Archivo de la etiqueta: cloud

acquisition, Colt, fibre, fidelity, Telco Cloud

Fidelity bid for Colt doesn’t convince directors

junio 19, 2015 Business Cloud News

Fidelity Investments, which is already the majority shareholder in Colt Group, has bid to acquire the remaining stock of the telecoms and cloud provider, but Colt directors are unconvinced.

The relationship between the two companies is intimate and has been from the very beginning. Fidelity provided the cash to form Colt back in 1992, to provide telecoms services in London. It soon expanded across Europe but in 2001, together with a lot of other telecoms and tech companies, encountered problems requiring a further injection of capital from Fidelity.

For some reason, despite holding its current majority position since then, Fidelity has decided it’s time for Colt to be wholly private once more. “As founders and majority shareholders of Colt, Fidelity is pleased to announce the continuation of its commitment to the business through returning the group to private ownership,” said Cyrus Jilla, President of Eight Roads, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity.

“We typically hold our proprietary investments outside the financial services industry, such as Colt, in the private domain. This transaction allows us to hold our investment in Colt consistent with this strategy while providing an attractive and certain value for the current Colt independent shareholders.”

The independent directors of Colt, who are there to protect the interests of its shareholders, have publicly acknowledged the offer of 190p per share from Fidelity, but reckon it’s too low.

“The independent directors believe that the offer undervalues the company and its prospects and accordingly they consider that the financial terms of the offer are not fair to the independent shareholders of Colt,” said their statement.

“The independent directors believe that the financial terms of the offer may be considered by some shareholders to be acceptable in the circumstances, and accordingly make no recommendation to shareholders whether or not to accept the offer.

“Over the course of 2015, the management of Colt has been working on a plan to refocus the company’s activities and significantly improve its financial performance. The Board has provisionally approved a new business plan and further details will be announced in due course.”

Colt’s shares were trading at around 156p before the bid and jumped straight up to 190p, implying the market thinks Fidelity’s bid is likely to be accepted.

451 Research, Apple Watch, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, News & Analysis, wearable technology

Four-fold cellular IoT connections predicted by 2019

junio 17, 2015 Business Cloud News

IT analyst firm 451 Research has forecasted the growth of cellular network-based connections for IoT-devices as anticipation surrounding the tech continues to grow. It also reckons wearable tech as a major enterprise tool will become reality in the next 12 months.

According to the firm, the telecoms industry can expect a nigh on four-fold boom in cellular IoT connections between 2014 and 2019, growing from 252 million to 908 million globally. The firm reckons such growth comes down to several key factors, primarily the ease of access to and reduced costs of hardware and broadband for enterprise customers. Secondly, the maturation of cloud, data management and analytics platforms means machine-generated data can be hosted and utilised quicker than in previous years.

Finally, 451 also attributes increasing M&A activity as a positive influence on the developing IoT market, with the ongoing vendor land-grab driving advancements in technology.

“We continue to be bullish that ultimately the hype of IoT will be proven to be warranted back on business impact,” said Brian Partridge, 451’s research VP. “Over the forecast period we expect that M2M/IoT solution suppliers will find fertile ground in vertical markets such as retail and government that will adopt IoT/M2M to enable strategic digitization strategies such as smart cities and the use of digital signage, mobile point of sale, and connected kiosks to drive the transformation from brick and mortar to ‘click and mortar’.”

Simultaneously, Harbor Research has revealed some numbers forecasting the profitability of IoT applications, claiming 80% of IoT apps will be generating revenue for users within the next three years. At present, its survey suggest, 65% of apps are money making.

451 Research also looked into the use of wearable tech in the enterprise, and said that 39% of the IT decision-makers it quizzed will be deploying wearable tech solutions in the next six months, with another 24% following within a year. Of those deploying in the next six months, 81% identified smart watches as their wearable tech of choice.

“The release of Apple Watch has opened the flood gates governing wearables’ adoption,” said Ryan Martin, who’s an IoT and wearable tech analyst at 451. “Not now that the river is running, it’s less about where it will end and more about where – and when – to start. We expect wearable technology to deliver a key interface and input into the Industrial Internet of Things”.

To go alongside its research, 451 produced this handy market map for the IoT ecosystem.

Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Financial Results, John Chambers, Kelly Kramer, News & Analysis, telstra

Cisco Q3: Enterprise shines while service provider biz struggles

mayo 14, 2015 Business Cloud News

Cisco said it enterprise business is looking strong but service provider segment still sees challenges

Cisco reported third quarter 2015 revenues of $12.1bn this week, just over 5 per cent what it raked in during the same quarter last year. In a call with analysts this week Cisco execs said the company sees continued growth in its enterprise segment, but its service provider business continue to struggle.

Revenue for the first nine months of fiscal 2015 was $36.3bn, up from $34.8bn for the first nine months of fiscal 2014.

Kelly Kramer, Cisco executive vice president and chief financial officer said the company saw a good balance across its portfolio, with its enterprise segment looking fairly strong, much like the previous quarter.

UCS revenues for the quarter were $3bn, which is sequentially flat but a 30 per cent year-on-year increase, and the company said its seeing growth in its converged infrastructure offerings (those co-developed with VCE and IBM). Its cloud revenues grew 11 per cent year-on-year, mostly on growth in its conferencing cloud software.

In a call with analysts this week Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers said the company is seeing better performance in its enterprise segment than its server provider business – hindered in part by an industry-wide slowdown in spending seen over the past few quarters now.

“In enterprise, the shift to selling outcomes, not products, is resulting in larger opportunities and dramatic increases in pipeline. In US enterprise, for example, the value of our pipeline of deals over $1 million increased approximately 60 per cent year-over-year, with the average deal size up over 30 per cent,” he said.

“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7 per cent, as global service provider capex remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organisational changes we have made in our global service provider organisation are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet.”

“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7%, as global service provider CapEx remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organizational changes we have made in our global service provider organization are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet”

Chambers also said Cisco’s intercloud strategy announced last year will kick into “phase 2” shortly, and while he declined to specifically outline what that entails he did shed some light on the programme’s challenges in its bid get other service providers on board with it.

“The pieces that we were missing was how do you go into this new environment where each of these “public clouds in clouds” are separate? And you have to be on different vendors or different companies’ tech to have the ability to go into it. So what we’re looking at first is an architecture and it cements our relationships in service providers. And then it really comes through to how you monetise it over time.”

“This will just take time to monetize, but the effect we see indirectly is already huge when you talk about a Deutsche Telekom or a Telstra and our relationships with those,” he added.

applications, Cloud computing, Featured, transformation services

If You Could Transform Your IT Strategy, Would You?

abril 16, 2015 GreenPages Blog

As you may know, GreenPages recently launched our Transformation Services Group, a new practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing.

This move was designed to allow us to help companies think beyond the near-term and to cast a vision for the business. As we look at the market, we see a need to help organizations take a more revolutionary and accelerated approach to embracing what we call “New World” IT architectures. While this is something we have been helping companies with for many years, we now believe that this is a logical evolution of our business that builds on our legacy of delivering high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.

When we think about some of the great work we have done over the years, many examples come to mind. One of these is a complex project we completed for The Channel Company, that helped them truly transform their business. Coming off a management buyout from its parent company, UBM, The Channel Company was tasked with having to migrate off the parent company’s centralized IT infrastructure under a very tight timeline.

Faced with this situation, the company was presented with a very compelling question: “If you had the opportunity to start from scratch, to transform your IT department, resources and strategy what would you do?”

Essentially, as a result of their situation, The Channel Company had the opportunity to leapfrog traditional approaches. They had the opportunity to become more agile, and more responsive. And, more importantly, they took it!

As opposed to simply moving to a traditional baseline on-prem solution, The Channel Company saw this as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink its entire IT strategy and chose GreenPages to help lead them through the process.

Through a systematic approach and advanced methodology, we were able to help The Channel Company achieve its aggressive objectives. Specifically, in less than six months, we led a transformation project that entailed the installation of new applications, and a migration of the company’s entire infrastructure to the cloud. This included moving six independent office locations from a shared infrastructure to a brand-new cloud platform supporting their employees, as well as new cloud-based office and ERP applications.

In addition to achieving the independence and technical autonomy The Channel Company needed, the savings benefits and operational efficiencies achieved were truly transformational from a business standpoint.

It is these types of success stories that drove us to formalize our Transformation Services Group. We have seen first-hand the benefits that organizations can achieve by transforming inflexible siloed IT environments into agile organizations, and we’re proud to be able to offer the expertise and end-to-end capabilities required to help customers achieve true business transformation.

In our view, the need for business agility and innovation has never been greater. The question is no longer “is transformation necessary?” but rather “if you had the opportunity to start from scratch and achieve business transformation, would you take it?”

If you’re interested in hearing more about how GreenPages has helped companies like The Channel Company transform their IT operations, please reach out.

By Ron Dupler, CEO

advanced virtualization, Cloud computing, Featured, transformation services

Launching GreenPages’ Transformation Services Group

abril 14, 2015 GreenPages Blog

I am excited to announce that today, with the launch of GreenPages’ Transformation Services Group, GreenPages took a major step in the continuing evolution of our company. This evolution was done for one reason, and one reason only –to meet the needs of our customers as they strive to compete in today’s rapidly-changing business and technology environment.

GreenPages’ new Transformation Services Group is a practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing. We see the establishment of this focused practice area as a way to help clients take a revolutionary, accelerated approach to standing up New World, Modern IT architectures and service delivery models that enable business agility and innovation.

Disrupt or be Disrupted

With each day’s latest business headlines we learn of new ‘up-start’ companies that are finding a new way to compete in what was once a mature market. You know the names – its Uber, it’s Airbnb. These companies have found a way to leverage advanced technologies as a strategic weapon and were able to completely turn existing industries on their heads without even owning cabs or hotels (respectively).

How’d they do it? They were agile enough from a business standpoint to understand the disruptive force that technology can play, and they were fortunate enough not to be encumbered by existing infrastructure, policies and procedures. While these companies clearly were smart and innovative, they were also fortunate — they had a blank slate and could start from scratch with an offensive game plan capable of delivering value to customers in new ways.

These market disrupters share the benefit of not being encumbered by legacy technologies, platforms and processes and as a result, are out-performing and executing their larger competitors. These companies were born to be agile organizations capable of “turning on a dime” when their competitors could not.

To compete effectively in today’s environment, every company needs to find a way to become more agile. Business leaders have the choice, play defense and respond to disruption, or play offense and become the disruptor. The need for business agility has never been greater. To support this needed agility and innovation, enterprises need nimble, agile IT platforms, as legacy platforms cannot meet this need.

If it were just about technology, modernizing IT would be a more straightforward situation, but it’s about more than that. This is more than a technology problem. This is a people and process problem. It’s about command, control and compliance… Needless to say, “high velocity change” is no walk in the park.

Fortunately, helping companies achieve transformational change is something we have been doing for many years and is an area where we have deep domain expertise. Throughout our history as a company, we have become adept at guiding companies through IT and business transformation. What we are doing today is formalizing this expertise—which has been forged working with our customers in the trenches and in the boardrooms—into a unique Transformation Services practice. Transformation Services represents the next logical evolution of GreenPages and builds on our prior legacy of high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.

Our Approach

We have always believed that while many companies face similar challenges, no two scenarios are identical. Through our more than 20 years of experience we have established a methodology that we use in each engagement, regardless of the challenge, that allows us to identify the best solution for each customer, drive organizational and technical change, and create positive outcomes for the business.

We hope that you share our excitement about this unique moment in the IT industry and our continued evolution as a company. We all know that technology can produce tangible benefits, but sometimes the road to deployment can be daunting. Transformation Services was founded to ensure our customers are able to successfully navigate that road with agility and velocity.

If you’re interested in learning more about our new Transformation Services Group, please reach out!

By Ron Dupler, CEO

Cloud computing, Featured, Microsoft, Windows Server 2003

Upcoming Live Events – Windows Server 2003…Does the Cloud Make Sense for Your Migration?

marzo 19, 2015 GreenPages Blog

I just wanted to take a quick minute to let the readers of our blog know that GreenPages is holding a series of live events around migrating Windows Server 2003 Workloads. The events are free and will be held in Cambridge, MA, Portland, ME, Tampa, FL, and Alpharetta, GA. David Barter, our Practice Manager of Microsoft Technologies, will be hosting the events.

We decided to put these events together because of the impact Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life is having on IT professionals across the globe. As you are probably already aware, the End-of-Life date is July 14th. Needless to say, that is coming up pretty quickly. There are perceived, and often real, challenges involved in upgrading applications. However, there are some serious drawbacks if you do not migrate. First, no new updates will be developed or released after end of support. Not migrating could also cause compliance issues for various regulatory and industry standards. Furthermore, staying put will cost more in the end. Maintenance costs for outdated hardware will increase and there will be additional costs for security measures that need to be taken.

On the flip side, benefits of migrating include reducing operational costs and increasing efficiencies, improving employee productivity, the ability to be cloud ready, and increasing business agility. There are different paths you can take, such as migrating to Windows Server 2012, Azure, or Office 365 as an individual product or as a Platform as a Service.

During the events, David will cover:

Developing an action plan and ways Azure and Office 365 can be part of it.
Potential migration pitfalls
Determining which applications will run “as is” on new platforms and which won’t
The areas of your infrastructure that will be affected by End of Life.
Examples of GreenPages’ customers going to the cloud, including how they approached the decision process and what their experiences were like.

You can register here. If there isn’t an event near you but you’re interested in learning more on the topic, I would highly recommend downloading David’s whitepaper. These should be great events (plus you get a free lunch and entered to win an Xbox One)! Below is some more information on event locations.

Portland, Maine

March 26th from 10am-11am at the Portland Harbor Hotel

Tampa, Florida

April 1st from 10am-2pm at the Microsoft Campus

Alpharetta, Georgia

April 2nd from 10am-2pm at the Microsoft Campus

Cambridge, Massachusetts

April 7th from 10am-2pm at the Microsoft Campus

If you have any specific questions about event logistics, feel free to reach out to Kelsey Barrett, our Marketing and Event Coordinator.

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

App Dev, CIO Focus Interview, Featured, hybrid cloud, IT Management

CIO Focus Interview: Kevin Hall, GreenPages-LogicsOne

marzo 6, 2015 GreenPages Blog

For this segment of our CIO Focus Interview Series, I sat down with our CIO and Managing Director, Kevin Hall. Kevin has an extremely unique perspective as he serves as GreenPages’ CIO as well as the Managing Director of our customer facing Professional Services and Managed Services divisions.

Ben: Can you give me some background on your IT experience?

Kevin: I’ve been a CIO for 17+ years holding roles in both consulting organizations and roles overseeing internal IT. The position I have at GreenPages is very interesting because I am both a Managing Partner of our services business and the CIO of our organization. This is the first time I have held both jobs at the same time in one company

Ben: What are your primary responsibilities for each part of your role then?

Kevin: As CIO, I’m responsible for all aspects of information services. This includes both traditional data center functions, engineering functions, operations functions, and app dev functions. As Managing Director I am responsible for our Professional Services and Managed Services divisions. These divisions provide help to our customers on the same sorts of projects that I am undertaking as CIO.

Ben: Does it help you being in this unique position? Does it allow you to get a better understanding of what GreenPages’ customers are looking for since you experience the same challenges as CIO?

Kevin: Yes, I think it is definitely an advantage. The CIO role is crucial in this era. It has certainly been a challenging job for a long time, and that has magnified in recent years because of the fundamental shift and explosion of the capabilities available to modern day CIOs. Because I am in this rather crazy position, it does help me understand the needs of our customers better. If I was just on the consulting side of the house, I’m not sure I could fully understand or appreciate how difficult some of the choices CIOs are faced with are. I can relate to that feeling of being blocked or trapped because I’ve experienced it. The good news is our CTO and Architects provide real world lessons right here at home for both myself and our IT Director.

Interestingly enough, on the services side of my role, in both the Professional Services and Managed Services division, we are entering our 3^rd year of effort to realign those divisions in a way that helps CIOs solve those same demanding needs that I am facing. We’re currently helping companies with pure cloud, hybrid cloud and traditional approaches to information services. I’m both a provider of our services to other organizations as well as a customer of those services. Our internal IT team is actually a customer of our Professional and Managed Services division. We use our CMaaS platform to manage and operate our computing platforms internally. We also use the same help desk team our customers do. Furthermore, we use various architects and engineers that serve our customers to help us with internal projects. For example, we have recently engaged our client-facing App Dev team to help GreenPages reimagine our internal Business Intelligence systems and are underway on developing our next generation BI tools and capabilities. Another example would be a project we recently completed to look at our networking and security infrastructure in order to be prepared to move workloads from on-prem or colo facilities to the cloud. We had to add additional capabilities to our network and went out and got the SOC 2 Type 2 certification which really speaks to the importance we place on security. What I love about working here is that we don’t just talk about hybrid cloud; we are actively and successfully using those models for our own business.

Ben: What are some of your goals for 2015?

Kevin: On the internal IT side, I’m engaged, like many of my colleagues around the globe, on assessing what the new computing paradigm means for our organization. We’re embarked in looking at every aspect of our environment along with our ability to deliver services to the GreenPages’ organization. Our goal is to figure out a way to do this in a cost effective, scalable, and flexible way that meets the needs of our organization.

Ben: Any interesting projects you have going on right now?

Kevin: As we assess our workloads and start trying to understand what the best execution venues for those workloads are, it’s become pretty clear that we are going to be using more than a single venue. For example, one big execution venue for us is VMware’s vCloud Air. We have some workloads that are excellent candidates for that venue. Other workloads are great fits for Microsoft Azure. We have some initiatives, like the BI project, that are going to be an open source project. We’ll be utilizing things like Docker and Hadoop that are most likely going to be highly optimized around Amazon’s capabilities. This is giving me insight into the notion that there are many different capabilities between clouds. The important thing is to make sure every workload is optimized for the right cloud. This is an important ongoing exercise for us in 2015.

Ben: Which area of IT would you say interests you the most?

Kevin: What interests me most about IT is the organizational aspect. How do you organize in a way that creates value for the company? How do you prioritize in terms of people, process and technology? For me, it’s not about one particular aspect; it’s about the entire program and how it all functions.

Ben: What are you looking forward to in 2015 from a technology perspective?

Kevin: I’m really looking forward to our annual Summit event in August. I think it is going to be the best one yet. If you look back several years ago, very few attendees raised their hand when asked if they thought the cloud was real. Last year, most of the hands in the room went up. What will make it especially interesting this year is that we have many customers deeply involved with these types of projects. Four years ago the only option was to sit and listen to presentations, but now our customers will have the opportunity to talk to their peers about how they are actually going about doing cloud. It will be a great event and a fantastic learning opportunity.

Are you looking for more information around the transformation of corporate IT? Download this eBook from our Director of Cloud Services John Dixon to learn more!

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Cloud computing, Featured, vCloud Air, VMware

VMware’s Partnership with Google: vCloud Air & the Google Cloud Platform

febrero 13, 2015 GreenPages Blog

Following on from Chris Ward’s excellent blog coming out of VMware PEX 2015, I wanted to add some details to the recent VMware announcement (January 29, 2015) to partner with Google to “deliver greater enterprise access to public cloud services” via a combination of VMware vCloud Air and the Google Cloud Platform.

For those who are unfamiliar, vCloud Air (formally VMware vCloud Hybrid Service or vCHS) is a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform built on the same traditional VMware vSphere we are all used to but managed 24/7 by VMware and their public cloud partners. vCloud Air offers services such as infrastructure, disaster recovery and backups, and allows you to extend both your network and workloads from traditional on-premise to the cloud with relative ease.

For some time now, Google has offered broad cloud platform services in the following categories, but as part of the first wave of integration into the vCloud Air space, only the highlighted sub-set of (4) Google Cloud Platform services will be made available to existing VMware vCloud Air customers, using a PAYG consumption model:

Compute (no current/planned integration points)

Storage
- Cloud Storage – Google’s distributed low-cost object storage service
- Cloud Datastore – Google’s schema-less, document-based NoSQL database service with automatic scale and full transactional integrity.

Networking
- Cloud DNS – A globally distributed low-latency DNS service

Big Data
- BigQuery – A real-time big data analytics service suitable for running ad-hoc BI queries across billions of data points in seconds.

Services (no current/planned integration points)

Management (no current/planned integration points)

Additionally, while Google offers their own management framework, there are some rumors that the partnership could eventually mature to include integration with VMware’s own vRealize Operations management solution. This will most likely be offered via VMware’s vRealize Air platform (in beta), which currently offers both Automation and Compliance programs. To quote our CTO, Chris Ward, “VMware vRealize Air checks a lot of boxes for customers of all sizes seeking multi-vendor, multi-cloud provisioning and management of their infrastructure services.

Industry experts, including GreenPages, Forrester and Gartner, are calling this partnership a big “win” for VMware customers, especially enterprise customers. This relationship will help to truly legitimize not only the cloud, but also the place of the enterprise customer in the cloud. Specifically, it will allow enterprise customers who are looking for broader database, analytics, and storage options and support, beyond the current vCloud Air portfolio, to find a suitable and scalable landing place for their applications and workloads. This will build on vCloud Air’s current support for over 5,000 applications and over 90 operating systems.

This is also a strong move for both VMware and Google. This relationship will give Google much needed enterprise IT exposure, something that VMware has deep roots in, and accelerates VMware’s ability to offer tools to manage a public cloud, an area in which Google has developed a global dominate position.

As with the vSphere 6 announcement, there is no “official” release date, but rumors are suggesting everything from the “first half of 2015” to availability “later this year.” Additionally, VMware had no details to share around pricing, but as soon as we know more and have had a chance to sample the integration ourselves, we will share more details. However, if history is anything to go by we should likely expect something in place by VMworld 2015.

If you have any questions or would like any additional details around this new partnership, email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

By Tim Cook, Practice Manager, Advanced Virtualization

Disaster Recovery as a Service: Does it make sense for you?

The cloud news categorized.