announced a partnership with Accenture that will see it move the bulk of its application landscape to Accenture’s public cloud service in a bid to save costs and switch to an “as-a-service” IT model.

Bob Skaggs, Columbia Pipeline Group, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Philip Guido

Columbia Pipeline links up with IBM in $180m cloud deal

CPG is sending most of its applications to the cloud

CPG is sending most of its applications to the cloud

Newly independent Columbia Pipeline Group (CPG) signed a $180m deal with IBM this week that will see the firm support the migration of its application infrastructure from on-premise datacenters into a hybrid cloud environment.

CPG recently split from NiSource to become an independent midstream pipeline and storage business with 15,000 miles of interstate pipeline, gathering and processing assets extending from New York to the Gulf of Mexico.

The company this week announced it has enlisted IBM, a long-time partner of NiSource, to help it migrate its infrastructure and line of business applications (finance, human resources, ERP) off NiSource’s datacenters an into a private cloud platform hosted in IBM’s datacenters in Columbus, Ohio.

The wide-ranging deal will also see CPG lean on IBM’s cloud infrastructure for its network services, help desk, end-user services, cybersecurity, mobile device management and operational big data.

“IBM has been a long-time technology partner for NiSource, providing solutions and services that have helped that company become an energy leader in the U.S.,” said Bob Skaggs, chief executive of CPG. “As an independent business, we are counting on IBM to help provide the continued strong enterprise technology support CPG needs.”

Philip Guido, general manager, IBM Global Technology Services, North America said: “As a premier energy company executing on a significant infrastructure investment program, CPG requires an enterprise technology strategy that’s as forward-thinking and progressive as its business strategy. Employing an IT model incorporating advanced cloud, mobile, analytics and security technologies and services from IBM will effectively support that vision.”

Companies that operate such sensitive infrastructure – like oil and gas pipelines – are generally quite conservative when it comes to where they host their applications and data, though the recent IBM deal speaks to an emerging shift in the sector. Earlier this summer Gaia Gallotti, research manager at IDC Energy Insights told BCN that cloud is edging higher on the agenda of CIOs in the energy and utilities sector, but that they are struggling with a pretty significant skills gap.

banking, David Arnott, Enterprise IT, Financial Services, Opinion, Temenos

Cloud banking: lit from within

Financial services companies are warming to cloud services

Financial services companies are warming to cloud services

In a world where, as John Schlesinger, chief enterprise architect at Temenos, argues, servers are about to stop getting cheaper, the advantages of cloud computing in terms of cost and customer experience look more compelling than ever. In the banking market, however, the spread of cloud systems has been slower than elsewhere due to factors including concern about data security, uncertainty about the position regulators will take on cloud technologies and the challenge of managing migration from the in-house, legacy IT systems that currently run banks’ critical functions.

So just how hot is cloud banking right now? A quick temperature check of the financial services industry’s attitude to cloud banking in April triggered a warm response.

There are two sides to every story and never more so than when discussing with banks the shift from in-house technology to on-demand cloud-based services. So in Temenos’ recent survey Cloud-banking heat map, we asked two key questions: what are the benefits you seek from cloud services; and what, if any, are the barriers to adoption you face?

Echoing the results of a similar Ovum survey The Critical Role for Cloud in the Transformation of Retail Banks,last year, our results show that cloud is no longer just about cost reduction, as 50 per cent of respondents see cloud as a means to adopt new technology, and 34 per cent reported the ability to add new business functionality more quickly as a top benefit. This is a very encouraging sign that banks are seeing the adoption of cloud technology as a means to support the delivery of new products and services.

That is not to say that the long term cost benefits of cloud services are any less important. In fact the highest scoring benefit sought from the cloud, at 58 per cent of respondents, is to reduce overall IT costs. Not at all surprising given the profitability hit banks have taken post financial crisis, cost-savings are an obvious driver of a cloud-based IT strategy.

The top reported barriers to adopting cloud services are concerns over data security (55 per cent) and reliability and availability (47 per cent), which are common challenges for financial institutions that are used to managing and maintaining their own IT. This highlights the need for cloud providers to do more to demonstrate to the industry the robustness of their security controls and availability metrics, as paradoxically we may find that security and reliability is a benefit rather than a barrier to cloud.

Concern over regulatory compliance is another top factor against cloud banking, cited by 45 per cent of respondents. This is no surprise in such a heavily regulated sector, and there is no quick fix, but when talking to lawyers in this space, the feeling is that with a high level of due diligence on the on the banks’ part, and a transparent and collaborative approach on the cloud provider’s part, a solution could be found that meets all parties’ needs, including those of the regulator.

In response to this, we see cloud software vendors, their platform partners and industry organisations are working closely to address security concerns. Co-ordinated efforts such as the Cloud Security Alliance and its Cloud Controls Matrix have set out security principles for cloud vendors and assist prospective customers in assessing security risk at individual cloud providers. Cloud providers themselves are investing heavily in compliance and security expertise to the extent that many observers argue that a well-implemented migration to the cloud can result in higher levels of security than an in-house system, as well as access to real-time reporting mechanisms that are often superior, too.

As the industry continues to warm up to cloud banking, we will see the same issues raised and discussed again and again. And rightly so: the only way to support the banking industry in any leap in technology and faith is by addressing issues and challenges openly until all parties are convinced of its viability.

However, while clear challenges remain to more rapid adoption of cloud-based technology in banking, it is clear that change is happening. Already, analysts at Gartner predict that by 2016, more than 60 per cent of global banks will process the majority of their transactions in the cloud. Many are already moving less sensitive functions there and developing strategies to enable them to capture the benefit of cloud-based systems for their core operations.

Written by David Arnott, chief executive of Temenos

Alastair Mitchell, Dods Research, Enterprise IT, Huddle, News & Analysis, Public Sector

Only one third of UK public sector comfortable with cloud – survey

Survey research reveals UK public sector workers still aren't sold on cloud

Survey research reveals UK public sector workers still aren’t sold on cloud

Only 35 per cent of public sector staff are comfortable using cloud-based services according to a survey report published this week.

The survey, commissioned by enterprise collaboration cloud service provider Huddle and carried out by Dods Research, petitioned more than 5,000 UK public sector workers on their views towards cloud services and collaboration.

According to the results just a third of public sector staff seem comfortable using cloud services, while slightly more say they have never used cloud services before.

The results come at a time when the UK government is looking to cut billions of pounds by cutting programmes and improving operational efficiency through the use of cloud services, a key pillar in its ‘cloud-first’ strategy originally revealed in 2013.

“The public sector frontline is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Huddle.

“On the one hand, staff are being asked to remove £13bn of spend, but on the other, the new cloud-based IT infrastructures that are key to a large proportion of these savings are not yet sufficiently understood or trusted enough to be widely deployed. UK government has to up the rhetoric on cloud benefits and training, else the cuts are simply not possible,” he said.

“It’s really very simple. If public sector employees — and in particular those in IT roles — are not convinced of the benefits of cloud computing and the changes to working practices that can be delivered through it, then the £13bn public sector savings are not realistic.”

The UK government spent over £4.3bn on IT services last year, though the government has frequently said cloud services must play a leading role in reducing IT spending across the UK public sector.

Enterprise IT, ERP, Infor, Mark Humphlett, Merit Globe, Mikael Porat, News & Analysis, pharmaceuticals

Recipharm taps Merit Globe, Infor for legacy ERP modernisation

Recipharm has sent its ERP platform to the cloud

Recipharm has sent its ERP platform to the cloud

Swedish pharmaceutical manufacturer Recipharm has enlisted Merit Globe and Infor to modernise the company’s ERP systems to help reduce application fragmentation across the organisations.

Recipharm said it wanted to streamline its ERP system and reduce risk associated with its fragmented suite of legacy applications. It deployed Infor’s M3 cloud-based ERP platform to replace its existing on-premise solution.

“We can see that new features are being developed and industry-specific functionality added, removing the need for customisation.  This is critical for us as we instigate business process improvement projects,” said Mikael Porat, director of supply chain, Recipharm.

“Looking ahead we are assessing options outside of the ERP such as electronic signature , as this is of major importance for compliance within the pharmaceutical industry,” he added.

The project also included integration with a host of third party systems as well as a migration from IBM AS/400 to Microsoft SQL.

“Success in the pharmaceutical industry depends on managing two contrasting factors, continual product innovation and complete compliance with regulations,” said Mark Humphlett, director, industry and solution strategy, Infor.  “From an operational perspective this means an agile ERP and standardised processes are critical.  Customisations must be kept to a minimum and integration must be lightweight and flexible to support growth.”

Pharma is a heavily regulated industry and one of the main inhibitors when considering a shift to cloud services. Results from the BCN Annual Industry Survey earlier this year, which included responses from over 715 senior enterprise IT decision makers, suggest Pharma was among the top three least likely sectors to shift to cloud services in the next two years, Aviation and Emergency Services being the other two.