Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

AWS, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

AWS to breach $10 billion barrier through fail-fast business model

Plant Growing In Savings Coins - Investment And Interest ConceptAmazon Founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos has announced the company has become the fastest ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales, while AWS will also breach the $10 billion milestone in 2015, owing the success to the company’s “fail-fast” business model.

Bezos claims in a letter to the company shareholders the cloud computing business unit has grown at a faster rate than the business on the whole as it celebrates its tenth birthday this year. The company launched its first major service in 2006, a simple storage service, but now offers more than 70 services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things, and enterprise applications.

“AWS is bigger than Amazon.com was at 10 years old, growing at a faster rate, and – most noteworthy in my view – the pace of innovation continues to accelerate – we announced 722 significant new features and services in 2015, a 40% increase over 2014,” said Bezos in the statement.

“Many characterized AWS as a bold – and unusual – bet when we started. “What does this have to do with selling books?” We could have stuck to the knitting. I’m glad we didn’t. Or did we? Maybe the knitting has as much to do with our approach as the arena. AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.”

Throughout the statement Bezos referred to the company as “the best place in the world to fail” as he coupled numerous failures within the business as the catalyst for innovation. The concept builds on a popular industry model of “fail-fast” and while numerous companies around the world claim to incorporate the model into their innovation models, industry insiders have told BCN the management team are less than happy to accept failure.

The model builds on the idea that failure within the innovation team is an acceptable practise, assuming it is done quickly and lessons are learnt to improve the product offering. Failing fast, in theory, enables the team to remove inadequacies in the product offering, encouraging innovation and efficiency. Sources said while the model can drastically improve the product offering, the management team can rarely come to terms with the idea that failure can lead to greater success.

On the surface, the organization wants to be seen to incubate innovation, though the management team rarely accepts failure. According to Bezos, Amazon is seemingly one of the few companies to have successfully embedded such a business model.

“Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there,” said Bezos. “Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.”

cloud security, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM Security targets incident response marketplace with Resilient acquisition

security monitoring roomIBM Security has completed the acquisition of Resilient, as part of the company’s expansion in the incident response marketplace. Financial terms of the agreement have not been released.

The company had announced its plans to acquire Resilient in February, alongside the launch of its X-Force Incident Response Services. Resilient’s incident response system allows customers to automate and orchestrate the many processes needed when dealing with cyber incidents. The new services include a remote incident response capability to help clients map how a breach occurred and take action to shut it down.

“The combination of Resilient’s people – top thought leaders in the incident response marketplace – and their technology is a differentiating addition to our security business,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager at IBM Security. “Our investments in threat detection and prevention have helped us move into a leadership position in the security market. With Resilient, we’re expanding the capabilities we bring to customers, helping them manage the complexities in resolving security incidents, including the coordination of teams, best practices, and reporting.”

The company have claimed by combining Resilient Systems’ Incident Response Platform with IBM’s QRadar Security Intelligence Incident Forensics, BigFix, X-Force Exchange and other Incident Response Services, it will be able to offer increased speed in dealing with threats.

IBM has been quietly building its security business over recent years through various acquisitions and company hires. In the last three years, the company has bought a number of security specific vendors including CrossIdeas, Lighthouse Security Group and Trusteer, the latter was rumoured to be around the $1 billion mark. The company now claims to be the largest cloud and cyber security vendor in the market, exceeding $2 billion in revenue and hiring more than 1000 security professionals in 2015, as well as holding than 3,000 security patents.

“The Resilient team is delighted to be joining IBM Security,” said John Bruce, Resilient’s CEO, “Together, we will be a powerful force helping organizations to manage the evolving security challenges that they face. With the scale of IBM research, development and investment behind us, we’re excited about the possibilities for innovation and to engage with new clients around the world.”

AI, Artificial intelligence, AWS, News & Analysis

AI battle ground intensifies with AWS rumoured to be making moves

amazon awsAmazon has apparently acquired deep learning start-up Orbeus in what would appear to be the company’s latest move on the artificial intelligence market, according to reports at Bloomberg. Sources close to Bloomberg have said the acquisition took place in the latter stages of 2015, though the deal has not been announced by Amazon as of yet.

Over recent months, artificial intelligence would appear to be the latest battle grounds for the cloud industry as numerous tech giants bolster their capabilities in the space. While the move has not been confirmed by either Orbeus or Amazon, the play builds on AWS’ previous acquisitions in the segment including high-performance computing company Nice and video processing company Elemental Technologies.

The Orbeus site is relatively bare for the moment, simply displaying the message “ReKognition API is no longer taking new customers. Thank you very much for your interest and support. But we’re up to new/exciting things and to stay tuned.” The Orbeus technology utilizes deep learning techniques to provide scalable image and face recognition solutions for businesses and consumers. The company has won numerous awards and also received healthy media attention for its application PhotoTime, which brings the advances of deep learning to the consumer market.

While the move has not been confirmed by any parties to date it does appear to demonstrate the importance of AI for the tech giants, most of whom are making notable efforts to improve product offerings in the face of increasingly demanding customers. AWS continues to remain as the leader in the public cloud space, though recent moves from Microsoft and Google appear to be closing the gap. Industry insiders have told BCN that AWS’ industry leading position may be coming under threat as competitors would appear to be making more significant moves to improve their own platforms.

The new expertise could counter moves made by Google and Microsoft in recent months, as the companies pursue AI competencies for improved customer experience and decision making capabilities. Google’s recent Go PR stunt demonstrated the efforts which the team have made in deep learning, whereas Microsoft announced a number of Microsoft additions to its Cognitive Services offering, formerly known as Project Oxford, at Build 2016.

News & Analysis, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Volkswagen

Volkswagen moves to OpenStack platform with start-up Mirantis

VWCar manufacturer Volkswagen Group has chosen OpenStack as its global standard for its next generation private cloud platform, as part of a worldwide standardization project to reduce IT costs and increase automation.

The company signed the deal with start-up Mirantis over the major players in the industry. While the move represents one of the biggest wins to date for the start-up, it would appear that Red Hat have lost out on a healthy deal in the process. Volkswagen is currently a customer of Red Hat, though it is not clear to what degree the relationship will continue.

“As the automotive industry shifts to the service economy, Volkswagen is poised for agile software innovation,” said Mario Müller, VP IT Infrastructure at Volkswagen. “The team at Mirantis gives us a robust, hardened distribution, deep technical expertise, a commitment to the OpenStack community, and the ability to drive cloud transformation at Volkswagen. Mirantis OpenStack is the engine that lets Volkswagen’s developers build and deliver software faster.”

Volkswagen highlighted the move to a private cloud platform will enable the business to better compete in an ever-more digitally enabled world. Müller said that four trends drove the company towards a more agile cloud computing platform, as the new platform enables greater levels of automation as well as a less consuming procurement process.

“Ubiquitous connectivity means we’ll have 50 billion smart sensors in end devices by 2030,” said Müller. “Cloud computing means data access everywhere. That means the amount of stored data doubles every two years. Third, social media. We have 1.3 billion Facebook users today, heading towards 7 billion. And big data. We can do real-time analysis of mass amounts of data.”

Initially Volkswagen will move its infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, ending with Platform-as-a-Service for the infrastructure model. On IaaS, Volkswagen will manage the middleware, runtime, data and applications, whereas Mirantis will manage the operating system, virtualization layer, servers, storage and networking, while on PaaS the company will only manage data and applications. The company aim to have PaaS up and running by July of this year. The transition to the IaaS model was completed at the end of 2015.

“First, it’s a service (the current IaaS platform) and not simply dedicated hardware,” said Müller. “The target VW internal audience is administrators and technical competence centres. It’s not designed for end users. The IaaS services provide virtualized hardware computer, networking and storage running on Linux with root access. Connectivity is via VW’s intranet. It’s not yet connected to the Internet. It doesn’t support legacy applications and we don’t yet offer central backups. It’s available to our teams in America, Europe and Asia.”

The deal represents a major win for Mirantis, which previously counted Red Hat as one of its investors. In two rounds of fund-raising in January and June 2013, Mirantis raised $10 million in growth capital funding from various venture capitalists, as well as a further $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP. The company then launched its own OpenStack distribution in October 2013, putting it in direct competition with Red Hat, though the technology still worked with Red Hat operating systems.

In recent years, the relationship between the two companies would appear to have soured as Red Hat announced in May 2014 that it would no longer provide support to Linux customers using non-Red Hat versions of OpenStack, contradicting the spirit of the open source community. Later that year in November the company also ordered all employees to stop working with Mirantis. The saga would not have appeared to have effected Mirantis’ perception in the market.

“OpenStack is the open source cloud standard offering companies a fast path to cloud innovation,” said Marque Teegardin, SVP at Mirantis. “It is our privilege to partner with Europe’s largest automaker and we are thrilled to support them as they use the software to out-innovate competitors and expand their business on a global scale.”

data centre, Datacentre, Equinix, Mobile Edge, News & Analysis

Equinix launches Data Hub solution for customers on the edge

Office worker sitting on rooftop in cityData centre company Equinix has launched its Data Hub solution to enable enterprise customers to develop large data repositories and dispense, consume and process the data at the edge.

As part of an Interconnection Oriented Architecture, the Data Hub is a bundled solution consisting of pre-configured colocation and power, combined with cloud-integrated data storage solutions, and will work in conjunction with the company’s Performance Hub solution. The company highlighted that while the Performance Hub solves for the deployment of network gear and interconnection inside Equinix data centres, Data Hub enables the deployment of IT gear integrated with Performance Hub.

The launch builds on a number of trends within the industry, including the growing volume of data utilized by enterprise organizations brought on by the implementation of IoT and big data capabilities. According to research from statista, the number of connected devices is forecast to reach 50 billion units worldwide by 2020. The company believe the healthy growth of data consumption will increase the need for organizations to re-think their existing IT infrastructure, and develop an Interconnection Oriented Architecture, at the edge.

“Data, and its exponential growth, continues to be an ongoing concern for enterprise IT,” said Lance Weaver, VP, Product Offers and Platform Strategy at Equinix. “And there is no expectation it will slow down in the near future.  To keep up with this relentless data rise, it is critical for the enterprise to rethink its IT architecture and focus on an interconnection-first strategy.  Data Hub, is the newest solution from Equinix and we are confident that it will provide our enterprise customers with the data management solutions they need today, while providing for growth tomorrow.”

The company have claimed there are a number of use cases including cloud-integrated tiered storage, big data analytics infrastructure, as well as multi-site deployment for data redundancy, allowing data to be synchronously replicated by an enterprise.

“With the explosive growth of mobile, social, cloud and big data, an enterprise data center strategy needs to evolve from merely housing servers to becoming the foundation for new data-driven business models,” said Dan Vesset, Group VP, Analytics and Information Management at research firm IDC. “Equinix, with its global platform of data centers and interconnection-first approach, offers the type of platform needed to create a flexible datacenter environment for innovation – specifically in the realm of data management at the network edge.”

Azure, Big Data, connected car, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Toyota

Toyota and Microsoft launch connected car initiative

ToyotaJapanese car brand Toyota has teamed up with Microsoft to launch Toyota Connected, a new joint venture to further the car manufacturer’s efforts towards autonomous vehicles.

Toyota Connected builds on a standing relationship with Microsoft to leverage Azure cloud technology to make the connected driving experience smarter. Based in Plano, Texas, Toyota Connected will expand the company’s capabilities in the fields of data management and data services development initiatives.

“Toyota Connected will help free our customers from the tyranny of technology. It will make lives easier and help us to return to our humanity,” said Zack Hicks, CEO of Toyota Connected.  “From telematics services that learn from your habits and preferences, to use-based insurance pricing models that respond to actual driving patterns, to connected vehicle networks that can share road condition and traffic information, our goal is to deliver services that make lives easier.”

The connected cars market has been growing healthily in recent years, but is not new to Microsoft or Toyota as the two companies have been collaborating in the area of telematics since 2011, working on services such as infotainment and real-time traffic updates. A 2015 report stated that connected car services will account for nearly $40 Billion in annual revenue by 2020, while big data and analytics technology investments will reach $5 billion across the industry in the same period.

The new company itself has been given two mandates; firstly to support product development for customers, dealers, distributors, and partners, through advanced data analytics solutions, and secondly to build on Toyota’s existing partnership with Microsoft to accelerate R&D efforts and deliver new connected car solutions. The company have stated that its vision is to “humanize the driving experience while pushing the technology into the background”.

The launch of Toyota Connected will able enable the organization to consolidate R&D programs into one business unit, which it claims will ensure that all initiatives remain customer centric. Initiatives will focus around a number of areas including in-car services and telematics, home/IoT connectivity, personalization and smart city integration.

As part of the launch, Toyota will also adopt Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, employing a hybrid solution globally, whilst also housing a number of Microsoft engineers in its offices in Plano.

“Toyota is taking a bold step creating a company dedicated to bringing cloud intelligence into the driving experience,” said Kurt Del Bene, EVP, Corporate Strategy and Planning at Microsoft. “We look forward to working with Toyota Connected to harness the power of data to make driving more personal, intuitive and safe.”

AI, Artificial intelligence, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforces acquires AI start up

Robotic hand, accessing on laptop, the virtual world of information. Concept of artificial intelligence and replacement of humans by machines.Salesforce is set to acquire deep learning start up MetaMind in an effort to bolster it artificial intelligence capabilities.

While terms of the deal have not been released, it would appear to be an “acqhire” based agreement, as Salesforce will integrate MetaMind’s technology into its current services. Long-term intentions have not been announced, though MetaMind’s capabilities will be used to automate and personalize customer support in the first instance.

“With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we’ll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes,” said MetaMind Founder Richard Socher. “We’ll extend Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.”

MetaMind’s expertise is based on Socher’s PhD where he explored deep learning artificial intelligence. The company teaches machines to recognize images and understand natural language, operating in a similar way to the networks of neurons in the human brain. While these capabilities have been limited to internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Baidu, Socher founded MetaMind under the ethos to “build deep learning technologies anyone can use, not just the internet giants”. The company was initially funded by Saleforce CEO Marc Benioff and venture capital fund Khosla Ventures.

The acquisition builds on growing AI trends within the industry on the whole, as industry giants are currently competing for leading spot in the emerging segment. With Microsoft, Google, IBM and Facebook, all making strides in recent weeks, it should not be seen as a surprise that one of the world’s largest CRM brands is also entering the fray.

“Over the past year and a half, we’ve been on a mission to empower business users with state of the art deep learning technology to simplify, improve and automate decision making,” said Socher. “And now, we’ll be able to continue our journey at Salesforce on a much larger scale, with the resources and ecosystem of one of the world’s most innovative and influential enterprise software companies.”

For unpaid web users, MetaMind’s products will be discontinued on May 4, whereas for paid users, products will be discontinued on June 4. Although it has not been made 100% clear what the long-term strategy of the acquisition will be Socher highlighted that the MetaMind team’s research will continue and it is still receiving CV’s for new positions.

Outside of the AI space, Salesforce has also signed an agreement with NEC to establish its second data centre in Japan to support its growing customer base over the Asia-Pacific region. Japan’s public cloud service market grew to 2.6 billion yen in 2015 and is forecasted to reach 6.3 billion yen by 2020.

“Salesforce’s plans to open a second data centre in the Kansai area reflects our commitment to Japan and the Asia-Pacific region,” said Shinichi Koide, CEO at Salesforce Japan. “Salesforce continues to increase its strategic investments in the market, enabling local companies to leverage the latest cloud, mobile, social, data science and IoT innovations to create connected experiences that matter to their customers.”

While Salesforce is still considered in the industry as the market leader, Oracle and Larry Ellison have actively targeted Salesforce market share, as the company still appears to measure itself against Salesforce’s success. As a company which has built its reputation on innovation it should not come as a surprise that Salesforce is pursuing technologies such as artificial intelligence to bolster its product offering and enforce its position as the industry leader.

acquisition, Blackstone, HPE, IT services, M&A, News & Analysis

HPE and Blackstone agree $825 million deal for Indian IT services business

Plant in front of a creative working deskHPE has announced its intention to sell its majority stake in Mphasis in a deal with Blackstone, believed to work in the region of $825 million.

The company said that Blackstone has agreed to purchase at least 84% of its stake in Mphasis for INR 430 per share. Blackstone will purchase the maximum amount of the remaining 16% stake that is permitted by Indian securities laws and subject to the outcome of a mandatory tender offer between signing and closing. Assuming the values are correct, HPE’s in the Indian business would be values in the region of $825 million.

Indian IT Services company Mphasis has been part of the HPE group since 2008, after its parent company EDS was wholly acquired by HPE. The company had 23,000 staff at the end of the quarter, delivering both business process outsourcing and IT services.

“While our financial relationship is changing, the business and commercial relationship with Mphasis remains an important part of our service delivery strategy,” said Mike Nefkens, GM of HPE Enterprise Services. “We remain committed to our strategic partnership with Mphasis and to providing our customers with the high level of service and support they expect from HPE.”

It is believed that the deal represents a move from HPE to remove business components which do not line with future business objectives. In recent weeks, the company has made moves to improve its position in a number of markets including cloud infrastructure equipment market and machines learning. While the deal may represent HPE moving away from the Indian IT services market, it will not affect the commercial relationship between the two companies.

HPE plans to renew the current master services agreement with Mphasis for another five years in connection with this transaction. It is estimated that HPE business accounted for 24 percent of the Indian company’s total revenue of rupees 15 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015.

AI, Artificial intelligence, Korea, News & Analysis

Korea to mount challenge in AI industry

AI-Artificial-Intelligence-Machine-Learning-Cognitive-ComputingKorea has announced plans to invest roughly 100 billion won (approximately $87.2 million) to foster the development of supercomputers in the country, according to the Korea Times.

Following the 5-game Go match between Google’s AlphaGo programme and Go World Champion Lee Se-dol, there has been a rise in interest in AI within the country. The attention has seemingly prompted the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning to invest 10 billion won annually for the next 10 years to boost the growth of artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet-of-Things technologies and other emerging industries through supercomputers.

The Go match would appear to have raised the profile in a country which is already in the process of bolstering its cloud computing credentials. At a cloud conference, the ministry also announced plans to increase the adoption of cloud computing from 6.4% to 13% over the next 12 months, as well as targeting international growth for Korean cloud computing companies.

The ministry has outlined a plan to develop a supercomputer with a data-processing speed of 1 petaflop (PF) in five years, eventually reaching 30 PF by 2025. The 1 petaflop supercomputer could be utilized in such use cases as predicting maritime and landslide-related disasters. It is believed that the supercomputer project has been granted state-level importance as more than 95% of Korea’s market for high-performance computers is controlled by overseas firms. The country’s market for high-performance computing is estimated at 260 billion won for 2015, accounting for 2.5% of the global total.

Google’s publicity stunt is only one of a number is recent months to demonstrate the potential and also challenges of AI. While Google’s stunt could be deemed a success, Microsoft’s twitter inspired AI bot Tay was less so. Tay highlighted to the industry that while there has been progress in the development and deployment of AI, there are still some challenges which persist. It would appear programming morals, values as well as the sense of right and wrong is one of the challenges which remain within AI.

The Korean government would appear to be targeting cloud computing and other emerging technology markets for future growth. The ministry has highlighted that as little as 6.4% of Korean companies currently utilize cloud computing technologies, representing a huge area of growth for domestic cloud computing organizations, as well as any international players who are active in south east Asia.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, NTT, SAP

NTT achieves SAP Global Certification

multi cloudNTT Comms has achieved SAP Global Certification for hosting services, cloud services and SAP HANA operations services.

The certification will enable NTT to build and manage SAP applications by utilizing the company’s enterprise cloud and its Global Management One platform. The offering will be made available on all NTT infrastructures across private, public and hybrid clouds, through a consumption-based delivery model.

“We’re set to see more organizations place key infrastructure and applications in the cloud. However, for global enterprises it is often a difficult and complex journey,” said Damian Skendrovic, CEO at NTT Comms Managed Services. “Our new cloud solutions for SAP put our customers in pole position to migrate to the cloud and manage their applications more effectively. This ensures that business operations are enhanced as quickly as possible and without disruption.”

To achieve the certification, a provider’s cloud platform must undertake comprehensive testing by SAP to authorize the integration with its complete application set. Aside from the company’s infrastructure being tested against the standards, NTT’s technical staff in the EMEA, Americas and Asia Pacific regions were also placed under the same scrutiny.

Outside of the managed services business unit, the NTT team have continued efforts to diversify its revenue channels and grow its business in new markets. NTT Data recently announced plans to acquire Dell Services for $3.06 billion, as it prioritized growth in international markets.

“NTT Data is pleased with the unique opportunity to acquire such high-calibre talent, and a corporate culture that shares common values with NTT Data, with emphasis on client first, foresight, teamwork and a commitment to innovation,” said Toshio Iwamoto, President and CEO of NTT Data Corporation. “Welcoming Dell Services to NTT DATA is expected to strengthen our leadership position in the IT Services market and initiates an important business relationship with Dell.”

The acquisition is the fourth made by NTT over the course of 2016, though it would appear that EMC are not in such a favourable position. Dell Services as a business unit was reportedly to be valued in the region of $5 billion, which could highlight Dell’s urgency in completing the sale. If reports are correct, it would appear NTT Data has negotiated a good deal.