Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

E-procurement platform could save UK government £10 billion – report

Duncan: 'Australian public sector is warming to cloud but technology gaps remain our biggest challenge.'

Central government could save up to £10 billion per annum through a reformed e-procurement platform, placing a greater emphasis on administrative efficiencies and market competition, according to a new report.

With the use of e-procurement models championed by the likes of South Korea and Estonia, The Reform, a public-service think-tank, claims that savings of 25% could be made to the present $40 billion procurement bill. Even if e-procurement growth continued on trend, UK government would be set to save in the region of £550 million annually.

Whilst there is a large level of scrutiny placed on the government spending, significant steps have been made since 2010. The government now procures more than 25% of its services from small and medium-sized businesses, and since 2015, has relied upon G-Cloud for the procurement of cloud services.

G-Cloud as a platform has lowered barriers to entry, allowing more firms to compete for government business, and saving in the region of 20-50% when compared to legacy contracts. Building on this success, the implementation of the Crown Marketplace platform will enable government to move e-procurement models to new departments beyond IT services.

While it is still early days within the UK, other countries have demonstrated the wide benefits of e-procurement. Estonia currently attributes roughly 50% of its expenditure through e-procurement platforms, saving an estimated 30-40% on the cost of administrating procurement.

The Reform has recommended a consolidated platform for all government procurement activities:

“The Crown Marketplace should be a single portal for the e-procurement of goods and services. This should be accompanied by an integrated payment function,” said the report. “The framework to purchase commodities must be recompleted regularly to ensure maximum competition.”

While the immediate benefits demonstrate a reduction in expenditure, the move away from the current process will allow government employees to create value-for-money propositions, as opposed to drowning in administrative tasks.

Though the report and supporting statistics demonstrates a positive outlook for government spend, the potential of e-procurement can only be achieved if trends accelerate. The report highlights “If e-procurement continues to expand at the rate of G-Cloud growth in 2015, total government e-procurement spend could reach £3 billion by 2020”

Current e-procurement adoption levels would see UK central government save in the region of £1.8 billion and £4.5 billion depending on the level of pro-rata savings, though emulating the example of South Korea or Estonia would see the UK save in excess of £10 billion.

Fresh redundancies illustrate IBM’s continuing cloud challenge

IBMWithin the last twelve months, the company has inducted more than 70,000 IBMers and spent more on acquisitions than in any other 12-month period in its history. Focusing on data analytics, security, machine learning and mobile, the business is attracting a new breed of employee to its ranks. All would seem well until you consult social media.

The Facebook group, Watching IBM, has increased its following by more than 66% over the last week. The group has taken responsibility for bringing light to the 70,000 job losses experienced by the firm in the past few months. Comments such as “At the beginning of 2015 our department had 25 people in it. At the beginning of 2016 our department has 13 in it,” highlight the decline.

For all the positive news of expansion, new product offerings, and 70,000 new employees, the headcount over the course of the twelve month period has shrunk around 1% to 377,757 from 379,592.

With company revenues declining for fifteen consecutive quarters, this should not come as a great surprise for most; IBM’s struggles to re-invent itself as a cloud business have been well documented over recent years.

Back in January, Clive Longbottom, Service Director at Quocirca commented that IBM could risk being left behind, should the transition take too long. With AWS, Microsoft and Google continuing to surge forward, that risk is continuing to grow, though the consultancy skills nurtured in IBM will remain in demand “I still believe that IBM will remain a major force in the IT world, it just has to make sure it positions and messages itself effectively to its existing customers and to its prospects”

Last week IBM released a report which highlighted that two- thirds of organizations implementing hybrid cloud are gaining competitive advantage from their hybrid environments are nearly three times as likely to use it to assemble data assets or monetize data.

Surveying more than 500 hybrid cloud implementers, in 26 countries worldwide, the report highlighted that 85 percent of respondent commented that a hybrid approach to cloud is accelerating the digital transformation in their organization. During 2015 Q4, total cloud revenues (public, private and hybrid) for the vendor increased 43% to $10.2 billion, though revenues throughout the business were down 9% to $22.1 billion in the same period for 2014.

Despite some negative press, and a surge in social media activity being directed towards the tech giant, it seems the workforce transition is far from complete. “We’ve been shifting resources aggressively,” CFO Martin Schroeter commented last week “and we’d like to shift them more aggressively.”

Docker buys Conductant to catalyse coding development

CodingContainer technology pioneer Docker has bought start up Conductant, best known for creating the Aurora strand of the Apache Mesos clustering system. Conductant’s software is used to catalyse faster development of large scale code.

Announcing the acquisition on its website Docker spokesman Solomon Hykes placed more emphasis on the talent, rather than the technology, that is being brought in with the take over of an early stage start up. Welcoming the Conductant ‘team’ to the Docker ‘family’ Hykes outlined the contributions that founders Bill Farner, David Chung and John Sirois made to operating and scaling production systems at Google, Twitter and Zynga.

Farna, who created the Aurora Project, will lead the process of integrating the clustering technology into the fabric of its container software. Docker’s expansion policy is to buy emerging software tool makers and integrate them into its container software core, according to Hykes. In January BCN reported how Docker has acquired Unikernel Systems in order to channel its hypervisor and unikernel experience into the development of Docker’s container systems. “We believe our job is integrating these technologies in tools that are easy to use and help people create new things. We did this for Linux containers, to help make applications more portable,” wrote Hykes.

Aurora, an extension of the Apache Mesos clustering system, is specifically designed for hyper scale production environments. Hykes claimed it is recognized as the most scalable and operationally-robust component of the Mesos stack, which in turn helps to create the conditions for operations-driven development (ODD). The experiences of the Conductant team, operating global scale clouds for Google, Twitter and Zyng, forced them to develop new techniques for rapid development. Bill Farner’s team at Twitter built Aurora to automate massive server farms that could be managed by handful of engineers.

Docker now plans to incorporate the best ideas from Aurora into Docker Swarm, which allows for any app to go on any infrastructure on any scale, and integrate Aurora as an optional component of the official Docker stack. One option is to integrate Aurora with Docker Swarm to form a powerful large-scale web operations stack.

While Swarm is designed to be the standard base layer to scale all kinds of applications, Aurora is optimized for large-scale consumer apps reaching hundreds of millions of users. “By making two of the most popular open-source infrastructure projects interoperate better, we believe both communities will benefit,” said Hykes.

Whitman thanks partnerships for strong HPE Q1

HPE street logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has claimed earnings of $300 million in its first quarter of 2016 show it is shaping up for the cloud more strongly than expected.

HPE CEO Meg Whitman claimed that the success of the company was a consequence of a strong product offering. “Our portfolio is truly the best we’ve had in years and is driving strong customer traction,” said Whitman, who claimed the company was in better shape for the cloud, describing it as ‘agile and nimble’. In January BCN reported how HPE is faced with making 72,000 more redundancies this year, according to IT market watcher Trip Chowdhry at Delaware-based Global Equities Research.

The results created earnings of 41 cents per share in HPE, exceeding the expectations of Wall Street analysts, who reportedly expected non-GAAP earnings of 40 cents a share. While Wall Street had estimated HPE’s revenue to be $12.68 billion, the unexpectedly good revenue figure was marginally higher, at $12.7 billion.

According to HPE, the earnings for the next quarter could be as high as 43 cents a share.

Whitman told analysts that HPE is in a much better position, being the main infrastructure provider for SAP HANA with double the number of shipments of its nearest competitor. Another important deal, with Canadian comms company Rogers, helped HPE establish its credential as a leader in creating hybrid cloud infrastructures for enterprises as the move away from their existing traditional IT systems. In January BCN reported how hybrid cloud management is the main focus of HPE’s cloud strategy.

Meanwhile, HPE’s networking revenue showed 62% growth on the same period last year. This was attributed to the acquisition of wireless networking specialist Aruba Networks in March 2015, which has created record revenue from China revenue performed well in other regions. “We are seeing strength in China,” said Whitman. Aruba also grew double digits at an operational level and the vendor enjoyed demand for HPE’s switching portfolio to complement Aruba’s wireless offerings.

Enterprise group revenue was up 1% on the equivalent period in 2015, at $7.1 billion. Networking revenue grew by 54%, through Aruba’s wireless tech sales, however server and storage sales declined, falling by 1% and 3%. More worryingly perhaps, enterprise service revenue is also in decline, falling by 6% to $4.7 billion, while software revenue dropped by 10%.

BT beefs up Cloud of Clouds security with Palo Alto Wildfire

Security concept with padlock icon on digital screenBT is to install a cloud-based breach prevention security system from Palo Alto Networks (PAN) into its global Cloud of Clouds, writes Telecoms.com.

Under the terms of a new BT-PAN agreement, BT’s existing Assure Managed Firewall service will now include PAN’s cloud-based WildFire malware prevention system, described as a ‘key component’ of the security specialist’s Next-Generation Security Platform. In a statement, BT said the installation is part of a long term plan to roll out stronger protection for its cloud-based applications as it aims to encourage enterprise customers to benefit from its Cloud of Clouds.

Though enterprises are keen to embark on a digital transformation, security concerns continue to hold them back, according to Mark Hughes, CEO of BT Security. The most obviously profitable use cases for cloud computing, such as big-data analytics and access to more cloud based applications, are the very attractions that cyber criminals are most likely to target. In the rush to provide greater levels of security telcos and cloud service providers face an investment protection challenge, Hughes said.

While enterprise customers need to access these applications quickly and securely, they must also find future-proof tools that can go with the cloud and won’t have to be expensively replaced in a few years time. “Enterprises need security that can protect them against targeted and increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks. They need a tougher lining around their cloud services,” said Hughes.

Palo Alto Networks will provide intelligent security monitoring and management services to the BT Assure portfolio of security services. The Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform includes a Next-Generation Firewall, Advanced Endpoint Protection and a Threat Intelligence Cloud.

BT recently won two new cloud service contracts with the European Commission worth £24 million, bringing its total of EC contract wins to four in 12 months, BCN reported in January. With data security an increasingly sensitive issue with the EC (as reported in BCN), BT has taken on a challenging brief to provide public and private cloud services across 52 major European institutions, agencies and bodies.

IBM, Apple combine IoT forces for sleep health study

electronic medical health recordIBM’s Watson Cloud is to be the foundation for research by the American Sleep Apnea Association (ASAA) into how human sleeping habits affect our health. IBM and ASAA have also jointly created a new SleepHealth app to encourage patients to contribute to the cloud based SleepHealth Mobile Study.

The SleepHealth study uses Apple’s Internet of Things technology and open source ResearchKit, which simplifies tasks and survey compilation and feeds its data into the SleepHealth app. SleepHealth is the first ResearchKit study to run on the Watson Health Cloud.

Though sleep is critical for physical and metal health it remains one of the most overlooked of the basic human needs and one in four Americans experience sleep problems. Chronic insomnia affects 10% of Americans and 25 million suffer from types of obstructive sleep apnoea such as disrupted sleep, snoring and uneven breathing, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This in turn can create heart disease, hypertension, obesity, cancer, depression and fatal accidents.

Researchers and physicians will use Watson to host its surveys and study exercises and interrogate the data to uncover patterns. The Watson Cloud makes crowd-sourcing data possible and creates a system of patient-led research and data-driven discovery, according ASAAs chief science officer Carl Stepnowsky. The SleepHealth app could build the world’s largest longitudinal study to collect data on both healthy and unhealthy sleepers, said Stepnowsky.

The Watson Health Cloud has opened up a diversity of data sources such as medical literature, treatment guidelines, claims data and clinical data, according to Kyu Rhee, chief health officer for Watson Health. Researchers can also opt to apply Watson Analytics for deeper insights from the data. “One of our goals at IBM Watson Health is to eliminate silos that hinder collaboration between researchers, patients and clinicians,” said Rhee.

The study also makes use of IoT technology. The SleepHealth app makes use of multiple Apple Watch sensors, such as the accelerometer, which detects movements, and the gyroscope, which determines orientation in space, to measure and record movements such as shifting positions during sleep. It also uses Apple Watch’s heart rate monitor to detect sleep. Some of the app’s features, such as the Personal Sleep Concierge and the Nap Tracker, were designed specifically to the Apple Watch as a way to improve sleep habits. SleepHealth will be the first ResearchKit app to use Apple’s new Night Shift feature that reduces light exposure before sleep.

SUSE targets simplification with OpenStack Cloud 6 release

Public privateGerman open source vendor SUSE claims its new OpenStack Cloud 6 is designed to overcome the fear of commitment that is putting IT buyers off engagement with the cloud. SUSE claims its new private cloud offering is a solution to the buying objections that potential customers have outlined.

According to SUSE’s own feedback, many companies want the cloud but think it’s too much hassle to install applications and can’t risk the disruption to their business. A recent study commissioned by SUSE found that more than 90% of large companies say they’ve already got at least one private cloud within their business, can see the advantages and would, in theory, use cloud computing for more business-critical workloads. But in practise they are not going to. Their worst fears are over installation challenges, possible vendor lock-in and a lack of OpenStack skills in the market.

SUSE claims it can address these fears and aims to convince potential clients that they won’t be subject to IT project creep. In response it is offering non-disruptive upgrades and a more business-friendly release cycle with longer support duration. This combination, it claims, will compensate for the limited skilled resources by requiring fewer upgrades and minimising disruption to production environments.

In addition, SUSE aims to offer more training to boost the available skills base with a new OpenStack training and certification scheme. SUSE is introducing the SUSE Certified Administrator-OpenStack  (SCA-OpenStack) certification along with a new training course on how to install and administer SUSE OpenStack Cloud. This is intended as a complement to, not a replacement for, existing SUSE OpenStack Cloud training. The training was developed in collaboration with the OpenStack Foundation exam development team.

A new course will specifically prepare students to take both the OpenStack Foundation Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam as well as the SCA-OpenStack exam. The new course will be held unveiled at an OpenStack Summit in Texas on April the 25th.

The Cloud 6 is based on the OpenStack release Liberty, has Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support designed to make it easier to move applications and data to the cloud. Cloud 6 also supports Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware hypervisor options and the OpenStack Manila shared file system service.

Cisco launches Digital Network Architecture virtualization platform

Network Function VirtualisationCisco has launched a new system which aims to virtualize every conceivable network function possible for clients and take them through the painful process of digital transformation, reports Telecoms.com.

The networking vendor has announced its new Digital Network Architecture (DNA), which it describes as an open, software driven framework. The DNA will complement and extend the policies of its datacentre based Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology throughout the entire network, Cisco says.

Whereas ACI software defined the network, DNA will help enterprises to define everything from the campus to the branch, whether the network is wired or wireless, at the core or at the edge, says Cisco. DNA will sit within the Cisco ONE Software family, in order to simplify software licensing and help protect investments by providing continuity.

The Cisco DNA is built on five guiding principles, which can be summarized as virtualize everything, automate management, analyse everything everywhere, one policy for the entire network and keep every layer of networking as open and extensible as possible.

The mission to virtualising everything that can be possibly software defined will maximise the options for telcos and all enterprises. This gives the clients the choice to run any service anywhere, independent of the underlying platform, be it physical or virtual, on premise or in the cloud, says Cisco. Yesterday Cisco announced the acquisition of Leaba Semiconductor, which specialises in networking semi-conductors which could play a central role in the virtualisation of networking functions and maximise the possibilities for embedding virtualised functions.

Automating network management will maximise the speed and efficiency of the virtualised functions of an enterprise, but this may be regulated by the third important DNA principle, the need to have pervasive analytics. Analytics will provide the checks and balances needed to keep the network and IT infrastructure meeting its performance potential. Similarly, a virtualised network can only be an efficient cloud if service management from the cloud can unify policy and orchestration across the network. On Monday BCN reported how Cisco plans to buy cloud orchestration specialist CliQr.

The key to preventing network sclerosis is keeping everything open and accessible, which is why Cisco’s fifth guiding principle for DNA is to keep everything open, extensible and programmable at every layer, so that Cisco and third party technology can be integrated.

NTT announces five major additions to Enterprise Cloud

NTT cloud diagramJapan’s NTT Communications (NTT Com) has announced five major improvements to its Enterprise Cloud in a bid to become the chosen vehicle for digital transformation. The new enhanced Enterprise Cloud is immediately available in Japan, and will be rolled out in the UK, Singapore, US, Australia, Hong Kong and Germany later this year.

According to NTT Com, enterprises want to make the difficult crossing from traditional IT to the cloud but need greater support. In response, it has announced that its new Enterprise Cloud offering will make the journey easier. The new improved offerings are described by NTT Com as Hosted Private Cloud for traditional ICT, Multi Tenant Cloud for cloud native ICT, seamless hybrid clouds, free and seamless connections between cloud platforms and a cloud management platform to give full visibility and governance.

NCC Com said enterprises with cloud ambitions face two major challenges: migration of their traditional systems and, having gone to the cloud, changing their mode of development-operations to fit the new ‘cloud native’ application culture.

NTT Com outlined how each of these five Enterprise Cloud ‘enhancements’ will help its target clients. The Hosted Private Cloud for Traditional ICT now consists of dedicated bare-metal servers with options for multi-hypervisor environments, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. The logic of the service is to make it easier for companies with traditional ICT to migrate to a hosted private cloud.

The Enterprise-class Multi-tenant Cloud for Cloud-Native ICT is based on OpenStack architecture, giving customers an industry-standard open API to control the Enterprise Cloud. It comes with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software from Cloud Foundry in order to provide Dev-Ops efficiencies. The open architecture was needed to address customer concerns about vendor lock-ins, says NTT Com.

The Seamless Hybrid Cloud Environment is created for clients by NTT Com configuring all the relevant network components (the virtual servers, bare-metal servers, firewalls and load balancers) running on complex on-premises environments.

The promised ‘Free and Seamless Connection between Cloud Platforms’ is made by connecting the Enterprise Cloud with a 10Gbps best-effort closed network, free of charge. In addition, connectivity between Enterprise Cloud platforms and data centres is provided at ‘competitive’ prices globally, said NTT Com.

Finally, the new Cloud Management Platform (CMP) promises full visibility and IT governance by unifying the control of both Enterprise Cloud and third-party providers’ clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

IBM and SanDisk join forces to create software defined flash storage for cloud

Sandisk infiniflashFlash storage maker SanDisk and IBM are working together on a new software defined, all flash storage system for data centres. News of this collaboration comes days after BCN revealed that EMC had introduced a new category of flash storage for the same market.

SanDisk’s new InfiniFlash, a high capacity and performance flash-based software defined storage system, features IBM’s Spectrum Scale file system. The joint product is the two manufacturers’ answer to the increasing demands faced by data centres who can never get enough capacity and performance and will need more flexibility in future. An all flash system gives the requisite computing power and the IBM-authored software definition provides the agility, according to SanDisk.

Flash is the only technology that can support the many variables of the modern hybrid cloud, according to SanDisk, which listed bi-modal IT, traditional and cloud native applications and the increasing workload created by social, mobile and real-time processing as drivers for the need for a powerful storage infrastructure. The InfiniFlash for IBM Spectrum is described as ultra-dense and scalable, meaning that it can be bought in small increments that can be easily snapped to together to quickly build a hyperscale infrastructure. SanDisk claimed it offers the lowest price per IOPS/TB on the market and the option for independent storage.

SanDisk claims InfiniFlash has five times the density, fifty times the performance and four times the reliability of traditional hard disks, while using 80% less power. Pricing starts at $1 per gigabyte (GB) for an all-flash system. When used with software stacks designed to reduced data (through de-duplication and other techniques) the cost of storage could fall to around 20 cents per GB, claims SanDisk.

The IBM Spectrum Scale, meanwhile, uses software definition to create efficiencies through file, object and integrated data analytics designed for technical computing, big data analysis, cognitive computing, Hadoop Distributed File System, private cloud and content repositories.

Ravi Swaminathan, SanDisk’s general manager of System and Software Solutions, promised the ‘best of both worlds’ to data centres. “Customers can afford to deploy flash at petabyte-scale, which drive business growth through new services and offerings for their end-customers,” said Swaminathan.