Category Archives: Public Cloud

DropBox, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Dropbox steps ups European commitment with local signing

DropboxDropbox has announced the appointment of Philip Lacor, who will act as the new VP for EMEA Sales, based out of the Dublin office.

The company has been making notable efforts in recent months to increase its presence in the European market, capitalizing on free-user growth in the region. Aside from Lacor’s appointment, Dropbox has opened offices in Hamburg, Dublin, London, Paris and Amsterdam, as well offering localized payment models in 12 European countries to increase the number of upgrades to the paid-for services.

With the continuing dispute between the EU and US focusing on transatlantic data transmission not looking like it would end in the near future, a number of companies have been identifying means to remove concerns of the European customers. Dropbox has opened several offices around Europe, hired local employees and outlined plans for a European data centre, where as Box has developed its Zones offering through a partnership with IBM. For the Zones offering, customers can opt to have their data stored regionally on the IBM Cloud.

“Dropbox now has over half a billion accounts across the globe and nearly 40% are in Europe, Middle East and Africa,” said Lacor. “I am incredibly excited to support the acceleration of our growth in EMEA, particularly on the Enterprise side. With our Dropbox Business and Dropbox Enterprise products, our business customers can become even more competitive by deploying Dropbox to simplify the way people work together.”

Lacor joins Dropbox from Vodafone in Germany, where he served as the Managing Director for the enterprise division. Prior to Vodafone, Lacor worked for worked at Dell for over 10 years in several European and EMEA-wide roles across sales, marketing and finance.

Box, data protection, data residency, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Box sets target on US government and Europe following 37% growth in Q1

Box co-founder and chief executive Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London this week

CEO Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London 

Box has reported healthy growth over the last quarter, increasing revenues 37% to $90.2 million, which the company has attributed to a more diversified portfolio. Public sector organizations and the European market are now in the crosshairs for future growth.

The US government is an area which has seemingly been prioritized by CEO Aaron Levie and the Box team moving forward, following the announcement Box for Government achieved FedRAMP certification from the Department of Defence. As the Department of Defence claims it has some of the highest degree of scrutiny around cloud platforms and technology, the team believe the certification will create a ripple effect throughout the US.

As a number of state and local government agencies lean on federal standards for guidance on what cloud technologies to adopt, the certification could lead to positive strides for the company. Levie highlighted the certification, as well as the partnership with IBM, has created a healthy sales pipeline for the team over recent months in the public sector segment.

The company added more than 5,000 customers to its ranks over the period, taking the total number to more than 62,000 businesses. Box now has 46 million users worldwide, of which 13% are now paying. Levie also highlighted work on its customer services processes has paid off over the quarter as customer churn rate is now below 3%.

“In Q1 we achieved record revenue of $90 million, up 37% year over year,” said Levie. “We also continue to gain operational efficiency and demonstrate leverage in our business model as we move towards our commitment to achieve positive free cash flow in the fourth quarter and in January 2017. Looking ahead underlying demand for Box remains very strong and our competitive position in the market has never been better. “

We created record sales pipeline in the quarter with several seven figure deals in the mix. This has been driven by the growing demand for a modern approach to enterprise content management, our differentiated product offerings and our maturing partnerships that are becoming an integral part of our go to market strategy.”

Box’s expansion strategy over recent months has been built upon the diversification of its product portfolio, but also its partner ecosystem. Firstly from a product perspective, the team launches Box Zones which enables organizations to dictate where data is stored around the world. This offering was brought about through the partnership with IBM.

Data residency is proving to be a sensitive area in recent months due to the confusion over data residency concerns following the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to strike down the Safe Harbour agreement, and the subsequent criticism its successor, EU-US Privacy Shield, has received. The Box Zones offering would appear to be the company’s means of negating the impact of data residency by removing the concern of transatlantic data transmission. The team claim the offering has not only gained traction with new customers, but also created a number of upselling opportunities for companies who have operations in regions where data protection rules are more stringent than the US.

Aside from Box Zones, the team has also launched a number of new offerings including its Governance product, KeySafe and the aforementioned Box for Government offering. Aside from creating new opportunities in the US, the product diversification has also been credited with growth in new regions, which is a key pillar for the Box expansion plans.

From a partner ecosystem perspective, the quarter saw a number of new announcements as well as positive wins out of longer standing relationships. Box announced a new partnership with Adobe in April, aiming to simplify working with digital documents in the cloud, though Levie was particularly focused on the relationship with Microsoft, which has yielded positive results throughout the quarter.

“And nowhere is our ecosystem strategy more relevant than our partnership with Microsoft which continues to yield significant dividends,” said Levie. “For the first time ever customers can now collaboratively edit their Office documents that are stored in Box or edit them on their iPad or iPhone. Adoption of Office 365 continues to be a key driver for new customers to invest in Box as well as allow existing customers to expand their usage of Box.”

Partnerships currently influence around 20% of Box’s revenues which aside from Microsoft also includes AT&T and IBM. The partnership with IBM has been particularly successful in the company’s drive towards Europe, where the option to store data in Big Blue’s German and Irish data centres is attractive, according to Levie.

Opinion, outsourcing, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Should Public Cloud be Synonymous with Outsourcing?

Marathon runners taking the position for the start of raceI caught an internet meme the other day that said, “The Cloud is just a computer somewhere else.”  But is that true?  Is the cloud really all about outsourcing your infrastructure to somewhere or someone else?

Popular opinion seems to indicate that’s the case.  But I would argue otherwise.

The cloud is a way of thinking.  Consider the ease with which you can swipe your credit card and walk away with a virtual infrastructure in the cloud.  Pay for what you need now, and scale out to meet your growing demands as your business or projects expand.  Who could say no to that?

In my experience as an IT leader and solutions architect, this is what the cloud is really all about.  Self-service provisioning; elastic, pay-as-you-grow infrastructure; and a service-driven operating model with all-inclusive, per-VM pricing.

If we take that perspective, we see that the cloud is not just about outsourcing.  In fact, all IT leaders should aspire to deliver the same agility, elasticity, and efficiency of the cloud model – whether their infrastructure runs on-premises or “in the cloud.”

With that said, this has not always been feasible or easy.  Traditional IT infrastructure is costly, complex, and rigid.  It simply doesn’t provide the same level of efficiency and agility as public cloud providers can deliver.  And that’s no surprise.  Early in their history, pioneering service providers and technology giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, discarded the old IT model and built their own infrastructure based on key design principles of software-defined, scale-out, and x86 commodity hardware.

Until now, visionary IT leaders who sought to deliver a cloud operating model on-site had little at their disposal.  But that is changing.  Breakthroughs in on-premises infrastructure like hyperconvergence are making it possible to bring the benefits of the cloud on-site, avoiding the tradeoffs of outsourcing their infrastructure and core business applications to the cloud.

In many ways, hyperconverged infrastructure delivers the same efficiency and agility of cloud.  It’s based on the same design principles noted above – x86 commodity building blocks, software-defined, and linear scalability. However, hyperconverged infrastructure also provides the performance, protection, and resiliency enterprises require – all while reducing complexity and costs.

In fact, in a recent independent study, focusing on the cost-effectiveness and three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of hyperconvergence and the public cloud, hyperconvergence vendor SimpliVity was compared to public cloud vendor Amazon Web Services. The study found that SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution offers a TCO savings of 22% to 49% when compared to Amazon Web Services. This shows that cost is no longer a barrier to creating a private cloud. Enterprises can choose what best suits their workloads, public or private.

Overall, with hyperconvergence, enterprises can now outsource to the public cloud or decide to stay on-premises, all the while maintaining the agility, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud.

Written by Rich Kucharski, Vice President of Solutions Architecture at SimpliVity

AWS, Docker, Microsoft Azure, Public Cloud

Cloud and software jobs surge over last 12 months

New productRackspace has released the findings from its annual analysis of the IT job market which highlighted demand for positions in and around cloud computing are rising at a healthy rate.

Vacancies for AWS engineer roles increased by 125% over the last 12 months, where are those advertised for Microsoft Azure competencies also increased by 75% in the same period. The rise in job focused on tailoring cloud solutions for individual companies, and also migrating from legacy technologies, supports previous research and claims that cloud computing is penetrating the mainstream marketplace.

“Our industry moves so fast that we can’t rely entirely on traditional forms of education from schools and universities to fill skills gaps,” said Darren Norfolk, Managing Director for Rackspace in the UK. “Therefore, technology companies have a responsibility to address these shortages by growing and fostering talent through on the job training and experience.

“I expect the rise in demand for cloud related jobs to continue as a growing number of businesses adopt a multi cloud strategy, using platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Openstack and AWS. The highly competitive recruitment market for skills in these areas means that managing the platforms in-house could become more costly than it has been in the past.”

Software development is another area which has demonstrated healthy growth as the number of vacancies for individuals who have Docker expertise has risen by 341%, though this is down from the 991% increase which was reported in the 2015 findings. The accelerated rate in which new technologies are penetrating the market and being implemented by companies throughout the world is seemingly too fast for in-house resource to be trained on these competencies, leaving hiring new employees the only option for some. Docker expertise is now the second most sought after job function in the IT world, according to the research.

DevOps as a practise would also appear to be have accepted in the business world, as the number of roles grew 53% over the last twelve months, following a 57% increase from the findings last year. The rise in roles would appear to be an indicator DevOps has not been integrated within the IT ecosystem, though it may still be considered too early to be mainstream.

consumer cloud, Consumer Protection, legislation, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

UK Competition and Markets Authority gives cloud providers a telling off

The seamstress the neck sews clothes in the StudioThe Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is concerned a proportion of cloud storage providers could breach consumer protection law in their terms and conditions, as well as business practises.

Alongside the report, the CMA has sent an open letter to all cloud providers outlining guidance on how the organization can ensure they remain true to the Consumer Rights Act 2015, as well as advice to consumers on the topic.

The concerns are mainly focused around three areas. Firstly, some cloud providers are currently able to change the service or the terms of the contract without giving customers prior notice. Secondly, the cloud provider currently has the ability to suspend or terminate the contract without notice for any reason. And finally, cloud providers are able to automatically renew a contract at the end of a fixed term without giving notice or withdrawal rights.

“Cloud storage offers a convenient means of keeping family photos, favourite music and films and important documents safe, and accessing them quickly from any device,” said Nisha Arora, CMA Senior Director for Consumer. “Our review found that people find these services really valuable. However, we also heard some complaints resulting from unfair terms in contracts. If left unchanged, these terms could result in people losing access to their treasured possessions or facing unexpected charges.

“In this rapidly-developing market, it’s important that we act now to ensure that businesses comply with the law and that consumers’ trust in these valuable services is maintained. We welcome the fact that a number of companies have already agreed to change their terms, and expect to see improvements from other companies.”

Although the CMA has not confirmed which cloud providers were potentially in breach of consumer protection law, it did comment Dixons Carphone, JustCloud and Livedrive have committed to changing their terms, as well as business practises.

The CMA also commented that while they were confident there would not be any breaches of consumer protection law following the report, any non-compliance in the future could lead to enforcement action and the CMA could apply to a court for an enforcement order. If that were breached it could be contempt of court and lead to an unlimited fine.

AI, Alibaba, Artificial intelligence, Database, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, SB Cloud, Softbank

Alibaba and Softbank launch SB Cloud for Japanese market

AlibabaAlibaba and Softbank have announced the establishment of SB Cloud Corporation, a new joint venture to offer cloud computing services in Japan.

The demand for public cloud in Japan and surrounding countries has been growing in recent years, with Japan leading the way as the most advanced nation. A report from Gartner last year estimated the total public cloud services spending in the mature APJ region will rise to $11.5 billion by 2018. Alibaba has targeted the region to grow its already healthy cloud business unit.

“I’ve really enjoyed working with the Alibaba Cloud team on the joint venture over the past few months,” said Eric Gan, the new CEO of SB Cloud and EVP of SoftBank. “During the business planning discussions, I quickly felt that we were all working very much as one team with one goal. I believe the JV team can develop the most advanced cloud platform for Japanese customers, as well as for multinational customers who want to use the resources we have available in Japan.”

SB Cloud will enable Alibaba to increase its presence in the market, where it already offers services to SoftBank’s business customer base in Japan, which primarily comprises of global organizations. SB Cloud will open a new data centre in the country, where it will now serve customers outside of established SoftBank customer base, offering data storage and processing services, enterprise-level middleware as well as cloud security services.

A recent report from the US Department of Commerce highlighted the Japanese market is one of the most competitive worldwide, though five of the six major vendors are American, Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce. Domestic companies, such as Fujitsu, have announced aggressive expansion plans. Fujitsu claims to be to investing $2 billion between 2014 and 2017 to capture an increased market share in cloud computing, primarily focused on the growing IoT sub-sector.

While Alibaba’s traditional business has been in the Chinese market, the company has been making efforts over the last 12-18 months to diversify its outreach. Last year, the company launched a new data centre in Singapore, as well as in Silicon Valley. It also launched what it claims is China’s first cloud AI platform last August, DT PAI. The purpose-built algorithms and machine learning technologies are designed to help users generate predictive intelligence insights, claiming the service features “drag and drop” capabilities that let users easily connect different services and set parameters, seemingly following IBM’s lead in designing a more accessible offering for the industry.

containers, hybrid, Joyent, News & Analysis, Public, Public Cloud

Joyent launches Container-Native offerings for public and hybrid cloud platform

JoyentJoyent has launched its next generation container-native (G4) and KVM-based (K4) instance package families, which are now available on its Triton-powered public cloud platform.

The company’s cloud platform runs on containers, as opposed to traditional VM’s which the majority of other cloud platforms run on, which it claims will notably improve efficiency. The software used to run the Triton Cloud service is 100% open source and available for customers to use to operate in their own private data centres within a hybrid cloud model.

“Workloads are more efficient on Triton Cloud,” said Bill Fine, Vice President Product and Marketing at Joyent. “This is because Triton allows you to run containers natively, without having to pre-provision (and pay for) virtual machine hosts. The result is less waste and more cost savings for you.

“Consider our recent blueprint to run WordPress in containers. A minimum running implementation requires six g4-highcpu-128M instances and costs just over $13 per month. That minimal site may be perfect for a small blog or staging a larger one. Should you need to scale it, you can resize the containers without restarting them or scale horizontally with Docker-compose scale (or another scheduler of your choice).”

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Joyent’s value proposition and marketing campaigns are seemingly built on the claim it is cheaper and more efficient than AWS, as it would appear the team are set on taking the fight to the incumbent industry leader. The company claim there is a notable price-performance cost advantage, more specifically, Elasticsearch clusters on Triton complete query requests 50% to 70% faster, Sharded MongoDB clusters complete tasks 100% to 150% faster and Standard primary/replica Postgres configurations up to 200% faster, in comparison to AWS.

“The cost of running on Triton is about half the cost of running on AWS,” said Fine. “With enough experimentation and determination you might be able to narrow this cost gap by more efficiently bin-packing your containers into VMs on AWS, but on Triton those efficiencies are built in and the cost and complexity of VM host clustering is removed. Each container just runs (on bare metal) with the resources you specify.”

AWS, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Salesforce

Salesforce plans to launch IoT offering on AWS

Salesforce WearSalesforce has announced plans to launch its new IoT offering on AWS facilities, moving away from it traditional play of using its own data centre infrastructure, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The offering is reportedly going to be launched by Salesforce in the next couple of months, is currently available to a select number of customers as the team test the various features. Saleforce’s IoT Cloud was initially announced last September, enabling customers to personalize the way they sell, service and market top their prospects. As part of the development, Salesforce has partnered with a number of firms including ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln, to bring the service to market.

“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce at the time. “The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”

Salesforce has traditionally built new services on its own data centre infrastructure, though it would appear to be joining a number of other companies, including Netflix, who are utilizing the services of AWS as well as in-house options. This is not the first experience of AWS for Salesforce however, as the company acquired Heroku in 2010, which operated on AWS. Working with AWS also gives Salesforce the flexibility to manage what could be large scale growth should the offering receive large scale traction upon launch, as adding additional hardware to its own data centre to meet demand could take days or even weeks.

Alongside the IoT announcement, Benioff has taken to Twitter to apologize for a database failure on the NA14 instance, which caused outages for a number of customers in North America, which lasted for more than 12 hours.

The failure occurred after “a successful site switch” of the NA14 instance “to resolve a service disruption that occurred between 00:47 to 02:39 UTC on May 10, 2016 due to a failure in the power distribution in the primary data centre” the company said. Although not confirmed by Salesforce, it would appear a large number of customers throughout North America were impacted by the failure.

Salesforce apology

hybrid cloud, Ixia, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Visibility

Ixia launches CloudLens to increase network visibility across cloud environments

Closeup on eyeglasses with focused and blurred landscape view.Ixia has launched its new CloudLens offering, a platform which it claims will increase network visibility across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments for service providers, cloud providers, and enterprise customers.

The new offering will enable customers to gain insight into network traffic in both physical and virtualized environments, using the company’s virtual network taps, packet and application flow filtering. The offering claims to answer the challenge of elastic demands of cloud customers in a multi-tenant self-serve model, deploying scalable traffic monitoring system in a matter of minutes, as opposed to days.

“The CloudLens platform is a true reflection of what Ixia is well recognized for in the industry, which is combining technology innovation with solutions that address real-world network challenges,” said Dennis Cox, Chief Product Officer at Ixia. “We are committed to addressing those challenges, and will continue to innovate, leveraging our years of experience, to deliver unprecedented visibility across all cloud environments.”

CloudLens will also include a number of automation features enabling the virtual taps and analysis tools to automatically change in reaction to demand or failures, without the need for an operator. The platform currently supports OpenStack KVM, VMWare ESXi, and NSX, and is expected to be extended to Microsoft Hyper-V later in the coming months.

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.