Archivo de la categoría: Microsoft

Azul, Content & Applications, Internet of Things, IoT, Java, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft and Azul Systems say Zulu Embedded will encourage IoT in Windows

internet of things farmingAzul Systems and Microsoft are to give Java developers open source development tools, device I/O libraries and a Java runtime targeting Internet of Things (IoT) applications on Windows 10.

The two vendors have created Zulu Embedded for Windows 10 IoT, which is a Java Development Kit (JDK), Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and a set of device I/O libraries. The libraries are based on OpenJDK, which has been certified by Azul for use with Windows 10 IoT Core and is compliant with the Java 8 SE specification.

Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core, is a modified version of Windows 10 that has been tailored to suit cheap, small-footprint embedded devices such as those based on Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnowboard Max.

The aim of the partnership is to ensure Zulu Embedded meets Java development and runtime requirements for Microsoft’s IoT initiatives. The success of the joint effort will be gauged by the number of Java compatibility updates, security patches and the levels of support for additional IoT device connectivity, control and communication, according to a joint statement.

There are Java developers around the world using Windows 10 IoT core, according to Steve Teixeira, Director of Program Management for the Windows Internet of Things team at Microsoft. These new initiative means they will be assured of a high-quality foundation for their Java projects if they use the latest advances in OpenJDK.

“Developers have many development and deployment choices for their IoT applications,” said Teixeira. By giving them more support, they are more likely to stay in the Microsoft cloud camp, he said. “Microsoft and Azul have made it easy for those who prefer Java to build premier IoT devices running Windows.”

Azul Systems is committed to updating and evolving Zulu Embedded to meet the specific requirements of Microsoft’s IoT platforms, said Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul Systems.

Zulu Embedded for Windows 10 IoT is free to download and use and may be distributed without restriction.

Microsoft, News, Services

Microsoft and Dell Pair Up

Less than two weeks after it announced a $67 billion bid to buy and privatize EMC, Dell has announced plans to develop a new hybrid cloud solution with Microsoft. The hybrid cloud aims to help customers with the difficulties that accompany the cloud. In addition, Dell announced a payment solution to help dissolve risks associated with cloud adoption. Dells extensive research into the hybrid cloud sector has convinced the company that this route will be successful.

Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell, has stated, “The challenges most customers face on their cloud journey are clear. They tell us it’s too complex, the cost-risk is too high, and control isn’t transparent.”

Dell has announced Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft, The new system is built around the new Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard that was discussed  by Dell and Microsoft CEO’s Michael Dell and Satya Nadella, respectively. According to the two companies,  the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft is an industry first; the new system delivers automated deployment and maintenance capabilities; a payment solution to reduce  customer investment risk; and hybrid cloud governance, control, and policy-based automation for Microsoft Azure along with other cloud environments. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for cloud and enterprise at Microsoft, stated,” “Customers want to simplify and accelerate their journey to the cloud.”

microsoft azure

The solution is set to contain an on premise private cloud as well as the ability to build and provision workload templates. It will also organize business services of a multitude of cloud environments through integration with the Dell Cloud Manager. The solution also offers unified private-with-public cloud management and consumption control across Windows Azure Pack, Azure and other cloud services.

In addition to Dell Hybrid Cloud System, Dell Cloud Flex Pay is also being offered. This new program allows users to utilize the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft with payment flexibility that entails cost savings without requirement of long term commitment.

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Azure, Dell, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Dell and Microsoft unveil joint hybrid cloud offering

Dell office logoDell has expanded its cloud portfolio with a new hybrid cloud offering with technology jointly developed with Microsoft. The new system is designed to break down the barriers to cloud adoption and offer a simpler but more secure payment system.

According to Dell’s own research, nine out of ten IT decision makers say a hybrid cloud strategy is important to achieve a Future-Ready Enterprise. The recently unveiled Dell Global Technology Adoption Index revealed that 55% of organisations around the world will use more than one type of cloud. The study also identified cost and security as the biggest barriers to adopting the cloud, with complexity being the biggest blockage associated with hybrid cloud.

The new Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft promises customers an on-premise private cloud with consistent Azure public cloud access in less than three hours. Clients are promised minimised downtime with non-disruptive, fully automated system updates that don’t impose themselves on users when not needed. It also offers workload templates to simplify service provision and governance models. The management of multiple clouds will be simplified by an out-of-the-box integration with Dell Cloud Manager (DCM) and Windows Azure Pack (WAP), Dell says.

The Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft is built around the CPS Standard, which combines optimised Dell modular infrastructure with pre-configured Microsoft CPS software. This will include Microsoft’s software stack and Azure Services for back-up, site recovery and operational insights.

Meanwhile the Dell Cloud Flex Pay programme gives customers a new flexible option to buy Dell’s Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft without making a long-term commitment. Cloud Flex Pay will eliminate the risks of being locked into paying for services that aren’t used fully says Dell.

“Customers tell us their cloud journey is too complex, the cost-risk is too high and control isn’t transparent,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell. “With our new Cloud Flex Pay program, cost-risk is all but eliminated.”

Azure, Datacentre, Equinix, Microsoft, Microsoft Office 365, News & Analysis, Software as a service, TelecityGroup

Equinix and Telecity to offer Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365

datacentre cloudData centre operators Equinix and TelecityGroup are both now offering Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 as part of their cloud offerings. Microsoft is understood to be announcing as many as five such partnerships with data centre operators.

Co-location specialist TelecityGroup said it is offering the cloud service to three distinct types of customer, these being enterprise customers, co-location partners and a reseller channel. The reseller channel itself is broken down three groups of telcos, managed service providers and systems integrators.

The nature of the market for Office 365 is broadening, according to Adi Ayyagani, the group head of market development for TelecityGroup. “Once interest was restricted to financial services and a couple of other early adopters, but now enterprises from every vertical market are showing an interest.”

TelecityGroup is offering the Office365 service on its software defined networking Cloud-IX platform. Though a number of operators are reportedly making ExpressRoute for Office 365 available, Ayyagani claimed that the Level 3 MPLS network that underpins Cloud-IX will make all the difference. “It means customers can get the service from anywhere, it’s more robust and there’s a greater level of integration available, so that configuration of the service is a lot simpler for service providers,” said Ayyagani.

The managed service providers, telcos and systems integrators reselling the cloud service will be able to use TelecityGroup’s broad footprint to access almost any market in Europe, the Middle East or African, said Ayyagani.

Meanwhile, global data centre operator Equinix has now announced worldwide availability of the cloud version of Microsoft Office for enterprises. The service improves the levels of data privacy since ExpressRoute enables most Office 365 network traffic to avoid the public Internet. Enterprises that use ExpressRoute in an Equinix data centre also get the benefit of being able to run hybrid and multi-cloud services that didn’t previously scale well over the Internet or over typical WAN works, it says.

“Office 365 customers can now benefit from predictable network performance and the ability to better manage network availability,” said Ross Ortega, Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager for Azure Networking.

Apache, Azure, Database, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Ubuntu

Microsoft selects Ubuntu for first Linux-based Azure offering

AzureMicrosoft has announced plans to simplify Big Data and widen its use through Azure.

In a blog post, T K Rengarajan, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Data Platforms, described how the expanded Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store, available in preview later this year, will provide a single repository that captures data of any size, type and speed without forcing changes to applications as data scales. In the store, data can be securely shared for collaboration and is accessible for processing and analytics from HDFS applications and tools.

Another new addition is Azure Data Lake Analytics, a service built on Apache YARN that dynamically scales, which Microsoft says will stop people being side tracked from work by needing to know about distributed architecture. This service, available in preview later this year, will include U-SQL, a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of user code. U-SQL’s scalable distributed querying is intended to help users analyse data in the store and across SQL Servers in Azure, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has selected Ubuntu for its first Linux-based Azure offering. The Hadoop-based big data service offering, HDInsight, will run on Canonical’s open source browser Ubuntu.

Azure HDInsight uses a range of open source analytics engines including Hive, Spark, HBase and Storm. Microsoft says it is now on general release with a 99.9 per cent uptime service level agreement.

Meanwhile Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio will provide an integrated development environment that aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify authoring, debugging and optimization for processing and analytics at any scale, according to Rengarajan. “Leading Hadoop applications that span security, governance, data preparation and analytics can be easily deployed from the Azure Marketplace on top of Azure Data Lake,” said Rengarajan.

Azure Data Lake removes the complexities of ingesting and storing all of your data while making it faster to get up and running with batch, streaming, and interactive analytics, said Rengarajan.

Azure, Cloud Storage, DataStax, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Storage as a Service

DataStax Enterprise delivered with Microsoft Azure to run on any cloud

AzureOpen source distributed database developer Datastax has worked with partner Microsoft to fine tune the delivery of its new cloud based system over the latter’s Azure service.

The new service, DataStax Enterprise (DSE) running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, was unveiled at the Cassandra Summit in California.

Databases no longer have to be centralised to have integrity according to Microsoft and Datastax, who claim to have created a distributed database that runs smoothly across all the varieties of the cloud. Datastax claims its DSE makes it easy to move Apache Cassandra and DSE workloads between data centres, service providers and Azure. DataStax claims customers can now build hybrid applications that can make full use of all three resources.

The new system aims to bring a stable version of a database to the cloud, overcoming the challenge of maintain one version of each record when elements of the database are stored on different computers at different locations. Datastax claims it can overcome the technical difficulties involved in both integrity and scalability so that users can enjoy the advantage of cloud computing, like flexibility of scale and cost controls, without surrendering the traditional strengths of a monolithic system.

The fine-tuning of the DSE with Azure ensures that the enterprises can have a development and production-ready ‘bring your own license’ clusters, claimed DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth. These can be launched in minutes on the Azure Marketplace platform using Azure resource management (ARM) templates, he told delegates at the summit.

Increasingly DataStax Enterprise customers use the database in hybrid cloud environments. Its alignment with Microsoft helps any company needing to build high-performance IoT, mobile and web apps quickly, said Bosworth.

“DataStax is a natural partner as it can build systems that scale across thousands of servers, which is ideal for a hyper-scale cloud environment,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft VP for Cloud and Enterprise.

Cloudflare, Funding, Google, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Qualcomm, startup

Cloud security start up Cloudflare gets $110 million in venture funding

Secure cloudGoogle, Microsoft and chip maker Qualcomm are among the investors to collectively stake $110 million in networking and cyber security start up CloudFlare, according to a report in Fortune.

Cloudflare offers services that speed up cloud systems and web sites while beefing up security. Its main market proposition is to speed up the functioning of any services used by enterprises at the edge of their networks. By doing so it provides a cheaper alternative to the traditional model of on-premise appliances.

Cloudflare claims enterprises can quickly set up cloud-based firewall, load balancing, WAN optimization, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, content delivery and domain name services services worldwide without needing any hardware. It claims that in one day it saved Chinese users more than 243 years of time that would have been collectively spent waiting for web content to load.

Last week Cloudflare finalized a joint venture with Chinese Internet giant Baidu that allows both US-based companies and Chinese-based companies to use CloudFlare’s website performance service while adhering to Chinese data laws.

Although CloudFlare maintains no physical operations in China, it has worked with Baidu to set up technology within Baidu’s facilities that mimic CloudFlare’s services elsewhere, Prince said.

The funding round was led by Fidelity Investments with Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu and Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of Qualcomm all contributing funds. CloudFlare now has $182 million in total funding.

Matthew Prince, CEO of the start up, said Cloudflare didn’t need the funding as much as it needed the credibility that comes with top brand association. The confidence that comes with the backing of Google and Microsoft could convince nervous buyers that this is a solid investment when the company prepares itself for an initial public offering, it was reported. However, the IPO is unlikely to happen this year, said Prince, and he hinted that it would come no earlier than 2017.

Content & Applications, Microsoft, News & Analysis, office 2016, Office 365, Software as a service

Microsoft releases Office 2016 for ‘mobile-first, cloud-first world’

Microsoft Office 2016 devices croppedMicrosoft has promised to ‘re-invent productivity and business processes’ for the mobile and cloud-first world, with its new Office 2016 for Windows. It has also unveiled new additions to Office 365 and made Office 2016 for Mac available as a one-time purchase.

The latest version of Office is designed to make optimal use of Windows 10, with better collaboration and tighter security. The productivity applications within the suite have been updated to make them more cloud friendly, with changes to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Project and Visio to make them more collaborative in nature, according to Microsoft.

One reported change is that groups of employees can now work on a single Word document and view each other’s comments as they are written. The new system now includes Skype for Business so that users of any new Office app can chat, screen share or video chat directly from their documents. Another new feature, enabled by Skype integration, is the ability to simultaneously co-author documents. In October Skype will be available on Office Online, according to Microsoft.

“The way people work has changed dramatically, and that’s why Microsoft is focused on reinventing productivity and business processes for the mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

These latest changes are a ‘big step’ in transforming Office from familiar but individual productivity tools to a connected set of apps and service designed for collaboration and teamwork, according to Nadella.

The security protection for business customers has been beefed up, according to Microsoft, with built-in data loss prevention features designed to cuts the risk of data leaks. New multi-factor authentication will secure the access of those outside the corporate network. Enterprise Data Protection, promised ‘later this year’ will help business to secure the process of sharing corporate content across application and cloud locations.

The delivery of future Office desktop application updates is to change, says Microsoft, so that Office 365 subscribers receive new features and capabilities continuously.

Other new tools include an analytics from Office Delve, a personal work analytics (Delve) and additional charts and formulas for Excel.

“The Office 2016 apps run beautifully on the best Windows ever,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate VP for the Office Client Applications and Services. “The Office 2016 apps simplify collaboration and remove barriers to team success.”

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.

Microsoft, Services

Microsoft Purchases Adallom

While Microsoft did not specifically relay how much it had paid for the purchase of Israeli based Adallom, website TechCrunch has estimated that the purchase was around $250 million dollars. This purchase serves as Microsoft’s response to the trend of increased cloud based computing. While Microsoft originally sold packaged programs such as its Office software, the company has begun to shift to software offerings through cloud based applications.

Adallom helps customers “protect critical assets across cloud applications,” according toMicrosoft vice president Takeshi Numoto’s blog post. “With more frequent and advanced cybersecurity attacks continuing to make headlines, customer concerns around security remain top of mind. These concerns pose real challenges for IT, who are charged with protecting company data in this rapidly evolving mobile-first, cloud-first world.” Adallom works with cloud based applications such as Salesforce and Dropbox. The three-year-old startup’s technology will be used in other Microsoft offerings as well, such as its Enterprise Mobility Suite and Advanced Threat Analytics.

adallom

The announcement of the acquisition was released the same day that Microsoft relayed its expanding partnership with Dell which will help diversify the amount of Windows 10 powered devices and services for a multitude of businesses. The center of this push is Microsoft Surface Pro tablets and accessories, which Dell will begin to sell in Canada and the United States through online shops, with more markets being added the next year.

“Our global enterprise customers have asked us to match the Surface Pro 3 and Windows 10 experience with enterprise-grade support and services -– and our partnerships like this one with Dell will do just that,” Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said in a release. Dell partnership has kicked off a “Surface Enterprise Initiative.” Microsoft has plans to release a new tablet for businesses.

This comes a day before an event hosted by Apple, which was anticipated to unveil a new tablet which could insert Apple into the market for Surface.

Microsoft is set to increase the business capabilities of its Windows 10 operating system.

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