Archivo de la categoría: IBM

Cleversafe, hybrid cloud, IBM, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

IBM acquires storage vendor Cleversafe in hybrid cloud play

IBMEnterprise IT giant IBM has announced it will be acquiring object-based storage software and appliances vendor Cleversafe to boost its storage and hybrid cloud offering.

IBM will integrate the Cleversafe portfolio into its IBM Cloud business unit. The growth in the amount of unstructured data companies are looking to process, coupled with the need to find a balance between on-premise and cloud storage deployments, has created the demand for more storage options and greater flexibility, according to IBM.

“Today a massive digital transformation is underway as organizations increasingly turn to cloud computing for innovative ways to manage more complex business operations and increasing volumes of data in a secure and effective way,” said Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM Cloud. “Cleversafe, a pioneer in object storage, will add to our efforts to help clients overcome these challenges by extending and strengthening our cloud storage strategy, as well as our portfolio.”

“IBM is an innovator and leader in cloud and storage and we’re excited about the opportunities that lay ahead once this transaction closes,” said John Morris, President and CEO of Cleversafe. “Together with IBM we can extend our object storage leadership position to address the broadest set of workloads for clients with the most expansive set of object-based solutions.”

The terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cleversafe employs 210 people so the size of the acquisition is likely to be in the tens of million dollars.

Incidentally IBM has also announced a new mobile cloud security solution aimed at enterprise, which is a combination of products from both companies.

“More employees are using mobile devices to be more productive. At the same time, data and apps are moving to the cloud. The changes are exciting, but security needs to be top-of-mind,” said Steve McGaw, CMO of AT&T Business Solutions. “Trusted collaborators like IBM are helping us better address changing business models. Together we’re giving options to deliver highly secure mobile access to cloud apps and data.”

app development, BlueMix, Content & Applications, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM Bluemix Local promises developers quick fix on hybrid cloud app building

IBMIBM has launched a new hybrid cloud system that could make application building a lot quicker for enterprises – without compromising security. The system, Bluemix Local, is designed to build apps across public, private and on-premises environments.

Bluemix Local solves the time consuming problem of managing enterprise infrastructure, it says. The process of moving data and apps between disparate cloud environments is forcing managers to make comprises, says IBM, with many companies sacrificing security in order to get finished quicker or missing deadlines in order to cover all security bases. Development with Bluemix Local can now proceed quickly, but still remain behind a client’s firewall.

A ‘write once, run anywhere’ feature now helps developers avoid much of the repetition in coding, allowing programmers to quickly stitch existing systems together and connect data and application programming interfaces into a single environment. The system also maintains consistency by keeping apps current across all platforms. IBM’s expansion of the Bluemix platform has been carried out on open architecture.

The system was developed to help companies in heavily regulated industries with strict compliance rules and sensitive customer data, such as banking, healthcare and financial services. IBM recommends a hybrid cloud approach as the preferred model for seamless connection.

New features in Bluemix Local include Relay technology, which conveys sync updates across the cloud so that all environments remain current. It has a single omnipotent admin console and gives access to IBM’s catalogue of 120 open-standards-based services from both IBM and third-parties. With a private catalogue and API Management services, enterprise clients can create, publish, manage and monetize their own APIs, IBM says.

Clients can also sync data across geographies using IBM’s global network of cloud data centres throughout the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe.

“IBM now has the broadest spectrum of hybrid cloud capability in the industry,” said Steve Robinson, general manager, Cloud Platform Services, IBM.

Box, Enterprise Cloud, Enterprise IT, governance, IBM, News & Analysis

Box tightens security for enterprise cloud offering with IBM integration

BoxWorks15Box has announced new developments in its security, governance and infrastructure management offerings.

At its annual BoxWorks conference, Box’s general manager for enterprise Whitney Bouck promised users would get better governance and better integration with IBM in a bid to fortify itself as an enterprise class cloud system.

New revisions to Box governance were promised, in order to help companies address their legal, regulatory and business goals for secure content collaboration. The improvements include additions to retention management and collaboration whitelist features. New development work has gone into Legal Holds, which caters for legal discovery or litigation processes. In future, customers can use the Legal Holds system to arrest content stored in Box, which makes a ‘defensible discovery’ on all Box content possible.

A raft of IBM integration initiatives was also announced, in order to improve Box’s capacity to work with IBM’s Content Navigator, StoredIQ, Case Manager and IBM Datacap systems.

Box clients were promised a single integrated view across IBM Content Navigator, while the integration with IBM StoredIQ makes searches of on-premise and Box-based data more thorough, giving users the option to classify and upload data directly back to the Box Platform.

Box and IBM Case Manager can now seamlessly share content, according to Bouck. This means users can put context to content and gives them more license to adapt their business processes. IBM Datacap with Box will simplify management and save clients money by enabling users to capture documents from multiple sources, extract key information and store them to Box, according to Bouck.

Box also promised an improvement in its information rights management service, with new Device Trust features giving intelligent control over sensitive content, without neutralising any of the system’s usability.

The cloud infrastructure has been beefed up with Box now supporting the new Amazon Web Services Key Management Service (KMS), which aims to simplify the self-management of encryption keys in the cloud.

More than 40 million users and 50,000 businesses use Box for collaboration, including 52 per cent of the Fortune 500, according to Bouck, and as more enterprises use Box it is working to fortify it.

“We’re building a new kind of enterprise content management and collaboration platform that meets the needs of the modern enterprise,” said Bouck.

developer, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Watson

IBM opens San Francisco office for Watson developer cloud

IBMIBM has opened a new office in San Francisco to channel further growth in its supercomputing business as it claims 77,000 developers across the world are using its Watson Developer Cloud to pilot, test and deploy new business ideas.

The San Francisco office will open in 2016 to give local start ups access to Watson technology for their software projects. The facility will include resources dedicated to IBM’s new Spark processing technology as the vendor seeks to get Spark users interested in Watson, it said. IBM claims 100 companies have released software services based on Watson.

With a reported $100 million of venture capital fund earmarked for startups looking to build products on Watson, IBM now plans to offer its nascent partners technical support and consultancy on business plans, in addition to market making initiatives that include introductions to potential customers.

In September IBM opened a new Watson Health business centre in the Boston area to target the health sector and pharmaceutical industry. The new cloud initiative comes in the wake of reports of declining revenues in 13 consecutive quarters, while the app economy is ‘in full swing’, as IBM described it, with industry revenue projected to grow to $143 billion in 2016, according to analyst IDC. By 2018 half of all consumers will interact with services based on cognitive computing on a regular basis, according to the analyst.

IBM also announced a new expanded portfolio of application programming interfaces into Watson, bring the net total to 50. IBM’s cloud development partners have created systems for query support for card payments, customer support Q&As for financial services, live event media aggregation ‘as a service’ social marketing and apps for the entertainment and marketing industries. Early investment partners include WayBlazer, Sellpoints, Welltok, Pathway Genomics, Modernizing Medicine and Fluid.

In the UK, IBM has created three new Watson partners 50wise, Volume and SocialBro, which have created cloud apps for financial services, sales training and online marketing.

Analytics, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM launches Cloud Security Enforcer to counter employee data leakage failures

Security concept with padlock icon on digital screenIBM has created a Cloud Security Enforcer service to give companies a more commanding view of all third-party cloud apps used by their employees and new powers to secure them. The Enforcer aims to give companies more control over granting access to corporate data and applications.

Most companies can only see a fraction of the cloud applications used by their workforce, according to IBM’s research. An Ipsos poll, conducted on behalf of IBM in July, found that one-third of employees at Fortune 1000 companies are sharing and uploading corporate data on third-party cloud apps. These employees increasingly engage in risky practices on these tools, such as signing in with their personal email addresses, using weak passwords or re-using corporate log-in credentials, says IBM.

The cloud’s productivity dividend for companies is being undermined by the loss of control of corporate data and the lack of employee protection, it says. The Millennial generation (those born between 1982 and 2002) are the worst offenders and the biggest users of cloud apps, according to IBM’s study. By 2020 half the employees at Fortune 1000 companies will be millennials and of these 51 per cent use cloud services at work. One in four employees links these apps to his or her corporate log-in and password, leaving loopholes through which hackers can gain access to company networks.

Rogue activities on unsanctioned apps, known as ‘Shadow IT’, lead to a loss of control that IBM’s new cloud-based tool combats by scanning corporate networks, finding the apps that employees are using and providing a more secure way to access them. The system was built in partnership with file sharing app maker Box, which aims to strengthen the security of files shared over mobile devices and the web. IBM has also built secure connectors into Box’s file-sharing cloud app for Cloud Security Enforcer, as well as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and Salesforce with more apps connectors to be added to its catalogue.

The Cloud Enforcer users deep threat analytics from IBM X-Force Exchange, IBM’s global threat intelligence network, which is manned by a global network of security analysts which monitors the internet for malicious activity and analyses 20 billion global security events daily.

AWS, Cisco, Dell, Equinix, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Public Cloud, Salesforce, Software as a service, Synergy Research

Public cloud generating $22 billion a quarter for IT Companies

metalcloud_lowresPublic cloud computing generated over $22 billion in revenues for IT companies in the second financial quarter of 2015, according to a study by Synergy Research Group.

The revenue breaks down into $10 billion earned by companies supplying public cloud operators with hardware, software and data centre facilities and $12 billion being generated from selling infrastructure, platforms and software as a service.

In addition the public cloud supports ‘huge’ revenue streams from a variety of internet services such as search, social networking, email and e-commerce platforms, says the report. It identifies the supply side companies with the biggest share of revenues as Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Equinix. On the cloud services side the market leaders are AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and IBM.

As the public cloud makes inroads into the total IT market, the hardware and software used to build public clouds now account for 24 per cent of all data centre infrastructure spending. Public cloud operators and associated digital content companies account for 47 per cent of the data centre colocation market.

While the total IT market grew at less than five per cent per year, the growth of cloud revenues outpaced it. Infrastructure and platform as a service revenues (Iaas/Paas) grew by 49 per cent in the past year and software as a service (SaaS) grew by 29 per cent.

“Public cloud is now a market that is characterized by big numbers, high growth rates and a relatively small number of global IT players,” said Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

However, the report noted that there is still a place for regional small-medium sized public cloud players.

connected car, IBM, Internet of Things, IoT cloud, News & Analysis

New IBM cloud service could help car makers to internet things and cut emissions

connected-car-normal

IBM has launched a cloud service that aims to harness the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) so that car makers can cut the costs of production, ownership and pollution.

The new IBM Cloud could help the likes of BMW and Mercedes to make better use of the mass of data created by all the intelligent sensors in a car and use this intelligence to make car drivers more efficient. The service aggregates data about the machines, the drivers and the passengers. IBM claims it could cut carbon emissions by helping cut fuel consumption through promoting better driving techniques, smarter route choices and sensible loading.

On the supplier side, the improved intelligence, says IBM, could help vehicle manufacturers to lower both the cost of production and ownership, through techniques such as predictive vehicle maintenance, real-time engine diagnostics and chassis stress analysis.

The IBM Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive system is available on IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure. IBM says it will analyse primary and secondary sources of intelligence. In addition to primary sources, such as geolocation data collected in the car, it will use external sources such as the car maker’s customer data and vehicle history. It will also use data from parking providers.

Automotive supplier Continental uses IBM MessageSight and IBM InfoSphere Streams, components of the IBM IoT for Automotive solution, to help manage complex data streams and apply analytics to its eHorizon system. This allows vehicle electronics to anticipate road conditions using digital mapping and crowd sourced data.

According to Telefonica’s 2013 Connected Car Industry Report, nine in ten new cars will be equipped with extensive connectivity services by 2020. IBM’s mission is to make sense of all the masses of big data and put it to good use, said IBM’s general manager for global automotive industry Dirk Wollschlaeger. “We have the potential to change how we interact with our vehicles,” said Wollschlaeger.

health, health cloud, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM Watson health launches to new cloud services to speed research

healthcare ITIBM has launched two new cloud services and a range of initiatives which aim to eliminate the worst bottlenecks of clinical research in the health sector.

The IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance is designed to help biomedical companies bring their inventions to market more efficiently. This system aims to speed up the process of meeting the pharmaceutical industry compliance regulations govern the hosting and access of data.

IBM Watson Care Manager is a population health system which aims to amalgamate features from IBM’s own Watson Health with Apple’s HealthKit and ResearchKit, which allows researchers to conduct studies using their iPhone. The new Care Manager system could allow medical professionals’ to consider a broad ranger of factors when working out a personalized patient engagement program.

IBM also announced partnerships with Boston Children’s Hospital, Columbia University, Icon, Sage Bionetworks and Teva Pharmaceuticals. It unveiled how the partners are using Watson’s cloud application to improve a number of health sector business processes, including drug discovery and development, personalized medicine, chronic disease management, pediatrics and digital health.

CVS Health, Medtronic, Yale University, Teva and Sage also announced the Watson Health Cloud is their organizations’ preferred development platform.

Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) has been named Watson Health’s foundational pediatrics partner, with IBM integrating its health cloud systems with the hospital’s OPENPediatrics initiative for sharing pediatric expertise. IBM and BCH will jointly develop commercial systems for personalized medicine, heart health and critical care. Another objective is to use Watson’s image analytics to help clinicians improve diagnoses for children with heart conditions. A third project involves using streaming analytics on data from patients on ventilation systems, in order to pre-empt patient decline.

Columbia University Medical Center is to test IBM Watson’s capacity to translate DNA insights into personalized treatment options for cancer patients. Meanwhile, clinical research organization Icon is to use Watson for clinical trial matching, which aims to speed up the process of screening the subjects of clinical trials. According to IBM 80 per cent of clinical trials fail due to inadequate patient enrolment and only 2 per cent of patients are eligible for trials.

“The IBM Watson Health Cloud can help us break down barriers that hamper progress in research,” said Sage Bionetworks president Stephen H. Friend.

ARM, electronics, IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis

IBM launches cloud-based Internet of Things service for electronic industry

IBM has launched the first in a series of cloud-based, industry-specific services for the Internet of Things (IoT), with an offering for the electronics industry. Its debut IoT service will gather data from individual sensors to provide instant analysis of the production processes of electronics manufacturers.

Meanwhile, IBM said it has integrated its IoT system, IBM IoT Foundation, with the firmware of chipmaker ARM, so that all devices driven by ARM chips will be able to release data for analysis. IBM said the fusion will allow ‘huge quantities’ of data from industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring devices to be gathered, analysed and acted upon.

The IBM IoT Foundation, a cloud-hosted offering, aims to simplify the complexity of analysing masses of machine to machine (M2M) data. It offers tools for analysing large quantities of fast-moving data and provides access to Bluemix, IBM’s service for managing and prioritising data flows. It also offers to secure confidential financial, IP and strategy information.

During the integration process, products powered by ARM’s ‘mbed-enabled’ chips will automatically register with the IBM IoT Foundation and connect with IBM analytics services. This unification means that information gathered from sensors in any connected device is delivered to the cloud for analysis. The IoT connection also means that commands can be pushed to devices, with actions being taken on the basis of the intelligence gathered.

If an alarm message is triggered on a machine in a manufacturing plant, it can now be automatically shut down and an engineer despatched to trouble shoot the disruption, IBM said. This cost-saving damage limitation is best achieved by combining the knowledge and communications protocols of different vendors at different levels of the ICT stack, according IBM’s General Manager for the Internet of Things, Pat Toole.

“The IoT is now at an inflection point and it needs the big data expertise of IBM and little data expertise of ARM to ensure it reaches its global potential,” said Toole.

Original design manufacturers and OEMs, like Ionics, are already seeing value in the chip level architecture harmonisation, said Krisztian Flautner, the General Manager of ARM’s IoT business. “Deploying IoT technology has to be easy, secure and scalable for it to feel like a natural extension of a company’s business,” said Flautner.

ANZ, Asia Pacific, banking, development, IBM, News & Analysis, Research

IBM signs cloud development agreement with ANZ bank

ANZ has signed a five-year, A$450 million (£208 million) strategic agreement with IBM, the centrepiece of which is the establishment of a cloud-based Innovation Lab based on IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform-as-a-service, reports Banking Technology.

The lab will allow the Bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services at “a fraction of the time and cost previously taken”.

As well as the Innovation Lab and cloud capabilities, the agreement includes access to IBM’s software portfolio and core systems infrastructure. The IBM agreement will provide common platforms across ANZ’s network as it continues to grow as a super-regional bank and will allow the bank to deliver a “more integrated and innovative banking experience for digital customers”.

IBM will deploy its newest z13 mainframe and Power8 infrastructure as part of ANZ’s private cloud environment. The infrastructure will provide the bank with the reliability, security and resiliency needed to service the needs of mobile customers across the bank’s network. IBM integration, content management, data, analytics and cloud software will support ANZ’s core banking and infrastructure needs.

“Understanding our customers’ needs and preferences around mobile and digital banking is critical to our business and to providing a superior customer experience,” said Scott Collary, ANZ’s chief information officer. “We therefore need to ensure we’re meeting these needs in an innovative, consistent and seamless way and with this partnership with IBM, we’re working to achieve this goal.”

IBM has been a strategic partner of ANZ for more than 40 years said Scott Barlow, IBM client director for ANZ Bank: “This new agreement continues to build on this by enabling ANZ access to an arsenal of leading edge technology to provide the agility, speed and innovation essential in the rapidly changing financial services marketplace.”