Archivo de la categoría: Software as a service

Cloud28+ promises to clear up the cloudy issues of compliance

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) claims its new Cloud28+ cloud service catalogue will simplify the search for compliant cloud services for European enterprises.

Cloud 28+ is a community of commercial and public sector organisations aimed at expanding cloud service adoption across Europe. The Cloud28+ catalogue, on the other hand, is a centralized enterprise app store which now lists 680 cloud services from 150 members across the range of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. To date 1000 end user organisations have pre-registered to use the catalogue.

The matchmaking Cloud28+ service online catalogue, now on general availability, promises a broad range of benefits for European customers. It allows customers to specify data centre locations and providers, in accordance with local laws and business requirements. It will helps users to find cloud-native independent software vendors with whom they can partner and it will help companies market themselves more expansively by letting them publishing their own services in the catalogue. This could allow end user organisations to turn their IT teams into ‘revenue-generating engines’, claims HPE.

The main benefit of the Cloud28+ service catalogue, HPE claims, is that it gives open access to huge numbers of enterprise cloud services. This will help cloud buyers to compare the cloud market, on functional and non-functional criteria, including price, service level agreements and certification levels.

One of the main selling points of the system is that is makes it easier to comply with increasingly strict data protections laws in the EU, according to James Kinsella, founder of Zettabox a cloud storage and team sharing system and the latest addition to the Cloud28+ catalogue. “It’s a logical community for Zettabox to join, as its mission is to build a cohesive and collaborative cloud environment, for Europeans by Europeans,” said Kinsella.

The Cloud28+ technology framework is based on HPE Helion OpenStack. This will give it the portability of cloud services and eliminate vendor lock-in, said Xavier Poisson, Hybrid IT VP at HPE. “This is an important milestone on the journey to a European Digital Single Market,” said Poisson.

The overturning of the Safe Harbour agreement in European courts had tremendous implications for cloud service providers, according to one analyst. “It certainly makes services that comply with European data privacy requirements more attractive,” said William Fellows, analyst at 451 Research.

Is Adobe axing Flash under cover of Creative Cloud?

Adobe Animate screenAs an official Adobe blog hailed a ‘new era’ for Flash Professional, the software company seems to be sidelining its creation.

Apple boss Steve Jobs once famously dismissed Flash as proprietary software from the PC age. Now Adobe appears to be admitting it doesn’t have a role in the age of the cloud. While updating readers on developments in its Creative Cloud, Adobe reveals that Flash Professional CC is to be re-branded as Adobe Animate CC in order to “more accurately reflect the content-formats produced by this tool.”

Flash has long been heavily criticised because its proprietary nature made it unsuitable for the web. Jobs said Apple would never consider Flash for any of its phones tablets because “we know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps.”

Latterly, the high power needed by devices running Adobe would make it unsuitable for the cloud, while the lack of openness would, in Jobs’ words, “hinder the progress of the platform.”

Adobe explains, in its blog, that “open web standards and HTML5 have become the dominant standard” and that “Flash Professional CC product team has embraced this movement by rewriting the tool from the ground up”. Adding native support for HTML5 Canvas and WebGL, in addition to supporting output to any format was such a ‘hug hit’ with Adobe customers that, in a short space of time, a third of all content produced in Flash Professional CC is HTML5-based, reaching over 1 billion devices worldwide.

The name change reflects the downgrading of Flash’s role in Creative Cloud. However, in another official blog post the vendor explains that Adobe Animate CC will continue to support Flash (SWF) and AIR formats ‘as first-class citizens’, as well as other formats like broadcast-quality video. “We will continue improving Animate CC’s HTML5 capabilities over time, while optimizing its core animation and authoring feature set,” said Rich Lee, senior product marketing manager for Creative Cloud web products.

In the cloud, it was the lack of stability and security that dissuaded Apple from using Flash.

Flash was highlighted by Symantec for having one of the worst security records in 2009. Steve Jobs once said he knew first hand Flash is the top reason for Apple device crashes. “We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash,” Jobs once said. Now, it seems, Adobe has accepted that Flash isn’t right for the cloud.

Microsoft launches PowerApps for programming in the cloud

Microsoft powerappsMicrosoft has unveiled a new DIY programming system called PowerApps and new features for Office 365 and Dynamics CRM 2016 at its annual Convergence EMEA conference in Barcelona.

The new features in Microsoft Office 365, include meetings and voice services in Skype for Business while there’s a new customer engagement option in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. Meanwhile Microsoft PowerApps is a new enterprise service that helps employees to create apps and share them with co-workers.

Office 365 now has options for a Skype Meeting Broadcast, Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) Conferencing, PSTN Calling and Cloud Private Branch Exchange. In addition Office 365 customers now have one platform for calling, conferencing, video and sharing, Microsoft claims.

There are new analytics and data visualization tools in the cloud package too. Delve Analytics promises interactive dashboards that tell users who they are spending their time with and how. This, says Microsoft, will help employees to prioritise better. The cloud package will have greater levels of security and compliance, it claims, through a new Customer Lockbox feature which allows each user to set access control limits. A new eDiscovery option makes it easier to manage large quantities of data and find information.

These new features, along with new Power BI (business intelligence) and Advanced Threat Protection are available in a new premium enterprise suite, Office 365 E5.

Meanwhile the new Dynamics CRM 2016, Microsoft promises, will be a more intelligent, mobile and productive system, thanks to new data and intelligence components. Among the features is a new ‘intelligent product recommendations’ mode for sales reps to personalize up-selling.

Dynamics CRM 2016 can also simplify everyday jobs, like meeting follow-ups.

On that same theme PowerApps is a system for creating apps for everything from a simple survey to something more ambitious and mission critical, according to Microsoft. These can connect to line-of-business systems and cloud services and run on any device. They can be used by everyone from employees through IT staff to Professional developers.

Microsoft moves Dynamics AX into the cloud

MicrosoftMicrosoft says the latest incarnation of Dynamics AX will mark its transformation from a packaged application to a cloud service.

On Thursday the vendor announced the latest release of its flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) system will be generally available in the first quarter of 2016. The main difference, it said, is that the ERP is now a service designed for the cloud.

A public preview of the new solution for customers and partners will be available in early December. The new name of the release, Microsoft Dynamics AX, reflects a departure from branding that reflected the year or the version of the product, a characteristic of software packages, it said. From now on the branding will underscore that Dynamics AX is a cloud-based service that will be regularly updated, it said.

Microsoft said it will also implement a new, simple and more transparent subscription pricing model to make it easier for companies to buy the system as they need it. Dynamics AX will offer a new user experience that looks and works like Microsoft Office and shares information between Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM and Office 365, according to the vendor. It will also combine near-real-time analytics powered by Azure Machine Learning with the ability to visualise data through Power BI embedded in the application, in order to give users more predictive powers.

In response to usability analysis, Dynamics AX will have a browser-based HTML5 client and a new touch-enabled, modern user interface. Now that it’s a cloud system it will adopt the principles of highly visual applications more akin to consumer applications, according to Microsoft.

The classic rigidity of ERP systems has been replaced, according to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise’s executive VP. “Our ambition to build the intelligent cloud comes to life with apps optimised for modern business. When you combine the hyperscale, enterprise-grade and hybrid-cloud capabilities of Microsoft Azure with the real-time insights and intuitive user experience of Dynamics AX, organisations and individuals are empowered to transform their business operations,” said Guthrie.

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.

Orange Business Services and Akamai offer 10x faster cloud access

Cloud computingOrange Business Services (OBS) and content delivery specialist Akamai claim they have worked out a way to give enterprise clients up to 10 times faster access to business critical cloud applications.

The new Business VPN Internet Accelerate service, available from OBS, was created using Akamai’s Cloud Networking technology. It optimizes software as a service (SaaS) access so that users don’t have to wait for cloud-based applications, dashboards and documents to open and save.

This, says OBS, will make their customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence activities more potent and productive. The performance improvement is made by tweaking the transport mechanism across the OBS virtual private networks that extend, via an IPSec tunnel, to branch offices in enterprises.

OBS said it improves the cloud user experience through five customer support centres and eight CyberSecurity Operations Centres where it analyses network traffic, constantly configures service levels and monitors security. The Orange business-grade Internet service relies on the global Akamai Intelligent Platform, a content delivery accelerator which has 200,000 servers in 110 countries to localize material. It uses Orange’s global private network of mobile, satellite and wireline access links.

Orange is currently running pilots of Business VPN Internet Accelerate with a number of enterprises. The service is scheduled to be globally available in early 2016.

Getting networks fit for a cloud future with business grade connectivity is vital, said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, OBS’s VP of Connectivity Solutions. “Business VPN Internet Accelerate allows enterprises to embrace global hybrid networks and the Internet,” said Biaggi.

The claim for ten times faster access speeds was based on the results of an Orange Proof-of-Concept between Paris and Singapore. The vendor did not disclose what system was used as a benchmark on which the ten-fold improvement was made.

New Egnyte service promises to impose strict version in the cloud

AppsCloud file service provider Egnyte has launched a Smart Reporting and Auditing service which promises to impose order on the way content is created, edited, viewed and shared.

The service is currently exclusive to Egnyte customers who want visibility and control over their organisation’s entire content life-cycle, whether files are in-house or in the cloud. The rationale is to help companies stop wasting money on the multiplication of effort involved when multiple versions of the same file exist across the diaspora of in-house systems, private and public clouds.

The promised returns on investment in these cloud services, the company says, are lower costs, less risk and higher productivity through visibility. Cost savings are promised on reducing bandwidth consumption, minimised support issues and less wasted employee time. Risk will be minimised, according to Egnyte, as fewer files will be leaked out of the organisation and suspicious activities – both internally and externally – can be highlighted. Visibility improvements will boost productivity by speeding the progress of projects and the prevention of unchecked document replication and mutation, which leads to multiple teams working on multiple different versions of the same project.

Companies and vendors have still not cracked version control yet, said one analyst, and the cloud will only make the task more complicated.

“Content is at the core of just about every business process today, but users are accessing files across multiple devices, anywhere, any time,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “It is entirely too costly and there is simply too much data.”

Solving the big data analytics problem will be increasingly important, said McClure.

Devcon Construction, the largest general contractor in Silicon Valley, has used the service on trial to track confidential design plans and blueprints. “It gives complete visibility on how the files are shared and accessed, so we can effectively manage desktop and tablet device workflows out in the field,” said Joe Tan, director of IT at Devcon Construction.

The cloud service now makes detailed file analytics and insights possible, claimed Isabelle Guis, chief strategy officer at Egnyte. “It’s critical for businesses to optimise file infrastructure and protect against potential threats,” she said.

LogMeIn acquires LastPass for $125 million to create remote access giant

Remote working SaaS company LogMeIn will acquire password management service provider LastPass for $125 million to bolster its position in identity and access management.

LogMeIn already has a strong position in cloud-based remote login and LastPass is best known as a password manager with an emphasis on enterprise, so it’s easy to see how the two product portfolios complement each other. The combined companies will be in a position to offer a wide range of remote access tools and services.

“LastPass has a great business, a beloved and award winning product, millions of loyal users, and thousands of great business customers – they are synonymous with the category,” said Michael Simon, LogMeIn’s Chairman and CEO. “We believe this transaction instantly gives us a market leading position in password management, while also providing a highly favourable foundation for delivering the next generation of identity and access management solutions to individuals, teams and companies.”

“LogMeIn and LastPass share a great common vision on reshaping identity and access management in ways that not only increase productivity but also improve security for individuals and companies, alike,” said Joe Siegrist, CEO of LastPass. “The striking commonality between our businesses, our products, and cultural DNA make this a great fit for both teams, and we believe a great win for our customers.”

In the rationale behind the move there was much talk of BYOA (bring your own app), which LogMeIn has identified as a key trend. Essentially this means remote workers using whatever tools they see fit and IT managers having to work out how to accommodate them – much as has happened with BYOD (bring your own device). LogMeIn’s strategy is to be the default BYOA enabler.

Amazon Web Services makes aggressive customer acquisition play

Amazon reinvent 2015At its Amazon re:Invent event Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a number of products and initiatives designed to make it easier for potential customers to move their business to the AWS Cloud.

AWS Snowball is a portable storage appliance designed to be an alternative to trying to upload data over networks, claiming to be able to move 100 TB of data to AWS in less than a week. Amazon is betting that companies are neither willing to prioritise their existing bandwidth, nor devote the time to do this over the network. In addition the company launched Amazon Kinesis Firehose, which is designed to make it easier to upload wireless streaming data to the AWS cloud.

“It has never been easier or more cost-effective for companies to collect, store, analyze, and share data than it is today with the AWS Cloud,” said Bill Vass, VP of AWS Storage Services. “As customers have realized that their data contains key insights that can lead to competitive advantage, they’re looking to get as much data into AWS as quickly as possible. AWS Snowball and Amazon Kinesis Firehose give customers two more important tools to get their data into AWS.”

On top of these new products Amazon announced two new database services – AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon RDS for MariaDB – designed to make it easier for enterprises to bring their production databases to AWS, which seems to take aim at Oracle customers especially.

“With more than a hundred thousand active customers, and six database engines from which to choose, Amazon RDS has become the new normal for running relational databases in the cloud,” said Hal Berenson, VP of Relational Database Services, AWS. “With the AWS Database Migration Service, and its associated Schema Conversion Tool, customers can choose either to move the same database engine from on-premises to AWS, or change from one of the proprietary engines they’re running on-premises to one of the several open source engines available in Amazon RDS.”

Continuing the theme of taking on the big enterprise IT incumbents Amazon launched QuickSight, a cloud business intelligence service that would appear to compete directly with the likes of IBM, while aiming to undercut them with a low-price as-a-service model.

“After several years of development, we’re excited to bring Amazon QuickSight to our customers – a fast and easy-to-use BI service that addresses these needs at an affordable price,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of Database Services at AWS. “At the heart of Amazon QuickSight is the brand new SPICE in-memory calculation engine, which uses the power of the AWS Cloud to make queries run lightning fast on large datasets. We’re looking forward to our customers and partners being able to SPICE up their analytics.”

Lastly Amazon announced a new business group in partnership with Accenture that is also designed to make it easier for companies to move their business to the cloud. The Accenture AWS Business Group is a joint effort between the two and is another example of Accenture putting the cloud at the centre of its strategy.

“Accenture is already a market leader in cloud and the formation of the Accenture AWS Business Group is a key part of our Accenture Cloud First agenda,” said Omar Abbosh, Chief Strategy Officer of Accenture. “Cloud is increasingly becoming a starting point with our clients for their enterprise solutions. Whether our clients need to innovate faster, create new services, or maximize value from their investments, the Accenture AWS Business Group will help them get there faster, with lower risk and with solutions optimized for AWS.”

Rackspace ups AWS functionality and support, becomes authorised reseller

AWSManaged hosting provider Rackspace has announced a ramped up suite of products featuring enhanced support and functionality with Amazon Web Services.

The agreement with AWS, announced at re:Invent in Las Vegas this week, will see Rackspace launch managed service offerings including tools, expertise, application management and operational support for AWS Cloud. “Fanatical Support for AWS” is the core service offering featured as part of the agreement, with three beta offerings supplementing the managed service – Managed Security for AWS, Compliance Assistance for AWS and Managed Cloud for Adobe Experience Manager.

Through Fanatical Support, Rackspace tells its customers to “leave the heavy lifting to us” as it claims to take care of migration, architecture, security and operations for companies looking to adopt AWS for application hosting.

Rackspace has also become an authorised reseller at AWS, as well as a managed services partner, and has joined the AWS Partner Network. CEO Taylor Rhodes spoke about the announcement on the company’s blog page.

“Over the past year, more and more of them [customers] have told us that they love Rackspace expertise and Fanatical Support, and would like to get it for the workloads that they prefer to run on AWS,” he said. “We have spent the past several months working with those customers and with AWS, to create the best managed-service offering on that platform.”

Rhodes went on to say that AWS adds to Rackspace’s existing commitment to support a number of other platforms.

“We help businesses tap the power of the cloud without the pain and expense of managing it all themselves,” he said. “We have gone deep on support for platforms such as OpenStack, Microsoft and VMware. Our success in leading the managed cloud market for those technologies has been validated by industry experts such as Gartner, and most importantly, by our 300,000-plus business customers.”

Finally, Rhodes then highlighted how Fanatical Support has evolved with today’s announcements, and how it will benefit various customer segments.  He claims it will appeal to businesses that have desired AWS integration with existing Fanatical Support functionality; for rapidly growing businesses needing to outsource some IT functionality in order to reallocate technical resource to other areas; and for customers new to both AWS and Rackspace.

Meanwhile, AWS’s VP of worldwide partner ecosystem Terry Wise, welcomed Rackspace’s increased integration and functionality of AWS.

“We’re pleased to see Rackspace support AWS customers and achieve membership in the AWS Managed Service Program,” he said. “A growing number of businesses who want the benefit of the AWS Cloud will find value in working with AWS Managed Service Partners like Rackspace. We have been impressed with Rackspace’s commitment to include beta customers in their AWS managed services offerings, along with certifying a large number of their technical staff.”