Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

Apache Spark, Artificial intelligence, Big Data, Cortana, Micrsoft Azure, News & Analysis

Microsoft launches Spark for Azure HDInsight and pushes into consumer AI

CortanaAlmost 12 months after releasing the public preview of Spark for Azure HDInsight Microsoft has announced general availability of the proposition to the industry, as well as extending Cortana’s offering to the Xbox.

Making the announcement on the Azure blog, Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing Manager for Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing, outlined the improvements made on the offering as well as the company’s efforts to make big data easy and more approachable. The company claims the Hadoop and Spark cloud service is now an enterprise-ready solution which is fully managed, secured, and highly available.

“Since we announced the public preview, Spark for HDInsight has gained rapid adoption and is now 50% of all new HDInsight clusters deployed,” said Chiu. “With GA (General Availability), we are revealing improvements we’ve made to the service to make Spark hardened for the enterprise and easy for your users. This includes improvements to the availability, scalability, and productivity of our managed Spark service.”

Features for the new services include new capabilities to the YARN resource manager to create an open source Apache licensed REST web service, as well as integrations between Spark and Azure Data Lake Store to increase scalability, Spark and Data Lake Store to increase security, Jupyter (iPython) notebooks and Power BI to build interactive visualizations over data of any size.

Alongside the Spark announcement, the Microsoft team has also ventured into the consumer AI market as Cortana will now be available on Xbox One, Xbox Live and Windows Stores. Starting with a limited Xbox Preview audience for Xbox One, the offering will be more widely released to the Xbox app (beta) on Windows 10 over the course of the summer.

Starting out with U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Germany and Spain, Cortana voice commands on Xbox One will work with both headsets and Kinect. Firstly users will be able to find new games, see what your friends are up to, start a party and accomplish common tasks, though new features will be adding over time.

Despite the company suffering a very public set-back in the AI world with the malfunction of Tay, the team have pressed forward, seemingly prioritizing AI for new features throughout the portfolio. CEO Satya Nadella stated at the Microsoft Build 2016 event AI would feature heavily in future investments, as the team target a Conversation-as-a-Platform proposition. The Cortana Intelligence Suite, which was launched at the event, allows developers to build apps and bots which interact with customers in a personalized way, but also react to real-world developments in real-time.

“As an industry, we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence,” said Nadella. “At Microsoft, we call this Conversation-as-a-Platform, and it builds on and extends the power of the Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.”

News & Analysis, Operator, Postpaid, Subscribers, T-Mobile

T-Mobile exchanges stock for referrals in pursuit of new subscribers

GrowthT-Mobile US has launched its new #GetThanked initiative to engage existing customers, offering various rewards including stock in the company.

Building on the company’s view that its competitors only offer rewards as an incentive for subscribers to spend more money, the T-Mobile initiative rewards customers simply for being customers. While those who want to participate in the Stock-Up initiative do not have to spend any money, they do have to ensure their family and friends sign up to a post-paid contract, in a similar manner social media uses viral marketing to promote apps and games.

“Get ready for a gratitude adjustment, America! This Un-carrier move is all about giving you a good thanking! No strings. No gotchas. Just ‘thank you for being a customer!’” said John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile. “At T-Mobile, we already wake up every day working for our customers—so I’ve decided to make it official and turn T-Mobile customers into T-Mobile owners by offering them stock. And we’re thanking customers every week with cool stuff from brands people love. For free. Every Tuesday!”

Newer customers will receive one share for every successful referral, whereas those who have been customers for five years or more will receive two. An individual can receive up to 100 shares a year on the scheme, which is managed by T-Mobile’s brokerage partner, LOYAL3. Aside from the shares, subscribers can also receive more conventional rewards including free in-flight, Domino’s pizza, holidays to Las Vegas, hiking trips to Machu Picchu, as well as other prizes.

T-Mobile currently accounts for 15.8% of the US market share, according to statistics from Ovum’s WCIS service, which has been steadily increasing from 13.9% in June 2014. The Un-carrier initiative was launched in March 2013, seemingly as a means to differentiate the brand in the US, made stronger strides into the post-paid market and increase brand loyalty. While the stock initiative could be perceived by some as a PR stunt, it could have an impact on brand loyalty, as customers may feel more affinity to T-Mobile should they own a small percentage of the company, as well as acquiring new post-paid customers.

The overall Un-carrier strategy itself would appear to be a successful initiative, as the company recently reported healthy Q1 results including subscriber gain, revenue growth, churn reduction and an improved forecast for the remainder of 2016. The company claims it acquired 2.2 million customers over the period, marking its 12th consecutive quarter of over 1 million customer acquisitions. Ovum suggests T-Mobile were amongst the biggest winners of Q1 with AT&T bringing in 1.8 million new customers, Verizon 2.2 million and Sprint just 500,000.

Data migration, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

82% of C-suite say public cloud is the way forward

Silhouette Businessman Holding PuzzleResearch from HyTrust claims 82% of C-suite execs are to increase the number of workloads their organization hosts on public cloud, reports Telecoms.com.

The transition to a cloud-based mentality and business model has given rise to arguably one of the most influential brands in the world; AWS. That is not to say Amazon as a brand wasn’t influential before the rise of the cloud; more the concept of the cloud made Amazon a major player in the Enterprise IT world.

In April, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky delivered the quarterly earnings call which outlined the team’s belief the AWS business unit would break through the $10 billion barrier. While this number does only represent roughly 10% of the company’s annual revenues, it demonstrates the progress of the cloud industry on the whole.

But the cloud is still seen as a proposition which is mainly utilized by the technologically advanced organizations, so what’s holding it back? The first answer for most would be security, but this might not be the case.

A recent survey from HyTrust highlighted while there may still be concerns for decision makers in trusting the cloud, this is certainly not holding these organizations back from investing. 42% of C-suite executives (CEO, CFO, CIO etc.) say critical server workloads have already been virtualized in their environments; for IT systems administrators and engineers, that number is 65%.

Data and security breaches are still top of the list of concerns when considering such a move, but the survey also highlighted 74% of respondents are planning to move (new or additional) workloads to a public cloud in 2016. This statistic is also weighted more towards the boardroom, as executives would appear to be more bullish in their cloud ambitions than other levels within the business. 82% of C-suite executives who were surveyed believe they will migrate additional workloads to the public cloud in 2016, compared to 66% at director level and 73% at administrator or engineer level.

For most, the C-suite would generally be perceived as the more risk adverse individuals within the business, having been exposed to the stakeholders and media alike when something does go wrong, however the statistics may demonstrate a more general acceptance of cloud computing throughout the business. Security has always been a concern of organizations since the beginning of the cloud revolution, though it would appear decision makers are now okay with accepting 100% secure is impossible and the new objectives should be to remain as secure as possible, consistently.

In terms of the top players within the industry, there are few surprises as to what brand decision makers are leaning towards during 2016. The only difference from many previous reports is the inclusion of VMware vCloud Air, which made an appearance in second accounting for 24% of the respondents, pushing Google Cloud out of the top three. Microsoft Azure was top of the list representing 32% of the vote, whereas the widely recognized market leader AWS sits in third, bringing in 22%.

AI, Artificial intelligence, Big Data, cognitive computing, IBM, Interactive Advertising, News & Analysis, Watson

IBM launches interactive ads on Watson

Robotic hand, accessing on laptop, the virtual world of information. Concept of artificial intelligence and replacement of humans by machines.IBM has announced the launch of Watson Ads to harness the AI potential of its cognitive computing platform and create interactive ads, personalized to individual customers. The first offerings of the initiative will be made available through The Weather Company sub-brand.

Personalized advertising has proved to be big business in recent months as brands aim to move away from the blanket marketing approach, as towards a proposition where one-to-one communications are the norm. IBM believe Watson’s ability to understand and comprehend natural language will enable advertisers to interact with customers on a more personal level, and also on a wide scale.

“The dawn of cognitive advertising is truly a watershed moment. Now as part of IBM, we have even more tools and technologies at our disposal to inspire innovations within advertising, artificial intelligence and storytelling,” said Domenic Venuto, GM of Consumer products at The Weather Company. “This is a huge opportunity to expose consumers to all of the surprising and delightful experiences that Watson has in store for them – and to make advertising a truly valuable interaction for both our fans and our marketing partners, which is always our goal.”

IBM claim the new proposition will aide advertiser in numerous ways including a better understanding of brand perception and customer favourability, helping customers make a more informed decision, improve overall experience, optimize creative and advertising strategies, as well as helping marketers use data more effectively.

As part of the initiative, the team will also create the Watson Ads Council, a collection of marketers from various verticals, who will act as a sounding board for the latest innovations leveraging Watson Ads and cognitive advancements in advertising.

“Transforming ourselves and industries is part of The Weather Company DNA,” said Jeremy Steinberg, Global Head of Sales at The Weather Company. “We’ve embraced big data and leveraged it to improve every aspect of our business, from forecast accuracy to ad targeting. Now we’ve set our sights on cognition. We believe human interaction is the new ‘search,’ and that cognitive advertising is the next frontier in marketing – and we’re leading the charge to make it a reality.”

Watson Ads will launch first exclusively across The Weather Company properties, but this is expected to have broad implications for other marketing channels, including out of home, television, connected cars and social media platforms.

AWS, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Service Outage

Aussies lose AWS for six hours

amazon awsAWS’ Australian customers suffered an outage over the course of the weekend for approximately six hours due to a power outage which coincided with adverse weather conditions.

The cause of the outage has not been officially confirmed, though did occur at the same time as a storm system that ran from Brisbane to the NSW South Coast which caused widespread flooding, was limited to the Sydney data centre roughly between 11.30pm 4.30am (PST) on June 4.

On the company’s status page it stated, “We are investigating increased connectivity issues for EC2 instances in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region,” at 10.47pm as well as, “We can confirm that instances have experienced a power event with a single availability zone AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region. Error rates for the EC2 APIs have improved and launches of new EC2 APIs instances are succeeding within the other Availability Zones in the Region,” at 11.49pm PST. Full connectivity was not reported until 4.43am PST.

Although the company has not since commented on the episode, the status page on the website currently states all services are up and running. The outage impacted a number of core and value add services including EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, ElastiCache, Redshift, Relational Database Service, Route 53 Private DNS, CloudFormation, CloudHSM, Database Migration Service, Elastic Beanstalk and Storage Gateway.

While there have been a number of outages in recent months, AWS has seemingly faired pretty well avoiding headlines for the most part. Google appeared to be taking the route of damage control in April following an 18 minute outage, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took to twitter last month to apologize for his company’s 12 hour outage and Apple customers lost numerous iCloud services for seven hours earlier this month.

AWS Outage

Big Data, data analytics, Datacentre, IBM, News & Analysis, Software Defined Data Centre, Software Defined Infrastructure

IBM makes software defined infrastructure smarter

IBMIBM has expanded its portfolio of software-defined infrastructure solutions adding cognitive features to speed up analysis of data, integrate Apache Spark and help accelerate research and design, the company claims.

The new offering will be called IBM Spectrum Computing and is designed to aide companies to extract full value from their data through adding scheduling capabilities to the infrastructure layer. The product offers workload and resource management features to research scientists for high-performance research, design and simulation applications. The new proposition focuses on three areas.

Firstly, Spectrum Computing works with cloud applications and open source frameworks to assist in sharing resources between the programmes to speed up analysis. Secondly, the company believes it makes the adoption of Apache Spark simpler. And finally, the ability to share resources will accelerate research and design by up to 150 times, IBM claims.

By incorporating the cognitive computing capabilities into the software-defined infrastructure products, IBM believes the concept on the whole will become more ‘intelligent’. The scheduling competencies of the software will increase compute resource utilization and predictability across multiple workloads.

The software-defined data centre has been steadily growing, and is forecasted to continue its healthy growth over the coming years. Research has highlighted the market could be worth in the region of $77.18 Billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 28.8% from 2015 to 2020. The concept on the whole is primarily driven by the attractive feature of simplified scalability as well as the capability of interoperability. North America and Asia are expected to hold the biggest market share worldwide, though Europe as a region is expected to grow at a faster rate.

“Data is being generated at tremendous rates unlike ever before, and its explosive growth is outstripping human capacity to understand it, and mine it for business insights,” said Bernard Spang, VP for IBM Software Defined Infrastructure. “At the core of the cognitive infrastructure is the need for high performance analytics of both structured and unstructured data. IBM Spectrum Computing is helping organizations more rapidly adopt new technologies and achieve greater, more predictable performance.”

Big Data, data analytics, Hadoop, Hortonworks, News & Analysis, Open Source, Wipro

Wipro open sources big data offering

Laptop Screen with Big Data Concept.Wipro has announced it has open sourced its big data solution Big Data Ready Enterprise (BDRE), partnering with California based Hortonworks to push the initiative forward.

The company claims the BDRE offering addresses the complete lifecycle of managing data across enterprise data lakes, allowing customers to ingest, organize, enrich, process, analyse, govern and extract data at a faster pace. BDRE is released under the Apache Public License v2.0 and hosted on GitHub. Teaming up with Hortonworks will also give the company additional clout in the market, at Hortonworks is generally considered one of the top three Hadoop distribution vendors in the market.

“Wipro takes pride in being a significant contributor to the open source community, and the release of BDRE reinforces our commitment towards this ecosystem,” said Bhanumurthy BM, COO at Wipro. “BDRE will not only make big data technology adoption simpler and effective, it will also open opportunities across industry verticals that organizations can successfully leverage. Being at the forefront of innovation in big data, we are able to guide organizations that seek to benefit from the strategic, financial, organizational and technological benefits of adopting open source technologies.”

Companies open sourcing their own technologies has become somewhat of a trend in recent months, as the product owners themselves would appear to be moving towards a service model as opposed to traditional vendor. According to ‘The Open Source Era’, an Oxford Economics Study which was commissioned by Wipro, 64% of respondents believe that open source will drive Big Data efforts in the next three years.

The report also claims open source has become a foundation stone of the technology roadmap of a number of businesses, 75% of respondent believe integration between legacy and open source is one of the main challenges and 52% said open source is already supporting development of new products and services.

Apple, Icloud, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Apple experiences outage in North America

Apple 1Apple has restored services to customers around the world after many of its cloud-based offerings and other services faced outages of up to seven hours.

The outages, which were reported from users mainly in North America, are yet to be explained by the company but impacted numerous products including the App Store, iCloud, Apple TV, photos and iMovies as well as a host of others.

The issues would have appeared to have begun at around 9pm (GMT) June 2, and all services were resumed by 4:55am (GMT). Apple spokespersons have been directing journalists to the company’s support page where it posted insightful comments such as “Users experienced a problem with the service above” and “Users may have experienced slower than usual performance when using iCloud Drive, Backup, iCloud Notes, iWork for iCloud and Photos. Users may have experienced slowness with multiple services at iCloud.com”.

The services aspect of the Apple business has been reporting healthy numbers in recent months, seemingly offsetting the drop in iPhone sales. During its Q2 earnings call the company ended its long run of constant year-over-year revenue growth, as it reported a decline for the first time in 13 years, according to Telecoms.com. iPhone shipments were down 16% and Mac sales also went down from $5.61 billion to $5.1 billion, however its services business increased by 20% to almost $6 billion.

Apple Twitter

 

DropBox, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Dropbox steps ups European commitment with local signing

DropboxDropbox has announced the appointment of Philip Lacor, who will act as the new VP for EMEA Sales, based out of the Dublin office.

The company has been making notable efforts in recent months to increase its presence in the European market, capitalizing on free-user growth in the region. Aside from Lacor’s appointment, Dropbox has opened offices in Hamburg, Dublin, London, Paris and Amsterdam, as well offering localized payment models in 12 European countries to increase the number of upgrades to the paid-for services.

With the continuing dispute between the EU and US focusing on transatlantic data transmission not looking like it would end in the near future, a number of companies have been identifying means to remove concerns of the European customers. Dropbox has opened several offices around Europe, hired local employees and outlined plans for a European data centre, where as Box has developed its Zones offering through a partnership with IBM. For the Zones offering, customers can opt to have their data stored regionally on the IBM Cloud.

“Dropbox now has over half a billion accounts across the globe and nearly 40% are in Europe, Middle East and Africa,” said Lacor. “I am incredibly excited to support the acceleration of our growth in EMEA, particularly on the Enterprise side. With our Dropbox Business and Dropbox Enterprise products, our business customers can become even more competitive by deploying Dropbox to simplify the way people work together.”

Lacor joins Dropbox from Vodafone in Germany, where he served as the Managing Director for the enterprise division. Prior to Vodafone, Lacor worked for worked at Dell for over 10 years in several European and EMEA-wide roles across sales, marketing and finance.

Cisco, data analytics, IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, Network Edge, News & Analysis

IBM and Cisco combine to deliver IoT insight on the network edge

Oil and gas platform in the gulf or the sea, The world energy, OIBM and Cisco have extended a long-standing partnership to enable real-time IoT analytics and insight at the point of data collection.

The partnership will focus on combining the cognitive computing capabilities of IBM’s Watson with Cisco’s analytics competencies to support data action and insight at the point of collection. The team are targeting companies who operate in remote environments or on the network edge, for example oil rigs, where time is of the essence but access to the network can be limited or disruptive.

The long promise of IoT has been to increase the amount of data organizations can collect, which once analysed can be used to gain a greater understanding of a customer, environment or asset. Cloud computing offers organizations an opportunity to realize the potential of real-time insight, but for those with remote assets where access to high bandwidth connectivity is not a given, the promise has always been out of reach.

“The way we experience and interact with the physical world is being transformed by the power of cloud computing and the Internet of Things,” said Harriet Green, GM for IBM Watson IoT Commerce & Education. “For an oil rig in a remote location or a factory where critical decisions have to be taken immediately, uploading all data to the cloud is not always the best option.

“By coming together, IBM and Cisco are taking these powerful IoT technologies the last mile, extending Watson IoT from the cloud to the edge of computer networks, helping to make these strong analytics capabilities available virtually everywhere, always.”

IoT insight at the point of collection has been an area of interest to enterprise for a number of reasons. Firstly, by decreasing the quantity of data which has to be moved transmission costs and latency are reduced and the quality of service is improved. Secondly, the bottleneck of traffic at the network core can potentially be removed, reducing the likelihood of failure. And finally, the ability to virtualize on the network edge can extend the scalability of an organization.

ABI Research has estimated 90% of data which is collected through IoT connected devices are stored or processed locally, making it inaccessible for real-time analytics, therefore it must be transferred to another location for analysis. As the number of these devices increases, the quantity of data which must be transferred to another location, stored and analysed also increases. The cost of data transmission and storage could soon prohibit some organizations from achieving the goal of IoT. The new team are hoping the combination of Cisco’s edge analytics capabilities and the Watson cognitive solutions will enable real-time analysis at the scene, thus removing a number of the challenges faced.

“Together, Cisco and IBM are positioned to help organizations make real-time informed decisions based on business-critical data that was often previously undetected and overlooked,” said Mala Anand, SVP of the Cisco Data & Analytics Platforms Group. “With the vast amount of data being created at the edge of the network, using existing Cisco infrastructure to perform streaming analytics is the perfect way to cost-effectively obtain real-time insights. Our powerful technology provides customers with the flexibility to combine this edge processing with the cognitive computing power of the IBM Watson IoT Platform.”