Over the last couple of years, Nutanix has been calmly creating and readying a set of tools and processes for companies that want to deploy cloud computing within their own IT departments.

To this end, Nutanix has announced that it will be adding a few developer tools and services to its Enterprise Cloud OS software that should make it easy for developers to deploy to a hybrid cloud system. In addition, it is also planning to bring new enhancements to its virtualization technology to help companies manage their distributed cloud environments.

One of the key changes that we can see is the Acropolis Object Storage. This product provides an Amazon S3-compatible API that’ll allow developers to do things like data archival on a demand basis. This will be similar to other public cloud offerings that are available today, but it will be applicable only for a hybrid environment.

During these announcements, one thing that Nutanix makes it clear is that it doesn’t want to build data centers. This is partly why it entered into an agreement with Google, so that the GCP can use Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor for managing data in the cloud. This agreement with Google is a key aspect to the future of Nutanix and for that matter, the entire cloud industry, because it represents a big step towards a multi-cloud system.

Let’s say, a customer wants to have the data of project A in a public cloud while it wants to have project B in their in-house data center. Now, it is creating a project C that needs to be partially in the cloud and partially in data-centers. From the company’s perspective, running three different clouds is tough because of differences in operating systems and compatibility issues. Further, application dependencies complicate the problem even more.

But, Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS combines these different cloud strands and makes it look like a single piece of computing fabric.

This integration is what makes Nutanix’s offerings so interesting for customers. Though the exact dates of release and pricing information is not available, the new products have sure created a buzz among cloud users.

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Forrester has come up with a bunch of predictions for 2018 and how it can transform the cloud industry.

• Dominant players : The existing cloud companies would continue their dominance in 2018 too. Currently, AWS, Google and Microsoft account for 76 percent of the total market share in the cloud industry. This will increase to 80 percent by 2018, thereby signaling a clear dominance by these top three players.
• SaaS vendors: SaaS vendors will transform into platform providers and will expand to provide deployment options.
• Increase in cloud spending: Microsoft Azure Spark will create an increase in private and hybrid cloud spending, as more businesses will consider one of the two options to move their data and applications.
• Shift in providers: Many cloud providers are considering to move around 10 percent of their traffic to other providers from existing carrier providers. This move will see a significant impact in revenue for telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon.
• Increased public cloud: As cloud computing spreads its wings far and wide, more businesses are expected to use these services. In fact, Forrester predicts that 50 percent of global enterprises will use at least one cloud provider for their business.
• Bigger growth:  It goes without saying that the entire cloud industry will grow by leaps and bounds and there will be a surge in the overall revenue generated by different cloud companies. Forrester predicts that the total cloud market will be worth $178 billion in 2018, up from the current $146 billion. It is also predicted to grow at a whopping compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 percent.
• Container war: The container war will be won by Kubernetes and it will establish itself as the most dominant player in this segment by 2018.
• Cloud security: There will be a renewed focus on cloud security and in most cases, it will be integrated with existing cloud platforms, thereby making it a central aspect and selling point for all cloud platforms.
• Training programs: Forrester predicts that enterprises will move towards an immersive training program to bring about a cultural shift within the organization.

Let’s wait for 2018 to see how these predictions span out. Overall, it looks good for the cloud market and we can expect a solid growth for this industry.

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Alibaba, often called as the fastest growing cloud company in the world, has once again declared stellar results for the third that ended in September.

A statement released by the company says that overall sales increased by 61 percent, and this includes both its cloud computing and core ecommerce businesses.  The cloud computing revenue alone rose by 99 percent to reach $447 million for the quarter. Much of this increase is attributed to value-added services that the company offered to its customers such as content delivery network, security services, data analysis and more. The addition of these services lead to an increase in the number of paying customers, and this is what led to the surge in revenue for the company.

Further, the company said that it wants to capitalize on its cloud business and to this end, it wants to invest $15 billion over the next three years. Much of this money is expected to go towards research and development and also, to further expand its portfolio of cloud services for customers.

Besides cloud, its core ecommerce business also did well for Alibaba. It climbed 63 percent to fetch about $6.98 billion for the company during the last quarter.  Much of this revenue came from new active users, that increased to 549 million during the last three months. These numbers go to show the power that Alibaba yields in the Chinese ecommerce market.

These numbers blew past the analysts expectations, which is again not a surprise.  The company reported a non-GAAP revenue of $8.3 billion or $1.29 per share while analysts were expecting just $7.9 billion or $1.09 per share.

Due to these impressive numbers, the company raised its full-year revenue growth to a range of 49 to 53 percent. Earlier, it was pegged at a range of 45 to 49 percent.

Such impressive growth numbers are a sure threat to the cloud industry giants, namely, AWS, Microsoft and Google. Though Alibaba is not even in the range of what these three giants earn, it could catch up over time, if Alibaba is able to produce the same results over the next few years.

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Doppler labs, the maker of Here One ear-buds, is shutting down.

This San Francisco-based company was founded in 2013 by Noah Kraft and Fritz Lanman, who continued to be the CEO and Chairman respectively. Kraft had experience in the entertainment industry while Lanman was an angel investor. Both of them came together to create a company that would manufacture an alternative to Apple’s Airpods.

To this end, it obtained many rounds of funding. The first of these was a $17 million Series B funding in July 2015 by The Chernin Group and Acequia Capital. With this capital, it began manufacturing and by the early part of 2017, it released its flagship product called Here One earbuds.

This was truly a different kind of product as the earbuds were supported with a companion app that allowed you to tune out external noise. For example, you could tune out airplane noise without tuning out the voice of the person sitting next to you. Likewise, you could amplify the bass at a concert and do other tricks to create a personalized listening space for you.

Despite these advanced features, Here One didn’t take off. According to a report, the company sold only 25,000 units as against the expected hundred thousand plus units. Due to this failure to sell, investors were not ready to invest more or back up this company in any way. Also, it couldn’t find a reasonable buyer, so Doppler labs decided to shut down its operations.

As a final good-bye, Doppler labs released an app that allowed Here One to be used as an app-based hearing assistant aid. This was one of the biggest ambitions of the company, so it fulfilled that and gracefully shut down its operations.

This shut down came as a surprise to many people simply because they weren’t expecting it at all. Internally, the company was stable with Kraft and Lanman providing the right leadership. Also, the product is a good one, though it failed to attract a large customer base. Maybe with time and more marketing, this product could have become a hit with customers. Though it’s hard to say, the exit of Doppler labs is sure to leave a small, but significant void in this industry.

However, the idea that in-ear computers are the next frontier has reached well within the industry. Let’s hope this leads to more developments on this front.

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Hashicorp, a leading player in the cloud infrastructure automation industry, announced that it has raised a Series C funding of $40 million. The entire funding came from its existing investors and till date, the total amount raised is $74 million. This round was led by GGV Capital and Redpoint along with other investors such as Mayfield and True ventures. A release by the company says that this funding will be mostly used for investment in its go-to market, besides its engineering and customer service teams.

Hashicorp is a company based in San Francisco that offers open-source tools and paid products that make it possible for developers to secure and run distributed application infrastructure. It was founded five years back, in 2012, by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar.

Hashicorp’s key products include:

• Vagrant – This is a virtualization product that supports the building of reproducible software environments
• Packer – This tool helps to build virtual machine images that can be deployed later.
• Terraform – It helps to provision and adapt infrastructure across different cloud platforms
• Consul – This tool provides DNS-based service recovery, RPC and KV storage.
• Vault – It handles privileged access management, encryption as a service and anything that will beef up the security of the infrastructure.
• Nomad – This tool supports scheduling and deployment of different tasks.

The widespread use of cloud, especially infrastructure-as-a-service, has led to a surge in the demand for Hashicorp’s products. Over the last few years, this company has seen tremendous growth in many key areas. Some of its notable achievements are:

• It has added new customers almost every quarter and today, its customer base includes top names such as Adobe, SAP Ariba, SpaceFlight, Barclays, Comcast, and Lotto New Zealand.
• Its products were downloaded 22 million times so far and it has released around 150 updates across all its suite of products.
• Last year, it introduced a program called HashiCorp Partner program to include resellers and system integrators across different regions in North America, Europe, Middle-east and Africa, and Asia Pacific.
• Its User Group has expanded to 44 cities and includes more than 8,000 members.

With such an impressive list of achievements within a short span of time, Hashicorp sure has a bright future ahead.

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Cisco systems, one of the giants in the world of IT, has announced that it is buying Broadsoft Inc for $1.9 million in cash. This translates to about $55 per share for Broadsoft’s investors, thereby marking an almost two percent increase over the closing price of Broadsoft’s shares on Friday.

Broadsoft is based in Gaithersburg, Maryland and it specializes in providing telecommunication services like phone, audio, video conferencing, and virtual meeting rooms. This company’s primary focus is on small and medium customers who can’t afford an overhaul of their existing infrastructure. This niche area of small and medium business is one of the reasons for Cisco’s acquisition.

In addition, Broadsoft has many software tools that are used by large cable and telecommunication providers, and Cisco believes these tools will come handy as it expands to cater to a network-intensive world.

Cisco, based in San Jose California, is changing its strategy to meet the new needs of its business environment. According to the company’s spokesperson, more businesses want to have a complete contact center that they can deploy in the cloud. Though Cisco is ready for this change, it still makes sense to have collaboration tools from smaller companies like Broadsoft.

This move also signals a push away from its traditional switching and routing business. In fact, this move can give Cisco access to small and medium-sized business markets that need an integrated mobile, video, voice and other forms of communication.

To top it, most of Cisco’s products such as WebEx are based on premises, which means, they have to be installed manually. On the other hand, Broadsoft’s products are cloud-based, so Cisco can make the most of them without going through the cycle of development.

For all these reasons, it’s a good move by Cisco and it got a big thumbs up from its investors right away, as the share prices rose by one percent.

This deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2018, after which broadsoft’s employees will be a part of Cisco’s unified communications technology group.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is shutting down its cloud server business as it’s no longer profitable and sustainable for the company.

Over the last few years, HPE was supplying low cost cloud servers to large cloud companies like Microsoft and Google. According to industry experts, these large companies negotiate and get large discounts, and this means, HPE is left with little to no profits. But at least, HPE was covering its costs and this segment continued operating.

However, the last few years, things took a downturn for this company. Instead of bargaining and negotiating for discounts, Microsoft, Google and other companies began to directly approach the suppliers in China and Taiwan to build low-cost cloud servers, thereby cutting out HPE’s role and profits.

This change in strategy by HPE’s large clients has hit its revenue. During the first quarter, for example, HPE’s profits plunged because Microsoft canceled a large order. In June, sales dropped further. Obviously, it makes no sense for HPE to continue fighting in this market and that’s why it has decided to exit this segment.

A company spokesperson said that HPE will continue to sell high end servers, that’s more profitable and tenable to the company. In fact, HPE’s CEO, Meg Whitman, has been pushing high end cloud servers including converged hardware to its clients, and this move has been working for the company.

Again, the longevity of this strategy is questionable simply because more Fortune 500 companies are moving their operations to AWS, Microsoft and Google because of the many benefits that come with it. As a result, they are no longer inclined to invest in the high-end cloud servers offered by HPE.

In all, this is a difficult situation for HPE and it has to come up with an out-of-the-box solution to get out of this dilemma. IBM faced a similar situation three years ago and eventually, it sold its cloud server business to Lenovo. Maybe HPE can also think along the same lines, provided it’s able to find a buyer for its business.

In the meantime, it’s going to be a tough road ahead for HPE.

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Blockchain is the latest technology that has the power to transform the way we think of networks and even do digital transactions. Though this technology is in its nascent stage, many companies are already taking the lead in providing the right solutions to boost this technology. One such company is Camelot Innovative Technologies Lab, or Camelot ITLab, in short.

Camelot ITLab is the first company to provide a solution for identifying and implementing specific solutions using blockchain technology in the logistics industry. This is, in fact, a configurable IT solution that aids the development and evaluation of blockchain applications in the entire logistics processes. It uses different blockchain technologies like Etherum and Hyperledger to create a design thinking, and this is combined withe xisting agile technologies to create a unique product that’ll help players in the logistics industry to tap into the power of blockchain technology.

These innovations caught the eyes of some of the biggest players in the blockchain world. One such player is SAP’s Blockchain and Co-Innovation program. Through this initiative, SAP offers its customers the opportunity to create, identify and implement different aspects of blockchain.

Camelot ITLab has been invited to be a part of this program to help customers to better understand the potential of blockchain technology and use the best practices available today. Specifically, different use cases along with its application in IoT will be explained to customers to bring more people into the blockchain bandwagon. Currently, some of the use cases that will be focused include parcel tracking and serialization, anti-counterfeiting, connected vehicles, machine sensor data, smart grid, distributed manufacturing and security.

Besides its expertise, Camelot was also chosen because of its long-standing with SAP as a business consultant in the digital value chain management segment.

SAP and its partners like Camelot ITLab are encouraging companies to register in this program and gain the knowledge that will help them top leap frog into the next era of computing and technology.

Let’s hope such initiatives pave the way for enhanced adoption of these technologies to make this world a more connected place.

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Governments world over are adopting cloud in a big way to leverage the many benefits that come from it. This foray into cloud, popularly known as government cloud market, is expected to explode over the next few years.

A report titled “Government cloud market by solution” has been released by the research firm MarketsandMarkets. According to this report, the market size of this industry is likely to grow from $15.4 billion in 2017 to a whopping $28.85 billion by 2022. That’s almost double the growth within just the next five years, accounting for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.4 percent.

These numbers clearly show that government cloud is growing by the day. But why, you may wonder.

Much of this growth is driven by factors such as

• Low IT costs
• Availability of a ton of solutions, so governments can choose the one that is best compliant with their standards.
• Little to no dependence on humans for operations and maintenance. This means the employee costs is negligible for governments
• Hassle-free maintenance and obviously there is no need for a large IT department to monitor operations.
• Compliance with most standards
• Instant access from anywhere and the associated flexibility with respect to working hours and locations for employees
• Easy deployment of cloud storage solutions. A lot of it can be deployed within just a few ours, thereby saving time and effort for governments.

Due to these benefits, government cloud is all set to boom over the next few years.

The report further states that out of all the different segments, the cloud storage segment is likely to see the highest growth.  This is not really a surprise considering the vast amounts of data that local, state and national governments have to collect and maintain to provide the right benefits to the right people.

The next sector that is likely to see major growth is the integration and migration segment.  Already, many government agencies have started making the move to cloud solutions, so migrating their existing data to the new platform will require help. Also, there are many legacy systems that need to be integrated with cloud, so solutions that bridge this gap will be in great demand.

Region wise, North America is expected to have the highest contribution to government cloud market while the Asia Pacific region is likely to have the highest growth during this period.

Overall, this is likely to be a period of high growth for government cloud and companies of all sizes, ranging from the mighty AWS and Microsoft to small startups are looking to cash in on this boom.

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Cryptoeconomics is an emerging field that revolves around the protocols involved in production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in a decentralized digital economy.

There is no official definition yet because this is a new field. But broadly speaking, it encompasses the latest technologies such as blockchain, game theory and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

Before we understand about cryptoeconomics, let’s briefly look into how it evolved.

Evolution of cryptoeconomics

If you take any torrent system, users can share or download files freely. However, the unwritten rule was users who download these files and have to seed them as well. But, not all users followed this rule simply because there was no economic incentive to seed and the process of seeding took up a lot of unnecessary space on the computer. As a result, peer to peer network sharing failed as a concept.

In 2008, a group or an individual called Satoshi Nakamoto released a paper about bitcoins. This concept used blockchain technology to take peer to peer network sharing to new levels. The difference between the failed sharing system and this one is that, now people had an economic incentive to follow the rules.

As a result, bitcoin has caught on in a big way and has led to the development of a new form of digital economy called the cryptoeconomics. As you would’ve guessed, it’s a combination of two words – cryptography and economics.

Why is it so called?

Bitcoins are based on blockchain technology where each block contains the hash of the previous block, so the entire chain is continuous. Each of these blocks will have transactions and a state that can change based on the nature of the transactions. For example, if one person has 100 bitcoins and wants to send 40 to another person, then these blocks will reflect the new states of 60 and 40 respectively. All these information is protected by cryptography functions like hashing, signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. This means, you’re transactions are safe and only valid transactions are allowed.

Since money in some form is exchanged for goods and services, there is economics involved. Each user has some financial incentive to perform a particular action in the peer-to-peer network. Broadly speaking, there are two types of incentives they have. The first incentive is in the form of tokens or cryptocurrencies that are assigned to users for their contribution to the peer-to-peer network.

The second incentive is rewards for doing a good and responsible task on the network. Likewise, users can also pay a fine or can even have their rights taken away for any bad acts they do. So, there is enough incentive for a positive contribution and this leads to economics.

That’s how cryptoeconomics came about.

We’ll talk in depth about this technology and how it works in future pieces. Do check back to know more about bitcoins, blockchain technology and cryptoeconomics.

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