Intel has begun to dive into the world of cloud services, leading a $100 million round of funding in a pure play OpenStack company. This investment into Mirantis will aid in the company’s optimization of its enterprise features and will drive industry adoption. OpenStack cloud software, first introduced in 2010, is built by a team of expert open source contributors under management of OpenStack. Under a relatively small time frame of just five years, OpenStack has become the fifth most popular cloud platform among global companies according to research done by Forrester Research Inc. This round of investment is set to coax adoption of cloud services by allowing it to be both installed and integrated into data centers easier.
Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager at Data Center Group, Intel, has stated, “As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds.”
Intel, Goldman Sachs, August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital have all invested in this most recent round of funding. However, Intel appears to be going the extra mile, collaborating with Mirantis on technical features. Intel’s deep technological insight will increase capability of enterprise deployments. The goal of this collaboration is to create thousands of new clouds to serve under Intel’s Clouds for All initiative. This collaboration will address issues such network integration and support for big data.

Alex Freeland, co-founder and president of Mirantis, is excited to exemplify that open design, open development, and open licensing are all important features in the future of cloud infrastructure software. “Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster.”
Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, also gave his opinion on the collaboration: “Obviously, Mirantis is trying to make headway in the OpenStack space. There are a lot of other IT vendors, including IBM and HP, that have all jumped on board as well and there’s a clear commitment to the OpenStack market. In order for the cloud really to take off it requires a collective effort from all the vendors involved. There’s really a who’s who now in the OpenStack space. This is a good commitment from Intel.”

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GCI has announced the purchase of Anchorage-based Network Business Systems on August 6th. They did not disclose the amount they paid. The purchase will double their cloud computing and IT services sector and can capitalize on the expanding cloud service market. The Network Business Systems will add about 30 employees to GCI’s existing infrastructure.

Network Business Systems has been offering cloud services in Alaska since 2009, but the market for the Cloud was rather sluggish. Recently, however, the demand for such services has grown.

GCI did not offer the most cash for Network Business systems, but owner Annette Jones was convinced to let GCI purchase her company for other reasons. “They did not make us the best offer, however we felt that they were the best buyer,” Jones said. “What I mean by that is we thought that our employees had the best growth opportunities with GCI and so that’s why we went with them.”

Because of this purchase, the amount of employees in GCI’s cloud sector would double from 30 to 60. Jones will continue to work with Network Business Systems as current employees will keep their jobs. GCI spokesman David Morris has said this purchase will better serve GCI’s existing customers who would like to know where their data is stored. He has stated, “Cloud computing is an emerging market, and the thing that we’ve found about Alaska businesses is that they would prefer that their data be stored in Alaska rather than some other place internationally. It makes a difference if you can come and touch and feel where your data is stored.”

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F5 Networks has recently announced the launch of its new F5 Ready program that will make it easier for customers to utilize the F5 solutions necessary for their cloud environment. F5 Ready will verify F5’s solutions to be able to encapsulate the needs of cloudproviders throughout the globe. This program plans to make the efficiency of the cloud more accessible to the world.

F5 Ready promotes both interoperability and efficiency, allowing for a smooth transition from industry’s applications and services into private, public, and hybrid clouds. Alex Rublowsky, Sr. Director, Licensing Business Models at F5, has stated, “Organizations going to the cloud want to know that they don’t have to give up their valuable application services to get there. Through the F5 Ready program, customers can keep their trusted security, availability, and acceleration services—even as they evaluate cloud service providers, combine technologies from multiple vendors, and look to scale additional application resources to public cloud environments.”

This program verifies compatibility with many cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bluelock, BT, Cisco Intercloud, Datacom, Dimension Data, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and SingleHop. Brian Singer, Senior Vice President, Products and Marketing at Orbitera has said, “Building and running our applications within AWS is key to modernizing our data center, and core to driving a more agile business that responds quickly to our customers’ needs. Now with F5 BIG-IP virtual editions directly available and verified within AWS, we are able to extend our existing F5 skills and policies to ensure the performance, availability, and security of our cloud-based applications.”

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Mirantis and CoreOS have recently announced that they are going to pair up to integrate Mirantis’ OpenStack distribution with CoreOS’s Tectonic container platform. The two companies will offer companies the ability to utilize both OpenStack and Kubernetes, the Google-incubated container management tool, on a platform that offers enterprise-grade support as well as manageability. In this format, OpenStack will function as an engine that will manage virtual machines and containers with the aid of Kubernetes.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, has said “OpenStack is quickly becoming the preferred open source cloud platform for a range of technologies — VMs, containers, bare metal and whatever comes next. Project contributors like CoreOS, Mirantis and Google are helping the community offer enterprises a cohesive open source cloud solution powered by OpenStack.”

Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS has also stated, “Now that Kubernetes is production-ready, companies using Tectonic and Mirantis OpenStack can have a Google-like infrastructure at their fingertips. Mirantis possesses a deep understanding of open source software and their commitment to the open source ecosystem around OpenStack is second to none. It was natural to work with Mirantis to help customers see the benefits of Kubernetes on OpenStack.” Tectonic can run on premise and public clouds. It offers a Container infrastructure platform that combines Kubernetes, CoreOS and Docker containers.
This shift has begun in the light of companies’ new interest in the idea of containers.

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GE has recently announced the expansion of its Predix Internet of Things platform to provide Infrastructure as a Service, a market currently dominated by cloud giant Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft, Google, and IBM. However, GE hopes to stand out amongst the competition by offering these infrastructure services specifically to meet the needs of its industrial customers.
GE currently manufactures large machinery such as jet engines, turbines, and locomotives, all loaded with sensors. These sensors generate massive amounts of information.

Predix was originally a Platform as a Service that allowed customers as well as third party developers to utilize the data from the sensors to build applications. With the expansion, the company will be providing infrastructure services to run those applications made.
While this greatly resembles the IBM cloud strategy, Harel Kodesh, CTO of GE Software has noted that there is a more focused set of services dedicated to the Internet of Things. He went on to explain that one of the main selling points was that the new infrastructure offering couples nicely with its software development platform. Also, the security layer has been designed specifically to meet the needs of companies running highly sensitive industrial equipment.
Another thing that sets GE apart from competitors like Amazon Web Services is that GE is able to understand how these large pieces of machinery work because it has built them. So, Predix will be able to process the amount of data the devices generate and also better predict the impact a given set of data will have on equipment based on factors such as temperature and workload.

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Skyscape Cloud Services Limited, an easy to adopt and utilize cloud service provider has begun an aggressive recruiting venture to aid the company’s delivery of cloud services in it’s UK sector. Skyscape has grown by 85 employees in the time frame of three years and this growth is expected to continue in the near future.
“This company has grown quickly in a short period of time becoming a successful enterprise that creates jobs and is focused on continually innovating, in order to surpass customer expectations,” said Simon Hansford, CEO at Skyscape Cloud Services. “We are at the start of a very exciting journey, and potential employees have the opportunity to be part of that and join a young, rapidly growing company. They will play a key role in supporting exciting fast-track projects that will support a revolution in public sector ICT and the delivery of public services online.”

In order to accommodate the rapidly going digital transformation in the UK, Skyscape is looking for both experienced and passionate individuals to aid in the adoption of the cloud. They currently have thirty new jobs throughout the company including cloud technical leads, web developers and pre-sale cloud architects. Skyscape is also actively working to close the skills ago with the creation of a work placement program for individuals who wish to gain experience with the cloud. The program will both develop cloud skills while allowing undergraduates to gain experience in operations. In the month of July nine undergraduates have joined Skyscape, and the company is hoping the more will join in the near future.

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