Archivo de la categoría: IBM

Enterprise IT, Eugene Barbashin, Europe, IBM, Mariinsky Theatre, News & Analysis

Mariinsky Theatre taps IBM cloud to improve broadcasting

abril 30, 2015 Business Cloud News

Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre is using a hybrid cloud to support live performance broadcasts

Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud solution that would improve its ability to stream live videos of performances to mobile devices globally.

The theatre already has more than 250,000 unique viewers around the world tuned into Mariinsky.tv, where it currently hosts webcasts of live performances and on-demand recordings.

It had previously broadcast performances on the web using its own on-premise platform to edit and stream performances, but the company said it sought a cloud-based platform for this in a bid to expand its global reach and improve its ability to withstand peaks in demand.

“To support a growing global community of loyal Theatre audiences, we needed a scalable, hybrid cloud solution that could meet the standards for quality that we and our viewers expect,” said Eugene Barbashin, head of the computer technology department, Mariinsky Theatre.

The company said at times its digital platform would need to scale to support thousands of simultaneous viewers, particularly around very popular orchestra or ballet performances, but that it was struggling to cope with demand at times.

“We tried various competitive offerings from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but viewers still had buffering issues while streaming performances. We chose IBM Cloud to more fully meet our needs in terms of reliable performance and ease-of-use,” Barbashin added.

AWS, Google, IBM, John Dinsdale, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Synergy Research

Synergy Research: AWS still larger than four biggest rivals combined

abril 27, 2015 Business Cloud News

AWS is larger than its four top rivals combined

Amazon pulled the curtain back from its AWS business last week, announcing its cloud services now rakes in over $5bn annually. John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group said that now puts the e-commerce giant ahead of most of its largest competitors.

Amazon recently reported its cloud business took in revenues of $1.57bn in the first quarter of 2015, and enjoyed close to 50 per cent growth year on year. This is the first time the e-commerce giant has publicly disclosed AWS revenues.

Following on from that, some vendors which shall remain nameless (AWS competitors) worked behind the scenes to remind press off how much more profitable their cloud businesses are by comparison. But Synergy Research data suggests AWS is far larger than most of its competitors combined, at least in the infrastructure services market specifically.

Microsoft enjoys the highest revenue growth rate and IBM is leading private & hybrid services segment, but according to Synergy AWS continues to grow faster than the market as a whole, and that its market share approached 30 per cent in the most recently reported quarter.

Google is quietly gaining share though it remains just half the size of Microsoft in this market, the firm said.

“Across the full and varied spectrum of cloud activities there are now six companies that can lay a valid claim to having annual cloud revenue run rates in excess of $5 billion – AWS, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco and salesforce – and all are able to claim leadership in different parts of the cloud market,” Dinsdale said.

“However, on a strict like-for-like basis AWS remains streets ahead of the competition in cloud infrastructure services. Furthermore, this part of the cloud market is growing much more rapidly than SaaS or cloud infrastructure hardware and software.”

Like-for-like comparisons seems scarce in cloud revenue reporting, not the least of which because it’s such a nascent sector. Considering the market leader in cloud only just started publicly disclosing revenues tacked onto that business, it may be some time before vendors and service providers come up with standard definitions for what can be reported as ‘cloud’ (for instance, IBM recently reported its annual cloud revenues now exceed $7.7bn).

Synergy estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (which includes IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) now total exceed $5bn.

IBM, Martin Schroeter, News & Analysis, quarterly results

IBM reports flat revenues but cloud revenue is up 75%

abril 21, 2015 Business Cloud News

IBM reported strong performance in cloud despite nearly three years of sequential quarterly declines

For Q1 2015 IBM reported flat revenues year on year and operating income slightly up on last year, due in part to currency impacts and some of the recent restructuring efforts at the firm, respectively. But the company also reported strong performance in its ‘as-a-service’ segment.

The company reported strong growth in its Power and mainframe businesses, with quarterly mainframe revenue more than doubling (with particularly strong growth in China). The company said Power showed strong performance in the scale-out systems market as well, in part due to the expansion of Power architecture in SoftLayer datacentres.

But at $19.6bn in the first quarter of 2015 revenue at dropped for the 12th consecutive quarter at IBM if a stronger dollar and the impact of divested businesses are taken into consideration.

The company’s chief financial officer Martin Schroeter aimed to reassure the market that bold moves to invest in new areas like Internet of Things and restructure its business were having a positive impact.

IBM is spending billions to shift its focus on lower-margin strategic initiatives like cloud, big data, mobile, security and IoT, and is continuing to “rebalance” its workforce at the same time.

“As we continue the transformation of our business, I’d expect a similar level of workforce rebalancing next quarter, which will impact our year-to-year profit performance,” Schroeter said.

“At our investor briefing at the end of February, we spent a lot of time on how we are transforming our business to where we see long-term value in enterprise IT. We have a core portfolio that’s high value to our clients and high value to us. Quite frankly, it’s essential.”

“While the market for these capabilities isn’t necessarily growing, we continue to reinvent and innovate to deliver that value,” he added.

But performance in areas of strategic importance for IBM looks promising. Schroeter said the annual “as-a-service” run rate stands at $3.8bn, up $1.5bn in the last year. Cloud revenue was up over 75 per cent from last year; on a trailing 12-month basis, the company reported cloud revenue of $7.7bn, with analytics up more than 20 per cent and social more than 40 per cent.

Brendan Hannigan, CrossIdeas, cybersecurity, IBM, Lighthouse, News & Analysis

IBM makes cyber threat data available as a cloud security service

abril 17, 2015 Business Cloud News

IBM is launching a cybersecurity cloud service

IBM is throwing its hat into the cybersecurity ring

IBM has unveiled a cloud-based cybersecurity service which includes hundreds of terabytes of raw aggregated threat intelligence data, which can be expanded upon by users that sign up to use the service.

At about 700TB, IBM’s X-Force Exchange service is being pitched by the firm as one of the largest and most complete catalogues of cybersecurity vulnerability data in the world.

The threat information is based on over 25 billion web pages and images collected from a network of over 270 million endpoints, and will also include real-time data provided by others on the service (so effectively, the more people join, the more robust the service gets).

“The IBM X-Force Exchange platform will foster collaboration on a scale necessary to counter the rapidly rising and sophisticated threats that companies are facing from cybercriminals,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager, IBM Security.

“We’re taking the lead by opening up our own deep and global network of cyberthreat research, customers, technologies and experts. By inviting the industry to join our efforts and share their own intelligence, we’re aiming to accelerate the formation of the networks and relationships we need to fight hackers,” Hannigan said.

Last year IBM made a number of acquisitions to bolster end-point and cloud security (CrossIdeas, Lighthouse) and adding cyber threat detection to the mix creates a nicely rounded security portfolio. But the move also put it in direct competition with a wide range of managed security service providers that have been playing in this space for years and going after the same verticals (oil & gas, financial service, retail, media, etc.), so it will be interesting to see how IBM differentiates itself.

Analytics, Apple, Big Data, Healthcare, IBM, John E. Kelly III, Mike Rhodin, News & Analysis, Vendor, Watson

IBM goes after healthcare with acquisitions, Apple HealthKit partnership, new business unit

abril 14, 2015 Business Cloud News

IBM is pushing hard to bring Watson to the healthcare sector

IBM announced a slew of moves aimed at strengthening its presence in the healthcare sector including two strategic acquisitions, a HealthKit-focused partnership with Apple, and the creation of a new Watson and cloud-centric healthcare business unit.

IBM announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Explorys, which deploys cognitive cloud-based analytics on datasets derived from numerous and diverse financial, operational and medical record systems, and Phytel, which provides cloud-based software that helps healthcare providers and care teams coordinate activities across medical facilities by automating certain aspects of patient care.

The company said the acquisitions would bolster IBM’s efforts to sell advanced analytics and cognitive computing to primary care providers, large hospital systems and physician networks.

“As healthcare providers, health plans and life sciences companies face a deluge of data, they need a secure, reliable and dynamic way to share that data for new insight to deliver quality, effective healthcare for the individual,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson. “To address this opportunity, IBM is building a holistic platform to enable the aggregation and discovery of health data to share it with those who can make a difference.”

That ‘holistic platform’ is being developed by the recently announced Watson Health unit, which as the name suggests will put IBM’s cognitive compute cloud service Watson at the heart of a number of healthcare-focused cloud storage and analytics solutions. The unit has also developed the Watson Health Cloud platform, which allows the medical data it collects to be anonymized, shared and combined with a constantly-growing aggregated set of clinical, research and social health data.

“All this data can be overwhelming for providers and patients alike, but it also presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform the ways in which we manage our health,” said John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president, solutions portfolio and research. “We need better ways to tap into and analyze all of this information in real-time to benefit patients and to improve wellness globally.”

Lastly, IBM announced an expanded partnership with Apple that will see IBM offer its Watson Health Cloud platform as a storage and analytics service for HealthKit data aggregated from iOS devices, and open the platform up for health and fitness app developers as well as medical researchers.

Many of IBM’s core technologies, which have since found their way into Watson (i.e. NLP, proprietary algorithms, etc.) are already in use by a number of pioneering medical facilities globally, so it makes sense for IBM to pitch its cognitive compute capabilities to the healthcare sector – particularly in the US, where facilities are legally incentivised to use new technologies to reduce the cost of patient care while keeping quality of service high. Commercial deals around Watson have so far been scarce, but it’s clear the company is keen to do what it can to create a market for cloud-based cognitive computing.

IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Texas Instruments

IBM bolsters Internet of Things initiatives

abril 10, 2015 Business Cloud News

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM has announced a slew of Internet of Things solutions following a recent pledge to pump £2bn into a series of IoT and cloud initiatives, including the creation of a standalone IoT division.

The company pulled the curtain back on two vertically-focused IoT solutions including IBM Aviation Maintenance, which is designed to optimise the availability and extend the life of critical aviation components; and IBM Product Line Engineering (PLE), a solution to help engineers more efficiently customise product designs for specific markets

It also reaffirmed plans to carve out a section in Bluemix for specialist IoT services (IoT Zone), and announced a number of new IoT-focused cloud services available on the platform: an asset management solution to increase visibility of the condition of assets; a managed continuous engineering platform to help large industrial manufacturing organisations speed up IoT app development, and Workbench, a service for modelling the design and impact of IoT systems.

“The IoT is generating massive amounts of data – data from mobile phones, automobiles, appliances and industrial appliances – that can be captured, analyzed and transformed into actionable insights, in a secure manner,” said Chris O’Connor, general manager, offerings, IBM Internet of Things.

“IBM is helping innovators who design and produce the next generation of connected devices and those who operate and maintain those devices, deal with the increasing complexity of creating products and solutions quickly to meet the needs of consumers,” O’Connor said.

The company also announced a partnership with Texas Instruments (TI) to develop a cloud-based provisioning and lifecycle management service for IoT devices, part of IBM’s plan to ink more IoT-focused strategic partnerships.

“Cloud connectivity and cloud services are fundamental to the IoT, but there are barriers to adoption especially for industrial applications such as manufacturing, building automation and energy management,” said Avner Goren, general manager of strategic marketing, Embedded Processing, Texas Instruments.

“By working with IBM to help secure device identity, provisioning and lifecycle management, we have created a foundation for IoT adoption to reach its full potential through better managed services across easy-to-use connectivity solutions,” Goren said.

The 2nd annual Internet of Things World event to be held in San Francisco in May is due to address some of the challenges ahead of the industry in terms of IoT. Sign up here.

Enterprise IT, federal government, IBM, News & Analysis, Public Sector, US Army

US Army deploys hybrid cloud for logistics data analysis

abril 9, 2015 Business Cloud News

The US Army is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support its logistics system

The US Army is partnering with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support data warehousing and data analysis for its Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) platform, the Army’s logistics support service.

LOGSA provides logistics information capabilities through analytics tools and BI solutions to acquire, manage, equip and sustain the materiel needs of the organisation, and is also the home of the Logistics Information Warehouse (LIW), the Army’s official data system for collecting, storing, organizing and delivering logistics data.

The Army said it is working with IBM to deploy LOGSA, which IBM said it is the US federal government’s largest logistics system, on an internal hybrid cloud platform in a bid to improve its ability to connect to other IT systems, broaden the organisation’s analytics capabilities, and save money (the Army reckons up to 50 per cent).

Anne Altman, General Manager for U.S. Federal at IBM said: “The Army not only recognized a trend in IT that could transform how they deliver services to their logistics personnel around the world, they also implemented a cloud environment quickly and are already experiencing significant benefits. They’re taking advantage of the inherent benefits of hybrid cloud: security and the ability to connect it with an existing IT system. It also gives the Army the flexibility to incorporate new analytics services and mobile capabilities.”

AWS, BlueMix, hackathon, IBM, NASA, Watson

IBM, NASA team on cloud, open data app code-a-thon

abril 7, 2015 Business Cloud News

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

IBM and NASA are partnering on the space agency’s Space App Challenge, which will see participating developers build applications that help solve space exploration challenges.

The goal is to get developers building applications that can be used to solve space exploration-related challenges using cloud-based services and publicly available data sets. Some initial applications include a system that uses data aggregators and analytics to help NASA tracks asteroids, and an app that uses senor data streams to guide movement for robots.

As part of the deal IBM will be offering up its Bluemix platform-as-a-service and Watson analytics for developers participating with the three-day code-a-thon, which is being coordinated by the space agency online; more than 10,000 developers are expected to participate across 136 cities.

The company also plans to allocate IBM staff to offer best-practice development tutorials for handling some of its cloud and big data technologies.

NASA is making available datasets from over 200 data sources including services and tools supplied through real-life NASA missions and technology.

“The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is at the forefront of innovation, providing real-world examples of how technology can be used to by the best and brightest developers in the world to solve some of the most daunting challenges facing our civilization,” said Sandy Carter, general manager, cloud ecosystem and developers, IBM.

“Using the IBM Cloud, IBM is making it easier for developers to solve NASA challenges by helping them leverage and make sense of data in ways that wouldn’t have been possible even just a few years ago,” Carter said.

The space agency has previously partnered with other cloud provider on similar initiatives. Last year NASA partnered with Amazon Web Service to host terabytes worth of climate and earth sciences satellite data to promote community-driven research and innovation using its data.

21Vianet, AWS, IBM, Josh Chen, Microsoft, Ralph Haupter

21Vianet, Microsoft renew vows on Chinese public cloud services

abril 7, 2015 Business Cloud News

21Vianet and Microsoft have extended a partnership to sell Azure-based services in China

Microsoft and 21Vianet have announced the two companies have renewed their partnership to jointly sell Microsoft’s cloud services in China.

The partnership, which now extends until the end of 2018 and will now include Office 365, will see 21Vianet continue to be the exclusive provider of Microsoft’s Azure-based services within China.

“As China’s premier infrastructure provider and cloud enabler, we are extremely excited to extend this important partnership with Microsoft. Since 2012, teams from Microsoft and 21Vianet have worked diligently and seamlessly in the preparation, public preview and commercial launch of both Windows Azure and Office 365 services in China,” said Josh Chen, chairman and chief executive officer of 21Vianet.

“As the growth momentum for cloud services remains exceptionally strong, we believe this partnership extension marks another significant step in solidifying the cooperation between 21Vianet and Microsoft as well as strengthening our leadership role in China’s cloud computing services market,” Chen said.

Microsoft and 21Vianet originally announced their partnership in 2012. Given the stringent data management measures applied to service providers by the Chinese government as well as local business rules, international companies like Microsoft are required to partner with a local service providers if they are to sell their services on the Mainland. 21Vianet also works with AWS and IBM to rollout their cloud services in China.

“We are very pleased to have extended a successful relationship with 21Vianet, following more than 2 years of close collaboration in bringing Microsoft public cloud services to the Chinese market. Both Azure and Office 365 have strong momentum in the market with broad adoption by both local Chinese companies and multinational corporations,” said Ralph Haupter, corporate vice president and chief executive officer of Microsoft Greater China.

“Customers value Azure and Office 365′s enterprise-grade benefits such as security, flexibility, reliability, scalability, openness, cost efficiency and deployment speed. We remain firmly committed to the Chinese cloud market, and we believe this extended partnership with 21Vianet will serve as a strong foundation for both companies to further contribute to the development of the cloud computing ecosystem throughout China.”

According to CCID Consulting, an IT consultancy catering to Chinese businesses, China’s cloud market is on track to reach $6bn by 2017.

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