CloudBees, Inc., on Wednesday announced it has closed an $11.2 million Series C financing round. The round was led by Verizon Ventures, the investment arm of Verizon Communications Inc. The round also included existing investors Matrix Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners, as well as new investor Blue Cloud Ventures.
“PaaS and continuous delivery are transforming the way enterprises create business applications and deliver value to the business by accelerating the way applications are built and deployed,” said Sacha Labourey, founder and chief executive officer of CloudBees. “CloudBees is at the center of this evolution and we are excited to have a group with the stature of Verizon Ventures lead our Series C investment round.”
IBM Cloud-Based Exchange Helps Transform Indian Automotive Industry
IBM on Wednesday announced it has deployed a business-to-business (B2B) cloud-based network that will help transform the Indian automotive industry by accelerating the movement of data and reducing transaction costs by up to 80 percent. The new exchange – AutoDX – was developed in partnership with the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) and the Automotive Components Manufacturers Association (ACMA), the two leading industry bodies in the Indian automotive industry.
CloudBees secures $11.2m series C funding, strengthens Verizon play
PaaS provider CloudBees has secured series C funding to the tune of $11.2m (£6.7m), in a round of investment led by Verizon Ventures.
The latest round puts the total investment at $25.7m (£15.4m), with Verizon joining existing investors Matrix Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners, as well as new investor Blue Cloud Ventures.
According to CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey, the money will be used in two capacities – increasing go-to-market capability in different geographies, as well as further investment in the product, with particular focus on its enterprise product, Jenkins.
“We are getting great traction especially around Jenkins, and there is demand from large organisations to scale their environment and help us get more efficient at managing big companies’ delivery environment,” he told CloudTech.
According to Labourey, the enterprise expertise only plays a small part in what makes CloudBees appealing to the venture capitalists.
“A lot of the …
Global cloud market will be worth $121bn by next year, report finds
A recent report from market research firm Markets and Markets reveals that the cloud market is expected to grow to $121 billion dollars by 2015: a 26% compound annual growth rate from the $37 billion value in 2010.
A large proportion of the growth of the cloud services sector is being driven by rapid adoption of Software-as-a-service platforms, which are saving businesses on the cost of licensing, management, and deployment of software and hardware for productivity and collaboration.
Infrastructure-as-a-service is also expected to grow rapidly as a platform on which businesses will host their own SaaS solutions and for other business critical infrastructure deployments.
Much of the growth is being driven by larger companies that have previously been reluctant to invest in cloud infrastructure because of concerns of vendor lock-in, lax security, and the difficulty of developing cloud solutions that are tailored to their specific requirements.
As the cloud sector …
How to Choose Where Your Load Should Come From
The goal of a load test is to replicate the traffic & conditions your app experiences in production as realistically as possible
As a tester, you understand how important it is to create the most realistic load test possible to provide confidence that your web application won’t fail in the field. But how do you know where your load should come from to produce realistic results?
Load testing from dedicated infrastructure inside your own datacenter is the most common and typically the most accessible way to wring out performance issues in your applications. This type of testing should be performed as part of your regular testing process.
DocuSign Raises $85 Million
DocuSign on Tuesday announced the company has raised an additional $85 million with the vast majority from large institutional public funds and the balance from existing investors. DocuSign will use the funds to fuel continued growth as the global standard for Digital Transaction Management (DTM). The company will further innovate the DocuSign DTM platform, drive deeper vertical solutions, invest in the company’s strategic partnerships, and continue its international expansion.
Digital Transaction Management has emerged as a new category of cloud services to digitally manage document-based transactions. DTM removes friction inherent in processes that involve people, documents, and data to create faster, easier, more convenient and secure transactions. DocuSign’s DTM platform helps consumers and businesses complete transactions faster by eliminating the hassles, costs, and lack of security in printing, faxing, scanning, and overnighting documents to capture information, payments, and signatures. Companies DocuSign to create better customer experiences, ensure security and compliance, and achieve substantial ROI.
Are We All Cloud Service Brokers Now?
By John Dixon, Consulting Architect
Robin Meehan of Smart421 recently wrote a couple of great posts on cloud service brokers (CSBs) and the role that they play for consumers of cloud services. (http://smart421.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/were-mostly-all-cloud-services-brokers-now/ and http://smart421.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/cloud-brokerage-and-dynamic-it-workload-migration/). I’m going to write two blogs about the topic. The first will be a background on my views and interpretations around cloud service brokers. In the second post, I will break down some of Robin’s points and explain why I agree or disagree.
Essentially, a cloud broker offers consumers three key things that a single cloud provider does not (these are from the NIST definition of a Cloud Service Broker):
- Intermediation
- Aggregation
- Arbitrage (run-time, deployment-time, plan-time)
My interpretation of these is as follows. We’ll use Amazon Web Services as the example IaaS cloud provider and GreenPages as the example of the cloud broker:
Intermediation. As a cloud broker, GreenPages, sits between you, the consumer, and AWS. GreenPages and other CSBs do this so they can add value to the core AWS offering. Why? Billing and chargeback is a great example. A bill from AWS includes line item charges for EC2, S3, and whichever other services you used during the past month – so you would be able to see that EC2 charges for January were $12,502.90 in total. GreenPages takes this bill and processes it so that you would be able to get more granular information about your spend in January. We would be able to show you:
- Spend per application
- Spend per environment (development, test, production)
- Spend per tier (web, application, database)
- Spend per resource (CPU, memory, storage, managed services)
- Compare January 2014 to December, or even January 2013
- Estimate the spend for February 2014
So, going directly to AWS, you’d be able to answer a question like, “how much did I spend in total for compute in January?”
And, going through GreenPages as a cloud broker, you’d be able to answer a question like, “how much did the development environment for Application X cost in January, and how does that compare with the spend in December?”
I think you’d agree that it is easier to wrap governance around the spend information from a cloud service broker rather than directly from AWS. This is just one of the advantages of using a CSB in front of a cloud provider – even if you’re like many customers out there and choose to use only one provider.
Aggregation. As a CSB, GreenPages aggregates the offerings from many providers and provides a simple interface to provision resources to any of them. Whether you choose AWS, Terremark, Savvis, or even your internal vSphere environment, you’d use the same procedure to provision resources. On the provider side, CSBs also aggregate demand from consumers and are able to negotiate rates. Why is this important? A CSB can add value in three ways here:
1) By allowing you to compare the offerings of different providers – in terms of pricing, SLA guarantees, service credits, supported configurations, etc.
2) By placing a consistent approval framework in front of requests to any provider.
3) By using aggregated demand to negotiate special pricing and terms with providers – terms that may not be available to an individual consumer of cloud services
The approval framework is of course optional – if you wish, you could choose to allow any user to provision infrastructure to any provider. Either way, a CSB can establish a request management framework in front of “the cloud” and can, in turn, provide things like an audit trail of requests and approvals. Perhaps you want to raise an ITIL-style change whenever a cloud request is fulfilled? A CSB can integrate with existing systems like Remedy or ServiceNow for that.
Arbitrage. Robin Meehan has a follow-on post that alludes to cloud arbitrage and workload migration. Cloud arbitrage is somewhat science fiction at this time, but let’s look forward to the not-too-distant future.
First, what is arbitrage and cloud arbitrage? NIST says it is an environment where the flexibility to CSB has the flexibility to choose, on the customer’s behalf, where to best run the customer’s workload. In theory, the CSB would always be on the lookout for a beneficial arrangement, automatically migrate the workload, and likely capture the financial benefit of doing so. This is a little bit like currency arbitrage, where a financial institution is looking for discrepancies in the market for various currencies, and makes various transactions to come up with a beneficial situation. If you’ve ever seen the late-night infomercials for forex.com, don’t believe the easy money hype. You need vast sums of money and perfect market information (e.g., you’re pretty much a bank) to play in that game.
So, cloud arbitrage and “just plain currency arbitrage” are really only similar when it comes to identifying a good idea. This is where we break it down cloud arbitrage into three areas:
- Run-time arbitrage
- Deployment-time arbitrage
- Plan-time arbitrage
In my next post, I will break down cloud arbitrage as well as go over some specific points Robin makes in his posts and offer my opinions on them.
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Windstream Hosted Solutions Opens Fourth Data Center in Charlotte, NC
Windstream Hosted Solutions has officially opened its fourth data center in Charlotte, N.C., bringing its nationwide total to 27.
The new enterprise-class data center is currently 39,300 square feet, with 10,380 square feet of raised floor space. Using a phased approach, Windstream Hosted Solutions plans to expand this new Charlotte data center to a total of 60,800 total square feet, with more than 20,500 square feet of raised floor space.
The state-of-the-art facility is the latest addition to Windstream Hosted Solutions’ nationwide network of data centers, all designed to deliver colocation, dedicated server, managed services and disaster recovery solutions to enterprise customers all over the U.S.
Can Net Neutrality Bring About Competition and Differentiation?
In the ongoing debate over net neutrality, brought to the forefront this past week by the Netflix, Comcast, Verizon deal, there is now increasing dialogue about what could happen if some form of real blocking and favoring starts to happen. For some this is the nightmare scenario: only popular and profitable services get capacity, because they can afford to pay. Rates go up significantly and niche applications are blocked or relegated to the slow lane. When you sign on with an internet service provider (ISP), you will then get access to only the restricted portfolio of services offered by the ISP. It will be just like signing on to a cable company and getting just the programming the cable company has chosen. What else should we expect? This is taming the wild west of the Internet and making it just the same as traditional cable TV. But, we have a right to ask, if service providers can adjust charging for the optimization of the increasingly scarce resource of bandwidth, what incentive is there for them to build more capacity? Why not just keep the network the way it is, and command higher and higher prices for the privilege of using it? Actually, the way things are today, with most households and businesses having no choice of supplier (or a choice of two, each with the same philosophy) the ISPs can do what they like, as long as they maintain transparency.
Appcore AMP™ Is Verified as Citrix Ready
Citrix Ready program helps customers identify third-party solutions that are recommended to enhance virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions from Citrix. Appcore AMP completed a rigorous verification process to ensure compatibility with Citrix CloudPlatform™, providing confidence in joint solution compatibility.
“Given the success and user growth of Appcore AMP since early 2013, the time was right for us to further enhance our ongoing relationship with Citrix. We are extremely proud that Appcore AMP is now Citrix Ready verified. Citrix CloudPlatform provides Appcore AMP with the most relevant cloud orchestration tool designed for service providers”, stated Appcore CEO Jeff Tegethoff.