Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Oracle

Oracle bolsters construction capabilities with $663mn Textura acquisition

Oracle planeOracle has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Textura, provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services.

The deal, valued at approximately $663 million, adds to the Oracle Primavera offering, building on the cloud suite for project cost, time and risk management. Over recent years, Oracle has been making efforts to the re-architect the Oracle Primavera products as a software-as-a-service offering to capitalize on growing digitalization trends within the construction industry.

“The increasingly global engineering and construction industry requires digital modernization in a way that automates manual processes and embraces the power of cloud computing to easily connect the construction job site, reduce cost overruns, and improve productivity,” said Mike Sicilia, GM of Oracle’s Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit. “Together, Textura and Oracle Engineering and Construction will have the most comprehensive set of cloud services in the industry.”

The company now claims to have a complete end-to-end cloud project-solution which manages all phases of engineering and construction projects. Textura’s cloud software currently processes more than $3.4 billion in payments for general contractors, engineers, and subcontractors each month, currently accommodating more than 6,000 different projects.

“Textura’s mission is to bring workflow automation and transparency to complex construction projects while improving their financial performance and minimizing risks,” said David Habiger, CEO at Textura. “We are excited to join Oracle and bring our cloud-based capabilities to help extend the Oracle Engineering and Construction Industry Cloud Platform.”

The acquisition builds on Oracle’s continued efforts to provide industry specific solutions, where the company reportedly spends more than $700 million annually.

AWS, Google, hybrid cloud, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM pull away from pack in race for cloud market share

racing horses starting a raceNew findings from Synergy Research highlight the cloud market is still dominated by AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM, as the pack is seemingly struggling to gain ground in the race for market share.

AWS still leads the way in the segment, accounting for roughly 31% of the global market share, with IBM, Google and IBM collectively accounting for the next 22%. The next 20 players in the market, companies such as HPE, VMWare and Alibaba for example, account for a collective 27%. AWS year-on-year growth was estimated at 57% while Google and Microsoft both demonstrated more than 100% growth over the same period.

“This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business. This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

Worryingly for the rest of the pack outside of the top four, the gap would appear to be growing as AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM are pulling further ahead. The 20 companies outside the top four averaged year-on-year growth of approximately 41%, though Synergy claim the cloud segment grew more than 50% over the course of Q1.

The team estimate the quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues, which include IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud, has now surpassed the $7 billion milestone, with the US accounting for roughly 50% of the worldwide market share.

 

Growth

AWS, Financial Results, News & Analysis

AWS quarterly revenues grow 64% to $2.6 billion

amazon awsAWS reported growth of 64% year-on-year growth to $2.6 billion for the quarter, becoming one of the few tech giants to have experienced a healthy Q1.

While IBM, VMWare, Intel and EMC have experienced mixed fortunes during the first few months of 2016, AWS has seemingly weathered the storm successfully. The company now anticipates it will break through the $10 billion barrier for annual revenues, and plans to improve its global footprint with continued expansion and new feature announcements. AWS ended the quarter with 33 Availability Zones in 12 geographic regions, with 11 more planned over the next 12 months.

“I would say there’s no let-up in the pace of invention here, particularly on the AWS side,” said Brian Olsavsky, CFO at Amazon. “We usually quote the number of new features and services to you each quarter, we had 214 in Q1, up from 170 the first quarter of last year. So over 26% growth in this quarter alone coming off a year where I believe the number was 722 significant new features and services delivered for AWS customers last year.”

The company did not update its figures for its data management revenues, at re:Invent AWS disclosed the product suite was at a $1 billion run rate, though it did highlight the Aurora database offering is the fastest growing product in the business unit’s history. The quarter also saw a number of product launches and updates including Amazon Lumberyard, a free, cross-platform, 3D game engine for developers to create games, the general availability of the AWS Database Migration Service, the general availability of Amazon Inspector, an automated security assessment service and updates for its block storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store.

While the AWS results have generally been well received across the industry, Amazon shares were up 12% during pre-market trading at the time of writing, it would appear to be one of the few bright spots across the quarter for technology businesses, as the accompanying Google Finance screen grab shows.

Finance

 

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

Microsoft voted most important mega-vendor by CIOs – JP Morgan report

cloud computing machine learning autonomousA recent report from JP Morgan has stated Microsoft is considered the most important IT vendor globally, with AWS ranked in second place.

In a survey of 207 CIOs, who account for $126 billion annual enterprise IT spend, JP Morgan uncovered Microsoft is considered the most valuable mega-vendor in the IT ecosystem. 46.9% of the CIOs surveyed highlighted Microsoft as the most critical and indispensable to the future of their IT environment, whereas AWS only accounted for 13%. While AWS is still generally considered as the market leader within the cloud segment, feedback highlighted Microsoft’s wider array of enterprise IT offerings (desktop, server, database etc.) positioned it as a much more critical component of their organizations future.

While the cloud revolution has been immensely profitable for certain organizations, the continued drive towards cloud computing has also proved a difficult time for others. Oracle and SAP are two such organizations, according to the report, which have dropped down in CIO’s priorities. Only 11.1% and 9.2% (Oracle and SAP respectively) of the CIO’s said the organizations were the most important vendors to the future of their IT strategy.

In fact, Oracle was highlighted as important to some of those CIOs simply because it was “the backbone of our data warehouse” or “mission critical applications and databases are Oracle” or “difficult to replace” or “too much already invested to move on”. It would appear Oracle is important out of necessity or a lack of choice, as opposed to Oracle’s strides forward in the IT world. The Oracle cloud offering was only mentioned twice by the respondents, compared to Azure being mentioned 16 times.

The report also brought attention to IBM whose fortunes in the new-era of cloud computing would appear to be dwindling. 26.1% of the respondents highlighted IBM would be the vendor which would lose their IT spend as the move towards cloud computing continues. The report also detailed that while only 16.2% of workloads are currently on public cloud, though in five years this figure would increase to 41.3%.

The era of cloud computing is seemingly taking chunks out of Big Blue’s traditional business units, though the team should be encouraged by its efforts in cognitive computing, which was recognized by some of the respondents. IBM’s Watson has been claiming more column inches than other cognitive computing offerings, though it remains to be seen whether this is a sign of intent to adopt from the enterprise community, or an effective PR machine.

cloud migration, News & Analysis, Public Sector, Salesforce, US government

Salesforce launches Government Cloud Lightning platform

Salesforce WearSalesforce has launched Government Cloud Lightning platform, a new offering to which enables US government agencies to connect with citizens and stakeholders anywhere and on any device.

The new product offering is built on the assumption that government agencies are burdened with legacy systems which limit the opportunities to communicate and operate effectively. The team claim the Cloud Lightning platform will enable government agencies to transform their operations to a more modern, mobile and responsive proposition.

In a report published last year, the Government Accountability Office claims $58 billion of their $79 billion IT budget in 2015 maintaining legacy systems, as opposed to investigating and implementing next-generation IT offerings to improve operations. Saleforce has seemingly built its proposition on the idea government agencies are in the process of a transformation to create a more digitally enabled ecosystem.

“Private sector innovation has changed the way citizens expect to interact with their governments, so providing our customers with modern and secure tools is paramount to increasing citizen satisfaction and engagement,” said Vivek Kundra, EVP at Salesforce. “The launch of Government Cloud Lightning, along with extended compliance standards and enhancements, will empower agencies, the aerospace and defense market, and government contractors to digitally transform and connect with citizens in new ways.”

The new offering is built on three key features; The Lightening Experience, the Lightening Platform and the Lightening Ecosystem. From an experience perspective, Salesforce claim the new product will offer users the opportunity to streamline how they communicate and collaborate, as well as create a personalized experience that is consistent across products and devices. The Lightening Platform will help users build apps for desktops and mobile devices, and the final feature will link agencies to Salesforce’s partner ecosystem.

“The Government Cloud Lightning ecosystem is a highly anticipated leap forward for the apps that our federal teams are building on Salesforce,” said Rusty Pickens, Senior Advisor for Digital Platforms at the US Department of State. “Government Cloud Lightning provides us with a modern and clean interface that allows us to build an item once and trust that it will work on any device. Even more importantly, it empowers our diplomats all over the world to access their CRM data right wherever they are, from a mobile device that has all the power of a typical government computer.”

Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Samsung

Samsung launches IoT cloud platform

SamsungSamsung has launched its Artik Cloud Platform, an open data exchange platform designed to connect any data set from any connected device or cloud service.

Speaking at Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco, the company has launched the service in direct competition with established platforms such as Microsoft’s Azure and IBM’s Bluemix, to capitalize on growing momentum in the IoT market.

“Our vision for the Artik platform is an end-to-end experience that reduces the obstacles, challenges, and time-to-market for IoT solutions,” said Young Sohn, Chief Strategy Officer at Samsung Electronics. “We’re excited to announce the Samsung Artik Cloud after three years of development and feedback from hundreds of developers. Unlike many other IoT cloud platforms, Artik Cloud breaks down data siloes between devices and enables a new class of IoT applications and services.

“The launch of this exciting new platform not only signals Samsung’s foray into the cloud services market but reinforces our belief that, by creating powerful open platforms, we can harness the information generated by IoT to develop new insights and new approaches to address the major global challenges of today and tomorrow.”

The company, which would generally not be considered a major player in the cloud market, claims it now offers an end-to-end solution, which will enable customers to collect, store, and act on any data from any connected device or cloud service. While the company would not appear to have the software capabilities of its now-competitors, the offering is positioned as an open cloud service positioning to counter this concern.

“The need for an open cloud solution that can work with any connected device, and with other cloud services is critical for broader consumer adoption,” said BK Yoon, CEO of Samsung Electronics. “The launch of Artik Cloud is extremely exciting because it promises to not only help Samsung connect our diverse portfolio of products, but also enable other companies to participate in a growing IoT ecosystem.”

The move does also follow a number of product launches over the last twelve months to bring Samsung into the IoT ecosystem. Last year the company launched three chips, Artik 1, 5 and 10, which were designed specifically to be embedded in IoT products. Although a new player to the market, the team also released a case study for Artik cloud with lighting company Legrand where it claimed to have saved months of development time as well as a notable amount of investment.

“To be connected to the ARTIK Cloud is another step in our openness strategy, which aims to make Legrand’s legacy devices and new smart devices interoperable with other connected products, and increases the value we deliver to our users,” said Ernesto Santini, Legrand VP Innovation and Systems.

The team would also appear to have learnt lessons from the Microsoft IoT strategy, targeting a broad range of potential customers from top-end enterprise organizations through to star-ups and also hobbyists. Hobbyists can connect up to 25 devices, collecting up to 150 messages from each device per day, for free. While Samsung does have ground to catch up when compared to the more established competitors such as Microsoft and IBM, such a flexible pricing plan will seemingly broaden the appeal of the brand.

AI, Facebook, News & Analysis, User experience

Facebook outlines user experience objectives for AI

FacebookFacebook has outlined its ambitions for artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to enhance user experience.

The recent introduction of bots through the Facebook platform is one of first steps on the journey to artificial intelligence, which the team believe can evolve into an AI platform which can learn and automate specific activities. The Facebook team ultimately want to build computer services that have better perception than people, whether this is predicting what content would be relevant to a user or products would be of interest, which it believes is possible within the next 5-10 years.

“We’re focused not on what Facebook is, but on what it can be and on what it needs to be, and that means doing bold things,” said Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. “A lot of what we’re building today in areas like connectivity, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality may not pay off for years, but they’re important to our mission of connecting the world. And I’m committed to seeing this mission through and to leading Facebook there over the long term.”

While true artificial intelligence could be perceived as a long-term ambition of the tech industry, Facebook has incorporated various AI and machine learning capabilities into its services over recent months. The Moments app is using face recognition to help users share pictures with friends, while also using AI to drive relevant content through a user’s news feed and filter spam. One of the more advanced applications of the technology is helping blind people comprehend what is in a photo by reading explanations of them aloud.

In terms of long-term ambitions for AI and machine learning capabilities will be to enhance the user experience and continue to drive more relevant content through their Facebook accounts. The team believe the future of AI will be able to understand the content of articles or videos in a more complex manner, linking the specific content with a user’s defined interests and previous use of the platform.

Currently, AI can potentially list what content is within an article, picture or video, but it doesn’t fundamentally understand what this content is, and thus cannot draw conclusions as to which users it would be relevant for. This intuition and perception would appear to be the next step in Facebook’s AI journey.

“One obvious thing I think over time is if you just look at the way that we rank News Feed, today we use some basic signals like who you’re friends with and what pages you like as some of the most important things for figuring out what – out of all of the millions and millions of pieces of content that are on Facebook, what we’re going to show and what are going to be the most interesting things to you,” said Zuckerberg.

“That’s because today our systems can’t actually understand what the content means. We don’t actually look at the photo and deeply understand what’s in it or look at the videos and understand what’s in it or read the links that people share and understand what’s in them, but in the future we’ll be able to, I think in a five or 10-year period.”

From a financial perspective, revenues for the quarter grew by 52% year on year to $5.4 billion, and advertising revenue grew by 57% to $5.2 billion. Mobile advertising revenue reached $4.2 billion, up 75% year over year, and is now approximately 82% of total advertising revenues for the business. The company now claims to have 3 million active advertisers on Facebook and over 200,000 on Instagram.

Big Data, FICO, News & Analysis, Predictive Analytics

FICO reinforces market position with product updates

dataGlobal analytics firm FICO has launched a number of new and updated offerings to enable businesses to develop prescriptive analytics and decision management applications and improve business decision agility.

The Decision Management Suite 2.0 product – an updated version of the same name – enables customers to develop analytic applications in the cloud and improve automated business decision agility. The Decision Central offering manages, audits, reports and updates decision logic and predictive models, so customers can record and store automated decisions so they can be reused, modified and improved. Finally, the Strategy Director tool helps users structure the decision flow. The tools are available through Amazon Web Services or as a private cloud or on-premises deployment.

“Many Big Data deployments have failed to deliver competitive advantage because their approach is completely backwards,” said Stuart Wells, CTO at FICO. “We focus on decisions-first, as opposed to data-first. That gives our customers the fastest route to real value, and the agility to change course faster than the competition. It means being able to innovate like start-ups. Some of our Decision Management Suite customers have reduced the time to deploy an analytic application from months to days, and the time to model a decision and act on it from weeks to minutes.”

While the concept of Big Data has been around for some time many business struggle to comprehend the vast amount collated, to utilize it within the organization in any meaningful manner. The FICO product suite is one of a number of new products in the industry which aims to bring all this data into one concise system, and ultimately drive decision making capability through the insight uncovered.

“The original launch of the FICO Decision Management Suite in 2013 represented a dramatic change in decision logic authoring and application development,” Wells said. “Now, with version 2 of the Decision Management Suite, FICO’s customers have the chance to pull even further ahead of their competitors. This product suite represents the future of prescriptive analytics and decision management, and it’s available now.”

Azure, hybrid, hybrid cloud, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Microsoft shifts focus to Chinese cloud market

MicrosoftMicrosoft has announced a successful year in the Chinese market, as well as intentions to step-up its expansion plans in the region, according to China Daily.

The company claims it now has more than 65,000 corporate clients, and appetite for its Azure offering in Chinese enterprise organizations is steadily increasing. As part of the expansion plans, Microsoft lowered its prices for Chinese customers earlier this month, seemingly in an effort to undercut its global competitor AWS, as well as local powerhouses such as Alibaba Tencent.

“Though the GDP growth is slowing down, Chinese companies still need to focus on three points to remain relevant and competitive: innovation, productivity and the return of investments,” Ralph Haupter, CEO of Microsoft in China. “And cloud computing can help in all of the above three aspects. We will focus on manufacturing, retail, automotive, media and other industries to further expand market share.”

While China has proved to be one of the top priorities of the majority of the cloud players in recent years, a recent report from BSA highlighted the region was one of the poorest performers in the global IT community. Measuring each country of their cloud policies and legislation, as well as the readiness of its enterprises, China ranked 23 out of the top 24 IT nations worldwide, mainly due to poor performance in the data privacy, cybercrime, promotion of free trade and security categories, though it was one of the worst performers across every category.

Despite concerns from the BSA, Ji Yanhang, an analyst at Analysys International, believes the market has strong potential, stating “China’s national strategies, such as boosting high-end manufacturing, will increase demand for cloud services in the coming years.”

The announcement follows last weeks’ quarterly earnings call, where CEO Satya Nadella reported that Office commercial products and cloud services revenue grew 7%, Office consumer products and cloud services revenue grew 6% and Dynamics products and cloud services revenue grew 9%. Azure revenues grew 120% over the period, though this is down from 140% growth in the previous quarter.

data centre, Database, flash storage, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM expands flash storage portfolio in continued transition to cloud positioning

Cloud storageIBM has announced the expansion of its flash storage portfolio, to bolster its position in the cognitive computing and hybrid cloud market segments.

The FlashSystem arrays combine its FlashCore technology with scale-out architecture, in the company’s continued efforts to consolidate its position as a vendor to power cloud data centres which utilize cognitive computing technologies. Cognitive computing, and more specifically Watson, has seemingly formed the central pillar of IBM’s current marketing and PR campaigns, as it continues its journey to transform Big Blue into a major cloud player.

“The drastic increase in volume, velocity and variety of information is requiring businesses to rethink their approach to addressing storage needs, and they need a solution that is as fast as it is easy, if they want to be ready for the Cognitive Era,” said Greg Lotko, GM of IBM’s Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure business. “IBM’s flash portfolio enables businesses on their cognitive journey to derive greater value from more data in more varieties, whether on premises or in a hybrid cloud deployment.”

The company claims the new offering will provide an onramp for flash storage for IT service providers, reducing the cost of implementing an all-flash environment, as well as scalable storage for cloud service providers. Another feature built into the proposition, will enable customers to deal with ‘noisy neighbour’ challenges and other network performance issues which can be present in a multi-tenant cloud environment.

“The workloads our department manages include CAD files for land mapping, geographic information system (GIS) applications and satellite imagery for the over 9.2 million acres of State Trust lands we’re responsible to oversee. The data we manage is tied directly to our goal to make this information available and to increase its analytical capabilities,” said William Reed, CTO at the Arizona State Land Department, one of IBM’s customers. “After exhaustive, comparative proof of concept testing we chose IBM’s FlashSystem, which has helped to increase our client productivity by 7 times while reducing our virtual machine boot times by over 85 percent.”