Picture credit: JD Lasica/Flickr

Cloud storage provider Box is set to finally go public nine months after its aborted first attempt, according to an updated regulatory filing.

The updated S-1 filing, viewable here, outlines plans to sell 12.5 million shares at between $11 and $13 a share, with CEO Aaron Levie tweeting a thinly veiled comment on the delay:

Well that certainly took a while.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) January 9, 2015

There was plenty of furore back in March when reports surfaced that Box had filed for IPO, with this publication noting at the time Levie’s comment over how neither he nor CFO Dylan Smith had “storied” careers at IBM or Oracle, and the general disruption between cloudy upstarts and legacy tech vendors.

Yet the ending wasn’t a happy one; after shares of various public cloud companies tanked – no, not that sort of public cloud – the Los Altos-based firm decided to withdraw and keep its powder dry.

In the updated document, many of the figures haven’t changed. Profitability is at -137%, while sales and marketing spend remains at 137% of the firm’s revenue. These are figures which don’t seem to concern Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, who wrote in his blog: “Compared to other publicly traded SaaS companies, Box is among the least in efficient customer acquisition.

“But in this market, which values revenue growth and seemingly ignores profitability, the bottom line doesn’t seem to matter as much as the top line. In that regard, Box is close to the top of the heap.”

Events since then have improved Box’s standing, not least the acquisition of General Electric as a new customer in May. In July, Levie announced the removal of cloud storage limits for Box’s business customers, calling it “the end of the storage wars.” Given Microsoft responded in kind, first by offering 1TB and then unlimited cloud storage for Office 365 subscribers, then it’s clear the next phase for Box and its nearest competitors is not just the storage of data, but its location and protection as well.

Not every pundit is in agreement, however. Vineet Jain, CEO of competitor Egnyte, previously spoke of the need for “basic financial sense” in IPO valuations. Yet Alex Gorbansky, CEO of Box partner Docurated, told this publication back in September of the difference between the media’s comment and what customers are actually thinking. “If you talk to customers and leading CIOs, they’re all enthusiastically investing in Box,” he said.

Box is usually portrayed as a bitter rival of Dropbox, although both companies play this down. Yet Dropbox’s recent business decisions – partnering with Microsoft for Office 365, for instance – marks a change in their strategy over recent months. Where Box goes from here, particularly given Microsoft and Google’s aggressive push on cloud storage, among others, remains to be seen.

Enterprise cloud adoption rates have climbed in leaps and bounds over the past several years and 72 percent of companies are expected to pursue a hybrid cloud implementation strategy by 2015.[1] But cloud technology’s value proposition has transformed as business needs have evolved. Whereas cloud was once seen as being a way to reduce costs, cloud users are finding it’s now much more than a matter of saving money. As business processes and applications have become more complex and simultaneously more automated, more companies have moved away from virtualized environments in favor of the flexibility, reduced capex, rapid service delivery and other business benefits experienced by their peers who have made the leap to the cloud.

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In today’s application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it’s their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Application Performance Management at CA Technologies, discussed how a user-centric Application Performance Management solution can help inspire your users with every application transaction.

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Cloud computing adds flexibility to enterprise IT. When companies wish to take advantage of this, they are finding they need to turn to microservices instead of their traditional, monolithic architectures to accommodate frequent change.

Microservices can overcome the challnges presented by frequent change, “by splitting monoliths into multiple independent services, each with its own simple business logic,” according to Sergey Sverchkov, a Solutions Architect with Altoros. Doing so leads to another issue: “choosing either PaaS or IaaS for microservices is an open question, “ he says.

Sergey recently posted a thoughtful piece on the topic of PaaS vs. IaaS when implementing microservices on the Altoros blog. Altoros provides system integration services for a worldwide client base with the Cloud Foundry PaaS, yet Sverchov’s piece takes a balanced view of which approach to take.

His fundamntal point is that a DevOps team will be spending a lot of time monkeying around (my phrase, not Sergey’s) when companies work straight to the bare infrastructure; taking the PaaS approach. “An automated PaaS is a bigger investment,” he writes, “but it can shrink release cycles from weeks to hours and even eliminate some downsides of the microservices model.”

In his post, Sergey covers six different areas regarding the implementation of microservices, and the differences between IaaS vs. PaaS in each of these areas, summarized as follows:

1. One service for one job. With IaaS, “every service is deployed as an (IaaS) instance; DevOps ar responsible for configuring valid communication interfaces.” With PaaS, “scalability can be controlled by a developer. Communication endpoints are served by the PaaS.”

2. Using different tools to implement different services. With IaaS, “DevOps needs to configure an application runtime.” With PaaS, “an application runtime is automatically deployed in a PaaS container.”

3. Loose coupling. With IaaS, “The DevOps team manages IaaS instances used for service deployment.” With PaaS, “containers are isolated elements for application deployment. Container lifecycle is managed by the Paas.”

4. Developer independence. With IaaS, “ DevOps may need to create multiple IaaS environments for each of the development groups.” Alternatively, with PaaS, development groups can be managed (using Cloud Foundry terminology) as “organizations” and “spaces.”

5. Continuous delivery. With IaaS, “DevOps engineers need to install and configure build-automation tools and integrate them with a project repository.” Specficially with Cloud Foundry, “build-automation solutions can be deployed as a regular application.”

6. Integration with external services. With IaaS, “the DevOps team deploys external services. Applications connect (to them) using properties.” With PaaS, “a service broker can be used to deploy and publish some external services. Service binding makes it easier to connect an application instance to external services.”

In addition to the item about IaaS/PaaS and microservices, Sergey has authored a much longer technical whitepaper on the general topic of microservices vs. monolithic architectures, available through the blog section of the Altoros website.

I heard a lot of talk last year about major public cloud infrastructure providers starting to subsume PaaS into their offerings. Besides the potential for a new era of vendor lock-in, the IaaS vs. PaaS debate also involves significant functionality issues and questions of the skillsets, and more important, efficiency enterprise IT will have as the presence of cloud – public, private, and hybrid – increases within their organizations. Sergey’s post adds value to this debate.

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OpenStack and Hadoop are both amazingly powerful platforms for those who need (and recognize that they need) them. We all know what private clouds and Big Data are, so I won’t waste your time explaining them. I will point out for those who haven’t had the pleasure of installing them that they are terribly difficult to install and manage. Not because they’re poorly designed and written, and not because Open Source doesn’t care about usability, but because they’re that complex. To illustrate this point, I like to point people to this picture from the OpenStack documentation that shows a simplified depiction of the architecture.

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In 2014, we saw AWS customers (especially in the small and mid-size segments) start to lay claim that they couldn’t make their own networks as secure as using Amazon’s EC2/S3 infrastructure services. This trend will accelerate in 2015. Small and medium businesses usage of cloud applications will increase because they are unable to keep pace with the rate of change of attacks and threats, as well as resulting legal and compliance requirements. Why? Mainly due to the cost and level of effort it would require to adequately protect against the myriad of data breach possibilities. They want to be experts in their businesses, not in IT Security, and their organizations don’t have the size and scale to justify in-house resources to do it themselves. As a result, they will rely partially on their service providers like Amazon Web Services. This doesn’t mean that these organizations are handing over all responsibility to Amazon. Amazon clearly states that security is a joint responsibility and spells out specific areas they will commit to versus end user responsibilities.

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SYS-CON Media announced today that Vormetric launched a popular blog feed on Cloud Computing Journal with almost 5,000 story reads.
Cloud Computing Journal aims to show how and why Cloud Computing is an opportunity for business to implement low cost, low power and high efficiency systems to deliver scalable infrastructure without heavy investment in hardware, training or software licensing.

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As much as we think the Apples and Walmarts of the world are running our lives, it’s much more likely that small businesses are running the world. Or at least in the United
States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 99.9 percent of U.S. business has less than 500 employees, 98 percent with less than 20 employees.

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What changes in the cloud computing, Internet of Things and Big Data landscape should you be expecting in 2015? This article offers a round-up of industry experts’ opinions on the New Year.
Now that cloud services have become part of IT’s “new normal,” commonly referred to as “hybrid,” it seems obvious that the approaches and tools we use to manage IT would also evolve and mature, though the pace of evolution varies amongs companies, of course. According to a Website Magazine article quoting a Gartner survey, more than 55% of CIOs indicate they would host all critical apps in the cloud by 2020. Cloud services use cases can vary greatly, but often hold common themes around converting traditional applications to SaaS, or adding disaster recovery to your existing datacenter with RaaS.
What does this tee up for next year? Here are four key areas to watch in 2015:

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