Citrix hosted its annual summit at Anaheim in California from 9th to 11th of January, 2017, and in this summit, it revealed a roadmap for the company. It offered a glimpse into what customers and investors can expect from the company in 2017, and the steps it is taking to increase its market share in the global cloud market.

One of the defining aspects is a plan to reinvigorate relationship with Microsoft. This is an interesting plan considering that its President and CEO, Krill Tatrinov has deep experience with Microsoft, and was in fact, the former Executive Vice-President of Microsoft’s Business Solutions Division. Before that, he was in charge of many key technological divisions in Microsoft. Since he took helm in 2006, Citrix has taken many steps to move closer to Microsoft, and in this summit, this strategy was made clear.

During a keynote address, PJ Hough, Senior Vice President products, announced that Citrix and Microsoft customers can deploy Windows 10 desktop on the Microsoft Azure platform directly, with the additional choice to deploy apps as well on Azure.  With such an integration in place, both Microsoft and Citrix are reaching out to mutual customers to help them transition to the cloud more easily. They are specifically planning to focus on those customers who have concerns regarding cloud. A report titled Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey released by Forrester shows that 38 percent of enterprises that were surveyed have not adopted any kind of cloud infrastructure, while another 23 percent have adopted just one cloud. This report clearly shows that cloud is not as ubiquitous as it may seem, and there’s always more room for penetration.

That is exactly what both the companies may do together under the invigorated relationship. Customers who already own XenApp or XenDesktop licenses can choose to move to Citrix Cloud-as-a-service. To help them with this transition, Citrix will be offering a substantial set of tools and expert knowledge using both Citrix’s and Microsoft’s offerings. This way, existing customers can get the advantages of cloud without having to pay extra, as the cost of their license will be adjusted towards this transition.

Besides its partnership with Microsoft, Citrix also announced a new pilot program for existing Citrix Service Providers (CPS), who wish to move their deployments to Citrix Cloud. Though this service is free as of now, Citrix plans to introduce a monthly licensing model in the future. With such a product, providers can have a Desktop-as-a-service option for hosting different Citrix technologies.

Also, Citrix is planning to introduce a new set of tools called Smart Check and Smart Scale to help customers deploy and configure apps and mobile workspaces on Citrix Cloud. These two offerings will join the existing Smart Tools family, and are believed to ease the process of cloud transition.

In all, Citrix is making a big push to reach out to those enterprises that have not moved to the cloud yet. To this end, it has renewed its partnership with Microsoft and has come up with a slew of tools to make the process easier for enterprises.

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2017 looks like it’s going to be a year of acquisition as the larger players are looking to consolidate their position by buying companies that add value to their current offerings. In this line, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has bought a cybersecurity company Harvest.ai to boost cloud security for the end-users. Though no official announcement has been made by either companies in this regard, TechCrunch and other major sources have reported this acquisition.

It is believed that AWS paid $19 million for this company, and this may be much more than what the investors hoped to earn by way of revenue. It’s interesting to note that the company has raised only $2.3 million by way of capital since it was founded, and employs only 12 people in all. All these employees are expected to move to Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle after the terms are settled.

This deal was believed to be in the offing for some time, as the co-founders, Anna Zelenak and Alex Watson had already moved to Seattle in 2016. Another co-founder, Jenny Brinkley, now lists Amazon as her employer on a political contributions page. These changes, along with inputs from anonymous sources within the company led TechCrunch to announce that Harvest.ai was acquired by AWS.

Harvest.ai is a San Diego based startup company co-founded by two former employees from the NSA in 2014, though it officially started its services only in March 2015. This company’s original name was 405Labs, but was later changed to harvest.ai, and the reason for the same is not known. This company specializes in using machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze the behavior of a user on the company’s network. Such a surveillance reduces the potential of cyber attacks, and increases the chances of stopping planned attacks before valuable data is lost.

It’s patent-pending product called MACIE Analytics uses artificial intelligence to get an in-depth understanding of who is logged in and what is being accessed in real-time, along with other pertinent information needed to identify a cyber attack such as what items are being moved and which areas are being accessed. With all this information collated together, it’s easy to stop phishing attacks as well as the more difficult insider attacks.

MACIE also comes with other cool features that make integration with existing systems a breeze. It works well with both cloud and on-premise systems, and creates extensive information on the activities of each user’s session. Such detailed information can go a long way in not just discovering attacks, but also for a detailed study about the company’s security system and its possible flaws.

Harvest.ai had been a customer of AWS, as it was featured in the “Startup Spotlight” of the latter. In many ways, this acquisition was a natural one for both the companies, more so for AWS, considering the sophisticated attacks that have been taking place over the last few months. Such a cloud-based tool could go a long way in protecting its customers’ data.

AWS could possibly use the services of this company as a part of its security-as-a-service division, and to supplement its existing security authentication and monitoring tools.

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Cloud is taking the world by storm. Currently, North America accounts for the highest revenue and top service providers call this region home, but the Asia-Pacific region is the fastest growing one.  Europe and Africa are catching up in their own respective ways, and the Australia New Zealand (ANZ) region is not to be left behind.

In fact, it maybe a cloud year for companies in the ANZ region, going by a survey conducted by Computer Weekly/TechTarget. Their report titled IT Priorities Research  shows that a significant number of CIOs who were interviewed as a part of the survey opined that they have already moved to the cloud or are planning to do so by 2017. Much of these cloud initiatives are expected in the areas of data center, storage, and backup, though other aspects such as cloud computing, IoT, and M2M are also expected to drive cloud adoption in the ANZ region.

To be precise, the report states that 41 percent of IT decision-makers are looking to be involved in some form of cloud storage initiative, while 36 percent will choose a cloud backup feature during this year. Besides these two areas, cloud is also going to play a big role in ANZ data centers as 39 percent of respondents plan to work around pure or hybrid cloud models within their data centers.

In addition, 54 percent of respondents believe that cloud computing will be a significant part of IT budget this year. This is an interesting revelation because in another survey, 38 percent of IT decision-makers in Australia and New Zealand expect their IT budgets to be flat or lower in 2017 when compared to the previous year. Putting these two together, we can say that even if budgets are going to remain stagnant, the fact that it much of it will be allocated for cloud, means that every IT decision-maker hopes to make the most of every dollar spent.

This report is sure to bring much cheer to cloud service providers of all sizes, as everyone can have a share in the pie, though the larger providers will have a significantly higher share than the smaller ones. Already, companies like Alibaba and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are setting up operations in Australia, or they are expanding their presence to cover more cities in this region. An example of such a move is the setting up of a large data center in Sydney by Alibaba, making it one of the largest ones outside of mainland China.  Other providers like Microsoft, IBM, and Google are likely to catch up too, and it won’t be long before we see their presence in this region.

In all, this news exudes much optimism, as companies can make their operations more efficient and bring in higher revenues and profits. The cloud providers who setup shop here will employ more people, who in turn, will fuel more demand for goods and services. Eventually, these development are sure to augur well for the economies of both these countries as well.

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As the cloud market matures, more companies are looking for innovative ways to use its features. There have been instances of companies that use cloud to provide a better indoor environment, and those that use it to solve many of the social problems we face today. The next in this line of innovative cloud products is Nvidia’s GeForce Now platform.

Announced during the company’s CES keynote, this product overcomes a drawback that is being faced by gamers all over the world, which is lack of support from PCs for a fantastic gaming experience. Most PCs today don’t have the capability to play modern games because they don’t support modern graphic cards. As a result, gamers world-over face frustration when they try to play their favorite game on their PC. To overcome this problem, Nvidia’s GeForce Now will allow players to access a cloud-based gaming system, so gamers can simply log into the system and play their games.

Nvidia has used GeForce Now brand in the past too, in case you’re wondering that it sounds familiar. In the past, this brand allowed players to stream games from their own PC, but unfortunately, this product did not go well with customers due to many reasons. Primarily, this product required a Nvidia product such as Shield Portal or Android TV, and this proved to be a disappointment for many customers. Learning from its mistakes, Nvidia has overhauled its GeForce Now brand to make it more attractive and sustainable to its end customers.

The advantages with this new product is obvious. Firstly, gamers can continue to enjoy their gaming sessions without any interruptions, and secondly, they don’t have to worry about upgrading their system or buying a new graphics card. This service is also reasonably priced, as it costs a mere $25 for 20 hours a play – peanuts when compared to the whopping cost of a graphic card and the inconveniences and disruptions that come with it. With this product, gamers are sure to be a happy bunch as they can save money, and at the same time, continue their gaming sessions. However, users will have to download a small client to access this cloud product. The good news is this download and installation takes only a few seconds, and is fairly self-explanatory.

This move augurs well for the gaming industry too, as it can reach out to more customers. Currently, many users are not playing some games because they don’t have the necessary hardware infrastructure. Now, if the same infrastructure is available on the cloud, more people would be willing to play online. In this sense, this move by Nvidia is sure to strengthen the gaming industry as a whole.

At this point, Nvidia plans to make GeForce Now available by March 2017.  We will probably have to wait until March to know the speed and gaming experience this product offers, because as of now, it’s not clear whether Nvidia is going to host it in its own data center or will it take the services of a cloud provider such as AWS.

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PCM, one of the leading technology providers in North America, has started 2017 with a big acquisition. On Tuesday, it acquired Stratiform, an industry leading provider of a wide range of cloud services. It paid a sum of C$2.1 million based on the closing price of Stratiform’s shares on December 29, 2016. In addition, it has agreed on a potential payout of C$1.75 million over a period of three years. Stratiform’s revenue was C$5.5 million for the fiscal year that ended on July 31, 2016.

This acquisition is expected to give a big fillip to PCM’s hopes of becoming a leading cloud provider in this region. In fact, Stratiform’s cloud-based products and services will lay the foundation for PCM’s cloud-related offerings. Through this acquisition, PCM plans to leverage on the clouds expertise of Stratiform to expand its own presence in Canada and the United States, and also reach out to more markets, especially small and medium business (SMB), mid-market, and public sector enterprises of North America. Stratiform is also a Microsoft Gold Partner, so this acquisition is likely to give PCM a better foothold in the world of Azure, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility Suite.

Stratiform was founded in 2012 by Jordan Byman and Darren Lloyd, with a clear aim to focus on Microsoft-related technologies. Within a short time, this company became a Microsoft Gold Partner for devices, deployment, cloud services, connectivity, and a Microsoft Silver Partner for hosting cloud solutions in the small and mid-market business segments. This company offers professional consulting, designing, and planning services on a wide range of Microsoft solutions. According to its LinkedIn profile, it employs anywhere 11 to 50 people. All this points to a small company that had an amazing run over the four years since its founding.

PCM, on the other hand, was founded in 1987, and is headquartered in El Segundo, California. With more than 3,700 employees spread across its 45 locations in the United States, Canada, Pakistan, and the Philippines, this company has an annual total revenue of more than $1.6 billion. Its operations is divided into many subsidiaries that include sales, services, marketing, logistics, and business process outsourcing (BPO).

This acquisition augurs well for PCM, as it can give it a strong foothold in the cloud market. In this sense, Stratiform is a good choice for acquisition, as it has an established market and expertise that has to be built on by PCM. Historically, PCM has expanded its operations and revenue by way of strategic acquisitions. It was founded as a telemarketing, direct marketing, and print catalogs company, and it made a foray into other areas by acquiring companies such as PC Wintel, Computability, Wareforce, Data Systems Worldwide (DSW), and En Pointe Technologies and Sales Inc.

As for Stratiform, it had a dream run, and it can continue building its expertise with a larger pool of resources, thereby giving the brains behind Stratiform a better chance to reach out to a global audience.

In all, 2017 started off on a great note for both the companies!

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The cloud market is one of the most happening segments of the tech sector, and this is why everyone wants to take a share in its multi-billion dollar potential. The latest company to enter this market is Fuji Xerox –  world’s biggest supplier of office printers and document management systems.

According to its executive vice-president, Masataka Jo, this company plans to launch its cloud arm in mainland China soon, with an aim to focus on the higher end clients in the market. He made it clear that much of the focus will be on China this year, as it wants to create a sustainable business model in the world’s second largest economy. With this idea in mind, it wants to introduce its cloud products and services that will supplement its existing operations. These announcements come at a time when the Chinese market is facing slowing demand for goods and services due to a dampening of its economy, and these measures are hoped to invigorate Fuji’s position in China and to boost demand for its products.

In November of last year, the company introduced a new cloud service package called “Smart Work Gateway.” This cloud-based service will help businesses to make the most of diverse work styles –  something that is becoming a growing demand considering the fact that different employees prefer varying work devices. This product creates a cloud ecosystem where multiple devices work, and where its own cloud products as well as that of its partners link organically. The best part is this ecosystem can be customized to meet the work environment expectations of different employees, that in turn, is sure to benefit the organization as a whole by way of increased productivity.

In addition, this gateway will collate pertinent information collected from different sources, analyze them, and will provide meaningful insights to clients to help them devise better business strategies and decisions. All this means, businesses get the added advantages of analytics besides the regular storage and maintenance.

This product, in many ways, supplements the existing products of the company. Unlike many traditional companies that plan to start cloud as a separate arm of business, Fuji wants to use cloud as a natural extension of its long cultivated technologies in language, image, and knowledge processing, to keep in tune with the changing times of the business environment, and also to add value to its clients. As a result, its clients will continue to use the same products of Fuji Xerox, but will also get more value in the form of business intelligence and better connectivity.

This product is currently available only in Japan and Hong Kong, but Fuji wants to extend it to China as well in the next few months. Over time, it plans to introduce it throughout its Asia Pacific markets.

This strategy clears brings out the need for traditional companies to embrace the cloud, and more importantly,  use the cloud ecosystem to add value to their clients. In many ways, it also reaffirms the fact that cloud is going to be one of the primary drivers of business growth in the coming years.

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Are you one of those people who want to make something special during the holiday season for your near and dear ones? Well, in that case, you’re sure to have browsed recipes from AllRecipes.com – one of the most popular and comprehensive database of food recipes for any season. This holiday season got even better as AllRecipes.com has turned to Microsoft Azure, a popular cloud platform, for sharing its recipes with millions of visitors like you.

AllRecipes.com is a food site owned by Meredith Corp, and has been in operation since 1997. Over these two decades, it has transformed the way people search for recipes, and in fact, has helped billions of people around the world to make any kind of dish. If you translate this to numbers, it services more than 1.5 billion people every year, and these visitors view about 95 recipes per second. Over the last few years, 66 percent of its visitors connect to it through their mobile device. These numbers are growing as more people around the world are exploring food beyond their comfort zone.

Typically, traffic to AllRecipes.com is cyclical. For example, the number of visitors on a Sunday afternoon is almost 60 percent more when compared to Monday morning. Likewise, traffic peaks during Thanksgiving and Christmas season as more people look for recipes to serve their family. A detailed study of its traffic pattern shows that eight weeks in November and December, especially during the holidays and the day before the Super Bowl generate the maximum traffic.

Since it’s traffic is cyclical and predictable, it makes sense for AllRecipes.com to move to the cloud. This way, it can choose a scalable plan that will handle its traffic during the peak season, and will expand during the off-seasons to help the company save some money. Without the cloud, this company would have to invest in large infrastructure, which would have not just cost not just a ton more money, but would also be underused during the off season. With cloud, AllRecipes.com has the option to expand or scale back, according to its needs.

Another important reason to move to the cloud is the expected responsiveness. Most chefs who visit the site are looking for ideas while dropping their kids at soccer practice or while shopping at the grocery stores. Sometimes, they may be at a place where the network is not great, and yet they may want to have an idea of what to make for dinner once they’re back. To cater to these customers, who incidentally form the largest customer base, it’s important that the site is fast, responsive, and takes as little data as possible. Again, this can be best achieved on a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure rather than on a data center that could be located miles away from the visitor’s location.

So, why did the company choose Azure, and not anything else? The simple answer is this site is built on C#, so Azure was the natural choice!

All this means is you’re sure going to spend a lot less time waiting for the site to load, and a lot more time cooking and having fun with your family and friends.

Merry Christmas!

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One of the major concerns during any winter season is the quality of indoor air. Since most of us have to shut our windows and turn on the heater to protect against the cold, the quality of indoor air suffers greatly. Such unclean air leads to an increased chance of respiratory and other illnesses during winters. To prevent these problems and to promote healthy indoor environment, cloud-giant IBM has partnered with a wellness, real estate and technology firm called Delos.

Under the terms of this partnership, Delos will tap into IBM’s Watson and its cloud infrastructure to understand the impact of indoor environment on human health. Specifically, it will create cognitive computing-based apps with Watson and Bluemix platform to give construction engineers and architects an insight into the existing problem, and may also provide solutions that can be incorporated in the design and construction of homes and offices. Through these apps, both companies want to drive home the point that a healthy indoor environment is essential for better living and working conditions. Already, many companies find it difficult to handle the low productivity and frequent sick leaves during the winter season, so they are sure to take steps to reduce this absenteeism and increase productivity.

Are you’re wondering why IBM chose Delos for this partnership? Well, for starters, Delos is already in the process of collecting massive amounts of data, to understand the relationship that exists between indoor air quality and health. So, in this sense, IBM is simply providing the right technology to help Delos make sense of the data they have collected. In many ways, it’s a natural partnership because IBM has the perfect platform and technological tools to help Delos identify the right patterns from its vast data. In addition to its own data, Delos is also tapping into the database of Mayo Clinic to fill in any gaps that may arise.

Delos has already setup a Wellness Lab in collaboration with Mayo Clinic, to simulate a wide-variety of indoor environments in real-time. it has setup sensors in homes and offices across different cities in the US to give its scientists and researchers greater access into everyday conditions. With this information, researchers can identify the impact of different aspects such as indoor light, optimal temperature, acoustics, dust levels, and more, on the health of those living in these conditions.

With IBM’s Watson and Bluemix, Delos can also look into the historical data, including the many studies that have been done in this regard. Eventually, it can combine all this information to understand what impacts indoor air, and in turn, what effect it has on human beings.

This partnership is a classic example of IT application, where the advancements we have made are used to improve our own well-being. Though this is not the first experiment of its kind, the fact that it taps into so many sources of information and uses advanced technology, makes it truly unique.

It won’t be long before we start breathing healthy air – even during winters!

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Cisco has announced that it will stop its Cisco Intercloud Services (CIS) in March 2017, and the existing workloads will be moved to other infrastructure. A spokesperson of the company confirmed that some may even be moved to the public cloud, depending on the nature of the workload, though it did not specify which public cloud will be chosen for this move.

This is a part of Cisco’s cloud strategy, and has been in the pipeline for some time now. In October, it announced a timeline to move its workloads to other private and public, and according to that document, the last date to order CIS through point-of-sale mechanism is March 31, 2017. It is not known if support for CIS would also end on the same date, or if there will be an extension based on a case-by-case basis. According to Kip Compton, Vice-President for Cloud Platform and Services, all clients on CIS would be fully migrated by the specified deadline.

Cisco has stated that it’s evolving customer demands have led the company to change its cloud strategy. According to a release, Cisco believes that the cloud industry has undergone massive transformation over the last two years, and many of its customers are looking to develop applications that would drive their digital transformations. In the light of these developments, the company believes its best to move away from CIS, and focus on other aspects of it cloud business. Some reports show that Cisco is planning to focus extensively on enterprise hybrid cloud and SP network virtualization, to ensure that its existing resources are being utilized to the optimum.

The concept of intercloud was introduced by Cisco in 2014, to make it easy for cloud providers to move their data between different clouds. This was hugely beneficial to many companies, as they could offer better service to their customers by moving workloads to clouds that were closer to the customers’ location.

CIS’ Intercloud comprises of computing, storage, and networking services, that are on par with some of the leading cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. CIS offered Virtual Machine instances that were optimized for general purpose workloads, as well as instances that were optimized for compute, storage, and memory. In addition, it gives customers a wide range of operating system choices that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Windows operating system. It is based on OpenStack – the open source cloud software.

It is worthy to note that HP also launched an intercloud service in the past and killed it, while Dell made plans to launch an Openstack-based cloud, but later moved away from it. Rackspace, the company that helped develop OpenStack, has stopped offering cloud services on it. All these companies have moved away from intercloud, as they believe that it does not play an important role in the cloud market at this point in time. In the future, if the cloud industry transforms to accept intercloud, then maybe they will start thinking about it again.

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