Yottaa on Tuesday announced that it has closed $9 million in Series B funding. This round of funding allows Yottaa to accelerate the delivery of affordable services that optimize, protect and monitor websites and critical web applications for any organization – in particular, for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). “At Yottaa, we optimize the web,” noted Yottaa CEO Coach Wei. “We make speed, scale and security easy and affordable to our customers for their websites and critical web applications.”
Implementing Yottaa speeds web performance by up to 600 percent and improves conversions by up to 30 percent according to customer data. All existing investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures returned for this round and were joined by additional undisclosed investors.

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When you have an existing system, and you have a need to deploy a mobile app that won’t interfere with what’s already in place, the cloud can offer a great solution if managed correctly.

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Research from the International Data Corporation (IDC) suggests that adoption of cloud from retailers in the Asia Pacific region is currently slow but will progress substantially within five years.

According to the survey, only 19% of the 56 respondents were currently pushing through a cloud adoption strategy for their business, but 32% stated they were considering implementing cloud within the next two-to-five years.

IDC further noted in their research that the three main barriers to widespread Asia Pacific cloud adoption were data security, firewalls and integration to internal IT systems.

The report, entitled “Cloud Adoption in the Asia Pacific – Retail Industry”, was carried out between December 2011 and January 2012 among mid-to-large retail companies across the Asia Pacific region, covering Australia, China, Malaysia, New Zealand, India and Singapore.

Research manager Kumar Gs Das called the Asian retail industry “cautious” about cloud and added: “The majority of them recognises that the …

– Survey reveals cost plays a key role when it comes to Cloud uptake –

Uncertainty around the current economic climate is forcing organizations to look at alternatives to on-site IT infrastructures and resources with one-in-three organizations citing managed services as a more affordable option, according to a survey conducted by hosted services provider Rise.

The research carried out at a recent event, surveyed over 100 IT industry representatives, regarding their willingness to embrace Cloud computing.

The results revealed that over one-third of the respondents stated that ‘affordability’ was a key driver when looking to move from on-premise to managed services. Cost was also referenced when it came to the demands of end users considering a migration to the Cloud. The potentially huge cost savings that can be realized by such a move was ranked second highest in a list of various demands.

The results also suggest that while firms are starting to gain a better understanding of Cloud computing, there still exists a level of uncertainty when it comes to the actual adoption. Over 50 per cent of respondents highlighted issues such as a lack of understanding, as well as security and complexity concerns as reasons for not migrating.

The results from the survey also include:

– Almost two-thirds of participants are looking to migrate to the Cloud within the next two years
– 63 per cent of participants identified cost and maintenance as the biggest challenge when it comes to managing existing IT systems
– Over 50 per cent of interviewees stated loss of control and security and storage as barriers to Cloud entry

According to Steve Holford, director at Rise, the results suggest that while uncertainty still exists around Cloud uptake, the cost benefits are forcing organizations to take a more serious look at managed services. “The uncertainty hovering over the financial markets has acted as a bit of a wake up call, forcing people to actively go out and see where savings can be made, and Cloud is most certainly one of those areas.

“The financial commitment that goes with maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure is huge, and Cloud computing represents an opportunity to do away with expensive upgrades and maintenance costs.”

Steve continued: “The low cost adoption of Cloud can potentially lead to enormous cost savings for a business, and in the current climate these can’t be ignored. Instead of buying additional servers and storage devices that are used only a fraction of the time, employees can have access to Cloud applications and only pay for the amount of time actually used. Also, by outsourcing your IT needs you’ll be able to realign and focus on core business activities. We appreciate that a lot uncertainty still exists, and that us why a hybrid Cloud model offering the benefits of a hosted service while keeping sensitive data on site might also be an attractive option.”

– ENDS –

About Rise
Rise is the channel sales division of Fasthosts Internet Group. Based in Gloucester UK, Rise provides Cloud Computing and hosted IT services to a variety of customers, who rely on its web-hosting services and DataCenter on Demand™ platform. Rise equips its channel partners with the infrastructure they need to provide Cloud services. This includes virtual and dedicated servers, storage, backup, web hosting and disaster recovery.

Rise host these services from the secure infrastructure of Rise’s DataCenter on Demand and support them 24/7/365. In honor of its commitment to delivering products and services for outstanding adoption and application of innovation, Rise was named 2011 winner of The Hosting Partner of the Year Award, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Awards, as well as being awarded the Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Partner of the year in March 2011. For more information, please see: http://uk.rise.co/ 


For further information please contact:
Andrew Chatterton/Nick Bird
Spreckley Partners
e. rise@spreckley.co.uk
t. +44 (0)207 388 9988

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The backbone to the consulting services from the CBPN is the CTM best practice – Cloud Transformation Management, and the primary outputs from these engagements will be CTM Roadmaps. CTM Roadmaps enable migration to Cloud Computing through Shared Service-based models. Shared Service Roadmaps The fundamental role of the CBPN is to catalogue Cloud Best Practices, […]

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Yahoo Sunday finally cut a deal with Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd.

It’s agreed to sell half its 40% stake back to the Chinese e-commerce company for at least $6.3 billion in cash and $800 million in preferred stock. Alibaba will also pay Yahoo $550 million up-front and royalties for operating Yahoo China for at least four years.

The companies have been trying to negotiate a deal for the last two year through four Yahoo CEOs, whichever way you count.

Alibaba is supposed to go public by the end of 2015, which will give Yahoo the opportunity to dispose another 10% of its shares. Either Alibaba will buy them at the IPO price or Yahoo will sell them in the IPO.

Yahoo bought its stake in Alibaba in 2005 for $1 billion. If Yahoo had only been as astute in valuing Microsoft’s $47.5 billion acquisition offer four years ago. Microsoft offered $33 a share for Yahoo, which hasn’t seen the upside of 20 bucks a share since.

Alibaba represents a hefty piece of the US company’s $19 billion market cap.

The Chinese company is looking for $2.3 billion from existing investors to pay the tab and the amount Yahoo realizes depends on how equity financiers value Alibaba. It needs a valuation of $35 billion-$40 billion to pay Yahoo $7.1 billion; $45 billion would give Yahoo $7.6 billion and $50 billion $8.1 billion. Alibaba was valued at $32 billion in September.

According to Yahoo CFO Tim Morse Yahoo intends to pay capital gains taxes on the deal, netting at least $4.2 billion after taxes and return “substantially all” of that to shareholders. The deal is expected to close in the six months.

Alibaba runs Alibaba.com, its core B2B site, as well as two of China’s biggest online shopping sites Taobao and Tmall, the first for small merchants and second for established brands.

One of its biggest problems is logistics, which basically stink in China. Payments are also a problem, according to Bloomberg, and it’s facing share-eating competition. Being Chinese, counterfeit goods are a constant issue.

Alibaba spun off its Alipay payment unit last year to a company controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma without telling Yahoo and claimed later that the Chinese government wouldn’t license an electronic payment service that wasn’t entirely Chinese-owned. It eventually made some restitution. It’s believed Alibaba may want to expand its payments position.

Softbank still owns 30% of Alibaba. It and Yahoo have agreed to dilute their voting rights below their combined 50% share ownership, giving Ma the control he craves.

Yahoo will be able to make other investments in China if it chooses. Yahoo and Alibaba are also reportedly talking about strategic initiatives.

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Cloud computing is creating the new Wall Street boom, according to NIA. The only industry that is as bright as cloud computing on Wall Street is social networking, NIA said in a recent report.
2012 will be known as the year cloud computing became widely adopted worldwide. Cloud computing is expected to create 14 million new jobs globally by 2015. In the consumer space, Gartner predicts cloud services will be on 90 percent of personal consumer devices by 2015 so consumers can store, connect, stream and synchronize content across multiple platforms at different locations. That’s a lot of tunes and apps.
So far this year, there have been three IPOs of cloud computing stocks, and all three IPOs have been major successes, indicating cloud computing is ready for primetime on Wall Street. And where the money goes, jobs follow.

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EMC is throwing itself a little party known as EMC World this week in Las Vegas, and has already made several cloud-related announcements while in town. One of them (see end of this article) led me to think about sending Big Data to the moon.

Hybrid Approach
Hybrid cloud – a term I hope goes away soon, along with public and private cloud – was central to an announcement about the VMax family of enterprise-storage arrays. In a nutshell, EMC says this storage is bigger, faster, and easier to deploy. It’s also aimed at customers with concerns about Big Data, too. The “simplified management capabilities (of VMAX) are central to achieving the level of performance, data protection, and management customers are facing,” according to Benjamin Woo of IDC.
The VPlex operating environment received an upgrade, too, and now delivers 40% more performance than before, according to EMC. The company claims “the industry’s only high availability three-site data center protection solution for active/active Hybrid Cloud deployments with its RecoverPoint software running within VPlex.”

I’ll Recover
Speaking of backup and recovery, EMC also announced new deduplication systems and software aimed to address bottlenecks caused by legacy backup systems, ie, “dealing with slow and unreliable tape-based recoveries.” Jason Buffington from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) said EMC meets the need of “IT transformation initiatives (who) are driving new requirements for backup and recovery, and users need to be able to architect and optimize their data protection infrastructure to meet their specific needs.”

BFF VMware
EMC didn’t leave VMware out of the mix, announcing an extension of the companies’ partnership, to deliver to storage analytics. Specifically, the EMC VNX Storage Analytics Suite and EMC VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite are planned to be available this quarter, the companies said.
VMware VP Ramin Sayar said, “the powerful combination of EMC storage intelligence and VMware’s vCenter Operations Management Suite will offer automated optimization and simplicity for our joint customers…organizations of all sizes can proactively manage their overall infrastructure system health, as they continue to automate and transform their IT infrastructure.”
Rich Napolitano, President of EMC’s Unified Storage Division noted “the benefits of total transparency into storage systems, in both physical and virtualized infrastructures, (which) are staggering. VNX Storage Analytics Suite is designed to capitalize on this transparency by offering simplified storage management, optimized performance and easily maintained service levels for unprecedented efficiency.”

Big Data
As far as Big Data goes, EMC’s cloud announcement was a bit more vaporous, with an announcement of “readying” the next version of the Isilon OneFS NAS operating system – code name “Mavericks.” The company said the new version, due sometime this year, will bring “new levels of data protection, security, system performance and interoperability.”

IDC’s Benjamin Woo was quite excited about this one, saying, “A major factor that sets Isilon apart in this era of Big Data is its interoperability with a wide array of applications delivered through a range of industry standard protocols. Isilon recently enhanced this capability to include native integration with Hadoop. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is again raising the bar on interoperability with enhanced integration with VMware and a new platform API that provides additional options to enterprises to integrate and manage Isilon storage systems with third-party applications….innovations like these strongly position Isilon scale-out NAS to help enterprises successfully address the challenges of Big Data.”
ESG’s Terri McClure was also enthusiastic, saying, “EMC Isilon pioneered the delivery of scale-out NAS to address these needs. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is building on that leadership by providing increased levels of data protection and performance to meet the still emerging business requirements in this new world of Big Data in the enterprise.”

VaaS, perhaps?
“IT-as-a-Service” – isn’t that the same thing as Infrastructure-as-a-Service? – was the topic of EMC’s DataBridge enterprise management tool announcement. Databridge “mashes up” (ie, converges) IT operations data, “transforming silos of disparate compute, storage and network management information into use-case specific DataBridge widgets for better visibility across the infrastructure,” EMC says.
Also available “later this year,” DataBridge puts real-time IT infrastructure management onto ye olde “single pane of glass,” the company says. Oh, I get it .. it’s IT-Management-as-a-Service. Howzabout Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS)?
In any case, EMC’s DataBridge “will include the DataBridge studio, an enterprise mashup environment where customers will go to build DataBridge widget. With DataBridge studio, customers can build and add new DataBridge widgets to their DataBridge library to share with others in the organization,” the company says.
Stuck in the Middle With You
You mid-range customers shouldn’t feel left out, as EMC has reduced by 38% the initial acquisition cost for Flash drive tiers. Its VNXe series will also deliver 50% more performance and capacity per rack unit, the company says.
ESG weighed in on this one, too, with Mark Peters saying, “EMC’s multifaceted enhancements to its VNX unified storage family hit on many different, crucial storage pain points experienced by IT generalists. EMC’s transformation of its midrange storage offerings…demonstrates its deep understanding of its target customers.”

To the Moon & Beyond
Finally, EMC announced a Atmos enhancements designed to allow the biggest of Big-Data customers to manage a 100-petabyte cloud as a single system across distributed sites, with obligatory performance improvements.
You know, if you stacked Quad Density, 720K, 5.25-inch floppy disks, at about six disks per inch, a 100-petabyte stack would reach far beyond the moon…seriously.

read more

EMC is throwing itself a little party known as EMC World this week in Las Vegas, and has already made several cloud-related announcements while in town. One of them (see end of this article) led me to think about sending Big Data to the moon.

Hybrid Approach
Hybrid cloud – a term I hope goes away soon, along with public and private cloud – was central to an announcement about the VMax family of enterprise-storage arrays. In a nutshell, EMC says this storage is bigger, faster, and easier to deploy. It’s also aimed at customers with concerns about Big Data, too. The “simplified management capabilities (of VMAX) are central to achieving the level of performance, data protection, and management customers are facing,” according to Benjamin Woo of IDC.
The VPlex operating environment received an upgrade, too, and now delivers 40% more performance than before, according to EMC. The company claims “the industry’s only high availability three-site data center protection solution for active/active Hybrid Cloud deployments with its RecoverPoint software running within VPlex.”

I’ll Recover
Speaking of backup and recovery, EMC also announced new deduplication systems and software aimed to address bottlenecks caused by legacy backup systems, ie, “dealing with slow and unreliable tape-based recoveries.” Jason Buffington from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) said EMC meets the need of “IT transformation initiatives (who) are driving new requirements for backup and recovery, and users need to be able to architect and optimize their data protection infrastructure to meet their specific needs.”

BFF VMware
EMC didn’t leave VMware out of the mix, announcing an extension of the companies’ partnership, to deliver to storage analytics. Specifically, the EMC VNX Storage Analytics Suite and EMC VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite are planned to be available this quarter, the companies said.
VMware VP Ramin Sayar said, “the powerful combination of EMC storage intelligence and VMware’s vCenter Operations Management Suite will offer automated optimization and simplicity for our joint customers…organizations of all sizes can proactively manage their overall infrastructure system health, as they continue to automate and transform their IT infrastructure.”
Rich Napolitano, President of EMC’s Unified Storage Division noted “the benefits of total transparency into storage systems, in both physical and virtualized infrastructures, (which) are staggering. VNX Storage Analytics Suite is designed to capitalize on this transparency by offering simplified storage management, optimized performance and easily maintained service levels for unprecedented efficiency.”

Big Data
As far as Big Data goes, EMC’s cloud announcement was a bit more vaporous, with an announcement of “readying” the next version of the Isilon OneFS NAS operating system – code name “Mavericks.” The company said the new version, due sometime this year, will bring “new levels of data protection, security, system performance and interoperability.”

IDC’s Benjamin Woo was quite excited about this one, saying, “A major factor that sets Isilon apart in this era of Big Data is its interoperability with a wide array of applications delivered through a range of industry standard protocols. Isilon recently enhanced this capability to include native integration with Hadoop. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is again raising the bar on interoperability with enhanced integration with VMware and a new platform API that provides additional options to enterprises to integrate and manage Isilon storage systems with third-party applications….innovations like these strongly position Isilon scale-out NAS to help enterprises successfully address the challenges of Big Data.”
ESG’s Terri McClure was also enthusiastic, saying, “EMC Isilon pioneered the delivery of scale-out NAS to address these needs. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is building on that leadership by providing increased levels of data protection and performance to meet the still emerging business requirements in this new world of Big Data in the enterprise.”

VaaS, perhaps?
“IT-as-a-Service” – isn’t that the same thing as Infrastructure-as-a-Service? – was the topic of EMC’s DataBridge enterprise management tool announcement. Databridge “mashes up” (ie, converges) IT operations data, “transforming silos of disparate compute, storage and network management information into use-case specific DataBridge widgets for better visibility across the infrastructure,” EMC says.
Also available “later this year,” DataBridge puts real-time IT infrastructure management onto ye olde “single pane of glass,” the company says. Oh, I get it .. it’s IT-Management-as-a-Service. Howzabout Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS)?
In any case, EMC’s DataBridge “will include the DataBridge studio, an enterprise mashup environment where customers will go to build DataBridge widget. With DataBridge studio, customers can build and add new DataBridge widgets to their DataBridge library to share with others in the organization,” the company says.
Stuck in the Middle With You
You mid-range customers shouldn’t feel left out, as EMC has reduced by 38% the initial acquisition cost for Flash drive tiers. Its VNXe series will also deliver 50% more performance and capacity per rack unit, the company says.
ESG weighed in on this one, too, with Mark Peters saying, “EMC’s multifaceted enhancements to its VNX unified storage family hit on many different, crucial storage pain points experienced by IT generalists. EMC’s transformation of its midrange storage offerings…demonstrates its deep understanding of its target customers.”

To the Moon & Beyond
Finally, EMC announced a Atmos enhancements designed to allow the biggest of Big-Data customers to manage a 100-petabyte cloud as a single system across distributed sites, with obligatory performance improvements.
You know, if you stacked Quad Density, 720K, 5.25-inch floppy disks, at about six disks per inch, a 100-petabyte stack would reach far beyond the moon…seriously.

read more