SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudistics, an on-premises cloud computing company, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Launched in 2016, Cloudistics helps anyone bring the power of the cloud to the data center in an easy-to-use, on- premises cloud platform that automatically provides high performance resources for all types of applications: Docker, Splunk, Hadoop, Citrix® VDI, and many other high performance workloads. With no onsite controllers to install or maintain, it’s easy to scale across a large site or multiple locations – all from a single, centralized dashboard.
What Is #DigitalTransformation? | @ThingsExpo #AI #DX #IoT #SmartCities
For a phrase that’s being thrown around a lot recently, what does “Digital Transformation” really mean? When someone says that they want to digitally transform their business, what does one really mean, why do they want to do it, and should they approach this “digital transformation” process? First off, let’s start with a definition. If we don’t know what we are trying to achieve, then how do we know how to get there? Or to quote the famous Greek philosopher Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
A Look Into Travis Perkins’ Cloud Journey
Travis Perkins, the building and construction company, started its cloud journey in 2013. It all began with a five-year roadmap that included a big adoption of technology to improve the efficiency of its operations. In fact, the management saw technology as an enabler of change and wanted to use it to stay ahead of competition.
Four years later, everything seems to be working as per plan for Travis Perkins as efficiency and productivity have soared. The company’s self service portal supports about 30,000 staff who find these IT tools productive and less time-consuming. Undoubtedly, this company’s IT budget has doubled over the last four years to keep pace with the benefits that come from it.
So, what exactly has changed in this company?
First and probably the most important is a change in the mindset. The company’s culture has moved from one where technology was seen as a disruptor to an active adoption of the same and even making it an integral part of everyday operations. Employees were given training on how to handle the new internal systems and this has worked wonders for the company in terms of what its employees can achieve in the same given time.
The second change is to move from an environment where fast fixing a problem was the norm to an environment where the possibility of a problem was reduced. In other words, Travis Perkins moved from a “fixing” approach to a preventing one, and this has helped the company to save a considerable amount of time and money.
With technologies like cloud, it was in a better position to predict a problem even before it occurred and could fix it right away. As a result, there was no disruption or loss to its operations. This was way better than addressing a problem and finding a solution after it occurred.
Thirdly, adoption of technologies like cloud helped this company to move away from legacy systems. Now, its new systems are more unified and presents many advantages such as flexibility and speed – things that were impossible to achieve earlier. It’s also helped the company to achieve greater levels of integration among all its operations.
This is a remarkable improvement considering that Travis Perkins is a company that operates in the traditional construction sector. It also quashes the myth that traditional sectors are fairly slow to adopt IT when compared to sectors like ITES and finance. In fact, the approach taken by this company is an example for other players in this industry to follow suit, so that everyone can leverage the power of IT, especially its emerging technologies like cloud, AI, IoT and machine learning.
Going forward, Travis Perkins aims to create a successful product catalogue that’ll allow customers to buy their products through the self-service portal. It also wants more employees, even those in warehouses, to use its IT systems to log incidences and track their progress.
Though these goals are sometime away, the cloud process has nevertheless started.
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Auth0 and Platform9 raise combined $52 million in series C rounds
Venture capital money for cloud technology continues to stream through, with more than $50 million announced over the past week for two companies in the identity and hybrid cloud space respectively.
Auth0, an identity as a service platform provider based in Bellevue, Washington, confirmed it has raised $30 million (£23.1m), while ‘open source as a service’ firm Platform9, based out of Sunnyvale, California, announced $22 million (£17m). Both rounds were series C.
For Auth0, the funding comes amidst a year of record growth, with revenue increasing almost three times year over year and new customers including Atlassian, News Corp, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Platform9, meanwhile, called the year’s performance ‘tremendous’ and pointed to a customer base growth of 360% and revenue growth of 300%.
Meritech Capital Partners led the Auth0 round, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and K9 Ventures, and new investors NTT Docomo Ventures and Telstra Ventures participating. For Platform9, the round was led by Canvas Ventures with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Redpoint Ventures, and Menlo Ventures, participating.
“In our dozens of calls with customers, it was clear that Auto0’s value proposition is resonating in the market,” said George Bischof, managing director at Meritech Capital Partners. “Developers can leverage Auth0’s extensible and easy to integrate identity platform and free up their cycles to work on the core application. Auth0 subscriber adoption is exponentially expanding and we are excited to support their rapid growth.”
Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9, wrote in a letter about the increasing importance of open source technologies for enterprise. “Enterprises will come to bet on solutions that are rooted in open source, instead of proprietary solutions that require the vendor to lock in the customer to remain a viable business over time,” he wrote.
“This will happen across a range of computing services, but is especially pertinent in the infrastructure space. Just ask any large VMware or AWS customer and chances are, they’ll tell you they are exploring open source alternatives.”
Elsewhere, Minjar, an AWS managed service partner, announced an undisclosed amount in a pre-series A funding round led by Blume Ventures. The company tweeted out news of Blume’s investment at the recent India Cloud Summit event.
How innovation accelerators will drive global ICT growth
Emerging technologies, such as IoT, robotics, and augmented reality or virtual reality (AR/VR), will drive the next wave of growth in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, increasing the overall opportunity to $5.5 trillion by 2020, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).
The IDC forecast illustrates that the ICT sector is dependent upon new technology innovation for growth, as traditional business technology revenue streams begin to decline in the face of cannibalization, substitution, and the shift to cloud-based computing solutions.
Global ICT market development
New technologies, which IDC calls «Innovation Accelerators,» will provide almost $7.4 trillion in aggregate industry revenue from 2015-2020 — adding $1.8 trillion to the overall size of the industry in terms of annual sales by the end of the forecast period.
A large proportion of this growth will come from the fast-growing IoT market, which is forecast to reach almost $1.3 trillion in annual revenue by 2020, of which more than $1 trillion represents new opportunity outside of traditional technology market categories.
According to the IDC assessment, robotics, augmented reality or virtual reality, security, cognitive systems or artificial intelligence, and 3D printing will contribute the rest of this fast-growing portion of the ICT market.
«The traditional ICT market of data center infrastructure, client devices, software, services, and telecommunications is now growing at a rate not much faster than real GDP and increasingly resembles a mature sector of the overall economy,» said Stephen Minton, vice president at IDC.
That being said, between 2015 and 2020, overall ICT Spending – excluding the Innovation Accelerators – will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just 1 percent in constant currency terms. Including the Innovation Accelerators, ICT spending will increase by 5 percent over the same period. In total, the Innovation Accelerators will post a CAGR of 18 percent.
Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) represents the largest market for Innovation Accelerators, forecast to reach more than $600 billion by 2020, followed closely by the United States. The fastest growth over the same period will be in Latin America, Central & Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa.
«Device sales are now dominated by mobile devices and cloud service providers represent a growing proportion of all infrastructure hardware and software sales, while big data and analytics are at the heart of the fastest-growing opportunities. Meanwhile, growth in the telecom market is already entirely dependent on mobile,» added Minton.
Global outlook for public cloud services
With public cloud services still growing at a double-digit rate, cloud computing will continue to cannibalise traditional spending on infrastructure, software, and IT services. Big data and analytics is also still expanding at a double-digit rate of growth and is forecast to see a 12 percent CAGR between 2015 and 2020.
Public cloud services and big data and analytics will each provide more than $200 billion in annual revenue by 2020. Meanwhile, the explosion in smartphone sales over the past few years and the ongoing growth of mobile data services means that overall mobility offerings are already valued at more than $1.5 trillion in annual sales.
Read more: Global cloud IT infrastructure revenues hit $8 billion in Q117, says IDC
How Travis Perkins put cloud at the heart of its five-year roadmap – and reaped dividends
In 2013, building and construction firm Travis Perkins developed a five-year roadmap for its IT. Technology would be seen as a ‘key enabler of strategic change’ rather than a support function, with investments amounting to more than double the IT budget, enhancing infrastructure and getting to grips with open source and cloud architecture in the process.
Four years into the plan, things seem to be going swimmingly. The IT budget has been duly doubled, and the company’s self-service portal supports 30,000 staff.
The key to Travis Perkins’ success has been changing the IT service management (ITSM) environment from a firefighting ‘fix fast’ approach to focus on cloud-based technology and a ‘fail less’ outlook. This has come through the use of ServiceNow from UK-based IT solutions provider Fruition Partners.
“The previous approach was mostly a result of having a spread of legacy solutions in place and no unified way to manage them,” Wendy Collison, Travis Perkins project manager for service development, told CloudTech. “Now, we are creating greater integration and efficiency across the business by harnessing multi-channel transactional support, re-engineering and upgrading legacy systems to provide enhanced infrastructure to provide fix solutions quicker.”
In July 2014, the service delivery team launched SolveIT, the first iteration of a self-service website. To begin with, the portal was focused on IT support, which helped users log IT incidents and track progress, as well as provide information so users could fix issues themselves.
Today, it is now accessible to all 30,000 employees across the Travis Perkins group, with 10% of all incidents and service requests going through the portal. This is described by the company as a ‘good achievement’, taking into account the fact the many workers in stores and warehouses who are less likely to use the portal through their job role. The company also reports a more than 20% reduction in incidents, and quicker root cause analysis.
“It took a while to gain momentum as for some colleagues in branch and store locations they didn’t notice any significant changes to working methods,” added Collison. “But through further updates and enhancements with ServiceNow, colleagues are seeing a real difference to the updates and information they receive, they are better informed and service teams have more time to concentrate on delivering better services and anticipating problems before they happen.”
Ultimately, the goal is to ‘move fully to a services-based organisation based around a service catalogue, detailing all the business services the organisation provides along with associated costs and commitments’. One such development in the pipeline is putting together an online branded clothing store for Travis Perkins staff, with employees being able to select uniform, schedule delivery, and organise returns via an automated system.
“The first step was to create a successful product catalogue enabling colleagues to purchase devices from our self-service portal, such as phones, laptops [and] printers,” said Collison. “Moving forward, we aim to create a full service catalogue where businesses will be able to purchase readily available solutions such as websites, business analytics and customer relationship solutions.”
This shows there are still a couple of steps to go for Travis Perkins – but the journey already undertaken gives a glimpse of how a long-term cloud plan, properly executed, can reap rewards.
Main picture credit: Travis Perkins
Four in five companies not getting most out of cloud investments, research warns
Only one in five organisations are getting the most out of their cloud investments with 96% saying it could do with a ‘makeover’, according to new survey results from Fugue.
The research, which garnered the responses of more than 300 IT operations professionals, found the majority of those polled said compliance and security concerns, unexpected downtime, and a plethora of cloud management tools available today, means their investments are not hitting the right mark.
When asked why the cloud landscape needed a makeover, 33% said their experience needed to be simplified and easier to use, compared with 29% who cited security, with more ease controlling costs (13%) and easier to control generally (10%) also cited.
More than a third (36%) of respondents said the C-suite fails to understand its complexity, while a quarter (26%) said IT leadership struggles with it and one in five (20%) said the same for developers. This complexity is borne out in the number of disparate tools used by organisations; just under a third (31%) say they are using between six and 10 tools, compared with 38% using three to five, 16% for 11-15, and 7% who are using more than 15.
Naturally, these results bode well for Fugue, a company based in Maryland, as well as Washington DC and Silicon Valley, whose modus operandi is around cloud automation and simplifying lifecycle management of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure service stack.
“The promises of the cloud are tremendous, but they are hard-won,” said Josh Stella, CEO and co-founder of Fugue in a statement. “You hear you’ll get rid of data centres, save money and move faster; cloud’s essentially an infinite resource. But what happens is that IT departments lose control of it – they can’t keep track of everything that’s running, and there are security and compliance complications.
“If you’re Netflix, you have enough money to throw at the problem, but most companies trying to manage the cloud end up in a DIY headache of patch-ups and tools that were born in the data centre and adapted for use in the cloud,” Stella added.
What does an AI-based future look like for companies?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next frontier that companies are looking to reach. A few years back, we’ve seen robots only in Hollywood movies where they co-exist with humans or in some cases, even take over the world and manipulate us.
Well, if those sights intimidated you, then you’ll be surprised to know that none of that is going to happen, at least not in our lifetime.
As a society, we have just begun our journey into the world of AI, fueled in part by development in technologies such a cloud, machine learning, storage, sensors and more.
From the perspective of companies that have taken a plunge into AI, the future looks fantastic. According to a report by Accenture Research and Frontier Economics, AI technologies are likely to fuel the profits of companies in the future. In fact, it may even be the driving force within the next couple of decades.
The report states that AI technologies can increase economic growth by an average of 1.7 percent across all the 16 industries it examined. Out of these, Information and Communication will get the highest benefit with an increase of 4.8 percent followed by manufacturing that can expect a growth of 4.4 percent. Financial services is also likely to join the party and have an economic growth of about 4.3 percent. These are the top three sectors that will gain from AI technologies, though other 13 industries will also see benefit in one form or another.
All this will increase output by $14 trillion that’ll be spread across 12 economies. And all this within the next couple of decades.
In addition, the report says that by 2035, this technology can increase productivity by a whopping 40 percent.
Where will much of these automation happen?
Education is expected to top the list at 84 percent followed by food services, construction and retail. If you look closely, many of the tasks in these sectors are fairly routine and can be performed without the need for human intervention. Such jobs would obviously be handed over to machines, and this can free up more time for humans to do other productive work.
On one side, there’s much debate about how automation will kill jobs and cause economies to stagnate. While this is true to some extent, it doesn’t take into account many factors. When automation starts spreading, undoubtedly many lower and middle class jobs will be lost. At the same time, they will be replaced by opportunities at the higher end where people can create machines, manage them and even come up with creative ways to put them to good use.
This way, jobs will not be lost, rather they will simply shift from one sector to another. It’ll be similar to what happened when the U.S moved from a manufacturing economy to a services one. We can expect a similar change to happen, and this will be a positive one not just for business, but for economies and for humans as a whole.
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Simonetta Mercieca of Parallels Honored as One of CRN’s 2017 Women of the Channel
Parallels is honored that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Simonetta Mercieca, Director of Sales for Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS), to its prestigious 2017 Women of the Channel list. Last year, Maria Dinallo, Parallels Senior Director of Channel Sales, was also named by CRN as one of the 2016 Women of […]
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Don’t Get Lost in the Cloud | @CloudExpo @RackWare #Compliance #AI #DX #HybridCloud
For most organizations, the move to hybrid cloud is now a question of when, not if. Fully 82% of enterprises plan to have a hybrid cloud strategy this year, according to Infoholic Research. The worldwide hybrid cloud computing market is expected to grow about 34% annually over the next five years, reaching $241.13 billion by 2022. Companies are embracing hybrid cloud because of the many advantages it offers compared to relying on a single provider for all of their cloud needs. Hybrid offers balance and flexibility. It helps companies achieve a wide array of business goals, including availability, reliability, security and cost-efficiency.