Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

ARM, electronics, IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis

IBM launches cloud-based Internet of Things service for electronic industry

IBM has launched the first in a series of cloud-based, industry-specific services for the Internet of Things (IoT), with an offering for the electronics industry. Its debut IoT service will gather data from individual sensors to provide instant analysis of the production processes of electronics manufacturers.

Meanwhile, IBM said it has integrated its IoT system, IBM IoT Foundation, with the firmware of chipmaker ARM, so that all devices driven by ARM chips will be able to release data for analysis. IBM said the fusion will allow ‘huge quantities’ of data from industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring devices to be gathered, analysed and acted upon.

The IBM IoT Foundation, a cloud-hosted offering, aims to simplify the complexity of analysing masses of machine to machine (M2M) data. It offers tools for analysing large quantities of fast-moving data and provides access to Bluemix, IBM’s service for managing and prioritising data flows. It also offers to secure confidential financial, IP and strategy information.

During the integration process, products powered by ARM’s ‘mbed-enabled’ chips will automatically register with the IBM IoT Foundation and connect with IBM analytics services. This unification means that information gathered from sensors in any connected device is delivered to the cloud for analysis. The IoT connection also means that commands can be pushed to devices, with actions being taken on the basis of the intelligence gathered.

If an alarm message is triggered on a machine in a manufacturing plant, it can now be automatically shut down and an engineer despatched to trouble shoot the disruption, IBM said. This cost-saving damage limitation is best achieved by combining the knowledge and communications protocols of different vendors at different levels of the ICT stack, according IBM’s General Manager for the Internet of Things, Pat Toole.

“The IoT is now at an inflection point and it needs the big data expertise of IBM and little data expertise of ARM to ensure it reaches its global potential,” said Toole.

Original design manufacturers and OEMs, like Ionics, are already seeing value in the chip level architecture harmonisation, said Krisztian Flautner, the General Manager of ARM’s IoT business. “Deploying IoT technology has to be easy, secure and scalable for it to feel like a natural extension of a company’s business,” said Flautner.

health, health cloud, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce says its Health Cloud is about building relationships, not records

Salesforce has unveiled a new cloud based system aimed at helping clinicians to build stronger relationships with patients. The launch comes in the same week that UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced plans to give patients in England access to their entire medical record by 2018, and to let them read and add to their GP record using their smartphone within a year.

Salesforce Health Cloud (SHC) is a cloud-based patient relationship manager that aims to give health service providers a more complete picture of each patient, by integrating data from electronic medical records, wearables and other sources, such as general practitioner and hospital notes.

The service was developed in the US, where recent legislation – such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – aims to put more emphasis on improving the patient experience. According to Salesforce, wearable technology has changed the way health services are administered and new cloud apps must cater for the new expectations of patients. The SHC is designed to meet the demands of a generation of digital natives that grew up with iPhones, Facebook and FitBits who expect to use technology to manage their care. According to Salesforce’s research, 71 per cent of  ‘millennials’ (those reaching adulthood around the year 2000) want their doctors to provide a mobile app to actively manage their health. Salesforce claims that 63 per cent of them want health data extracted from their wearables to be available to their doctors.

The Health Cloud was developed with input from a variety of US-based healthcare companies, including Centura Health, DJO Global, Radboud University Medical Center, Philips and the University of California and San Francisco. Development partners included Accenture, Deloitte Digital, PwC, MuleSoft and Persistent Systems, who collectively integrated records and customised content.

Features include a Patient Caregiver Map, which can map household relationships, as well as all providers and specialists involved in a patient’s care. A ‘Today’ screen alerts caregivers to timely issues, such as missed appointments or the need to refill medications. The logic of the system is that fewer patients will fall through the cracks in any health service, an issue that Salesforce Chatter – an internal social networking tool – aims to combat through a review process for internal health service conversations.

“The era of precision healthcare is upon us,” said Joshua Newman, Chief Medical Officer for Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences.

Apttus, Funding, investment, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Cloud vendor Apttus raises $108m to fund new services and features

Cloud software vendor Apttus has raised a further $108 million to fund the growth of its quote and renewals management business.

The new investment comes only seven months after it secured $41m in February 2015, as investor confidence in its e-commerce, contract management and renewals management software has surged. Founded in 2006, it received its first series of investment funding in 2013, when it received $37 million.

The Series C funding round was led by KIA. Previous investment rounds have been led by Salesforce’s venture capital arm Salesforce Ventures, which also contributed to this round of investment. Investors in this latest round also included Iconiq Capital and K1 Capital.

The Apttus cloud systems integrate with Salesforce’s CRM platform and are used to develop sales and renewal quotes within Salesforce’s system.

The funds will be used to develop new systems and provide new services to Apttus customers and prospects. According to Apttus, the main targets will be in the manufacturing, life sciences, financial services and telecommunications industries.

Apttus aims to give clients a better system of demand management by giving its users more information about their clients. The intelligence it curates allows sales staff to identify and concentrate their efforts on the most likely sales prospects. This information is gathered by the system by assessing the online track record of the potential customer. By monitoring and managing every transaction, this system gives the seller an ‘unbroken funnel’ throughout the sales cycle. This channelling of the customer is known as the Quote-to-Cash process.

The Apttus system was built on the Salesforce1 platform and it claims to have been an active partner of Salesforce since its foundation in 2006, with participation in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Apttus has 70 customers in the Fortune 500 and is projected tohave 1,000 employees by the end of 2015, a 400% growth in headcount since 2013. It now has offices in London, Sydney and Chicago with a Japanese location planned.

Apttus’s cloud software has re-defined the Quote-to-Cash process and the flow of money, said Farouq Bastaki, Executive Director of Alternative Investments at KIA. “We believe they have developed the future of how organizations manage their entire revenue operation with a modern front office, in the cloud,” said Bastaki.

cloud adoption, Europe, News & Analysis, Research, UK

Mounting frustration with cloud technology is stifling adoption – research

An influential group of senior business executives is being disillusioned by experiences with cloud hosted applications, according to new research. The proportions, though relatively low, are growing as cloud disenchantment threatens to set in.

The revelations come from research by cloud service provider Stratogen. Its main finding was that the expense, the lack of both applications and support and the downtime involved are all disappointing the company decision makers who backed cloud computing in their companies.

If news of the disenchantment spreads among the business community, the bad feedback could nip cloud growth in the bud, according to Karl Robinson, chief commercial officer at StratoGen. “The research highlights a major problem for cloud technology,” said Robinson, “It is clear UK businesses today have a distinct lack of confidence in the cloud’s ability to deliver the benefits it is capable of.”

The study, conducted independently by Arlington Research, involved a survey of 1000 senior business executives. Around three quarters (74 per cent) of the survey group reported day to day frustrations with using cloud hosted applications.

The main complaint for 20 per cent of the study group was the high cost of their cloud applications. Another minority (17 per cent) complained about the lack of available cloud applications. The lack of IT support was mentioned by 16 per cent of the survey and one tenth of those surveyed were not happy with the amount of downtime.

As a result, a minority of the survey group (17 per cent of the business leaders quizzed) are concerned that their cloud systems are preventing their company from growing. Around the same proportion (14 per cent) are worried that downtime is affecting employee productivity and creating a loss of company earnings.

Though these are complaints from a small minority, the survey figures seem to indicate that their influence is disproportionally high, since 33 per cent of the business leaders say they are now ready to remove their business off the cloud completely. A further 31 per cent are also considering a cloud exodus.

“The perceived high cost of cloud hosting is a direct result of the unexpected metered costs businesses are all too often hit with,” said Robinson, “migration challenges and the time invested in integrating cloud technology with legacy applications can further increase the cost of cloud computing.”

Analytics, Big Data, Hadoop, News & Analysis, SAP, Telco Cloud, Vora

SAP announces improvements to cloud platform and Vora analytics software

SAP HANA VoraSAP has released new software that it claims will make analytics easier for users of open source Hadoop software.

The SAP HANA Vora is a new in-memory query engine that improves the performance of the Apache Spark execution framework. As a result, anyone running data analysis should be able to get better interactions with their data if it’s held on Hadoop and companies will benefit from more useful intelligence.

SAP claims this new software will overcome the general ‘lack of business process awareness’ that exists in companies across enterprise apps, analytics, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) sources. The software will make it easier for data scientists and developers to get access to the right information by simplifying the access to corporate and Hadoop data.

SAP HANA Vora will bring most benefit in industries where Big Data analytics in business process context is paramount. SAP identified financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing as target markets. The savings created by the new software will come from a number of areas, it said. In the financial sector, the return on investment in the systems will come from mitigating risk and fraud by detecting new anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data.

Telecoms companies will benefit from optimising their bandwidth, SAP claims, as telcos use the software to analyse traffic patterns to avoid network bottlenecks and improve the quality of service. Manufacturers will benefit from preventive maintenance and improved product re-call processes as a result of SAL HANA Vora’s newly delivered powers of analysis of bills-of-material, services records and sensor data.

The use of Hadoop and SAP HANA to manage large unstructured data sets left room for improvement, according to user Aziz Safa, Intel IT Enterprise Applications and Application Strategy VP. “One of the key requirements is better analyses of big data,” said Safa, “but mining these large data sets for contextual information in Hadoop is a challenge.”

SAP HANA Vora will be released by the end of September, when a cloud-based developer edition will also be available. Here’s a SAP vid on the matter.

 


cloud transition, Enterprise IT, Europe, News & Analysis, study, UK

Cloud strategy still tentative for many UK corporations – study

IT managers and CIOs should not feel they’ve missed the boat as the majority of enterprises have only just started their cloud journey, according to a new enterprise study.

If a study of 200 senior IT managers in large public and private sector organisations is an accurate reflection of the nation’s IT, only 3 per cent of enterprises have arrived at their final cloud destination. Not far from half (41 per cent) of IT managers surveyed were categorised as ‘still taking their first tentative steps towards cloud’ by the survey conductor Vanson Bourne. The study, run on behalf of UK cloud services provider Redcentric, also identified another significantly large group (32 per cent) that said they’re only half way to their cloud destination.

The study also identified the five types of personality trait that emerge among IT managers and CIOs as the pressure to adopt cloud technology builds. Five genres of manager were identified – in ascending order of caution – as Experimenters, Evolutionaries, Accelerators, Progressives and Cautionaries.

The relative proportions of these self-identified personality types did not always match the spread of cloud installations, however. Four per cent of cloud managers identified themselves as ‘risk-taking experimenters’ who were ‘willing to accept the ups and downs of moving to the cloud and not entirely sure the direction they will take’. This roughly equated to the proportion of managers (3%) who were satisfied they had completed their cloud journey.

Equal numbers of IT mangers and CIOs saw themselves as Accelerators (16%) who want to move to the cloud as fast as possible and Progressives (16%) who want to use cloud to make bold business changes. Taken together, these categories indicate that 32 per cent of the study group are frustrated in their ambitions for the cloud. This matched exactly the number (32 per cent) of companies that have yet to reach the half way point of their cloud migration.

The majority of the study group (50 per cent) identified themselves as Evolutionary and stated that they take a steady approach where cloud is a natural progression for the business.

There is a significant group of Cautionaries (15 per cent) who are most cynical about cloud overall. However, only 3 per cent of the group have not embarked on cloud projects, which indicates that 12 per cent of IT managers and CIOs have embarked on a cloud migration without having any faith in the technology.

“We wanted to help UK organisations understand where they are and where their journey is likely to take them next,” said Redcentric sales director Andy Mills, “The findings show there is huge untapped potential still to explore.”

Americas, Datacentre, Dell, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, VMware, VMworld

Dell tells VMworld how it simplified the cloud

Dell serversDell claims it will demystify the cloud for enterprise buyers with a raft of new products and services, which it unveiled at VMworld in San Francisco.

A new release of Dell’s Active System Manager will deepen integration with the product portfolio of virtualisation vendor VMware, it claimed, making it easier to automate the management of public and private cloud computing, and hybrids of the two.

“Dell’s portfolio helps customers to design, deploy and manage hybrid clouds from the device to the data centre to meet each customer’s unique journey to a hybrid cloud,” said Jim Ganthier, VP and GM of Engineered Solutions and Cloud, Dell.

Converting public cloud deployments to hybrid cloud environments brings financial returns that have been verified by several independent studies, according to Dell. “Dell’s innovations and our VMware partnership can deliver the business results and outcomes,” said Ganthier.

Meanwhile, an updated version of its Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL Horizon Edition will shrink workloads on virtual desktops and applications by up to 80 per cent, Dell claimed. This would cut the price of management and hosting. A new thin client operating system, Wyse ThinOS 8.1, will tighten security and make support easier, it claimed. Another improvement comes from the new version of Wyse Cloud Client Manager (CCM), which extends management to bring millions of Windows Embedded Standard (WES) and SUSE Linux thin clients under the umbrella of its management platforms.

Dell is working with VMware to make virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) easy to create and run, claimed Steve Lalla, Dell’s VP of commercial client software. “Collaboration enables us to deliver these solutions to our customers within VMware Horizon environments,” said Lalla.

One of the productivity shortcuts created by active system manager (ASM) is that any business analyst or IT architect can use templates and automation methods to speed up processes such as requests, approvals, help desk and self-service. The saving of time and manual effort and improved responsiveness and consistency will create rapid payback, claimed Dell.

Dell also claimed it has been ‘deeply involved’ in the joint development – with VMware – of EVO SDDC, which aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify the building of large scale software defined data centres. Dell’s EVO SDDC offerings will align closely with VMware’s general availability in the first half of 2016, said Dell.

EMC, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Virtualisation, VMware

VMware opens up at VMworld San Francisco

VMWare campus logoVirtualisation pioneer VMware has unveiled a raft of new services tailored for hybrid cloud services and open systems at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco.

VMware announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0, the company’s second release of its distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software. The new release, based on OpenStack Kilo, will be available on September 30.

“Customers can now upgrade from version one to version two in a more operationally efficient manner and even roll back if anything goes wrong,” said VMware product line manager Arvind Soni.

The move could be seen as a U-turn by VMware, whose revenue streams come from sales of its vSphere virtualization software. The most recent annual VMware report warned that “open source technologies for virtualization, containerization, and cloud platforms such as Xen, KVM, Docker, Rocket, and OpenStack provide significant pricing competition and let competing vendors [use] OpenStack to compete directly with our SDDC initiative.”

However, with OpenStack distributions available from Canonical, HP, Huawei and Oracle – and investment in OpenStack companies from Intel, IBM and other major players, VMware has announced continued support. In October 2014 parent company EMC bought three OpenStack start ups – Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning – to provide a variety of cloud services which adhere to the increasingly popular open standard.

Meanwhile, testing and running disaster recovery plans will be quicker, promises VMWare, now its vCloud Air service has a new cloud-based Site Recovery Manager. The service is now offered on a pay-per-use basis, replacing the more expensive annual subscriptions.

In the event of a disaster recovery event or test, fees will be charged for each virtual machine protected and the storage they consume, said VMware.

Storage could get cheaper as VMware has introduced vCloud Air Object Storage on the Google Cloud Platform. The debut product from VMware’s new Google reseller relationship will be available from September 30th, which will also see an alternative offering launched: vCloud Air Object Storage service, powered by EMC.

The start of the fourth financial quarter should also see VMware release its new vCloud Air SQL database as a service, as the virtualisation vendor looking to match the breadth of features offered the cloud industry’s top service providers.

With a new Hybrid Cloud Manager, VMware aims to help clients to migrate workloads, extend the range of their data centres and fine tune the process of juggling resources between private and public clouds. The management takes place through the interface of VMware’s vSphere Web Client, and will support the migration of virtual machines.

ANZ, Asia Pacific, banking, development, IBM, News & Analysis, Research

IBM signs cloud development agreement with ANZ bank

ANZ has signed a five-year, A$450 million (£208 million) strategic agreement with IBM, the centrepiece of which is the establishment of a cloud-based Innovation Lab based on IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform-as-a-service, reports Banking Technology.

The lab will allow the Bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services at “a fraction of the time and cost previously taken”.

As well as the Innovation Lab and cloud capabilities, the agreement includes access to IBM’s software portfolio and core systems infrastructure. The IBM agreement will provide common platforms across ANZ’s network as it continues to grow as a super-regional bank and will allow the bank to deliver a “more integrated and innovative banking experience for digital customers”.

IBM will deploy its newest z13 mainframe and Power8 infrastructure as part of ANZ’s private cloud environment. The infrastructure will provide the bank with the reliability, security and resiliency needed to service the needs of mobile customers across the bank’s network. IBM integration, content management, data, analytics and cloud software will support ANZ’s core banking and infrastructure needs.

“Understanding our customers’ needs and preferences around mobile and digital banking is critical to our business and to providing a superior customer experience,” said Scott Collary, ANZ’s chief information officer. “We therefore need to ensure we’re meeting these needs in an innovative, consistent and seamless way and with this partnership with IBM, we’re working to achieve this goal.”

IBM has been a strategic partner of ANZ for more than 40 years said Scott Barlow, IBM client director for ANZ Bank: “This new agreement continues to build on this by enabling ANZ access to an arsenal of leading edge technology to provide the agility, speed and innovation essential in the rapidly changing financial services marketplace.”

Datacentre, Interoute, Mark Lewis, Networks, News & Analysis, VDC

Interoute opens Trans-Pacific network route between Hong Kong and Los Angeles

Interoute is expanding its fibre network, which will boost its cloud biz

Interoute is expanding its fibre network, which will boost its cloud biz

Interoute has added two new independent networking routes between Los Angeles (LA) and Hong Kong to support what it claims is Europe’s biggest cloud service platform.

It described the additions as ‘the final step in creating a fully meshed global network’. With low latency fibre connecting its territories it claims it gives customers faster access between the USA and Asia regions.

The pan-Pacific services are built on Interoute’s own private MPLS network. With complete ownership of its network, the service provider claims it can guarantee security. The option to choose between one of two distinct routes now gives it much higher levels of reliability, Interoute claimed.

Interoute has integrated its MPLS network with its cloud infrastructure platform Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC). The VDC, announced in November 2014, was created and run globally in order to simplify the process of running businesses in multiple markets.

Today’s announced network expansion follows the launches of the Interoute IP points of presence (PoPs) and VDC zones in Los Angeles (LA1) and Hong Kong (Hong Kong2). This announcement also follows Interoute’s recent opening of a new PoP in Singapore (Singapore3), in a bid to strengthen its position in one of the world’s biggest financial hubs.

“Our investment in new links between Asia and the USA signifies the next stage in the development of Interoute’s global networked cloud,” said Mark Lewis, Interoute’s communications and connectivity VP. “Customers wishing to expand across the globe need a network and services platform that supports their digital businesses.”

The new route goes live in September 2015.

Interoute’s estate now comprises 12 datacentres, 14 virtual datacentres, and 31 collocation centres, with connections to 195 additional third-party datacentres across Europe, where it owns and operates 24 dense city networks.

The new routes will help Interoute strengthen its offering beyond Europe, according to Lewis. “With the launch of these new connections, Interoute is delivering the network capacity and service platforms that enterprises need to grow across the Pacific and around the world.”