Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

Avago, Broadcom, Chris Taylor, Hock Tan, Internet of Things, IoT, M&A, News & Analysis, Strategy Analytics

Avago buys Broadcom for $37bn to create IoT chip dream team

Avago is buying Broadcom for $37bn to create an IoT giant

Avago is buying Broadcom for $37bn to create an IoT giant

It seems every corner of the mobile market is consolidating right now and semiconductors are clearly no exception, with digital signal processing chip maker Avago acquiring communications chip company Broadcom for $37bn, reports Telecoms.com.

Avago was spun off from Agilent Technologies back in 2005, which was itself spun off from HP in 1999, leading to what was at the time the world’s largest IPO. It has a broad portfolio of semiconductor products and is strong in mixed-signal circuits and sensors. Broadcom has long been a leader in communications technologies such as ethernet, wifi and Bluetooth.

“Today’s announcement marks the combination of the unparalleled engineering prowess of Broadcom with Avago’s heritage of technology from HP, AT&T, and LSI Logic, in a landmark transaction for the semiconductor industry,” said Hock Tan, president and chief executive of Avago. “The combination of Avago and Broadcom creates a global diversified leader in wired and wireless communication semiconductors. Avago has established a strong track record of successfully integrating companies onto its platform.”

“This transaction benefits all of Broadcom’s key stakeholders,” said Scott McGregor, president and chief executive of Broadcom. “Our customers will gain access to a greater breadth of technology and product capability. For our shareholders, the transaction provides both compelling up-front value as well as the opportunity to participate in the future upside of the combined business.”

In practice the combination of Avago’s strength in sensors and Broadcom’s in communications looks like a potential IoT dream team, creating the ability to offer unified IoT chips that do everything you could ask of a connected thing.

Chris Taylor, analyst at Strategy Analytics, told explained that Avago’s other strengths include RF power amplifiers and filters. “Their most notable success has been in Apple phones over the past several years with their multi-mode, multi-band power amplifiers,” he said. Taylor also noted their success in RF filters for LTE bands above 1.9 GHz, which are likely to be used more extensively as more capacity is needed.

A similar move was recently announced by NXP and Freescale, which are merging to form a semi company with strengths in NFC, automotive and microcontrollers, and which NXP announced today it would be selling off its RF Power business to fund. Both of these merged companies must compete with mobile chip leader Qualcomm, which acquired wifi chip giant Atheros back in 2011. It will be interesting to see if there’s a response to all this M&A from Asian chip players such as Mediatek.

Audi, connected car, Huawei, M2M, News & Analysis, Vendor, Volkswagen

Huawei’s details connected car partnerships with Audi, Volkswagen

Huawei is pushing forward with a number of connected car partnerships this week

Huawei is pushing forward with a number of connected car partnerships this week

Chinese networking giant Huawei is going big on the connected car market this week with the announcement of partnerships with German car makers Audi and Volkswagen, reports Telecoms.com.

This week’s news specifically concerns Volkswagen, with the demonstration at CES Asia of some MirrorLink-based technology that enables smartphones apps to be used on the vehicle-mounted systems. While this sort of thing has been around for a while, it seems that Huawei is facilitating the integration of MirrorLink technology in VW cars, all of which will feature it by next year.

“Our cooperation with Huawei will seamlessly blend the capabilities of users’ smartphones with the systems in their cars,” said Sven Patuschka, executive vice president for R&D of Volkswagen Group China. “All content on the phone will be shown in real time on the car’s infotainment touch screen. The result is smart and convenient interaction between phone and car.”

Earlier this week at the same show Huawei unveiled an R&D partnership with Audi, but this time focused on “interconnected car technology”, which seems to mean embedded modems.

“We see the unlimited opportunities available in the interconnected car market and we are excited about our partnership with Audi Group,” said Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei Consumer Business Group. “By partnering with industry-leading automobile companies like Audi, Huawei aims to bring the best interconnection services and solutions to the next generation of cars, while actively promoting interaction between cars, smartphones, wearables and people, creating a seamless communication experience and driving environment.”

The connected car has long been viewed as the next major opportunity for the tech industry, but it has been slow to develop. One of the main reasons is the relatively long lead times in the automotive industry, which means bets have to be made on embedded technology standards that may be obsolete by the time the car comes to market. The answer, of course, is open standards, but as ever we have to wait for the proprietary land-grab to exhaust itself first.

Visit Connected Cars 15 to find out all about connected car business models and technologies.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Shaun Gregory, Watson

Woodside to deploy IBM Watson to improve oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Australian oil and gas firm Woodside will deploy IBM’s Watson-as-a-Service in order to improve operations and employee training, the companies announced this week.

The energy firm plans to use the cloud-based cognitive compute service to help train engineers and operations specialists on fabricating and managing oil and gas infrastructure and facilities.

The company said the cognitive advisory service it plans to use, ‘Lessons Learned’, will help improve operational processes and outcomes and include over thirty years of collective knowledge and experience operating oil and gas assets.

Woodside Senior vice president strategy, science and technology Shaun Gregory said the move is a part of a broader strategy to use data more intelligently at the firm.

“We are bringing a new toolkit to the company in the form of evidence based predictive data science that will bring down costs and increase efficiencies across our organization,” Gregory said.

“Data science, underpinned by an exponentially increasing volume and variety of data and the rapidly decreasing cost of computing, is likely to be a major disruptive technology in our industry over the next decade. Our plan is to turn all of this data into a predictive tool where every part of our organisation will be able to make decisions based on informed and accurate insights.”

Kerry Purcell, managing director, IBM Australia and New Zealand said: “Here in Australia IBM Watson is transforming how banks, universities, government and now oil and gas companies capitalise on data, helping them discover completely new insights and deliver new value.”

Alex Hilton, APM Group, Cloud Industry Forum, cloud standards, ENISA, Enterprise IT, European Commission, News & Analysis, Public Sector, Richard Pharro

CIF cloud code of practice gains European Commission backing

The Cloud Industry Forum's COP gained the EC's seal of approval for cloud certification this week

The Cloud Industry Forum’s COP gained the EC’s seal of approval for cloud certification this week

The Cloud Industry Forum’s (CIF) code of practice for cloud service providers has been added to the European Commission’s growing list of cloud certification schemes. The move means it passes the EC’s benchmark for service security and reliability.

The Commission’s Cloud Certification Schemes List was set up as part of the European Cloud Strategy and developed by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA); it gives an overview of different existing certification schemes for cloud services in the region.

The scheme effectively the Commission’s way of recognising a certification’s claim to ensuring cloud contracts guarantee a certain level of security or reliability, which it hopes will assure European customers of a provider’s claims and help stimulate spending on cloud services.

“This is a major milestone for the Cloud Industry Forum and the broader cloud community.  There are no dedicated cloud standards in the market, making it difficult for small business customers to identify trusted advisors,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive officer of the Cloud Industry Forum.

“We hope this recognition will encourage more users of cloud services to actively seek providers that are CIF-certified, and likewise more CSPs to seek certification. We have taken important steps in providing a foundation in what is a fast changing and, to many, a new technology sector,” Hilton said.

Other certification schemes included in the list include the Cloud Security Alliance’s attestation, certification and self assessment, EuroCloud’s Star Audit, ISO 27001 and PCI v3.

Richard Pharro, chief executive of APM Group, the Cloud Industry Forum’s certification partner, added: “The Code of Practice was first established with the aim of driving levels of accountability, capability and transparency in the Cloud industry, which are all critical to the Cloud service contract. With the adoption of Cloud within businesses progressing at an incredibly fast rate, those key tenets of Cloud delivery are as important as ever.”

“CSPs need to ensure they operate their businesses and services in a fully open and transparent manner where it is clear to their customers – existing and new – that they are trustworthy and capable of offering the services they claim to be able to offer. The CIF CoP is one of very few schemes which offers this much needed reassurance to end users regarding the organisations they choose to work with,” he added.

Dell, digital signing, DocuSign, e-signing, Google, Intel, Keith Krach, News & Analysis, Rick Echevarria, Salesforce

DocuSign bags $278m from Intel, Dell

DocuSign raised $278m, its largest single funding round to date

DocuSign raised $278m, its largest single funding round to date

Digital signing firm DocuSign announced it has secured $278m in a series F funding round from a range of investors including Intel and Dell.

The latest funding round brings the total amount raised by the firm to just over $500m. Others that have previously invested in the company include Google Ventures, VISA, Salesforce, Samsung and Telstra.

DocuSign is not the first digital signing (or ‘e-signing’) company to target enterprises (it competes with EchoSign, acquired by Adobe in 2011), but it has enjoyed reasonable success in the space and last year announced integration deals with both incumbents and younger cloud companies like Microsoft and Box, respectively.

In the past year it has grown its customer base (paying companies) by over 5,000 and 10 million unique users; it claims to have over 100,000 customers and 50 million unique users.

“Intel and DocuSign share a hyper-focus on creating trusted platforms to power our customers’ success,” said Rick Echevarria, vice president, Intel Security Group and general manager of Intel Security Platforms Group. “We’ve seen the value of the DocuSign platform, and we look forward to integrating our offerings to help our customers worldwide securely transact anything, anytime, anywhere, on Intel-powered devices.”

Keith Krach, chairman & chief executive officer of DocuSign said: “We’re pleased to have the biggest technology brands invest in DocuSign as part of The DocuSign Global Trust Network. These strategic engagements will help bring the power and value of DocuSign’s DTM platform to more countries, companies and customers around the world.”

The funding round comes just over a year after it bagged $85m from investors. At the time the company also announced it would pivot into security solutions, offering a security appliance that claims to implement “bank grade” security measures for digital transactions. Developed in conjunction with Bank of America, it gives highly regulated customers encryption key management capabilities and makes digital transactions behind enterprise firewalls auditable.

Ark Data Centres, Capita, Datacentre, Huw Owen, News & Analysis, Peter Hands

Capita to deploy private cloud service in Ark datacentres

Capita is deploying its private cloud solution in Ark's UK datacentres

Capita is deploying its private cloud solution in Ark’s UK datacentres

IT services specialist Capita struck a deal with Ark Data Centres this week that will see the company deploy its private cloud service in Ark datacentres.

Capita IT Enterprise Services said that deploying in Ark’s facilities would mean the company spends one tenth of the capital cost compared to that of maintaining its existing facilities, making it more competitive as it moves further into the cloud services segment.

Peter Hands, executive director, Capita IT Enterprise Services said: “Ark Data Centres offers modern facilities which integrate its innovation in cooling technology, dynamic monitoring, modularity, security by building not site, guaranteed power usage effectiveness (PUE) and speed. Combined with our expertise in cloud based services, we’re in prime position to deliver the availability that our customers need, with the flexibility and security that they want and with the reduced carbon footprint that everyone seeks.”

Capita will be deploying the private cloud solution on VCE Vblocks initially in one installation with about 28 cabinets worth of space, with two further installations planned across Ark’s datacentres.

Ark has sites in Hampshire and Wiltshire.

“At Ark we are fully focused on delivering data centres. Just datacentres, but those that are the very best,” commented Huw Owen, chief executive of Ark Data Centres. “We don’t attempt to sell further up the IT services stack. As a result, all Ark customers enjoy a professional relationship of integrity and complete trust.”

Aaron Levie, Box, federal government, News & Analysis, Public Sector, Sonny Hashmi, US Department of Justice

US Department of Justice taps Box for file sharing and collaboration

The US DoJ is deploying Box as the company pushes forward in the public sector

The US DoJ is deploying Box as the company pushes forward in the public sector

The US Department of Justice is deploying Box in a bid to improve content sharing and collaboration. The company also said it will shortly receive Agency Authorization to Operate, which means the solution can be deployed across all DoJ agencies.

The DoJ said it is deploying Box to simplify internal and external collaboration between other federal government agencies and third-party organisations, improve support of mobile devices for content sharing and collaboration, and reduce its increasingly fragmented landscape of document storage and the tools used to manage content.

“There is an increasing need to securely connect and enable processes across agencies and jurisdictions as well as to connect government employees with their data, content, and stakeholders,” said Aaron Levie co-founder and chief executive officer at Box.

“Innovative government agencies, like DOJ, are deeply committed to leveraging emerging cloud technologies to better serve the American people, while ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information. We are thrilled to support the DOJ’s technology efforts, helping to transform the way they manage and share information,” Levie said.

Box said it has over 40 federal government customers, over 34 million users and 45,000 organisations globally using its service, and the company is planning a big push into the public sector. The company recently brought on Sonny Hashmi, former chief information officer for the US General Services Administration to help it penetrate further into the public sector, and it is also currently pursuing FedRAMP compliance in a bid to certify the service for use across all US federal government agencies.

ConteXtream, HP, News & Analysis, NFV, Saar Gillai, SDN, Virtualisation

HP buys ConteXtreme in SDN, NFV play

HP is acquiring SDN specialist ConteXtreme

HP is acquiring SDN specialist ConteXtreme

HP has acquired software-defined networking (SDN) specialist ConteXtreme to strengthen its service provider business and network function virtualisation (NFV) offerings.

Founded in 2007, ConteXtream provides an OpenDaylight-based, carrier-grade SDN fabric controller that works on most hypervisors and commodity server infrastructure. It’s based on the IETF network virtualisation overlay (NVO3) architecture, which includes virtualised network edge nodes that aggregate flows and maps them to specific functions, a mapping subsystem based on the Location-Identity Separation Protocol (LISP), a set of application-specific flow handlers for service chaining, and a high-performance software flow switch.

The company also offers analytics that help monitor traffic and detect anomalies.

“We’re moving away from being tied to dedicated machines to having a resource pool with automated, self-service mechanisms. In the networking world, there are countless functions – firewall, caching, optimization, filtering etc. – and a bunch of inflexible hardware to do those things. NFV is about saying, ‘Why can’t we put these various functions in the cloud? Why does each function need to be on specialized and dedicated hardware?’,” explained HP’s telco business lead Saar Gillai.

“ConteXtream’s scalable and open and standards-based technology delivers innovative capabilities like advanced service function chaining, and is deployed at a number of major carrier networks across the globe. ConteXtream’s technology connects subscribers to services, enabling carriers to leverage their existing standard server hardware to virtualize functions and services.”

Gillai said the acquisition will accelerate its leadership in NFV, and that HP also plans to increase its involvement with OpenDaylight, an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling SDN and NFV.

The past year has seen HP slowly scale up its involvement with SDN and NFV initiatives.

In September last year the company announced the launch of an app store for HP customers to download SDN-enabled and virtual networking applications and tools – networking monitoring tools, virtual firewalls, virtual load balancers and the like – developed by HP as well third parties and open source communities. It also partnered with Wind River to integrate its NFV technologies with HP Helion OpenStack.

Akamai, Asia Pacific, China Unicom, Networks, News & Analysis, Noam Freedman, Telco Cloud, Vendor

Akamai, China Unicom strike cloud deal

China Unicom may be using the Akamai deal to bolster its appeal outside China

China Unicom may be using the Akamai deal to bolster its appeal outside China

China Unicom and Akamai have announced a partnership that will see the two companies integrate their cloud services and content delivery network, respectively.

The deal between China Unicom’s cloud division CU Cloud and Akamai will see the former offer the latter’s full portfolio of content delivery, web performance and security offerings, a move CU Cloud said will improve global access to its growing suite of cloud services.

Akamai’s turnkey CDN technology will also underpin global delivery of its cloud services, CU Cloud said.

“China Unicom is a major carrier in China, serving the global internet market,” said Noam Freedman, senior vice president of Akamai’s global networks division. “We’re excited to be partnering with CU cloud to tap into the fast-growing China cloud and CDN market. Akamai sees increased demand for delivering content to Chinese internet users from global customers. With this strategic partnership, we believe Akamai is best positioned to serve this growing need.”

China Unicom has for the past few years targeted cloud services fairly aggressively. In 2013 it was revealed the company was teaming up with a other incumbents including China Mobile and China Telecom on the construction of massive cloud computing datacentres, with total investment from all three operators topping $3bn.

It has also partnered with other local specialists like Huawei and Pacnet on cloud infrastructure and service development.

The latest move may be a sign that China Unicom has set its sights beyond the local market and wants to compete with other increasingly global cloud providers with roots in China – like Alibaba and Pacnet, which have also bolstered global access to their platforms in a bid to cater mainly to large Chinese multinationals.

Big Data, IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis

IBM opens IoT, cloud, big data studio in Shanghai

IBM has opened another studio in Shanghai to target IoT, cloud and big data development

IBM has opened another studio in Shanghai to target IoT, cloud and big data development

IBM has opened another studio aimed at attracting design and digital experts to work with clients on digital solutions using the company’s mobile, big data and cloud technologies, this time in Shanghai.

Based at IBM’s Yangpu and Zhangjiang offices, the hub will host local IBM Design and Interactive Experience teams as well as digital service designers and developers.

“People’s expectations of enterprise technology has changed because of great design they see in devices and apps they use at work and at play,” said Phil Gilbert, general manager, IBM Design. “Our studios around the world bring design into everything we do and change the way we work to transform how enterprise technology is created, with client experience at the centre.”

The company said the studio will be a space for clients in industries such as healthcare, financial services and retail that are keen to develop new digital services in collaboration with IBM; it has about 20 of these studios located around the world.

Earlier this year the company opened a studio at its Southbank location in London which hosts employees specialising in big data, cloud and mobile products and services – including Bluemix, the company’s platform as a service.