It’s been a string of changes at Rackspace. Only last week, the company announced that it has appointed a new CEO and a few days later, it announced that it is acquiring a managed and consulting cloud services company called TriCore Solutions.

The exact terms of the deal was not disclosed though it is speculated that this acquisition can give Rackspace a big boost in terms of its offerings and its stance in the cloud space today. The deal is expected to close by the end of June.

Though the financial details were not disclosed, Rackspace claims that this is the largest ever acquisition that the company has made so far. This is an important statement coming from the company considering that it has so far acquired eight companies, with the last acquisition being in 2013. This data goes to show the importance given by Rackspace to this deal, as the company believes that TriCore’s products and client base can give a big boost to the enterprise applications management segment of cloud.

TriCore specializes in providing Oracle and SAP Enterprise Resource Planning products that include business intelligence, analytics and data integration services. These are deemed as mission critical in most organizations, yet they are hard to manage and can cost the company a ton of money too. This is why most companies prefer to take help when it comes to handling these applications.

Rackspace has a firm footing in these mission critical applications market and to take it to the next level, it has acquired TriCore. In a way, TriCore’s products are complementary to that of Rackspace, so it’s only natural for both these companies to come together to capture a larger share in this market.

This acquisition gives Rackspace the flexibility to not just manage the cloud services of a company, but also move up the stack and manage complex applications from some of the larger vendors such as Oracle and SAP. This upgrade has been something that Rackspace’s customers have been asking frequently in the near past, and to meet their demands, Rackspace has decided to go ahead with the acquisition of TriCore instead of doing any research and development in-house.

This is a sensible move considering that TriCore and Rackspace have a lot in common and can benefit from each other’s expertise and knowledge. Currently, TriCore servers about 275 customers, and after this acquisition, all these customers will become a part of Rackspace. The new CEO of Rackspace, Jeff Cotten, even opined that TriCore’s workspace is similar to Rackspace, so the transition should be smooth for both the companies.

TriCore has about 500 employees and all of them are expected to join Rackspace, though they will continue to work from their existing locations.

The next few months are likely to be crucial for Rackspace as it moves away from competing with large public cloud providers. At present, Rackspace is unable to break the wield of companies like Microsoft, AWS and Google, so it makes sense for it to change its strategy and focus on  a smaller niche area.

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Mergers, acquisitions and buys have become a standard practice in today’s business world, especially in segments that see explosive growth like the cloud industry. The latest in this list is the announcement from Red Hat that it has bought a startup company called Codenvy, though the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Codency is a four year old startup company that specializes in providing cloud native development tools to help develop containers and cloud-first applications. Based in San Francisco, this company has about 40 employees.

Codenvy’s product is built on Eclipse Che, an open source and cloud integrated development environment that doubles up as a server as well. As a result, Codenvy integrates runtimes, project, development and test environments into a single space to make collaboration easy. And the best part is all of it runs well in Linux containers.

In addition, Conenvy also connects to popular workflow tools such as Jira and Jenkins to make it easier for developers to create any kind of cloud application, regardless of the segment or industry.

According to Harry Mower, a senior director at Red Hat, Codenvy’s technology reduces the time it takes for developers to get started and create cloud-based applications. In fact, this could be one of the reasons for Red Hat to acquire this startup.

Both these companies also have a long history of association as they have collaborated with Microsoft to create development tools. In fact, Codenvy is already a part of Red Hat’s OpenShift platform. Considering this association, it’s only natural for Red Hat to acquire Codenvy to strengthen its native tools portfolios.

Red Hat has announced that going forward, it will put Codenvy and Eclipse Che at the center of its workspace management technology. Also, it plans to add Codenvy to its existing portfolio of developer tools and application platforms, with an aim to make it easy for developers to create applications in hybrid cloud environments as well. Currently, many developers find it challenging to create applications for hybrid clouds, and Red Hat wants to reverse this trend and make life easy for these developers.

This can be an important move for Red Hat because the development environment is changing and evolving. Today, developers work across concurrent projects that require them to have mastery over multiple programming languages. This has created a lot of difficulty and pressure for developers, so everyone, including the organizations they work for, want to ease this pressure on them.

To top it, more organizations are moving towards DevOps and containers to accelerate the speed of deployment. To handle both these trends, a tools like Codenvy can come handy, as it will help developers to build complex applications across varying platforms with relative ease. It even allows developers across different geographical areas to communicate and collaborate with each other on the same tool. Again, this is sure to ease a lot of pressure for developers and can help them become more productivity in the future.

Overall, this is an important acquisition in the world of open source development and one that can give developers a lot to cheer.

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We’ve been using Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for a few years now. We added something called Identity as a Service (IDaaS) a few years back, and now it’s time for Supercomputing as a Service.

Cray, a supercomputer vendor, has made its high  performing computers, technologies and servers available to users through the cloud. It has recently partnered with a company called Markley to offer supercomputing technologies as a hosted service.

Under the terms of agreement, both these companies will come together to offer supercomputing to clients in the life sciences industry, to start with. Later, they’ll expand to other verticals and have even hinted that they’ll look at developing some industry-specific software and solutions in the future.

Overall, this is a good move that’ll augur well not only for these two companies, but for the technology industry as a whole. Currently, not all computers are supercomputers simply because it takes a certain amount of time, money and resources, and many organizations may not be up to it. In fact, they may want to focus on their core operations, which is understandable. At the same time, they were missing out on the power that comes with supercomputers.

Now, with supercomputer being offered as a service, it should be easier than before to simply use this service to improve your business, without having to spend considerable time and effort in getting the supercomputers ready. In this sense, this announcement can be seen as a big leap in the adoption of technology and hopefully it can transform many businesses in the future.

From Cray and Markley’s perspective too, this is a good move as it can create a niche area for both the companies. Markley is already well-known for its multi-tenant and mission critical infrastructure and data center facility, so this idea to bring supercomputers as a service will be an important feather to its cap. In fact, this Boston-based company has never experienced a primary power outage in its 15 years of operation, which is a remarkable feat by itself. Add supercomputers to this list, and it’s sure to make it even better.

With this offering, Cray plans to expand its reach to the commercial and enterprise data spaces as well. This is an interesting that was announced by its CEO, Peter Ungaro, during the most recent quarterly report that took place earlier this month. In this announcement, Ungaro accepted that the high-performance computing (HPC) market is slowing down and it’s time for the company to look into related adjacent markets as well.

While the HPC market may rebound soon, it still makes sense for a company to expand to commercial areas, as this is could end up to be a more lucrative and lasting market for Cray.

In all, supercomputer as a computer is a fantastic piece of news that has already started sending exciting ripples in the world of technology. Let’s see how it shapes up over the next few months.

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President Trump signed an executive order to put an end to the federal government’s cybersecurity woes.

This order mandates a single set of rules for all departments and puts the head of the department as accountable for that agency’s security. The obvious idea behind this accountability is to avoid department heads from passing the blame to the IT department, every time there’s a breach. By doing this, agency heads were caught passing the buck without taking any steps whatsoever to correct them.

To put an end to this blame games, this order was drafted quite some time ago and was supposed to have been signed on January 31 of this year, but was postponed without any reason or explanation. But, finally it was signed and would come into force right away.

An unexpected surprise that came to light in this order was an initiative to move as much of the government’s cyber-defense programs to the cloud. This means, the government wants departments to move their data and applications to the cloud to leverage its many benefits.

This is a significant and sensible move considering that there are roughly 190 departments today. If each department tries to develop its own defenses, then it’ll simply be a duplication of efforts and a waste of resources. A better way would be to share services and resources, so that efforts are more streamlined and departments can follow similar standards.

The Trump administration believes that historically a lot of time and effort went into creating and protecting legacy IT systems in federal departments and this spending did not yield any result. To top it, there are a number of security vulnerabilities as is evident from the many hacking incidents that have taken place over the last few years.

This is critical considering that U.S system’s store a lot of sensitive information about its residents such as their Social Security Number and date of birth, which can cause a lot of problems, when it falls in the wrong markets. There are already many criminals prowling in cyberspace to get such sensitive information, so they can sell it in the black market for a substantial amount of money.

When government systems don’t follow security best practices and use legacy systems, they make it that much more easier for these criminals to get the information they want. So, this move to move to the cloud could enforce better security standards and hopefully, will keep the criminals at bay.

Besides these important strategies, the order signed by President Trump also gives directives on reviewing the general vulnerabilities of the U.S government and its systems, zero in on the main culprits and adversaries of U.S cybersecurity and provide training to the next generation of cybersecurity professionals, so they can handle the future cyber needs of the country.

In all, this is an excellent and much-awaited move that’s needed to beef up the cybersecurity of U.S and also to protect the assets of its citizens.

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It’s raining agreements in the cloud sector, and the latest is the one that Oracle entered into with AT&T. Under the terms of this agreement, AT&T will move its thousands of large-scale internal databases to Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

This deal gives a win-win scenario for both companies. For AT&T, this deal gives access to Oracle’s cloud services portfolio and all the tools that come with it. Specifically, this agreement will allow AT&T to optimize the scheduling and dispatch of its field technicians.

Currently, AT&T employs more than 70,000 field technicians and it wants to make the most of their services. To optimize the skill and availability of these technicians, it wants to combine its own machine learning and big data capabilities with Oracle’s cloud technology. Through this combination, AT&T plans to increase the overall productivity and efficiency of its workers and ensure that technicians arrive on-time for service requests.

Right now, that’s one of the complains that its customers have, as the company gives a two-hour window for its technicians arrival time. That can be too large a time gap and customers can plan their day better if they know the exact arrival time of technicians. This is why AT&T wants to provide accurate time slots and want to ensure that its technicians arrive at the given time.

This time accuracy is dependent on the work duration of each job. For example, if a technician starts his first service at 9 AM and takes half an hour to finish it. Add another 15 minute commute time, so the next service can be only at 9.45 AM. Now, if the system predicts inaccurately that the technician can finish the job in 20 minutes, then he will not be able to keep up the next appointment. This is why both the duration of the job and the overall schedule of the technicians have to be considered, and AT&T is doing just that with advanced technology.

This is a significant agreement for Oracle too, as it’s looking to expand its cloud-based offerings. Such deep collaborations with existing clients provides more opportunities for Oracle to extend its offerings. Interestingly, Oracle entered into agreements with VMware and Equinix as well, on the same day. These three agreements can greatly boost Oracle’s revenue and more importantly, give it a firm hold in the competitive cloud market.

One significant trend that we’ve been noticing is the flexibility that companies like AT&T have when it comes to entering into agreements with cloud providers. For example, AT&T has earlier deepened its commitment with both Amazon Web Services and IBM to handle cloud services for networking, mobility, security, analytics and the Internet of Things. This is a heartening trend as companies can pick and choose the provider they want for multiple divisions or services, without having to rely on a single company to provide it all.

Overall, this agreement is expected to give rich benefits to both Oracle and AT&T, and hopefully will improve service and offerings to AT&T’s end customers.

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Verizon announced that it will be selling its cloud business to IBM to help boost the buyer’s presence in the cloud market. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, so we don’t know the exact amount that transpired in the deal.

This is surprising news for many reasons. In February 2016, Verizon said that it wants to continue providing top quality cloud service to its corporate and government customers, and to this end, it is making substantial investments in the cloud business.

But, by  end of 2016, it sold 29 data centers to a company called Equinux for $3.6 billion. Right after that, this news that it has sold its cloud and managed hosting services to IBM.

With this deal, Verizon has completely quit the cloud business, though it announced that it will be working with IBM on a range of strategic issues and initiatives. Again, the exact detail of these initiatives have not been disclosed.

So, what prompted Verizon to sell its cloud business and come out of the industry altogether? The answer may lie in the history of its cloud business.

Looking back, we can say that Verizon’s cloud business had a rocky start. It put together a new division after it acquired an offering from Terremark. It built too much on it too quickly as it moved its VMware to Xen. During this time, it also started a new object store and a block store. There was also a compute service that was offered for some time, but it was closed down in February of 2016 because Verizon wanted to focus on its virtual public cloud.

The message throughout was patchy and disorganized. One of the senior brass in Verizon, George Fischer, said that the company had ambitious plans for its cloud division as it wants to become the world’s leading managed services provider. To achieve this lofty goal, it wanted to created an eco-system using the best technology solutions from Verizon and other service providers. Within a few months though, the company sold its data centers.

Not sure what happened in the company during this time for such wild transitions and the gap between its actions and statements made by the top management.

IBM is silent on this deal. There has been no statements whatsoever from this company, though it is the one that stands to gain the most from this deal. IBM is one of the top players in the cloud market, but it is trailing heavily behind Microsoft and AWS. Google is also fast closing in on the cloud market.

To compete with these players, the infrastructure and client base it has obtained from Verizon can give it a big boost. Already, the company is making rapid strides in closing the gap, and this deal can further bolster these efforts.

In some ways, this is better for everyone because a few large players sharing the market is way better than a ton of small players who fight with each other for market share. Such a trend is healthy for the industry as a whole.

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Juniper Networks, a specialist in networking products, announced the first quarter results of 2017. It reported a revenue of $1.2 billion, which is a 11 percent increase year-on-year. The non-GAAP net income was $1.78 billion and this represents an almost 25 percent increase year-on-year.

Juniper’s business is divided into three main divisions, namely, telecom and cable, cloud and enterprise. Out of these three, cloud grew the most for the company and helped it to surpass the expectations of analysts. This led to the company’s earnings per share to be $0.46, almost four cents more than what the analysts had been expecting.

Going back to the segments, cloud grew the highest at the rate of 25 percent, while telecom and cable grew at 10 percent and strategic enterprise at two percent respectively. In fact, the telecom and cable business sagged a bit over the last quarter when compared to the year before, and this was compensated by a buoyant growth in its cloud segment.

Still, routing remains the staple of Juniper Networks, as it accounts for more than 43 percent of its revenue. However, that business grew only by three percent when compared to the last year.

This revenue clearly shows that cloud is the future for Juniper Networks as the revenue and growth are clearly better than the other sectors. The CEO of Juniper, Rami Rahim even said that cloud is one of the biggest strategies that’s driving the industry today. He said that companies across all verticals are adopting the cloud, thereby opening the cloud industry in many ways. This industry is no longer the exclusive idea of a handful of companies and that’s because cloud is way more than mere infrastructure and storage.

In other words, what this essentially means is cloud adoption is increasing the chances for  many tech companies to make it a primary revenue generator, and Juniper is likely to be one of them soon. This has also opened many opportunities for Juniper to expand within its own strength. Already, many telecom and cable operators are changing their architecture to include cloud services, and Juniper is poised to  handle this transition for them.

Already, Juniper has an interesting list of clients, with the top names being Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Facebook. It is also looking to expand its cloud offerings to traditional telecom providers located within and outside the U.S, as every company is looking to leverage the power of cloud.

Besides cloud, Juniper is also looking to strengthen its security business. The report shows that there’s been a small increase in the sale of security products, and the company is confident that it can do better in the coming months. Of special mention is Juniper’s SRX security portfolio that the CEO believes is gaining traction among its clients. We can expect better results from this product in the upcoming quarters.

With such an impressive result and an optimistic roadmap for the future, Juniper’s investors are sure a happy bunch. The stock price shot by six percent during aftermarket trading on Wednesday.

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Skyhigh Networks has announced that it has entered into an agreement with CIS Cybermarket, the government purchasing cooperative that serves the local, state and tribal governments.

Central Internet Security (CIS) Cybermarket, previously known as the CIS Trusted Purchasing Alliance, makes the most of the purchasing power of the public sector to help them navigate the world of cybersecurity. It specifically collaborates with leading cybersecurity companies to help the public sector take advantage of the advancements made in technology.

This is big news both in government tech and cloud world because this is the first time that CIS Cybermarket has offered the services of a cloud service broker to its members.

In general, security is a major concern for government departments because they deal with sensitive information such as Social Security Numbers (SSN), date of birth and financial details that can bring heavy loss if it falls in the wrong hands.

Moreover, there are still many apprehensions when it comes to storing sensitive information in the cloud, despite all the advancements made in the field of cloud security. Much of these apprehensions can be attributed to the number of hacking incidents that have taken place in the near past as well as lack of knowledge on the processes in place to curb these malpractices.

To assuage these fears, security assurances are important as they give a fair amount of confidence and surety about data safety. In this case, many members of CIS Cybermarket want to move their operations to the cloud, but are wary of the pitfalls. This is why Skyhigh Networks was chosen to provide the much-needed assurance about data safety.

To give you a small brief, Skyhigh Networks is a cloud access security broker that helps organizations to enforce security, compliance and governance policies across all its data points and cloud services, regardless of the device and number of users. In many ways, this cloud-hosted software provider acts as a control point to ensure continuous visibility, so companies can always stay on top of their data and applications. Such a software alleviates many fears and even gives assurance about cloud security.

So, this brings up the next question, why Skyhigh Networks and why not some other cloud access security broker?

One of the primary reasons is that Skyhigh Networks is the only cloud access service broker to be authorized through the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. This program is used by federal agencies to assess cloud vendors and to make the right choices based on their needs. Almost all state and local governments use this program as a standard for buying all kinds of cloud services.

Besides this authorization, Skyhigh also has the experience and expertise needed to guide members through the enforcement process across all their SaaS, PaaS and IaaS platforms.

This partnership, the first of its kind, is expected to bolster the relationship between public and private sector, particularly in the cloud industry. Let’s hope that this addresses many of the fears and insecurities that plague the public sector when it comes to cloud adoption.

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Huawei, a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Shenzhen has decided to build a cloud, but a little differently than others. It will be based on its cut of OpenStack, but the difference is it will have a patchwork of clouds that will run by itself.

Sounds confusing? Well, yes. After the announcement was made a couple weeks ago by its CEO Eric Xu, it got many reporters and the cloud community wondering on what this could be and what exactly does Huawei plan to implement.

After many questions and clarifications and reports by many journalists, it’s clear that Huawei will create a cloud platform and will take the help of its partners to build public clouds that’ll run on this platform.

Surprisingly, Huawei has already started the process of implementing this idea. It has already entered into partnerships with companies such as Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica and Orange and they are expected to build their public cloud offerings on this platform. Besides, Huawei has its own public cloud too that it runs in China. It’s not clear if this cloud service that it offers in China will be a part of its platform.

On the software side too, Huawei has made some progress. It has built a cut of OpenStack called “FusionSphere” and another software called “FusionStage”, which is an enterprise platform-as-a-service that is built on Kunernetes and Docker. Though these products are not complete and ready for public deployment, they’re almost there. This is also partly why Huawei has started offering it to customers who may want it.

At this point, it is targeting telecom companies, especially those in the developing countries. Huawei wants to target the countries where it has a wide presence and then move on to other markets. In fact, it is offering good kits at affordable rates, so these tools are accessible to anyone in any part of the world.

Though this company has spelled out a road map for its products and for its emergence as a key cloud player, there are some aspects that are still hazy. Will Huawei run its own public cloud? Will it back local cloud providers, and if so, what’s the criteria for that? There are many such unanswered questions, but what’s clear is that all Huawei-powered clouds have unified APIs that will allow their customers to migrate their operations to the cloud.

This can bring up the question of what’s different. Well, the significant difference is that Huawei plans to reach out to countries that the top players such as AWS, Microsoft and Google will not touch for years. This is great news for these countries as well as the cloud industry as a whole because it simply means that more countries and businesses will get to enjoy the benefits of cloud. This way, global companies will also get to work with local companies since they have cloud as the common link that can bring their businesses together.

Overall, this strategy from Huawei will work well for itself as well for other small companies in developing countries, provided it is implemented  the way it was conceived.

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