Diadem Technologies, one of the leading cloud service providers in India, has partnered with Jelastic to offer PaaS and CaaS solutions to their customers.

Diadem, in an announcement, said that it chose Jelastic as its partner after evaluating many PaaS solutions because Jelastic is a proven service with more than 50 data centers around the world. More importantly, it provides round the clock support thereby making it easy for customers to reach out to the support team at any time. In fact, this is a key reason because Diadem takes pride in providing proactive support to its customers, according to the announcement.

Another reason for choosing Jelastic is that it is built on Virtuozzo, and this is something that Diadem has been using over the last five years for all its virtual machine deployments. In this sense, Jelastic will fit well within the ecosystem of Diadem and may even feel like an extension.

In addition to all this, the web interface of Jelastic is smooth and easy to use, and this is sure to make the life of thousands of developers easy. They no longer have to spend enormous amounts of time in deployment as these can be done with reduced time and effort.

Besides these factors, pricing is a key aspect that proved to be a clincher for Jelastic. It offers a pay-per-use pricing model, so clients are charged for exactly what they use. Nothing more, nothing less. This is significant because cloud expenses will reduce greatly for clients and they can better plan their budget. Such a flexibility is not offered by most other public cloud providers today.

For all these reasons, Diadem chose Jelastic as its cloud PaaS partner as it plans to expand its presence in India. In fact, this is the only Uptime Certified Tier IV data center in India and it is currently located in the financial capital of Mumbai.

As more businesses in India take to cloud, there is no dearth in the number of opportunities for any company in the cloud space. The rate of cloud penetration is fairly low in India now. Such a situation presents a great opportunity for cloud companies to strengthen their infrastructure and offerings because when everyone starts taking to the cloud, it’s going to undoubtedly be a booming business, Every company wants to be in the right position to tap into this huge opportunity when it presents and each company is preparing in its own way for this bounty.

Let’s hope this partnership works for Diadem and gives them more opportunities to expand and succeed within India.

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Travis Perkins, the building and construction company, started its cloud journey in 2013. It all began with a five-year roadmap that included a big adoption of technology to improve the efficiency of its operations. In fact, the management saw technology as an enabler of change and wanted to use it to stay ahead of competition.

Four years later, everything seems to be working as per plan for Travis Perkins as efficiency and productivity have soared. The company’s self service portal supports about 30,000 staff who find these IT tools productive and less time-consuming. Undoubtedly, this company’s IT budget has doubled over the last four years to keep pace with the benefits that come from it.

So, what exactly has changed in this company?

First and probably the most important is a change in the mindset. The company’s culture has moved from one where technology was seen as a disruptor to an active adoption of the same and even making it an integral part of everyday operations. Employees were given training on how to handle the new internal systems and this has worked wonders for the company in terms of what its employees can achieve in the same given time.

The second change is to move from an environment where fast fixing a problem was the norm to an environment where the possibility of a problem was reduced. In other words, Travis Perkins moved from a “fixing” approach to a preventing one, and this has helped the company to save a considerable amount of time and money.

With technologies like cloud, it was in a better position to predict a problem even before it occurred and could fix it right away. As a result, there was no disruption or loss to its operations. This was way better than addressing a problem and finding a solution after it occurred.

Thirdly, adoption of technologies like cloud helped this company to move away from legacy systems. Now, its new systems are more unified and presents many advantages such as flexibility and speed – things that were impossible to achieve earlier. It’s also helped the company to achieve greater levels of integration among all its operations.

This is a remarkable improvement considering that Travis Perkins is a company that operates in the traditional construction sector. It also quashes the myth that traditional sectors are fairly slow to adopt IT when compared to sectors like ITES and finance. In fact, the approach taken by this company is an example for other players in this industry to follow suit, so that everyone can leverage the power of IT, especially its emerging technologies like cloud, AI, IoT and machine learning.

Going forward, Travis Perkins aims to create a successful product catalogue that’ll allow customers to buy their products through the self-service portal. It also wants more employees, even those in warehouses, to use its IT systems to log incidences and track their progress.

Though these goals are sometime away, the cloud process has nevertheless started.

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With infrastructure and technology in place, the next frontier that companies are aiming for is speed.  Terark, a Chinese company believes that it has the secret to make cloud 200x faster than its existing speed.

Is it true?

Apparently yes. Terark has developed algorithms that compress data to help databases run 200x faster than their existing speeds. This translates roughly to one Terark database doing the job of five servers running existing industry standard databases.

The inventor of this algorithm, Lei Peng, is also the CTO of Terark. According to him, existing databases store their data in blocks and each block has an index associated with it. To retrieve data, a search has to be made through the indices and the corresponding block has to be retrieved. To do this, these blocks of data have to be compressed and decompressed, and this puts a huge workload on existing servers.

Terark’s algorithm addresses this limitation by using a method called Nested Succint Trie that can index 100% of the data. For comparison, current systems index only one percent of the data.

This way, blocks don’t have to be compressed, decompressed and retrieved, rather they can be read into directly. Compression still happens,  but at the global level, so the query speeds are much faster than before.

An analogy for this method is the library. Let’s say a library has different sections such as art and gardening and each section has hundreds of books. Each of these books have their own index, mostly likely as the first page.

When you want a book, the librarian will direct you to the appropriate section, but you’ll have to go through each book’s contents to find the information you want. That’s the existing system.

With Terark, the index pages of all the books are stored in a single database, which means, you can simply search through the index to find the book you want. It’s almost like putting your entire library on Google and searching through it, according to Remy Trichard, the VP of Terark.

Such an innovative approach has definitely caught the attention of big players in the cloud market. Already, this company has entered into a $1 million contract with Alibaba Cloud.  Under the terms of this contract, the Alibaba will give its clients the choice to switch their databases to TerarkDB to get faster speeds during search. Though the pricing structure is not still clear, Alibaba claims that its customers can save a ton of time and money by switching to TerarkDB.

Undoubtedly, this is a big deal for Terark and inspired by the success of its model, it is looking to move beyond the Chinese shores. In fact, it is looking to expand into European and American markets to scour for potential clients and to help them understand this new technology.

That said, this company is not looking to expand their offices beyond China, at least not for now. There are only ten employees now, but it already has six patents. It’ll be interesting to see how this company moves forward in the coming months.

The post Terark – A Company that Makes Cloud 200x Faster? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Google and Nutanix have entered into an agreement to further application development.

With this agreement, it’s clear that Google understands that it needs help from smaller companies to share its workload on the cloud. Currently, Google has a big presence in the public cloud, but runs behind competitors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. In fact, all these three companies fight intensely for the same public cloud space, though AWS is the clear leader among the three.

Nutanix, on the other hand, is a successful startup that went public last year. It’s data hardware and software gives a hybrid approach to the cloud and bridges the gap that exists between on-premise servers and data servers in the cloud.

Google obviously stands to gain much from this partnership as it can expand its market offering to also include hybrid cloud, apart from its plethora of offerings in the public cloud. This is also more in tune with the market expectations as many companies want to adopt a hybrid approach.

Though security concerns on the cloud have been bridged to some extent, there are still some inhibitions surrounding it, especially when it comes to critical data. This is why companies prefer to keep their mission critical data and applications close to them and run their other applications on the cloud. Such a hybrid approach is what is becoming a preferred mode and this explains why Google has struck an important partnership with Nutanix.

In the past, Google has been a little hesitant in supporting cloud architectures that are based on a  hybrid approach where a part of the company’s data is stored on its own infrastructure. With this partnership, Google has clearly come out of those inhibitions and even wants to use this to its favor.

This agreement is a part of Google’s larger plan to diversify its cloud offering and score over that of its competitors. In fact, Google has been embarking on a multitude of strategies to grow its cloud business and much of it has been successful so far.

From Nutanix’s point of view too, this is a big milestone as it gives a worldwide customer base and access to resources that can probably take years for Nutanix to create for itself.

It’s good news for cloud customers as well because they can have more choices and a better level of service when the products of both these companies are combined.

The first integration that comes from this partnership will be available to the public from the first quarter of 2018 onwards. These products are expected to make it easy for customers to seamlessly move their data between their on-premise and cloud architectures.

Overall, this is good news for customers and the cloud market at large.

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Neoway, a Brazilian company that provides analytics services to local companies announced that it has raised $45 million in funding. This round was led by QMS Capital and existing investors such as Accel, Monashees and Endeavor Capital joined in. Two notable new investors in this round were PointBreak and Pollux.

The main aim for this round of funding is that Neoway wants to expand its business outside of Brazil. In fact, it wants to bring its expertise to the U.S market as it believes there’s a lot of potential for its services here.

This company currently based in Florianopolis in Brazil specializes in collecting massive amounts of data and analyzing them to get meaningful insights that can help its customers to improve their businesses. It typically collects data from 6,000 different databases from more than 300 sources, collates them together and provides the analytics.

On the face of it, this process may seem simple, but in reality, it’s anything but simple. These 300 sources will have data stored in many different formats, so Neoway has to bring them to a common format first before any analysis can be run on it.

To give you a perspective, let’s say you’re a company that sells tour packages. To get an in-depth analysis of your customers and business operations, you need to collect data from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more. Each of this information can be in the form of a comment, like, text, image, video, audio or more. You’ll have to glean all the relevant information from these different data formats and put them together to get what you want.

Neoway uses bots to crawl the web and find any information that mentions your company or is relevant to you in some way. It identifies this relevance using advanced algorithms and machine learning technologies.

Based on this data, you can better understand the preferences of your customers and create packages that’ll appeal better to them. It can even help you to create and sell custom packages to customers based on their needs. In turn, this will increase your overall revenue and profitability.

Neoway has already help many Brazilian companies such as Raizen and Shell to tap into the power of analytics. As a part of its expansion plans, it has opened an office in New York City. To top it, it has partnered with a prominent data provider called InfoGroup and so far, has collected data from 50 million companies.

In addition, it’s also running a test pilot program with a prominent financial institution and a consumer goods company.

To gain a strong foothold in the U.S market, Neoway has hired Andrew Prozes, the former CEO of LexisNexis, another company that’s known for its work in the data warehouse industry. In fact, Prozes was also a part investor in this round of funding.

Let’s join together and wish this company a lot of success in its new stint in the U.S.

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Adobe Systems Inc has reported another incredible quarter that beat analyst’s expectations on both profits and revenue.

Adobe has announced that revenue from its digital media business is $1.21 billion, which is almost four billion more than what analysts were expecting. Overall, it’s revenue saw a 27 percent jump as it touched $1.77 billion during this quarter. Analysts were predicting a revenue of only $1.73 billion. Also, profit per share was $1.02 per share as against the expectation of 95 cents per share.

Adobe also raised its forecast to a growth of 23 percent as against the expectation of 22 percent.

Creative Cloud is the flagship product of Adobe and it’s also the one that’s seen one of the highest demands over the last few quarters.

According to company reports, there are over nine million members in its online community, thanks to the super popular Photoshop and Flash. In fact, it is believed that there two products helped Creative Cloud as a whole to cross the $1 billion mark during the last quarter. Since then, there has been no looking back. In this quarter, Creative Cloud and the Digitial Media Annualized Recurring Revenue accounted for $4.56 billion, as against the analysts expectations of $4.54 billion.

Undoubtedly, the share price of Adobe went up by four percent to reach a record level of $146 per share.

Much of this success can be attributed to the switch that Adobe made in 2012. Led by its CEO, Shantanu Narayen, this company switched to a cloud-based model to move many of its traditional products to the cloud. Though the CEO and the management were met with stiff resistance from investors, this strategy has paid well, as is evident from the strong results that Adobe has been churning quarter after quarter.

The company has even been making some acquisitions to strengthen its portfolio and to move deeper into cloud-based services. Late last year, it acquired a company called TubeMogul for $500 million. This is a brand advertising company that adds to Adobe’s creative products, thereby providing a richer experience and greater value for its customers.

Besides acquisitions, it has also been striking lucrative partnerships to promote its products and to continue to expand its customer base. An example of this strategy is the partnership it struck with Microsoft to sell more of its business marketing products.

All these different tactics have paid off well for the company and it sure has a happy bunch of investors today. This is evident from the meteoric rise of its shares over the last few years. A quick look shows that Adobe’s share price has risen about 350 percent over the last five years and touched new levels after the results were announced on Tuesday evening.

With such a positive outlook and a clear strategic direction, Adobe exudes a lot of confidence about its future. Investors, analysts, employees and all other stakeholders like to see such exuberance, and this is partly why we can say that the performance of the company as well as its share prices are going to go through the roof in the coming months.

The post Adobe’s Results Prove that Cloud is the Way Forward appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Adobe Systems Inc has reported another incredible quarter that beat analyst’s expectations on both profits and revenue.

Adobe has announced that revenue from its digital media business is $1.21 billion, which is almost four billion more than what analysts were expecting. Overall, it’s revenue saw a 27 percent jump as it touched $1.77 billion during this quarter. Analysts were predicting a revenue of only $1.73 billion. Also, profit per share was $1.02 per share as against the expectation of 95 cents per share.

Adobe also raised its forecast to a growth of 23 percent as against the expectation of 22 percent.

Creative Cloud is the flagship product of Adobe and it’s also the one that’s seen one of the highest demands over the last few quarters.

According to company reports, there are over nine million members in its online community, thanks to the super popular Photoshop and Flash. In fact, it is believed that there two products helped Creative Cloud as a whole to cross the $1 billion mark during the last quarter. Since then, there has been no looking back. In this quarter, Creative Cloud and the Digitial Media Annualized Recurring Revenue accounted for $4.56 billion, as against the analysts expectations of $4.54 billion.

Undoubtedly, the share price of Adobe went up by four percent to reach a record level of $146 per share.

Much of this success can be attributed to the switch that Adobe made in 2012. Led by its CEO, Shantanu Narayen, this company switched to a cloud-based model to move many of its traditional products to the cloud. Though the CEO and the management were met with stiff resistance from investors, this strategy has paid well, as is evident from the strong results that Adobe has been churning quarter after quarter.

The company has even been making some acquisitions to strengthen its portfolio and to move deeper into cloud-based services. Late last year, it acquired a company called TubeMogul for $500 million. This is a brand advertising company that adds to Adobe’s creative products, thereby providing a richer experience and greater value for its customers.

Besides acquisitions, it has also been striking lucrative partnerships to promote its products and to continue to expand its customer base. An example of this strategy is the partnership it struck with Microsoft to sell more of its business marketing products.

All these different tactics have paid off well for the company and it sure has a happy bunch of investors today. This is evident from the meteoric rise of its shares over the last few years. A quick look shows that Adobe’s share price has risen about 350 percent over the last five years and touched new levels after the results were announced on Tuesday evening.

With such a positive outlook and a clear strategic direction, Adobe exudes a lot of confidence about its future. Investors, analysts, employees and all other stakeholders like to see such exuberance, and this is partly why we can say that the performance of the company as well as its share prices are going to go through the roof in the coming months.

The post Adobe’s Results Prove that Cloud is the Way Forward appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

It’s raining money for startups and the latest startup to get funding is a French company called Shadow. Also called Blade, this company has raised a series A funding of $57.1 million. It had already raised more than $14.6 million from some prominent angel investors like Nick Suppipat and Michael Benobou among others.

It is attracting so many investors because of its unique idea. It treats your computer as being a part of a data center, so it treats your phones and laptops as a thin client. This is a different way to make your computers more powerful and portable than before.

The good part about this idea is that this company is not reinventing the wheel, rather it is building on the latest developments in the world of technology and are even leveraging it to give you a powerful service. As of now, this service is mostly geared towards cloud gaming, though it can be extended to other services as well in the future.

Currently, this startup company is running thousands of virtual machines on a 800-grade Xeon processor that comes with a dedicated Nvidia GTX 1070 for each instance of virtual machine. This means, as a user, you a private and powerful machine for gaming, but everything is in the cloud.

Imagine the benefits that come with it. First off, it helps you to save a ton of money. You no longer have to spend loads of money in buying a powerful computer and the necessary hardware that come with it. Rather, you can simply pay a monthly subscription to this service and avail the same infrastructure.

Secondly, it gives you the flexibility to opt for more powerful computers as they become available. For example, let’s say, you bought a computer with an advanced chipset for gaming. A few months down the line, the same company introduces a more advanced and powerful chipset that could potentially change the entire gaming experience. To enjoy this power, you’ll have to buy another chipset again or be contended with what you have.

But with Shadow and cloud gaming as a whole, the infrastructure is something you don’t have to worry about. It’s up to the company to upgrade its system and maybe charge you a little bit more to use the same service. Still, you get to leverage technology as they become available, without ever worrying about the costs involved.

Thirdly, all the infrastructure is managed for you, so you can sit back and enjoy the game. No more worrying about security updates and patches. Gaming doesn’t really get easier than this, and this is why Shadow is attracting so many investors.

As of now, this service is available only in France, but we can expect it to become available in other countries too, as the company has decided to accept a lot more customers. The demand for this service is going up, as users are spending an average of 2.5 hours each day over the last 30 days.

To offer a better service, this company is working on its encryption and other features too.

The post Shadow Raises $57 Million appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Netskope, a cloud access security broker, has raised $100 million in new funding. The Series E funding was led by its previous investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners. Along with these two investment firms, Social Capital and Iconiq Capital also participated. In addition, two new investors who had not participated in any Netskope’s previous rounds of funding also contributed and they are Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital.

According to a statement released by the company’s founder and CEO, Sanjay Beri, this additional round of funding would be used to building its customer base. In the previous round, Netskope released $938 million, thereby bringing the total money raised to $231.4 million

Netskope has been fairly successful in raising money for its activities, with the first round coming in 2013 and worth just a paltry $21 million. These funding rounds reflect the rapid strides Netskope has made over the last five years.

One of the biggest reasons could be the fact that cloud security is a booming industry. With growing use of devices, the many access points for an application is greatly increased. For example, let’s say you use an internal app to log in to your workplace and maybe even log time to it. You’re likely to see it from your desktop at work, your laptop at home and maybe even from your smartphone and tablet while on the move. This means, there are four access points to that app and a security vulnerability can come from any of it.

These multiple access points are one of the important reasons for the many hacking incidents we’ve seen over the last few years or so. Also, the emergence of different services such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and IDaaS are adding to security problems. To tackle the growing complexity of security head-on, Netskope has been working on a standalone security platform.

Existing systems and security practices don’t work well with cloud simply because it’s growing and becoming more integrated and complex by the day. This is why Netskope has come up with a unique principle that’s called “privacy by design.” This principle gives you the flexibility to track and identify specifically what you want such as a set of specific apps or documents instead of analyzing every bit of information that passes through your network, which is truly impossible. You can set keywords and create other security policies that will allow you to have a better control over your network and that’s exactly what Netskope aims to achieve with its platform. It has already secured this idea with more than a hundred patents.

That said, Netskope is not yet profitable and continues to depend on investors for its everyday operations. So, it’ll be interesting to see how much it’s able to translate its ideas into monetary value when it finally releases its platform to the world.

Until then, it’s a wait and watch game for investors and for the general public. There is also some skepticism in the industry circles about security products because none of them have really made the impact they claim to make. Let’s hope Netskope can change this barrier.

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Wave, a Canadian firm that specializes in offering cloud-based accounting software for small and medium firms got another round of funding today. NAB’s venture capital arm led this round of funding with A$32 million. Royal Bank of Canada and a few other investment firms were also a part of this funding round.

Wave was founded in 2010 to provide free accounting software for small businesses. Over the last few years, it has grown enormously and now it offers a suite of cloud-based products for a range of different financial activities such as lending, payroll, payments, invoices and receipts.

Currently, this company employs about 130 people and reaches out to more than 2.5 million customers spread across 200 countries.

Specifically, it has more than 25,000 small business customers in Australia and this explains why Australian-based companies like National Australia Bank (NAB) have invested in this company. In this round, NAB and RBC are the main investors and they are joined by companies like Social Capital, CRV, OurCrowd and HarbourVest. A few Canadian companies like IT Venture Fund, Portag3 and OMERS Ventures also participated with their Australian counterparts.

Though the exact split up of investments made by each firm is not known, NAB is one of the highest investors and this gives it an opportunity to appoint an observer to Wave’s Board of Directors. NAB has invested in many such small companies that create a big impact in the economic and social world.

This series of D investment is the eighth round of funding for Wave, and during the previous seven rounds, it has raised US$55.7 million. These levels of funding reflect the stellar performance of Wave. One of the highlights of this company is that it helps small businesses to be more productive and efficient by giving them the tools needed to be successful.

In fact, their invoicing and accounting software is free to use for anyone, but clients have to pay for additional software they need such as payroll, lending and more. In many Asian and African countries, these free tools can be a game changer and it is known to have helped many companies to become successful at what they do.

Such a social impact has garnered the interest of many firms, so it’s no surprise they are making a beeline to invest in Wave.

Wave announced that it will use this round of funding to integrate more financial services into its free software, so it has a greater benefit on small businesses and the people they employ. Such a move is sure to present opportunities for these small businesses to grow and along with, Wave will also grow.

Such accounting software can also change the way banks perform their core functions of risk assessment and credit pricing. Currently, banks use the data stored in the form of financial statements to make these decisions and the existing software systems and operational processes are based on this presumption. Now, with cloud-based accounting software, businesses can use live data which can disrupt the practices followed by the banking industry for decades.

NAB doesn’t seem to mind that though.

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