Why do your mobile transformations need to happen today? Mobile is the strategy that enterprise transformation centers on to drive customer engagement.
In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Roger Woods, Director, Mobile Product & Strategy – Adobe Marketing Cloud, covered key IoT and mobile trends that are forcing mobile transformation, key components of a solid mobile strategy and explored how brands are effectively driving mobile change throughout the enterprise.

read more

Why do your mobile transformations need to happen today? Mobile is the strategy that enterprise transformation centers on to drive customer engagement.
In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Roger Woods, Director, Mobile Product & Strategy – Adobe Marketing Cloud, covered key IoT and mobile trends that are forcing mobile transformation, key components of a solid mobile strategy and explored how brands are effectively driving mobile change throughout the enterprise.

read more

(c)iStock.com/Peter Chernaev

Almost three quarters of survey respondents in a study conducted by Unisys believe that it is ‘critical’ or ‘very important’ for organisations to modify IT processes and resources to support a digital business model.

The survey, which polled 175 IT and business executives in the US and Europe, examined the effect of social, cloud, mobility, data analytics, the Internet of Things, and security on driving new business models. 88% of respondents say data security in the cloud is a top priority for competing in the digital world, while more than half (55%) of organisations’ applications are already deployed in a cloud environment.

The overall sense of the report was that organisations were seeing positive results from their cloud and digital initiatives. As data security is a priority, one of the more interesting aspects is with regards to improvements over the past 12 months; 56% said data security had gone up, compared to greater user experience with applications and services (44%), IT efficiency (42%) and infrastructure performance (41%).

Similarly, organisations need to be more agile to better compete, the research argues. Only 15% of companies polled say they have the ‘extremely flexible’ and ‘nimble’ attributes required to take full advantages of the opportunities of digital.

“Digital business is all about finding innovative ways to empower workers and customers,” said Steve Nunn, vice president of cloud and infrastructure services at Unisys. “The organisations that will prosper in the new order are those that most quickly become focused, proficient and flexible in integrating and securing the cloud, IoT, and other key digital technologies to drive new levels of service.

“This research points the way for organisations to become more nimble and successful in capitalising on present and future business challenges,” Nunn added.

(c)iStock.com/MaboHH

With the latest VMworld event kicking off in Las Vegas, end user computing giant VMware came prepared with a litany of news releases. Yet the news was more of an update than anything completely new; an extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy, as well as the continuation of a partnership with IBM.

Back in February last year, this reporter penned a piece arguing why VMware hadn’t left it too late with its hybrid push. The new release of the VMware Cloud Foundation, utilising what it calls ‘cross-cloud architecture’ which allows users to manage applications running in private and public clouds and across multiple vendors, promises “huge strides in helping customers transform into digital businesses.”

“All business is digital business,” said Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO in the opening keynote. “There is no longer a meaningful distinction – and every industry and every core business process is becoming driven by digital, being driven by the cloud.”

This discussion was précised by a series of stats – essentially, the history of cloud computing as VMware saw it – as well as a spot of future-gazing. We didn’t go as far back as the AT&T video from 1993 which was certainly one of the earliest instances of the word ‘cloud’ in its current technological guise, but we did hear a snippet of speech from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt dating from 2006, where VMware argued that 98% of workloads ran on traditional IT – the 2% which didn’t was “largely” from Salesforce. Fast forward to 2016 and that number stands at 73%, with 15% and 12% for public and private cloud respectively.

According to VMware, 2021 will be the year when 50% of workloads will be in the cloud, and 2030 the year when public cloud will reach the dominant share. The number of workloads – defined as an operating system instance – will go up from 29 million in 2006 to almost 600 million by 2030.

VMware’s vision for the leading and lacking businesses. Picture credit: VMware

For the time being, however, we have VMware Cloud Foundation. The press material describes it as a release which “offers a new ‘as a service’ option that delivers the full power of the SDDC (software-defined data centre) in a hybrid cloud environment.”

In other words, VMware aims to be an enabler for businesses running on other, more populous clouds. This is why the future stats, and the message VMware is pushing, is important. If public cloud is expected to become the primary destination for workloads by 2030, then this enterprise as a middleman has a defined shelf life.

Related to this was the partner news, which primarily came through an update on VMware’s work with IBM. Since the partnership was announced in February this year, the companies say that more than 500 new clients are running VMware’s software on IBM’s cloud. The three marquee customers named were Marriott International, Clarient Global LLC, and Monitise. “Our collaboration with VMware is becoming the glue for many organisations to scale and create new business opportunities while making the most of their existing IT investments in a hybrid cloud,” said Robert LeBlanc, SVP IBM’s cloud operation in a statement.

The final aspect of the opening day to note, again looking into the future, was a short chat between Gelsinger and Michael Dell, who spoke of the importance of VMware’s open ecosystem moving forward and a shared focus on making the customer cloud architecture journey easier. Dell, of course, announced its intent to acquire EMC, incorporating into it not only VMware but Pivotal, VCE, ERS, and Virtustream, in October last year.

You can find the main VMware announcements here.

The traditional workplace consisting of fixed cubicles where day in and day out employees come and work normal business hours is gone and new generation of “Untethered Workplace” where there is no fixed slots for any employee and ideally the workplace has the capacity of only a subset of total employees will be the future.
Digital enterprises are here to stay and more and more startups and even traditional enterprises are transforming them selves towards new ways of working. The office space in a traditional sense is not only expensive from real estate and maintenance point of view, but also that the new generation of employees are not really tied to one city or one work place rather they are working from any where, any time. Enterprise mobility has firmly taken roots such that most employees feel comfortable by accessing their business applications from outside the office boundaries to become more agile and responsive.

read more

«Going mobile» seems to be the mantra of modern day enterprises, with 63 percent of them firmly believing that mobility leads to competitive advantage. Their belief is not without cause, as a recent survey by Nielson reports that 93 percent of consumers who research products via mobile go on to make the purchase, while 55 percent of them make the purchase within an hour. If this wasn’t reason enough for businesses to jump on the mobility bandwagon, high operational efficiency coupled with increased employee productivity and customer loyalty paint a compelling picture.

read more

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Managed cloud services provider Rackspace is to be acquired by private equity company Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion (£3.26bn), it has been announced.

“This is a big day for Rackspace,” wrote Taylor Rhodes, Rackspace CEO, in a blog post. “We expect that this transaction will help us better serve our customers in 120 countries, who now include more than half of the Fortune 100.

“It will allow us additional flexibility to enhance the multi-cloud services that today’s customers demand, and to seize the big opportunity that we face as the world’s #1 managed cloud company,” Rhodes added.

The deal’s total $4.3bn value includes the assumption of $43 million of net cash, with shares going at $32.00 each, representing a 38% premium as of August 3 – which Rackspace notes was the last trading day “prior to news reports speculating about a potential transaction.”

Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace, said the move was a result of “diligent analysis and thoughtful strategic deliberations” by the board across many months. “We are confident that as a private company, Rackspace will be best positioned to capitalise on our early leadership of the fast-growing managed cloud services industry,” he said.

As the press material inferred, speculation has been rife for most of the previous month around Rackspace’s future.

Earlier in August, the company sold its Cloud Sites business unit to Michigan-based hosting provider Liquid Web. Speaking to analysts a few days before around Rackspace’s latest financial results – 277 customers on its AWS service over the past nine months with 60% choosing the higher tier option the highlight – Rhodes refused to comment on speculation, but noted that 2017 IT spending growth would “almost certainly” be negative – with Gartner statistics on the Brexit EU referendum vote cited as a possible reason – and that selling “non-core” Cloud Sites would give the company “more focus.”

This story however goes back a bit further. Back in 2014, the company did an abrupt about-turn after considering various M&A options before deciding to carry on alone. Rhodes was named CEO at the same time; Weston had stepped into the breach following the retirement of Lanham Napier six months earlier.

Ian Moyse, a cloud industry leader – and formerly senior sales exec at Rackspace – said the news came as no surprise, and sounded a cautious note around its AWS and Azure services. “Those at the top will have felt pressures to do something different and separate themselves from the shackles of current measurements,” he told CloudTech. “This will give them some breathing space to reshape their market position, but they are going to have to sell an awful lot more of these cheaper third party services at lower resale margins to get anywhere near the results of their past.

“The next 24 months is going to be key to Rackspace to reposition itself in the lucrative cloud and IoT markets,” he added.

Traditional on-premises data centers have long been the domain of modern data platforms like Apache Hadoop, meaning companies who build their business on public cloud were challenged to run Big Data processing and analytics at scale. But recent advancements in Hadoop performance, security, and most importantly cloud-native integrations, are giving organizations the ability to truly gain value from all their data.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, David Tishgart, Director of Product Marketing at Cloudera, will cover the ins and outs of Hadoop, and how it can help cloud-based businesses.

read more