Benchling has launched its inaugural 2023 State of Tech in Biopharma report, which has shed light on the obstacles that biopharma encounter when striving to fully implement and embrace these technologies. The report surveyed 300 R&D and IT experts from biopharma companies large and small to do a first-ever investigation into biopharma’s use of an… Read more »
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Vertice, an optimisation platform for SaaS and cloud spend, has unveiled the results of its global survey, ‘The State of Cloud Cost Optimisation’, which reveals that organisations are being held back from controlling their cloud spending and gaining ROI because of a lack of alignment between finance and tech leaders. Amidst cloud costs rising by… Read more »
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Kyndryl, an IT infrastructure services provider, has unveiled the findings of its inaugural global survey and analysis of the current and future state of mainframe modernisation for businesses. The survey among 500 business and IT leaders finds that most organisations are taking a hybrid approach to mainframe modernisation and collectively achieve $12.5B in cost savings. In today´s competitive and fast-changing business environment, enterprises are looking… Read more »
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Dell Technologies has unveiled new Dell APEX offerings across cloud platforms, public cloud storage software, client devices and compute. These additions to its as-a-Service and multicloud portfolio spanning data centre to public cloud and client devices could help businesses operate and innovate faster through improved management and mobility of their applications and data wherever they… Read more »
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Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, started its recent annual Apsara Conference by announcing the launch of ModelScope. This is an open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform that comes with hundreds of AI models, including large pre-trained models for global developers and researchers. During its flagship conference, the cloud provider also introduced… Read more »
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Cloud access security broker Skyhigh Networks and security vendor Check Point claim they’ve jointly made security, compliance and governance policies for cloud services a lot easier to manage.
The initial launch of their combined service is aimed at regulating software, platform and infrastructure (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) as a service offerings.
The integration of their security offerings means that mutual customers can use Skyhigh’s cloud access security broker (CASB) and Check Point’s firewall more effectively while taking less time to set up and enforce internal policies. The idea is to alleviate the work of enterprise security managers as they try to comply with external regulations and protect corporate data.
Meanwhile Skyhigh is offering a free cloud audit as it claims that an all time high adoption of cloud has not been matched by cloud security standards. According to the Q4 2015 Skyhigh Cloud Adoption and Risk Report, the average company uses 1,154 cloud services and uploads over 5.6 TB to file sharing services each month. However, this vast migration of data to the cloud is creating a security gulf, it claims, because the rush to cut costs has seen companies lose visibility and control over their IT estate.
The combined Skyhigh Check Point service promises to shed more light on the state of the network, enforce data loss prevention (DLP) policies, protect company data, consolidate usage of cloud services, identify any risky data uploads or downloads from questionable service providers and protect against data exfiltration attempts. By applying threat intelligence to analyse cloud traffic patterns, detecting anomalous behaviour and remediating against users or cloud services the two partners claim they can restore the levels of security enterprises need, by making it easier to implement.
“Companies want to embrace cloud services, but they can’t leave behind security controls as corporate data moves off-premises,” said Chris Cesio, business development VP at Skyhigh Networks.
Oracle has added new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings from its Slough data centre, which currently caters for 500 UK and global customers.
Clients from both the private and public sector are being promised tailored versions of the new services, which include Oracle’s Database, Dedicated Compute, Big Data and Exadata cloud services.
Oracles claims that it is offering enterprises a mission critical PaaS and outlined four main selling points for the new services. Clients will now be able to develop, test and launch applications much more rapidly and cheaply, it claims. No supporting figures were given to exemplify this, however. Secondly, the new service will give companies greater flexibility without compromising their security, Oracle claims.
It will also use Hadoop’s open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware. This, says Oracle, will provide massive storage for any kind of data, boost the available pool of processing power and allow the data centre to handle a far greater volume of concurrent jobs. Oracle claimed that this can be delivered as a secure, automated service that meshes with existing enterprise data in Oracle Database. The fourth plank of its new offering is instant access to a virtual computing environment to run large scale applications on the Oracle Cloud.
Oracle currently has 19 data centres running its Oracle Cloud from various points of the globe. Last week it announced the intention to open a new Cloud data centre in Abu Dhabi. Oracle will be investing in two new cloud sales centres in Amsterdam and Cairo along with new offices opening this year in Dubai, Dublin and Prague.
In December 2015, BCN reported that Oracle’s co-chief executive Safra Catz warned fiscal 2016 will be “a trough year for profitability as we move to the cloud.”
In January 2016, however, BCN reported that Oracle had announced aggressive expansion plans with a recruitment drive for junior and senior sales staff to be based in six cities across EMEA.
The cloud software giant is now actively headhunting for 1,400 new cloud sales staff to work out of sales HQs in Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Malaga and Prague.
France-based ISP turned cloud operator OVH has announced that its TimeSeries platform service is now integrated with the 
cloud service provided by IoT specialist Sigfox.
The fine tuning of the two services was announced at the CES 2016 show in Las Vegas, where the two service providers demonstrated showed how the OVH TimeSeries platform as a service (PaaS) can analyse and act on data being fed in from 7,000 sensors connected to the Sigfox IoT.
OVH claimed that machine-learning algorithms within the TimeSeries service can identify patterns and automatically trigger actions in response to the perceived situation. Having started as an ISP in Roubaix, France OVH has evolved to become a cloud service provider in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Finland.
In November BCN reported how it has launched a public cloud service in the UK with customisable security as protection against cyber attacks becomes a major selling point alongside open systems mobility. It recently expanded its offering into the US and Canada. It currently has 220,000 servers in 17 data centres but claims it will have opened 12 new data centres by 2018.
The new integration means that now companies can use OVH’s PaaS TimeSeries application programming interfaces to retrieve data. This frees companies from having to build and manage their own databases, it claims.
The integration and demo at CES will help companies to understand the entire value chain of the Internet of Things, according to OVH CEO Laurent Allard. “A turn-key system for storing and managing data and hosting business applications makes it much simpler, quicker and cheaper to get running with the IoT,” said Allard.
In other news, Sigfox has also announced a pilot programme with the French postal service company La Poste. The two companies are collaborating to invent a new of online postal.
The Domino programme aims to automate the ordering of parcel pickup and delivery via Sigfox’s IoT network. A regional rollout will start in the first half of 2016.
However Oracle’s co-chief executive Safra Catz warned fiscal 2016 will be “a trough year for profitability as we move to the cloud.”
Oracle’s total revenues were down by 6% to $9.0 billion with the sales of ‘cloud plus on-premise software’ down 4% to $7.0 billion. Meanwhile, total cloud revenue has gone up in the last quarter by 26% (in US dollars) and Oracle made $649 million on pure cloud software. The two most successful categories of cloud software for Oracle have been SaaS and PaaS which accounted for $484 million, a rise of 34%. Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenue was $165 million, a rise of 7%.
Expect the SaaS and PaaS revenue to grow by 50% in Q3 and 60% in Q4, said Catz. According to Oracle it won 100 Fusion Human Capital Management system contracts and over 300 Fusion Enterprise resource planning deals in the last quarter. Oracle said it is on target to sell and book more than $1.5 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year.
“We now have more than 1,500 ERP customers in the cloud, that’s at least ten times more ERP customers than Workday,” said Oracle’s other joint CEO, Mark Hurd. “It was a very strong growth quarter for our cloud business, with SaaS and PaaS bookings up 75% in constant currency and billings up 68% in U.S. dollars.”
Not everyone in Wall Street is convinced however. “While the company is showing some signs of cloud success, the meat and potatoes legacy database and app business is under major secular pressure,” FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives told MarketWatch.
Oracle’s Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share of outstanding common stock.
Trade body the Cloud Foundry Foundation, has announced the industry’s first certification programme for platform as a service (PaaS) offerings as part of its drive to standardise the PaaS sector of cloud computing.
Cloud Foundry Certification aims to ensure all certified products use the same core Cloud Foundry software. Certification will be awarded to products and services that meet strict technical requirements outlined by the foundation’s technical governing body, it claims. Products called “Cloud Foundry” can only use that designation after meeting Cloud Foundry Certification standards. Products must re-certify every year.
The goal is to make applications work across any PaaS in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment. The first products to be tested for certification will be CenturyLink’s AppFog, HPE Helion Cloud Foundry, Huawei FusionStage, IBM Bluemix, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, SAP HANA Cloud Platform and Swisscom Application Cloud.
The standard is necessary because the first generation of cloud computing companies saved time and money by tying themselves to a single cloud provider such as Amazon or Google, according to Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji. As the second generation of companies begins businesses want long term commitment and need an industry standard in order to regain control of their applications.
“Now that companies are regularly building new applications on their platforms they want broad standardisation across vendors,” said ESG Analyst Stephen Hendrick. Gartner research reports the PaaS market crossed the $4 billion mark this year and Wikibon Research predicts it will grow to $68.3 billion by 2026.
IDC predicts that by 2016, there will be an 11% shift In IT spending, with money being moved from traditional in-house IT delivery to the cloud and by 2017, 35% of new applications will use cloud-based as faster DevOps life cycles to streamline app production.
Cloud Foundry is collectively developed by 55 member companies in banking, telecoms, heavy industry, management consulting and large-scale computing vendors such as Pivotal, IBM, SAP, HPE, Intel, EMC, VMware, Cisco.
The platform is portable across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and a range of data centre infrastructure.