Archivo de la categoría: IBM

AWS, Channel, Europe, IBM, Ingram Micro, News & Analysis, VAR

Ingram Micro expands cloud marketplace to EU

Traditional IT resellers are trying to rebuild the business model to fit cloud services

Traditional IT resellers are trying to rebuild the business model to fit cloud services

IT tech distributor Ingram Micro has launched a marketplace for cloud services in Europe in a bid to bolster its appeal to channel partners, many of which are increasingly offering their products as-a-service. The move is aimed at making its proposition in the cloud economy more compelling, particularly as other traditional IT vendors and cloud incumbents move in on reseller turf.

The Cloud Marketplace, which handles billing and service deployment for a range of services offered by cloud vendors, is already up and running in the US. But the most recent announcement will see the platform launch imminently in France, the Netherlands, and the UK.

The company said it plans to launch the marketplace in Belgium, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Sweden in the second quarter of 2015.

In prepared remarks the company said it wanted to enable channel partners to more effectively sell their cloud wares to clients, and in particular, exploit what Ingram sees as a growing opportunity in the SME market for resellers. With the Cloud Marketplace, channel partners can manage the complete end-customer subscription lifecycle from a single, automated platform, provided and supported by Ingram Micro, the company said.

“For our channel partners, enabling businesses to operate in a hybrid environment that includes cloud-based solutions is as much about business transformation as it is about technology,” said Carl Alloin, executive director Europe, Ingram Micro Cloud. “Our Cloud Marketplace was designed to help channel partners quickly scale as they seek to expand their footprint and profitability in the cloud.”

Ingram is among a growing number of resellers refitting their channel models for the cloud (Arrow is another big one in Europe that recently launched a cloud app marketplace), in part because other traditional vendors and cloud service providers are starting to threaten their role in the market. Vendors like IBM, which launched its cloud service marketplace last year, are much more willing to cooperate with other vendors they would otherwise compete with at different levels of the stack, while cloud incumbents like AWS are attracting a range of other software and service providers to its fast-growing ecosystem.

Analytics, BlueMix, IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, smart cities, Vendor

IBM to pour £2bn into Internet of Things business unit

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

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

IBM announced it plans to spend up to £2bn over the next four years to consolidate and revamp its Internet of Things technologies and services into a standalone business unit. The move seems aimed at broadening its appeal beyond proto-IoT segments it traditionally caters to.

Through its Smart Cities and Smarter Planet programmes the company has effectively been offering what many today refer to as Internet of Things technologies, but the renewed investment will see IBM mobilise and train a massive fleet of consultants (over 2,000) on its consolidated IoT services portfolio, and offer a cloud-based platform for companies to help them marry data real time IoT data streams with other data sets and services.

The company also plans to carve out a section in Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service, for specialist IoT services, and expand IoT-focused partnerships with a range of technology and service providers.

“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” said Bob Picciano, senior vice president, IBM Analytics. “This is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters.  Over the next decade, integration of IoT in business operations and decision-making will transform business.”

The move is part of a broader reorganisation effort currently underway at IBM, which is seeing the company realign internally (and trim headcount) to more effectively support service and technology development around cloud, mobile, security, and data analytics. Its Internet of Things offerings are both increasingly drawing from those other segments, and broadening beyond traditional smart cities or intelligent manufacturing segments use cases – areas where IBM has traditionally played.

In February for example ARM and IBM jointly announced an Internet of Things starter kit to enable developers to rapidly prototype mbed-based IoT applications using Bluemix, which ships with a development board from Freescale, powered by an ARM Cortex-M4 processor. The companies are aiming the kit at startups, which hasn’t traditionally been IBM’s nor ARM’s target demographic.

IBM, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, Pete Lorenzen, SDN, Virtualisation

IBM opens SDN, NFV labs in Dallas, Paris

IBM is moving to bolster its service provider business

IBM is moving to bolster its service provider business

IBM has announced the launch of two Network Innovation Centres, where the company’s clients can experiment with software-defined networking and network function virtualisation technologies. The move seems aimed at bolstering its service provider business.

The centres, one in Paris, France and the other in Dallas, Texas, will focus primarily on experimenting with solutions for large enterprise networking systems and telecoms operators, and feature technologies from a range of IBM partner companies including Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Juniper Networks, Riverbed, and VMware.

IBM said facilitating automation and orchestration innovation will be the main thrust of the centres.

“Effectively applying cloud technologies to the network could allow a company to reduce its overall network capacity while increasing utilization by dynamically providing resources during the day in Beijing while it’s nighttime in New York, and vice versa,” said Pete Lorenzen, general manager, Networking Services, IBM Global Technology Services.

“A telecom company could better manage periodic, localized spikes in smartphone usage caused by major sporting events or daily urban commutes, dynamically provisioning capacity when and where it’s needed,” Lorenzen added.

IBM has pushed farther into the networking space in recent years, having scored a number of patents in the area of networking automation and dynamic network resource allocation. A significant driver of this is its service provider business, where some of the company’s competitors – like HP – are attempting to make inroads.

Corey Bell, Datacentre, IBM, Ken King, News & Analysis, Open Compute, OpenPower, OpenStack, Power8, Vendor

OpenPower members reveal open source cloud tech mashups

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower Foundation members pulled the curtain back on a number of open source cloud datacentre technologies including the first commercially available OpenPower-based server, and the first open server spec that combines OpenStack, Open Compute and OpenPower architectures.

Members of the open source hardware community, which IBM – the community’s founding organisation – said now numbers over 110 organisations, revealed a number of joint hardware initiatives falling under the OpenPower umbrella.

The Foundation announced the first OpenPower-based servers, developed by Chinese ODM Tyan (TYAN TN71-BP012), a variant of those IBM recently said it would add to its SoftLayer datacentres. The servers will be commercially available in the second half of 2015.

IBM and Wistron also revealed an OpenPower-based server using GPU and networking technology from Nvidia and Mellanox, respectively, which is being aimed at high performance compute workloads.

The foundation also announced the first server spec and motherboard mock-up combining the design concepts of the Facebook-led open source hardware project, Open Compute, with OpenStack and OpenPower technologies, an initiative Rackspace – among other service providers with a vested interest all three open source projects – was keen to bring to fruition.

“Collaborating across our open development communities will accelerate and broaden the raw potential of a fully open datacentre. We have a running start together and look forward to technical collaboration and events to engage our broader community,” said Corey Bell, chief executive officer of the Open Compute Project.

In an interview with BCN earlier this month Brad McCredie, IBM fellow and vice president of IBM Power Systems Development and president of the OpenPower Foundation said there is a big opportunity for Power to succeed in the market, and that IBM hopes to claim up to 30 per cent of the scale-out market in a matter of years.

Ken King, general manager OpenPower Alliances at IBM said: “OpenPower started off as an idea that immediately resonated with our technology partners to strengthen their scale out implementations like analytics.  Now, OpenPower is fundamental to every conversation IBM is having with clients — from HPC to scale out computing to cloud service providers.  Choice, freedom and better performance are strategic imperatives guiding customers around the globe, and OpenPOWER is leading the way.

Chris Moody, Glenn Finch, IBM, News & Analysis, Social media, Twitter, Vendor

IBM says over 100 enterprises creating Twitter-integrated cloud services

Twitter and IBM are jointly deliver solutions leveraging IBM's technology and consulting expertise with Twitter's vast data troves

Twitter and IBM are jointly deliver solutions leveraging IBM’s technology and consulting expertise with Twitter’s vast data troves

IBM said it has over 100 pilots in place that see the company working with enterprises in a range of verticals to create cloud-based services integrated with Twitter. The move comes months after the two companies inked a deal that would see Twitter make its data stream available to Big Blue’s clients.

IBM said the move enables social data-enabled application development via Bluemix, and the ability to combine predictive analytics and Watson services with Twitter data in compelling ways.

The company also said it has over 4,000 service professionals well-versed in Twitter data integration who are on hand to help enterprises integrate Twitter in their applications

“So much of business decision making relies on internal data such as sales, promotion and inventory. Now with Twitter data, customer feedback can easily be incorporated into decision making,” said Chris Moody, vice president of data strategy at Twitter. “IBM’s unique capabilities can help businesses leverage this valuable data, and we expect to see rapid demand in retail, telecommunications, finance and more.”

Glenn Finch, global leader of big data & analytics for IBM Global Business Services said: “The unprecedented partnership between IBM and Twitter helps businesses tap into billions of real-time conversations to make smarter decisions. Through unique expertise, curation and insights Twitter data is now able to inform decision-making far inside organizations”

IBM and Twitter originally announced the collaboration, which focuses on three distinct areas, in October last year, making IBM one of just a handful of companies to have full access to Twitter’s entire data stream.

Twitter offered up its data for developers to integrate into their big data applications built on IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or Bluemix.

IBM and Twitter said they would jointly develop enterprise applications that integrate Twitter data with IBM’s customer engagement solutions (ExperienceOne) that help users map sentiment behaviour in real-time.

And the companies also planned to jointly develop solutions for specific industries such as banking, consumer products, retail, and travel and transportation, with IBM throwing its vast consulting resources behind the effort.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Research

Cloud Computing Entering Hypergrowth Phase

Cloud services and cloud platforms are now an undeniable part of the IT landscape. Forrester research indicates the shift has begun from exploration of cloud as a potential option, to rationalization of cloud services within the overall IT portfolio.

Cloud platforms, most notably Amazon Web Services, were only collectively $4.7 billion last year but are maturing quickly thanks to stronger recent solutions from traditional IT partners IBM, HP and Microsoft. The growth in use, maturity, and financial viability of public cloud platforms are proving their longstanding value as legitimate deployment options for enterprise applications. While not a one-for-one replacement for on-premise, hosting, or colocation, cloud platforms fit well as ideal deployment options for elastic and transient workloads built in modern application architectures.

For applications and services built in an agile mode with modern architectures, discrete cloud services, such as database, storage, integration and other standalone cloud middleware components, will empower developers by freeing them from the management and maintenance of these components and reduce overall deployment footprint and cost. They are also managed and enhanced by vendors as often as daily delivering new capabilities that can help a company maintain pace with the changing desires of an empowered customer base

As the largest clouds continue to invest in efficiencies that can only be achieved at their massive scales, the gulf between the cost efficiencies that can be had from the cloud and what is possible on-premise or through other outsourcing and hosting options will widen dramatically.

How Forrester came to these conclusions.

Aspera, Big Data, IBM, M&A Activity

IBM Acquires Aspera for Fast Big Data Transfer

IBM today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Aspera, a privately held company based in Emeryville, California. This provides IBM with new and complementary capabilities to better enable companies to move Big Data, on premise or in the cloud, at global distances with the speed required by today’s business.

Aspera’s patented extreme file transfer technology accelerates the secure transfer of large files and large collections of files by up to 99.9 percent – reducing a 26 hour transmission of a 24 gigabyte file, sent halfway around the world, down to just 30 seconds. This speed is powered by Aspera’s patented” fasp protocol”, which breaks the bottlenecks inherent in broadband networks to achieve high performance, efficiency and security in the most difficult WAN environments. Recently awarded an Emmy for engineering, Aspera is used at virtually every major Hollywood studio, cable provider and pharmaceutical company with leading brands such as Netflix, PBS and Universal Studios.

IBM, M&A Activity, Marketing, Messaging, Mobile, Short Message Service, SMS, Xtify

IBM Acquires Mobile Messaging Startup Xtify

IBM today announced the acquisition of Xtify Inc., a ventured-backed company based in New York City. Xtify provides mobile messaging tools via the cloud to help organizations increase mobile sales and improve brand loyalty. Xtify mobile capabilities will be delivered through IBM’s SaaS portfolio and will run on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure.

Xtify will expand IBM’s Smart Commerce initiative helping CMOs, digital marketers, mobile application developers with mobile campaign creation, content targeting, dynamic real-time segmentation and analytics across all mobile device platforms and browsers. Xtify’s technology is designed to deliver real-time, personalized offers via in-app mobile messages and push notifications.

The acquisition of Xtify has implications across IBM’s business: 

  • Xtify will expand IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative to help digital marketers develop relevant push notifications delivered via mobile devices and browsers. Smarter Commerce is among IBM’s most profitable business units boasting more than $3.5 billion in acquisitions since 2010.
  • As part of IBM’s MobileFirst strategy, Xtify will make it easier for developers building mobile applications using IBM’s WorkLight platform to deliver relevant and timely cross-channel marketing messages to customers based on open standards.

CSL International, IBM, Israel, M&A Activity, Virtualization, zEnterprise System

Breaking: IBM Acquiring CSL International

IBM today announced a definitive agreement to acquire CSL International, a  provider of virtualization management technology for IBM’s zEnterprise system. CSL International is a privately held company headquartered in Herzliya Pituach, Israel.

The zEnterprise System enables clients to host the workloads of thousands of commodity servers on a single system for simplification, improved security and cost reduction. The combination of IBM and CSL International technologies will allow clients to manage all aspects of z/VM and Linux on System z virtualization, including CPU, memory, storage, and network resources.

hybrid cloud, IBM, M&A Activity, Private Cloud, SmartCloud, SoftLayer

IBM Acquiring SoftLayer for Private Cloud Infrastructure

IBM is acquiring SoftLayer, a privately held cloud infrastructure provider. IBM hopes SoftLayer will enable IBM to  marry the security, privacy and reliability of private clouds with the economy and speed of a public cloud, with Fortune 500 companies the target market.

IBM says the majority of the Fortune 500 have concerns about how cloud will work with the IT investments they have already made, and many have been waiting for a cloud that is better than “good enough.”   As a result, although cloud is growing quickly, it’s still only a small part of the total IT spend.  There’s a lot of opportunity for IBM to capitalize on.

SoftLayer has a breakthrough capability that provides an easy “on ramp” especially for the Fortune 500 to adopt cloud. And for the SoftLayer born-on-the-cloud customers, IBM opens a new market into the enterprise.   Specifically, SoftLayer allows cloud services to be created very quickly on dedicated servers — rather than a virtual ones, which is the norm in the public cloud.

By building out a cloud on a dedicated server , a client no longer has to worry about sharing computing resources with other companies — thereby improving privacy, security and overall computing performance.  By using dedicated servers, software that was built for on-premise use can be more easily ported to the cloud.  It doesn’t have to go though as much heavy configuration as it does with a virtual server, which it was not developed to work with.

This capability will be added to IBM’s SmartCloud portfolio. IBM SmartCloud offers 100 cloud-based solutions for line-of-business execs including Watson Engagement Advisor; hybrid solutions such as IBM PureSystems, mission-critical cloud services for SAP on our SmartCloud Enterprise+ and the best private cloud solutions in the market.

Headquartered in Dallas, SoftLayer serves 21,000 customers with a global cloud infrastructure platform spanning 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. SoftLayer excels at running cloud-centric, performance-intensive applications in mobile, social, gaming and analytics.

IBM is also announcing today the formation of a new Cloud Services division that combines SoftLayer with IBM SmartCloud into a global platform, reporting to SVP Erich Clementi, IBM Global Technology Services.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close later in 2013 following standard regulatory review.