When a new rollout of endpoint devices is on the horizon, their prospective users will most likely rejoice—but not those who are tasked with the rollout job if a central administration platform has not been put into place. Taking record of all those devices, their initial configuration, and their subsequent ongoing support significantly adds to […]
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Oracle has revealed the startups taking part in its Bristol-based Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator Programme, including Snap Tech, LettUs Grow We Build Bots, Sauce and GapSquare.
The diverse set of companies will be able to take advantage of collaborations with other businesses in the cloud space, as well as each other. They will be mentored by both Oracle engineers, technical teams and business experts, be able to make use of a co-working space and build their own opportunities by coming into contact with Oracle customers, partners and investors.
Visual search business Snap Tech offers consumers the tools to find exactly what they're looking to buy via visual search, AI, and machine learning, matching searches with the products online retailers have to offer.
LettUs Grow is a completely different kind of technology, helping vertical farms implement irrigation and control technologies, while We Build Bots' IntelAgent has been designed for contact centre agents, offering a collaboration-led customer service platform built upon AI and analytics.
Sauce's cloud-based video collaboration platform is reinventing video content for businesses, encouraging businesses to generate engaging content from a wide variety of sources.
The final business entering Oracle's accelerator programme is Gapsquare, which seeks to eradicate gender pay gaps by analysing data and generating data-driven recommendations for change.
“The startups in Bristol continue to raise the bar for global cloud innovation, and we are proud to welcome a select group of five to our second cohort,” said Reggie Bradford, senior vice president, Startup Ecosystem and Accelerator.
“Following the success of our initial cohort in Bristol, we will continue to leverage our cloud expertise, leading cloud products, and global network to support their rapid growth.”
Previous businesses taking part in Oracle's Startup Cloud Accelerator programme include Interactive Scientific, Duel, GRAKN.AI, iGeolise and Trail. The company also has similar programmes running in Austin, Bangalore, Bristol, Delhi–NCR, Mumbai, Paris, São Paulo, Singapore and Tel Aviv, helping startups around the world develop their cloud-based apps and services with the business and technical support of a tech giant.
<em>Image credit: Unite</em>
Having been in the web hosting industry since 2002, dhosting has gained a great deal of experience while working on a wide range of projects. This experience has enabled the company to develop our amazing new product, which they are now excited to present! Among dHosting’s greatest achievements, they can include the development of their own hosting panel, the building of their fully redundant server system, and the creation of dhHosting’s unique product, Dynamic Edge.
CloudEXPO New York 2018, colocated with DevOpsSUMMIT and DXWorldEXPO New York 2018 will be held November 12-13, 2018, in New York City and will bring together Cloud Computing, FinTech and Blockchain, Digital Transformation, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, AI and Machine Learning to one location.
Public cloud adoption will continue to go up and up – but as hybrid initiatives go up with them, concerns persist over how to handle cloud migration challenges.
That’s the key finding from the latest study by VIAVI Solutions. The IT and network testing provider, in its most recent State of the Network Global Study, polled more than 600 IT professionals and found more than half (56%) of enterprises polled had made the leap to public cloud as of this year. This number is set to go up to 72% by 2020.
By 2020, more enterprises plan to run a larger percentage of their apps in the cloud. As of this year, 62% of firms polled say only up to a quarter of their apps are cloud-based. By 2020, this number is set to dip to 28%, with 44% saying they have between a quarter and half of their apps in the cloud. More than a quarter (28%) of those polled said they expected at least half of their apps to be cloud-based in two years – a number which is only at 11% today.
Yet while these figures all look impressive, it is akin to the duck analogy – serene on top but paddling like hell underneath. Two thirds (65%) of those polled said their network team was responsible for troubleshooting cloud issues, compared with 24% who said they weren’t.
As VIAVI puts it, this translates as a disconnect between IT and business; if IT are fighting fires post-migration, then the chances are they weren’t around pre-migration, as the move may have been decided by a specific business unit. More than half (52%) said their biggest problem was determining whether problems were caused by the network, the application, or the system – by some distance the most frequently cited issue.
In terms of what needs to be done, the company suggests four key takeaways; adopting a ‘cloud by default’ approach; ensure engineers have as much visibility into the organisation’s SaaS offerings as possible; get visibility for the full application journey, from the user, to the cloud and the data centre, and get remote user intelligence on board.
“Based on this year’s State of the Network, you’ve really got to feel for enterprise IT teams. They’re losing control of infrastructure and services that are migrating to the cloud, while simultaneously supporting employees who may be working anywhere, and yet remain on the hook to maintain performance and resolve issues,” said Douglas Roberts, VIAVI enterprise and cloud business unit VP and GM. “They need solutions to increase their scope of visibility and speed of response, as well as smarter analytics.”
Headquartered in Plainsboro, NJ, Synametrics Technologies has provided IT professionals and computer systems developers since 1997. Based on the success of their initial product offerings (WinSQL and DeltaCopy), the company continues to create and hone innovative products that help its customers get more from their computer applications, databases and infrastructure. To date, over one million users around the world have chosen Synametrics solutions to help power their accelerated business or personal computing needs.
Dynatrace is an application performance management software company with products for the information technology departments and digital business owners of medium and large businesses. Building the Future of Monitoring with Artificial Intelligence. Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more business becomes digital the more stakeholders are interested in this data including how it relates to business. Some of these people have never used a monitoring tool before. They have a question on their mind like «How is my application doing» but no idea how to get a proper answer.
DXWorldEXPO LLC announced today that Big Data Federation to Exhibit at the 22nd International CloudEXPO, colocated with DevOpsSUMMIT and DXWorldEXPO, November 12-13, 2018 in New York City. Big Data Federation, Inc. develops and applies artificial intelligence to predict financial and economic events that matter. The company uncovers patterns and precise drivers of performance and outcomes with the aid of machine-learning algorithms, big data, and fundamental analysis. Their products are deployed by some of the world’s largest financial institutions. The company develops and applies innovative machine-learning technologies to big data to predict financial, economic, and world events. The team is a group of passionate technologists, mathematicians, data scientists and programmers in Silicon Valley with over 100 patents to their names.
Big Data Federation was incorporated in 2015 and is based in Silicon Valley, California.
Today’s AI cannot create an algorithm that satisfies a human’s intent in all but the simplest cases. What we do have is AI that can divine insights from patterns in large data sets.
If we can boil down algorithms into such data sets, then we can make some headway. For example, if an AI-based application has access to a vast number of human-created workflows, then it can make a pretty good guess as to the next step in a workflow you might be working on at the moment.
In other words, we now have autocomplete for algorithms – what we call ‘next best action.’ We may still have to give our software some idea of how we want an application to behave, but AI can assist us in figuring out the steps that make it work.
Looking at the figures from analysts like Gartner and IDC, one could be forgiven for thinking that HPE is in a spot of trouble; according to the latest reports, the company is trailing behind its main rival Dell Technologies in revenues and market share across both servers and storage.
You would imagine HPE would be concerned about this; its market share has shrunk over the past year whilst Dell’s has expanded, and this trend doesn’t show any immediate signs of stopping. Dell has gone from strength to strength since it swallowed EMC in 2016, while the last few years have been turbulent for HPE, to say the least.
However, the company appears to be weathering the storm. New CEO Antonio Neri seems like a strong and confident leader, its recent financial results have been showing improvement, and recent announcements about its intentions to simplify its channel programme have met with approval from partners.
Now that HPE has regained some stability, surely it’s looking to retake its position at the head of the infrastructure market? Yet, according to Mark Linesch, vice president of strategy for HPE, the company isn’t remotely concerned with whether or not it holds the market crown.
«Yeah, Dell’s got a couple of points of share according to Gartner – big deal,» he tells Cloud Pro.
«We’re not worried about Dell in servers at all. They’re a tough competitor, and we take them very seriously, but no – why would we worry about Dell getting a couple of points on us in servers? Who cares?»
Instead of chasing rankings, he says, the company is focusing on delivering maximum value and satisfaction to its customers, trying to help them solve their business problems by building the best infrastructure it possibly can.
This might sound like excuses from a company hoping to save face after losing the top spot that it held for so many years, and that may well be the case. However, downplaying its traditional infrastructure to a certain extent may actually be a sound strategic move for the vendor.
«I think it’s important that at this time of its existence – a new CEO, spin outs complete, et cetera – that HPE demonstrate to the market that it can set realistic goals and achieve them, or over-achieve, even,» says 451 Research co-founder William Fellows. «I don’t think that needs to be about catching Dell.»
On the other hand, Forrester senior analyst Naveen Chhabra warns that Dell is one competitor that shouldn’t be underestimated.
«While there is no doubt that HPE is gaining customers and market share, it absolutely needs to keep an eye on the market momentum,» he says. «Dell has forged a great number of technology partnerships, has a great ecosystem internally and externally.»
Dell has its own share of issues, but nothing notable enough that HPE should not be worried about Dell. Dell has a formidable family of technology offerings across its multitude of businesses.»
Both experts agree, however, that the biggest imminent threat to HPE is not Dell – or any other vendor, for that matter. Instead, it’s the industry’s growing shift towards the cloud.
As cloud infrastructure becomes more robust, more affordable and more popular, HPE needs to change up its strategy. To borrow a phrase from its sister company, it needs to reinvent itself.
HPE is doing this, counterintuitively, by embracing the cloud – or at least certain aspects of it. In particular, it’s adopting cloud-like service models for its on-premise infrastructure, offering consumption-based pricing for its hardware customers through HPE GreenLake. Using its traditional infrastructure business as a bedrock, the company is hoping that it can build long-term services and subscription-based revenue models that will sustain it going forward.
In addition to this new cloud-style go-to-market model, HPE is also putting considerable weight behind what it calls ‘the intelligent edge’ – the mish-mash of connected devices, peripherals, networking hardware and industrial equipment that comprises everything that’s not in the cloud or in the data centre. The company is ploughing $4 billion into the intelligent edge over the next four years, and has indicated that it’s a significant strategic priority.
According to Chhabra, while this is is a smart play for the company, it’s not without its risks, and he cautions that the market still isn’t totally mature.
«There is no doubt that the edge business is growing and hence almost all the large infrastructure vendors are putting their bets on ‘expected developments’ on the intelligent edge,» he says. «However we still need that to mature to levels where their independent and collective losses by adoption of public cloud can be offset.»
«In my humble and honest opinion, the messaging and focus on ‘the intelligent edge’ is directional and still at corporate levels. I don’t see concrete evidences of the developments – like technology and go-to-market partnerships, solution development, et cetera – that the infrastructure vendors are making. These developments are important and critical to ensure they are either ahead of the market, or take the leading position and create a niche for themselves.»
It’s true that HPE is no longer the market leader in server shipments, and that isn’t set to change any time soon – but that might not matter. Market trends suggest that as the traditional on-prem infrastructure business is increasingly eaten by the cloud, pivoting to emerging technologies is going to be the only way that companies like HPE are going to remain relevant.
CEO Antonio Neri says he’s playing the long game with his strategy, and that makes sense. Duking it out with Dell over market share may have been the way things worked with the old HPE, but that’s not the game any more. The two companies may well end up competing on the battlefield of edge computing – Dell has made significant investments in the area itself – but when it comes to old-school infrastructure, HPE may have to lose the battle in order to win the war.
Image courtesy of HPE