Archivo de la categoría: Research

Database, genomics research, News & Analysis, Research

Paradigm4 puts oncology in the cloud with Onco-SciDB

Digital illustration DNA structure in abstract colour backgroundBoston-based cloud database specialist Paradigm4 has launched a new system designed to speed up the process of cancer research among biopharmaceutical companies.

The new Onco-SciDB (oncology scientific database) features a graphical user interface designed for exploring data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and other relevant public.

The Onco application runs on top of the Paradigm4’s SciDB database management system devised for analysing multi-dimensional data in the cloud. The management system was built by database pioneer Michael Stonebraker in order to use the cloud for massively parallel processing and offering an elastic supply of computing resources.

A cloud-based database system gives research departments cost control and the capacity to ramp up production when needed, according to Paradigm4 CEO Marilyn Matz. “The result is that research teams spend less time curating and accessing data and more time on interactive exploration,” she said.

Currently, the bioinformatics industry lacks the requisite analytical tools and user interfaces to deal with the growing mass of molecular, image, functional, and clinical data, according to Matz. By simplifying the day-to-day challenge of working with multiple lines of evidence, Paradigm4 claims that SciDB supports clinical guidance for programmes like precision anti-cancer chemotherapy drug treatment. By making massively parallel processing possible in the cloud, it claims, it can provide sufficient affordable computing power for budget-constrained research institutes to trawl through petabytes of information and create hypotheses over the various sources of molecular, clinical and image data.

Database management system SciDB serves as the foundation for the 1000 Human Genomes Project and is used by bio-tech companies such as Novartis, Complete Genomics, Agios and Lincoln Labs. A custom version of Onco-SciDB has been beta tested at cancer research institute Foundation Medicine.

Industry veteran Stonebraker, the original creator of the Ingres and Postgres systems in 1985 that formed the basis of IBM’s Informix and EMC’s Greenplum, won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award and $1million from Google for his pioneering of database design.

News & Analysis, Research, The Bunker

Hybrid cloud proving a struggle for enterprise – research

Velostrata is the latest hybrid cloud vendor to come out of stealth

Hosting and co-location company The Bunker says the vast majority of companies are installing hybrid cloud systems but with a massive failure rate.

The Bunker’s Completing the Hybrid Cloud Puzzle, based on market research conducted by Vanson Bourne among CIOs and IT decision-makers, indicates that though hybrid clouds are overwhelmingly popular 63% of the survey struggled to execute their vision for the cloud.

Cloud migration failures were attributed to a lack of in-house skills (49%); confusing, biased or incorrect advice (44%) and alack of integration of Cloud Infrastructure and non-Cloud resources (41%).

Out of the survey group of mid-market and large corporations, ranging in size from 1000 to over 3000 employees, 90% are in the throes of creating a hybrid of cloud and on-premise computing. Meanwhile, 96% said they expect to migrate applications or data to their cloud infrastructure within the next 5 years.

It has not been easy, however, since 70% of the 94% of organisations that have already migrated applications or data to a cloud Infrastructure have experienced a failure. For some this failure was a failed or stalled project or the lack of any return on their investment. Despite many of the survey group claiming a ‘good level of engagement; for the cloud, both internally and externally, over half of respondents (54%) confessed they hadn’t got the optimum technical solution to address their needs.

The motives for adopting a cloud solution were efficiency, flexibility and scalability (identified by 60% of the group) and lower costs (40%) and the need to turn IT spending from a capital expenditure to an operational costs (which was identified by 38% of the group).

Around half (55%) of the study identified their ideal model for IT infrastructure to involved a mixture of in-house and outsourced IT infrastructure using a mix of private and public cloud.

“The business benefits of Cloud technologies may be compelling, but organisations continue to struggle when it comes to delivering on them,” said Bunker CTO Phil Bindley. The CIOs are failing to build technology systems that meet business needs, according to Bindley, but it’s not their fault. “CIOs and IT decision-makers do not appear to be getting the advice or support they need,” he said.

Gemalto, News & Analysis, Research, software, Software as a service

Software market frustrating for enterprise users says Gemalto research

Software licensing is still causing enterprises grief, according to new research by security firm Gemalto. The biggest pain points and causes of frustration are the inflexibility of licensing arrangements and the unhelpful delivery options.

According to the State of Software Monetization report, software vendors must change if they’re to satisfy enterprise user demand. This means delivering software as a service and making it accessible across multiple devices, it concludes.

The disparity between customer demand and vendor supply has been created by the shift in tastes from enterprise software customers. This is a function of the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) phenomenon, which has been partly created by intelligent device manufacturers and mobile phone makers. However, despite creating the demand for more flexibility they have not been able to follow suit and provide a matchingly flexible and adaptable licensing and packaging technique for software, the report says.

The most frequently voiced complaint, from 87% of the survey sample, was about the cost of renewing and managing licenses. Almost as many (83%) complained about the time needlessly wasted on unfriendly processes for renewing and managing licenses (83%) and the time and costs that were lost to non-product-related development (82%). Most of the survey sample (68%) said they had little idea over how the products they buy are being used in the enterprise.

Four out of five respondents believe that software needs to be future-proofed to be successful.

The report was compiled from feedback from 600 enterprise software users and 180 independent software vendors (ISVs), in relation to headaches related to software licensing and packaging.

Software consumption is changing and customers only want to pay for what they use, according to Shlomo Weiss, Senior VP for Software Monetization at Gemalto. “Delivering software, in ways that customers want to consume it, is critical for creating a user experience that sells,” said Weiss.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Research

Cloud migrations driven by bosses, business leaders and board – report

multi cloudThe majority of cloud migrations are driven by the three Bs – bosses, board members and business leaders, as technology experts become marginalized, says a new report. However, the report also indicated  most projects end up being led by a technology-savvy third party.

Hosting vendor Rackspace’s new ‘Anatomy of a Cloud Migration’ study found that CEOs, directors and other business leaders are behind 61% of cloud migrations, rather than IT experts. Perhaps surprisingly, 37% of these laymen and laywomen see their cloud migration projects right through to completion, they told the study.

The report, which compiled feedback from a survey of 500 UK IT and business decision-makers, also revealed what’s in the cloud, why it’s there and how much IT has been moved to the cloud already. There was some good news for the technology expert, as the report also indicates that one of the biggest lessons learned was that cloud migration is not a good experience and that the majority of companies end up consulting a third-party supplier. However, in the end, nine out of ten organisations were able to report that their business goals were met, albeit only ‘to some extent’. The report was compiled for Rackspace by Vanson Bourne.

Among the 500 companies quizzed, an average of 43% of the IT estate is now in the cloud. Cost cutting was the main motive in 61% of cases.

Surprisingly, 29% of respondents said they migrated their business-critical applications first, rather than embark on a painful learning curve with a less important application. The report did not cross reference this figure with the figures for migrations led by CIOs. However, 69% of the survey said they learned lessons from their migration that will affect future projects, which almost matches the  71% of people who didn’t make a mission critical application their pilot migration project.

Other hoped-for outcomes nominated by the survey group were improvements in resilience (in 50% of cases), security (38%), agility (38%) and stabilising platforms and applications (37%).

A move to the cloud is no longer an exclusive function of the IT department, concluded Darren Norfolk, UK MD of Rackspace. “Whether business leaders understand the practicalities of a cloud migration project or not, there appears to be broad acceptance that they can do it,” he said.

Apache, Hadoop, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Research, Spark

Apache Spark reportedly outgrowing Hadoop as users move to cloud

cloud competition trophyApache Spark is breaking down the barriers between data scientists and engineers, making machine learning easier and is out growing Hadoop as an open source framework for cloud computing developments, a new report claims.

The 2015 Spark User Survey was conducted by Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark.

Spark adoption is growing quickly because users are finding it easy to use, reliably fast, and aligned for future growth in analytics, the report claims, with 91 per cent of the survey citing performance as their reason for adoption. Other reasons given were ease of programming (77 per cent), easy deployment (71 per cent) advanced analytics (64 per cent) and the capacity for real time streaming (52 per cent).

The report, based on the findings of a survey of 1,400 respondents Spark stakeholders, claims that the number of Spark users with no Hadoop components doubled between 2014 and 2015. The study set out to identify how the data analytics and processing engine is being used by developers and organisations.

The Spark growth claim is based on the finding that 48 per cent of users are running Spark in standalone mode while 40 per cent run it on Hadoop’s YARN operating system. At present 11 per cent of users are running Spark on Apache Mesos. The survey also found that 51 per cent of respondents run Spark on a public cloud.

The number of contributors to Spark rose from 315 to 600 contributors in the last 12 months, which the report authors claim makes this the most active open source project in Big Data. Additionally, more than 200 organisations contribute code to Spark, which they claims makes it ‘one of’ the largest communities of engaged developers to date.

According to the report, Spark is being used for increasingly diverse applications, with data scientists particularly focused on machine learning, streaming and graph analysis projects. Spark was used to create streaming applications 56 per cent more frequently in 2015 than 2014. The use of advanced analytics, like MLib for machine learning and GraphX for graph processing, is becoming increasingly common, the report says.

According to the study, 41 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as data engineers, while 22 per cent of respondents say they are data scientists. The most common languages used for open sourced based big data projects in cloud computing are Scala (used by 71 per cent of the survey), Python (58 per cent), SQL (36 per cent), Java (31 per cent) and R (18 per cent).

News & Analysis, procurement, Public Sector, Research, Sungard

Hidden cost of public sector cloud over £300m a year, says research

The UK’s public sector is spending an extra £300 million a year on maintaining cloud services and on hidden costs associated with their cloud computing projects, according to Sungard Availability Services.

The claim follows an independent study, commissioned by Sungard, that questioned 45 senior IT decision makers in the UK in public sector organisations with more than 500 employees. The average individual cloud spend of the study group, in 2014/15, was £390,000.

Sungard’s analysis of the research appears in a report, Digital by Design: Avoiding the Cloud Hangover in the UK Public Sector, which claims that unexpected costs and increasing complexity will create a ‘cloud hangover’.

The main revelation of the research is that 82 per cent UK public sector organisations (according to the study group of 45 decision makers) have encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend. The average yearly cost of maintaining cloud services (among the study group) was £139,000. A further £258,000 was spent by each, over the last five years, on unforeseen costs. External maintenance costs for hardware accounted for 41 per cent of these unexpected costs, while systems integration was the other major contributor to bill shock, accounting for 30 per cent of the unbudgeted expenditure.

According to the report, 42 per cent of UK public sector organisations use the cloud to lower the work load for their ‘IT team’, while 47 per cent expect the cloud to reduce IT costs. Some 43 per cent of the public sector’s cloud customers are allegedly struggling with the costs of personnel needed to manage cloud deployments.

Roughly half (53 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations said cost savings were the key driver for adopting cloud services, but 33 per cent believe this has not been achieved. Over half (55 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations (claims the report) complain that the cloud has increased the complexity of their IT environment and 71 per cent say that cloud computing added a new set of IT challenges. Achieving interoperability between existing IT and new cloud platforms was the most frequently mentioned challenge, cited by 44 per cent of the survey group.

“There is no silver bullet for adopting cloud computing,” said Keith Tilley, executive VP of Global Sales and Customer Services Management at Sungard Availability Services, who called for a case by case review.

business, Exact, News & Analysis, Research, SME, UK

Cloud business users grow faster and are twice as profitable says study

Companies that commit themselves to cloud computing are likely to grow faster and enjoy twice the profit of their non-cloud using rivals, according to a study. The research also indicates that the UK is leading Europe in cloud adoption. However, one critic said there is no evidence that cloud computing creates productivity, or is a consequence of it.

The Exact 2015 SME Cloud Barometer report, an independent study of 2,975 SME leaders in the UK, the USA, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, found a correlation between companies with three or more cloud products and revenue growth. The ‘heavy users’ of cloud achieved higher revenue growth and over twice the profit of their less committed cloud users.

Penetration of cloud computing in the UK is relatively high in comparison with its European peers, according to the study. The UK has the second highest number of ‘heavy’ cloud software users (27 per cent) behind the USA on 29 per cent. However, the Netherlands, Belgium and France were not significantly behind, with their rates of cloud adoption being 25, 24 and 24 per cent respectively. Germany, with a cloud adoption rate of 10 per cent, was more significantly behind.

Nearly half (47 per cent) of the UK sample of small and medium sized enterprises SMEs now use at least one cloud business software tool.

The study examined the correlation between growth and cloud adoption and found that on average those companies it defined as heavy users enjoyed revenue growth of 26 per cent in 2015. In comparison the companies that used only one or two cloud computing systems grew revenues by an average of 14 per cent. Those with no cloud systems at all showed the slowest growth rates, with revenues on average growing by 10 per cent.

Of the UK sample, the most popular reason given (by 54 per cent of the survey) for adopting new cloud systems was that the ‘need to replace outdated versions’. Saving money on IT was the most frequently cited motivation for cloud computing among UK SMEs. Getting better access to information was the third most important criterion for cloud.

Erik van der Meijden, CEO of study sponsor Exact, claimed that most SMEs see it as a strategic purchase. “[They] said they felt that technology is going to have a strong impact on the competitive landscape in their market over the next three years,” said Meijden.

However, analyst Clive Longbottom, principal researcher at Quocirca, said the link between cloud and productivity needs more definition. “Causality is something that doesn’t seem to be taken into account here,” said Longbottom, “slow-thinking companies that are performing badly are unlikely to be at the leading edge of technology. Those that see technology as a core part of their business will tend to perform better.”

CIO, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Research, Support

Support for the cloud is over priced, say disillusioned CIOs

SupportThe vast majority of businesses now use cloud computing but most feel ripped off, according to a study.

Research firm Vanson Bourne has canvassed a sample of 200 chief information officers (CIOs) for their feedback on cloud computing. The results show that almost all (186 out of 200) use the cloud in some form. However, almost as many of them (160 of the 200 CIOs) agreed that ‘ripped off’ was the multiple choice answer that best described their feelings over support services.

If the survey was statistically significant and was representative of industry wide sentiment, then 80 per cent of British businesses feel they are paying a high premium for basic support on their cloud services. While the penetration of cloud computing is high, with 93 per cent of businesses now using ‘some form’ of the service, some 84 per cent of the total sample said that it has not met their expectations on reducing support.

The most common problems presented by the survey were: slow response times to customer service queries (which was identified by 47 per cent of the sample), call handlers lacking technical knowledge (41 per cent), over-use of automated phone lines (33 per cent), complicated escalation processes (28 per cent) and a lack of 24/7 cover (19 per cent).

The results suggest that support from service providers is poor, according to Richard Davies, CEO of service provider ElasticHosts, which sponsored the independent study.

Companies adopt cloud in order to remove the headache of managing IT and the burden on in-house IT staff, so they expect to provide less support themselves, Davies said. For precisely that reason, the cloud service provider must not run a skeleton support service, Davies argued. Too often, according to Davies, companies have to pay a high premium to get the same level of service they got from their internal support.

“When using any service, you want to be able to ask questions, whether to learn how to configure a server or to query a bill. You should be able to do this without having to pay a hefty premium,” said Davies.

Asking a cloud service a technical question frequently involves a long wait and a call that is re-routed through an automated service. Ultimately a human call handler will admit they don’t know the answer, according to Davies.

“The industry should be doing more to help customers,” said Davies, “the first contact for support should be an engineer with strong technical understanding of the service.”

CRM, Database, Mobile, News & Analysis, Research, salesforce.com, Software as a service

Salesforce would be more effective if it was more mobile, workers tell survey

Salesforce WearCustomer relationship management leader (CRM) Salesforce needs to improve the employee experience before its clients can get the most out of it, says a new report.

The advice comes in the fourth annual State of Salesforce report, from consultancy Bluewolf, a partner agency to world’s top CRM vendor. It suggests that while customers of companies that use Salesforce feel more connected, the users of the CRM system aren’t as happy. The main complaints are inconsistent data quality and a lack of mobile options. However, the majority of the survey sample plan to ramp up their investment in the system.

Based on the feedback from 1,500 Salesforce customers worldwide, the 2015-2016 report suggests that the concerns of employees should be the next priority for Salesforce as it seeks to fine tune its CRM software.

The demand for better mobility was made by 77 per cent of salespeople surveyed. Their most time-consuming task was identified as ‘opportunity management’ which, the report concludes, could be improved by better mobile applications. The study also says that employees were twice as likely to believe that Salesforce makes their job easier if it could be accessed from a mobile device.

Bluewolf’s report suggests that Salesforce’s priorities in 2016 should be to invest more three areas: the mobile workforce, predictive analytics and improving the sales team’s experience of using apps.

In the modern obsession with customer experience, it is easily forgotten that employees create the customer success, according to Bluewolf CEO Eric Berridge. “While innovation is essential to improving employee experiences, companies must combine it with data, design and an employee culture.”

However, the report does indicate that companies are happy with Salesforce, since 64 per cent plan to increase their budget. Half, 49 per cent, have at least two Salesforce clouds and 22 per cent have at least three. A significant minority, 11 per cent, say they are planning to spend at least half as much again next year on Salesforce services.
That investment is planned because 59 per cent of Salesforce users say the CRM system is much simpler to use than it was a year ago.

Meanwhile, many companies are taking the employee matter into their own hand, says the report. One in three companies has already invested in agent productivity apps and one in five is planning to invest.

IDC, News & Analysis, Research, Storage

The cloud is commoditising storage for enterprises – report

Cloud storageLittle known unbranded manufacturers are making inroads into the storage market as the cloud commoditises the industry storage, according to a new report by market researcher IDC. Meanwhile, the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, it warns.

The data centres of big cloud companies like Google and Facebook are much more likely to buy from smaller, lesser known storage vendors now, as they are no longer compelled to commit themselves to specialised storage platforms, said IDC in its latest Enterprise Storage report.

Revenue for original design manufacturers (ODMs) that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew 25.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2015, in a period when overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 per cent. However, data centre purchases accounted for US$1 billion in the second quarter, while the overall industry revenue is still larger, for now, at $8.8 billion. However, the growth trends indicate that a shift in buying power will take place, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, said Sheppard.

ODMs such as Quanta Computer and Wistron are becoming increasingly influential, said Sheppard. Like many low-profile vendors, based in Taiwan, they are providing hardware to be sold under the badges of better known brand names, as sales of server-based storage rose 10 per cent in the second quarter to reach $2.1 billion.

Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the bulk of the enterprise storage business, which was worth $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment are declining, down 3.9 per cent in that period.

With the cloud transferring the burden of processing to data centres, the biggest purchasers of storage are now Internet giants and cloud service providers. Typically their hyper-scale data centres are software controlled and no longer need the more expensive proprietary systems that individual companies were persuaded to buy, according to the report. Generic, unbranded hardware is sufficient, provided that it is software defined, the report said.

“The software, not the hardware, defines the storage architecture,” said Sheppard. The cloud has made it possible to define the management of storage in more detail, so that the resources can be matched more evenly to each virtual machine. This has cut the long term operating costs. These changes will intensify in the next five years, the analyst predicted.

EMC remained the biggest vendor by revenue with just over 19 per cent of the market, followed by Hewlett-Packard with just over 16 per cent.