Archivo de la categoría: Private Cloud

AWS, Financial Results, hybrid cloud, Managed services, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Rackspace

Rackspace prioritises AWS and Azure partnerships for future growth

Taylor Rhodes

Taylor Rhodes, President and CEO at Rackspace

Rackspace has reported healthy growth for Q1 2016, as the team continues its transition to become managed services provider, leveraging partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Revenues for the first quarter were reported at $518 million, a year-on-year growth of 9.9%, while profits grew 77.5%. Although the growth of the business over the last 12 months has been viewed as generally positive, industry commentators highlighted the $24 million gain from the divestiture of Jungle Disk, and what could be perceived as a lacklustre outlook for the rest of 2016 has dampened the news. The exec team expects revenues of between $519 million and $524 million for the second quarter.

“First, we saw a strong demand for our expertise and support on the AWS and Microsoft Clouds and for our OpenStack private cloud offer. Collectively, we now serve more than 400 customers on these platforms and our demand is scaling rapidly,” Taylor Rhodes, President and CEO at Rackspace. “From the October launch of our AWS service through the end of April, we’ve been actively marketing with AWS and have signed 187 customers across every firm size, geography, and vertical.”

The transition to a managed cloud services company began a number of years ago with the launch of Rackspace’s Fanatical Support services, though seemingly began making real traction within the industry last year, as the team announced expanded partnerships with Microsoft in July, when Azure public and private cloud infrastructure was incorporated into the offering, and AWS in August. The team also recently announced a new partnership with Cloud Technology Partners, which it believes will increase cloud adoption rates.

The partnerships are also enabling the company to diversify its geographical focus as over 40% of the AWS customers are coming from non-U.S. regions. Rhodes also believes the new capital-light business models employed enables the company to roll-out new offerings worldwide. Previously, new products were rolled out first in the USA, due to capital intensity, and then phased out over time into other regions worldwide, however the new model is claimed to offer Rackspace increased flexibility and agility in bringing new offerings to the market.

The shift in strategic direction is supported by a renewed effort in the marketing department, as Rhodes highlighted campaigns will now be directed towards driving brand awareness and demand generation for the managed cloud services business, specifically the Fanatical Support services offered to AWS and Microsoft Azure customers.

“Our new head of Global Sales and Marketing, Alex Pinchev, started work at the beginning of Q1,” said Rhodes. “He and his team are moving aggressively to shift resources toward our new fast-growing offers while sustaining our core business. They are training more of our sales teams to sell our new offers and are hiring additional specialists in areas of high demand. We advised you last quarter that these sales and marketing efforts will take time to gain full traction, that transition contributed to our slow start to the year”

Efforts for Rackspace on the OpenStack front would also appear to be bearing fruit, with the launch of OpenStack Everywhere, Next Generation Bare Metal Servers and the Private Cloud Powered by Red Hat offering. All three offerings would seemingly demonstrate the company’s drive towards the OpenStack private and hybrid cloud market segments. The team are confident in the growth potential of the OpenStack private cloud market, and highlighted a number of major customers wins were through this aspect of the business.

“Our role as the co-founder of OpenStack has given us unique capabilities in software development, DevOps, continuous integration and deployment, and other key disciplines,” said Rhodes. “Those capabilities provide a major differentiation for us versus other managed services providers as we expand to provide managed cloud services on AWS and the Microsoft Cloud.

“We’ve really seen a tipping point, what really looks like a significant tipping point in the market for OpenStack private clouds in the last six months to nine months. Some of our largest deals that we closed in March were OpenStack private cloud deals and some of the largest deals that we have in our pipeline today are OpenStack private cloud deal. So, really that’s the traction that we’re seeing.”

Adoption, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Statistics, VMTurbo

57% of organizations still don’t have multi-cloud strategy – survey

Competition. Business concept illustrationResearch from VMTurbo has highlighted 57% of organizations have no multi-cloud strategy at all, where as 35% do not have a private cloud strategy and 28% lack one for public cloud.

Although hybrid cloud is considered one of the growing trends within the industry, the research suggests the noise behind multi-cloud strategies is coming from either a small number of customers, or from vendor organizations themselves. Of those who would be considered in the ‘Functional Multi-cloud Owner’ group, which only represented 10.4% of the respondents, almost half were using a two-cloud model, and just over a quarter were using a three-cloud model. The multi-cloud strategy was favoured by larger organizations in general.

“A lack of cloud strategy doesn’t mean an organization has studied and rejected the idea of the cloud; it means it has given adoption little or no thought at all,” said Charles Crouchman, CTO of VMTurbo. “As organizations make the journey from on-premise IT, to public and private clouds, and finally to multi- and hybrid clouds, it’s essential that they address this.

“Having a cloud strategy means understanding the precise costs and challenges that the cloud will introduce, knowing how to make the cloud approach work for you, and choosing technologies that will supplement cloud adoption. For instance, by automating workload allocation so that services are always provided with the best performance for the best cost. Without a strategy, organizations will be condemning themselves to higher-than-expected costs, and a cloud that never performs to its full potential.”

The survey also demonstrated the total cost of ownership is not fully understood within the community itself, less so within smaller organizations. SME’s planning to build private cloud environments estimated their budget to be in the region of $150,000 (average of all respondents), whereas the total bill for those who have already completed such projects averaged at $898,508.

The stat backs up thoughts of a number of organizations who believe there should be more of a business case behind the transition to the cloud than simply reducing CAPEX and OPEX. Last month, BCN spoke to Gwil Davies, Director & Cloud Lead in the EMEA IT Infrastructure Centre of Excellence at Deloitte, to understand the economics behind cloud computing. Davies believes a successful journey to the cloud is not just focused on reducing CAPEX and OPEX throughout the organization, but identifies where value can be achieved through a cloud-enabled business.

“I think it’s more important for organizations get a real understanding of how to use the cloud and perhaps not automatically assume that moving all of their current IT into cloud is going to be the cheaper solution.” said Davies.

The business case for the cloud is almost entirely dependent on the long-term ambitions of the business itself, though the survey does imply there is a need to further educate some corners of the IT industry on the benefits and perceived cost of private cloud. Cloud computing as a concept could be perceived to have penetrated the mainstream market, though the benefits may be less so.

Bharti Airtel, Enterprise IT, Micrsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Bharti Airtel bolsters cloud capabilities with Microsoft partnership

Silhouette Businessman Holding PuzzleBharti Airtel has announced the launch of Connexion as well as a new collaboration with Microsoft to deliver Azure ExpressRoute to Indian businesses.

The new Connexion service is designed to maximize network performance over the cloud, whereas Azure ExpressRoute ensures a more secure and scalable connection between enterprises, cloud service providers, and data centre partners, through using a private connection as opposed to public internet. Microsoft claim the service increases reliability, speed and security, while also lowering latency.

“Over the years, at Airtel, we have been serving a vast array of global customers through our world class technology and innovative connectivity solutions,” said Ajay Chitkara, CEO of Global Business at Bharti Airtel. “Today, we are excited to further expand our value proposition for them with the launch of our ‘Connexion’, which is a direct private connectivity to cloud services.

“This platform is the right choice for the service providers and businesses seeking to make their IT infrastructure more agile and flexible. With ‘Connexion’ – we are confident of helping customers seamlessly and more securely connect to Microsoft Azure, by bringing down their network cost substantially and improving performance.”

The partnership further increases Airtel’s international cloud capabilities and ability to serve customers in the Middle East, South Asia and Asia-Pacific regions. Last month, the Airtel business also announced a partnership with GBI to build its influence within the Middle East. GBI operates a multilayer carrier neutral network, connecting the world to the Middle East, a region which is a long-term target for Airtel’s growth ambitions.

“This new partnership with GBI is a significant step in that direction,” said Chitkara. “GBI being a key network asset for the region will not only improve our customers’ experience and reach but would also enable GBI’s customers to experience a seamless extension on the Airtel Global network spanning across 50 countries across 5 continents”

data protection, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

IBM and Box extend partnership to offer greater flexibility on data residence

Partnership hand holdingIBM has extended its partnership with Box to provide enterprises the choice to store data regionally in Europe and Asia on the IBM Cloud.

The IBM cloud will be available as part of Box’s new Box Zones technology, and is the first time that Box customers will have the choice of where to store their data. IBM will also utilize the Box Zones offering to extend its hybrid cloud proposition.

“Organizations want to tap into all of the benefits of the cloud while retaining the security, performance, control and other attributes they might achieve with local data centre infrastructure,” said John Morris, general manager at IBM Cloud Object Storage. “With Box Zones and the IBM Cloud, enterprise customers across Europe and Asia will soon have the choice to leverage the IBM Cloud global footprint locally, and uniquely support hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments, integrating data between Box Zones and on-premises content repositories”

Since the launch of the partnership in June 2015, the pair has integrated a number of different products, including a new version of the IBM MobileFirst for iOS Expert Seller app that is built on Box Platform.

“Box and IBM are focused on bringing world-class technology to enterprises across the globe, and on building dynamic content and collaboration solutions that transform the way our customers do business,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. “Box Zones enables us to combine Box’s rich, intuitive content management experience and collaboration tools with IBM Cloud’s powerful global infrastructure to overcome many of the data storage concerns faced by businesses in Europe and Asia.”

The launch would appear to be well timed as transatlantic data movement and residence has been under continuous scrutiny following the European Court of Justice’s decision to strike down Safe Harbour last October. While EU-US Privacy Shield has been put to the industry, receiving backing from Microsoft in the process, industry insiders have told BCN that the new policy is unlikely to have much impact on the concerns of EU citizens and businesses. As the EU-US Privacy Shield is a policy, not law, companies are likely to refer directly to national legislation as opposed to any European directive.

IBM’s and Box’s partnership could be perceived as a shrewd move to counter any arguments that potential customers have with regard to their data residence and overall compliance.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Public cloud spend to increase by 14.1% in 2016

Searching. Search for opportunities. Business illustrationResearch firm IDC have released findings which demonstrate healthy growth in the cloud market throughout 2016.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker estimates spending on public cloud infrastructure is to increase by 14.1% over the course of the 12 months to $24.4 billion, and spending on private cloud platforms could be up 11.1% to $13.9 billion.

“For the majority of corporate and public organizations, IT is not a core business but rather an enabler for their core businesses and operations,” said Natalya Yezhkova, Research Director for the storage systems group at IDC. “Expansion of cloud offerings creates new opportunities for these businesses to focus efforts on core competences while leveraging the flexibility of service-based IT.”

Total spend for IT infrastructure products is expected to increase by 18.9% over the course 2016 to reach $38.2 billion, though it is still yet to surpass traditional, non-cloud, environments, which will decrease by 4%. Non-cloud platforms will still account for the majority of enterprise IT spend, accounting for 62.8%. From a cloud-deployment product perspective Ethernet switching spend will increase by 26.8%, with investments in servers and storage to grow at 12.4% and 11.3%, respectively.

The report also detailed vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products over the course of 2015, which grew 21.9% to $29 billion. Revenues for Q4 grew at a slower rate, 15.7%, but still accounted for $8.2 billion, with public cloud grabbing the lion’s share $4.9 billion. Japan saw the largest margin of growth, 50%, whereas Central and Eastern Europe declined 9.3% seemingly owing to political and economic turmoil, which could be linked to a reduction in IT spend.

“The cloud IT infrastructure market continues to see strong double-digit growth with faster gains coming from public cloud infrastructure demand,” said Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Computing Platforms at IDC. “End customers are modernizing their infrastructures along specific workload, performance, and TCO requirements, with a general tendency to move into 3rd Platform, next-gen technologies.

“Public cloud as-a-service offerings also continue to mature and grow in number, allowing customers to increasingly use sophisticated, mixed strategies for their deployment profiles. While the ice was broken a long time ago for public cloud services, the continued evolution of the enterprise IT customer means that public cloud acceptance and adoption will continue on a steady pace into the next decade.”

HPE continued as market leader for cloud IT infrastructure vendor revenues bringing in around $4.55 billion over the course of 2015, increasing its market share from 15% to 15.7%. Dell, Cisco, EMC and IBM completed the top 5, with only IBM dropping market share over the period. The company’s market share decreased 24.6% to roughly $1.24 billion, down from 6.9% to 4.3% of the overall segment.

News & Analysis, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Volkswagen

Volkswagen moves to OpenStack platform with start-up Mirantis

VWCar manufacturer Volkswagen Group has chosen OpenStack as its global standard for its next generation private cloud platform, as part of a worldwide standardization project to reduce IT costs and increase automation.

The company signed the deal with start-up Mirantis over the major players in the industry. While the move represents one of the biggest wins to date for the start-up, it would appear that Red Hat have lost out on a healthy deal in the process. Volkswagen is currently a customer of Red Hat, though it is not clear to what degree the relationship will continue.

“As the automotive industry shifts to the service economy, Volkswagen is poised for agile software innovation,” said Mario Müller, VP IT Infrastructure at Volkswagen. “The team at Mirantis gives us a robust, hardened distribution, deep technical expertise, a commitment to the OpenStack community, and the ability to drive cloud transformation at Volkswagen. Mirantis OpenStack is the engine that lets Volkswagen’s developers build and deliver software faster.”

Volkswagen highlighted the move to a private cloud platform will enable the business to better compete in an ever-more digitally enabled world. Müller said that four trends drove the company towards a more agile cloud computing platform, as the new platform enables greater levels of automation as well as a less consuming procurement process.

“Ubiquitous connectivity means we’ll have 50 billion smart sensors in end devices by 2030,” said Müller. “Cloud computing means data access everywhere. That means the amount of stored data doubles every two years. Third, social media. We have 1.3 billion Facebook users today, heading towards 7 billion. And big data. We can do real-time analysis of mass amounts of data.”

Initially Volkswagen will move its infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, ending with Platform-as-a-Service for the infrastructure model. On IaaS, Volkswagen will manage the middleware, runtime, data and applications, whereas Mirantis will manage the operating system, virtualization layer, servers, storage and networking, while on PaaS the company will only manage data and applications. The company aim to have PaaS up and running by July of this year. The transition to the IaaS model was completed at the end of 2015.

“First, it’s a service (the current IaaS platform) and not simply dedicated hardware,” said Müller. “The target VW internal audience is administrators and technical competence centres. It’s not designed for end users. The IaaS services provide virtualized hardware computer, networking and storage running on Linux with root access. Connectivity is via VW’s intranet. It’s not yet connected to the Internet. It doesn’t support legacy applications and we don’t yet offer central backups. It’s available to our teams in America, Europe and Asia.”

The deal represents a major win for Mirantis, which previously counted Red Hat as one of its investors. In two rounds of fund-raising in January and June 2013, Mirantis raised $10 million in growth capital funding from various venture capitalists, as well as a further $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP. The company then launched its own OpenStack distribution in October 2013, putting it in direct competition with Red Hat, though the technology still worked with Red Hat operating systems.

In recent years, the relationship between the two companies would appear to have soured as Red Hat announced in May 2014 that it would no longer provide support to Linux customers using non-Red Hat versions of OpenStack, contradicting the spirit of the open source community. Later that year in November the company also ordered all employees to stop working with Mirantis. The saga would not have appeared to have effected Mirantis’ perception in the market.

“OpenStack is the open source cloud standard offering companies a fast path to cloud innovation,” said Marque Teegardin, SVP at Mirantis. “It is our privilege to partner with Europe’s largest automaker and we are thrilled to support them as they use the software to out-innovate competitors and expand their business on a global scale.”

Enterprise IT, Korea, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Korean government prioritizes growth of cloud computing

Network ExpansionThe Korean government has announced a new policy to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in the country, according to Business Korea.

Speaking at a cloud computing conference in Korea, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning have announced that it will be running a number of initiatives to increase the adoption of cloud computing from 6.4% to 13%, seemingly over the next twelve months. Over the same period, the government also plans to increase the number of Korean cloud companies from 353 to 500, as well as growing private cloud adoption in public institutions to at least 3%.

The Korean government has estimated that should the new initiatives be successful the domestic cloud market could be worth in excess of 1.1 trillion won, roughly £670 million. To support the growth of the industry, the government will also build a cloud computing support centre in Daegu City, which will provide guidance for public institutions who are making the transition.

While the government has laid bare its intentions for the industry in the country, it has not been stated how cloud computing is currently perceived by enterprise. The government has estimated that 6.4% of businesses in Korea currently utilize the cloud, whereas in the UK the figure is viewed as generally much higher. It has been estimated recently that 93% of enterprise in the UK have adopted the cloud.

In what could be seen as a move to encourage enterprise appetite for the cloud, the government has invited enterprises in need of cloud computing in various industries to join the deregulation task force currently led by IT firms in the private sector.

Alongside this announcement, the government has also prioritized the growth of SME’s through the adoption of cloud. In what appears to be a move to emulate companies such as Uber and AirBnB, Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning will work in collaboration with the Center for Creative Economy & Innovation to provide cloud software and infrastructure to smaller organizations who could otherwise not afford the technology.

In terms of international expansion of the Korean cloud computing industry, the government will once again provide assistance highlighting the Software-as-a-Service market. It believes the SaaS market is where the country has the greatest opportunity to compete on the international scale, as there is not an outright market leader for the moment. It also believes that the country is a good position to capitalize on the growing Infrastructure-as-a-Service market in South East Asia.

The success of all cloud initiatives could partly depend on the success of the government in engaging enterprise in the country and building the appetite for the technology, which is at a low adoption rate in comparison to other nations.

hybrid cloud, natural resources wales, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Trustmarque

Natural Resources Wales extends cloud ERP relationship with Trustmarque

CloudSystem integrator Trustmarque has announced it will continue it work with Natural Resources Wales, focusing on disaster recovery, and application and infrastructure support.

The agreement, which has now been in place for two years, was initially launched to help Natural Resources Wales simplify its IT estate following the merger of the three different bodies. Natural Resources Wales was brought about through the merger of Countryside Council for Wales, Environment Agency Wales, and the Forestry Commission Wales, all of which operated on different ERP systems.

“The creation of Natural Resources Wales resulted in a complex and disparate IT estate, and over the past two years Trustmarque has helped us effectively simplify it,” said Paul Subacchi, Head of Business Support Services at Natural Resources Wales. “Our ERP system is absolutely critical to the organisation, enabling us to become more efficient and offer greater self-service functionality to our employees.  Cloud is a significant part of our IT strategy, so we need a platform that is available, resilient, flexible and secure to deliver our ERP system.”

Initially projects focused on consolidating all ERP systems it was using for finance and HR onto a single platform, delivered through a combination of cloud, on premise and managed services. Trustmarque will now deliver Natural Resources Wales’ sole ERP system as a private cloud service, as well as creating a self-service portal, MyNRW, for the organizations 2000 employees.

Security was an important consideration for Natural Resources Wales, as Trustmarque has to continually demonstrate that it meets minimum security requirements set forward by G-Cloud. The requirements range from encryption to protect consumer data transiting networks, Trustmarque staff security screening and consumer separation, as well as ensuring that its own supply chain meets the same standards.

“The work we have done with NRW throughout our collaboration is testament to Trustmarque’s end-to-end IT service capabilities and our expertise in delivering cloud services,” said Mike Henson, Cloud and Managed Services Director at Trustmarque. “By selecting the Trustmarque Cloud, Natural Resources Wales is now able to realise the benefits of its Unit 4 ERP system via a secure and robust platform.

“We’ve also removed the potential ‘headache’ that software licensing can cause, allowing Natural Resources Wales to focus on its core business without any compliance concerns. We see our continuing partnership with Natural Resources Wales as an important and valuable digital transformation programme, and look forward to our future work together.”

AWS, DropBox, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Dropbox drops Amazon Web Services for in-house system

Hand Touching A Cloud Secured By Electronic LockDropbox has announced that it will no longer be utilizing Amazon Web Service’s cloud infrastructure, favouring its own in-house solution.

The project, named “Magic Pocket” has been in the works for over two and a half years, and will store and serve over 90% of users’ data on the company’s own custom-built infrastructure. Dropbox was one of Amazon’s first customers to utilize its S3 service to store bulk data eight years ago, but has commented that the relationship will continue in certain areas.

“As the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system,” said Akhil Gupta, Dropbox VP of Engineering. While the company has traditionally stored file content on Amazon, the hosting of metadata and Dropbox web servers has always been in data centres managed by Dropbox itself.

“There were a couple reasons behind this decision. First, one of our key product differentiators is performance. Bringing storage in-house allows us to customize the entire stack end-to-end and improve performance for our particular use case,” said Gupta. “Second, as one of the world’s leading providers of cloud services, our use case for block storage is unique. We can leverage our scale and particular use case to customize both the hardware and software, resulting in better unit economics.”

The company has witnessed healthy growth over recent years, recently passing the milestone of 500 million users and 500 petabytes of user data, prompting the in-house move. Back in 2012, the company only had around 40 petabytes of user data, demonstrating 12-fold growth in the last four years. Dropbox initially began building its own storage infrastructure in 2013, with the company first storing user files in house in February 2015. The team hit its goal of storing 90% of its data in-house on 7 October 2015.

“Magic Pocket became a major initiative in the summer of 2013. We’d built a small prototype as a proof of concept prior to this to get a sense of our workloads and file distributions. Software was a big part of the project, and we iterated on how to build this in production while validating rigorously at every stage,” said Gupta “We knew we’d be building one of only a handful of exabyte-scale storage systems in the world. It was clear to us from the beginning that we’d have to build everything from scratch, since there’s nothing in the open source community that’s proven to work reliably at our scale.”

The move highlights the transition through to private cloud as a business benefit once enterprise reaches a certain level. Zynga is another company who have a similar story, moving between private and public cloud in recent years. Zynga is now in the process of shifting its data back onto in-house infrastructure. Dropbox’s move highlights the potential for overhead reductions when effectively moving onto private cloud, though if the company fails to scale as planned, the move could become a financial burden.

While the move does result in AWS losing a substantial amount of business, it is not the end of the relationship. The team will continue to partner with Amazon for new projects, but will also offer its European customers the opportunity to store data on AWS infrastructure in Germany, should they request it.

News & Analysis, Open Source, Private Cloud, Suse

SUSE targets simplification with OpenStack Cloud 6 release

Public privateGerman open source vendor SUSE claims its new OpenStack Cloud 6 is designed to overcome the fear of commitment that is putting IT buyers off engagement with the cloud. SUSE claims its new private cloud offering is a solution to the buying objections that potential customers have outlined.

According to SUSE’s own feedback, many companies want the cloud but think it’s too much hassle to install applications and can’t risk the disruption to their business. A recent study commissioned by SUSE found that more than 90% of large companies say they’ve already got at least one private cloud within their business, can see the advantages and would, in theory, use cloud computing for more business-critical workloads. But in practise they are not going to. Their worst fears are over installation challenges, possible vendor lock-in and a lack of OpenStack skills in the market.

SUSE claims it can address these fears and aims to convince potential clients that they won’t be subject to IT project creep. In response it is offering non-disruptive upgrades and a more business-friendly release cycle with longer support duration. This combination, it claims, will compensate for the limited skilled resources by requiring fewer upgrades and minimising disruption to production environments.

In addition, SUSE aims to offer more training to boost the available skills base with a new OpenStack training and certification scheme. SUSE is introducing the SUSE Certified Administrator-OpenStack  (SCA-OpenStack) certification along with a new training course on how to install and administer SUSE OpenStack Cloud. This is intended as a complement to, not a replacement for, existing SUSE OpenStack Cloud training. The training was developed in collaboration with the OpenStack Foundation exam development team.

A new course will specifically prepare students to take both the OpenStack Foundation Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam as well as the SCA-OpenStack exam. The new course will be held unveiled at an OpenStack Summit in Texas on April the 25th.

The Cloud 6 is based on the OpenStack release Liberty, has Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support designed to make it easier to move applications and data to the cloud. Cloud 6 also supports Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware hypervisor options and the OpenStack Manila shared file system service.