Recently, I’ve had several conversations with US Federal Government Agencies about monitoring applications moving to FedRAMP (The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) data centers. Because of the Government’s Cloud First policy, which mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits, agencies are increasingly forced to move application outside of their own data centers. With less control on the infrastructure, the new focus is now on the performance and availability of their applications running in the cloud. Agencies want an assurance their applications are running at the same level of performance (or better) once they make the move. This is where I believe an APM solution like AppDynamics is a perfect fit to mitigate risk by providing agencies 100% visibility into their application performance.

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This white paper digs deep into the reasons testing mobile apps is fundamentally harder than traditional web or desktop applications. A collaboration by Tina Zhuo and Dennis Schultz from IBM along with Yoram Mizrachi from Perfecto Mobile and John Montgomery from uTest, these experts explore the complexities of mobile test environments, the value of the mobile device cloud, the unique role crowd sourcing can play, and how teams can leverage automation to help deliver quality apps.

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Late last week CloudTech reported that the state of California was moving to the cloud, thanks to a contract won by IBM, AT&T and KPMG. And according to George Cruser, general manager infrastructure for IBM Global Technology Services, it was a unique contract in the 25 years he’s done government work.

“It was kind of an interesting competitive bid because it was the standard government bid, and then they had a series of negotiations where they took two teams across and did day-long sessions with each team,” he tells CloudTech.

“We ended up doing four day-long sessions before being selected as the victor.

“I would say [it’s] the first time I’ve ever spent four days in live discussions with a government client, and the result was they knew exactly what they were getting, and they made adjustments to make sure they got what they wanted,” he adds.

The contract itself is at $37m, at five years open to all government entities within California. IBM said in a press release accompanying the launch that, alongside supplying and managing the infrastructure, it would “work closely with the state to transfer essential knowledge and best practices in security and systems integration to the Department of Technology.”

It’s like a private membership only cloud, and the state gets to choose who the members are

Cruser confirms this, adding: “One of the requirements was they would have a full understanding as opposed to just pure outsourcing.”

IBM confirmed that it was working with a couple of states “who were very much interested in the concept”, but couldn’t say any more than that. However Cruser adds: “California clearly is a leader, in showing that they’ve essentially built a private cloud for multi-tenant use.

“I view it somewhat as it’s a private membership only cloud, and the state gets to choose who the members are.

“At the moment they’ve said it’s going to be California government entities, all the way down through municipalities and local. In the future they can choose to extend it more broadly than that if they so desired.”

The future for CalCloud is adding platform as a service and software as a service capability to its infrastructure as a service offering at present. Cruser notes the advantages California holds as the shape of cloud computing changes.

“I think the beauty of it is all the things that we don’t know will be available in the next five years can be made available through this contract,” Cruser says. “As infrastructure grows, as platform grows, evolves and changes, software as a service evolves and changes, the state’s got a platform now in which to stay current.”

Elsewhere, IBM has announced with AT&T, its main network partner, and DARPA, a proof of concept technology that rapidly reduces set up times for cloud-to-cloud connectivity through software defined networking.

The public cloud computing model is rapidly becoming the world’s most prolific IT deployment architecture, yet it leaves many promises unfulfilled. While offering scale, flexibility, and potential cost savings, the public cloud often lacks the isolation, computing power, and control advantages of bare metal servers. Recent feedback suggests that people who adopted public cloud solutions for their elasticity and convenience are now lamenting their “simple” solution’s complexity.
To deploy enterprise solutions with the public cloud, one must consider redundancies as a safety net for outages and other disasters, as well as more intricate network architecture for true interoperability.

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Cloud services provider SherWeb on Tuesday announced that it has acquired ORCS Web Inc., a Windows-based managed hosting provider headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. OrcsWeb will continue to operate as a wholly owned SherWeb subsidiary. Other terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
OrcsWeb represents SherWeb’s third acquisition in as many years and its first in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – a segment in which SherWeb has recently made significant inroads. Earlier this year, SherWeb was named a Microsoft 2014 World Hosting Partner of the Year Finalist for its soon-to-be-launched Performance Cloud Servers, which promise the fastest performance on the market.

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Ericsson on Tuesday announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire US-based MetraTech Corp., a provider of metadata-based billing, commerce and settlement solutions uniquely adaptable to multiple business models and industries.
The acquisition includes all 140 employees and contractors comprising a team of highly skilled software experts. It will further build upon Ericsson’s expertise in billing and expands its geographic presence in the US.

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Vormetric on Tuesday announced that Rackspace Hosting has joined the Cloud Partner program, and will be offering encryption and key management services to customers via Vormetric’s Transparent Encryption solution. Vormetric’s Transparent Encryption combines the performance, flexibility, simplicity and scalability needed to safeguard data-at-rest within Rackspace’s managed cloud environments, enabling customers to address their compliance requirements, and to help protect sensitive information.
«Organizations have increasingly adopted Rackspace as their provider of choice for enterprise class cloud and hosting solutions,» said John Engates, CTO at Rackspace. «With Vormetric, we’ve added new capabilities to extend data security practices to our customer implementations across our managed cloud platform.»

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Amazon Web Services is still the dominant market leader in infrastructure services, but IBM and Microsoft are closing the gap in revenues with Google well off the pace, according to the latest number crunching by analyst firm Synergy Research.

For the research house, it represents the first changing of the record in some time, having previously been huge advocates of Amazon’s market offering. AWS was “in a league of its own” this time last year, and “dwarf[ed] all competition” in November, Synergy argued.

At the time it was an irresistible viewpoint, and one CloudTech heartily agreed with in an editorial piece at the time.

Yet things have changed. Microsoft, and IBM particularly, have upped their game in 2014. And it can’t go unnoticed. Microsoft and IBM have gained market share over the past four quarters while AWS and Google remained at similar levels, according to Synergy.

The overall effect of this can be seen in the table below:

It’s worth noting here that this study only examines cloud infrastructure services – IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid. Synergy assesses that AWS revenues in this market are ‘well in excess’ of $1bn per quarter, and while Microsoft and IBM have similar figures per quarter, a lot of this is tied up in software/SaaS and cloud-related hardware products.

So what does this report mean for the main players? According to chief analyst John Dinsdale, it appears to be a mere blip for AWS.

“I do not think that Amazon is resting on its laurels – quite the opposite actually,” he tells CloudTech via email. “It is continuing to innovate and introduce new service offerings, [and] is looking and feeling like a company that intends to maintain its leadership position.”

While the main pretenders to Amazon’s throne have all caught up, Google has stood still. Dinsdale argues its lack of enterprise presence is inevitably holding it back.

“Amazon didn’t but it is benefiting from being the first to market and staying in front of the pack – so it has built the scale and now has credibility with enterprise customers,” says Dinsdale.

“IBM and Microsoft do, and they can leverage that,” he adds.

The study focuses on a quarterly survey of cloud operators alongside extensive supplemental research, and having covered it in detail for over two years, Dinsdale feels Synergy has a pretty good grasp on the market.

Amazon is looking and feeling like a company that intends to maintain its leadership position

In other words, the goalposts haven’t moved – which may be interesting considering the amount of up-and-coming players who have made big bets in the space, including Fujitsu, HP and SAP.

Dinsdale says Fujitsu “is a major player”, but not quite big enough yet to feature in this report (the company ranks #7 in Synergy’s analysis), while adding that HP is “now moving quite aggressively and becoming a substantial infrastructure services player.” Salesforce, who could be seen as the black sheep when compared to AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google in this report, is there on the strength of its PaaS offering, Dinsdale explains.

Amazon reported a loss of $126m across its portfolio in Q2, with the company expecting to lose between $410m and $810m in Q3. Revenues in its ‘other’ business markets – of which AWS is a major part – suffered deceleration in the second quarter, suggesting that the price cuts on its AWS packages are beginning to be felt in the profit margins.

“We remain heads-down focused on driving a better customer experience through price, selection and convenience,” said chief financial officer Tom Szkutak, in an analyst call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“We believe putting customers first is the only reliable way to create lasting value for shareholders,” he added.

Despite this, the Q2 figures show Amazon definitely has challengers to its crown in both revenue and innovation – and they’re not going to go away soon, either.

One would think that small businesses have things easy because fewer employees means a smaller and easier team to manage. In fact, there are a lot of challenges that are unique to small businesses, and one of the big ones if «growing pains.»

It’s difficult for a business owner to lock themselves into contracts, whether it’s a lease on an office building or a contract with an internet provider, because it’s sometimes impossible to predict how quickly the business will grow and whether these existing arrangements can sustain a larger team. At least, that was true until the cloud came along.
Small business owners that have unexpected success will more than likely have to withstand some stressful aspects of business growth, but cloud-based phone systems at least take away some of the stress and allow you to focus on the more exciting aspects.

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