Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
It is interesting that missing from this quadrant figure are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. The reason is that report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012 (Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time).
Gartner reinforces what many in the cloud industry believe: Amazon Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla. Gartner has also found one big minus on Amazon Web Services: AWS has a “weak, narrowly defined” service-level agreement (SLA), which requires customers to spread workloads across multiple availability zones. AWS was not the only provider where there was something negative to say on the service-level agreement (SLA) details.
Read the whole Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article to see the Gartner’s view on clould market today.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
U.S. Tech Firms Look To Data Centers on European Soil
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/06/u-s-tech-firms-look-to-data-centers-on-european-soil/
Silicon Valley companies say they’ve been preparing for today’s European Court of Justice decision invalidating the U.S.-Europe Safe Harbor agreement on data transfers.
Their lawyers have been working to come up with legal mechanisms to keep them in compliance with EU data protection laws. But they’ve also been spending billions building data storage and processing facilities on European soil, reducing the need to transfer data to the U.S. in the first place. That effort dovetails with an explosion of cloud based services that require more data centers.
IDC estimates that in 2015, $8.2 billion will be spent in Europe on professional cloud services, an increase from only $560 million in 2010.
Last year, Amazon opened a data center in Frankfurt, its first major data center in continental Europe, in part to show it complies with strict German data-privacy laws.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Now it’s the security industry’s turn to be burned by cloud
Amazon ignites Web Applications Firewall to char security chaff
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/07/amazon_throws_waf_to_sieve_security_chaff/
Amazon has launched web application firewall to help customers guard against common web exploits.
The web attic touts the service as a means to ink custom rules to block attack patterns like SQL injection and cross-site scripting and offering the ability to quickly deploy application rules.
Rules can be set based on IP address, HTTP headers, URI strings, and configured through the API or management console. The more rules set the higher the cost.
Amazon Web Services man Jeff Barr offers a case study of how the WAF could work.
“[Attackers] could run through a list of common or default usernames and passwords, or they could attempt to exploit a known system, language, or application vulnerability perhaps powered by SQL injection or cross-site request forgery as the next step,” Barr says
“Like it or not, these illegitimate requests are going to be flowing in 24 by 7.
“Even if you keep your servers well-patched and do what you can to keep the attack surface as small as possible, there’s always room to add an additional layer of protection.”
Amazon has slapped chicken feed service pricing on the WAF, asking for 60 cents per million hits, US$1 a rule, and $5 for each access control list.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teradata’s moon-on-a-stick approach: Floats on AWS and Microsoft Azure
Enterprise giant up against Amazon’s Redshift
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/07/teradata_on_aws_azure/
Teradata is throwing its enterprise-class analytics database onto the public cloud, starting with rival Amazon and then Microsoft’s Azure.
Teradata Database on AWS will be offered as a service in the first quarter of 2016, and sold on a pay-per-use basis, Teradata was expected to announce Wednesday.
Until now, the publicly-held analytic data company had offered its database as a service through its own cloud as well as on prem, via its hardware for a princely sum.
Teradata has offered an Express version of its database for AWS, but this was aimed only at developers working in non-production environments.
Teradata Database on AWS sees the firm respond to customers who want to run Teradata and/or other data warehouse architectures on prem and in the cloud, specifically AWS. Not sitting on the AWS public cloud with the full-blooded database would have cut Teradata out of that particular loop.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quentin Hardy / New York Times:
AWS’s new services and features go after legacy customers of tech giants like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft — Amazon Messes With Billions in Corporate Computing Dollars — LAS VEGAS — There is a famous story from the early days of Google that goes something
Cloud Computing
Amazon Messes With Billions in Corporate Computing Dollars
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/amazon-messes-with-billions-in-corporate-computing-dollars/
There is a famous story from the early days of Google that goes something like this: When a group of New York media big shots heard about the huge efficiency of search advertising, which could hurt their own businesses, the memorable reaction of one of them was a more vulgar take on “You’re fussing with the magic!”
Amazon Web Services just did much the same thing to the multibillion-dollar business of corporate computing by going after the legacy customers of companies like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.
A legacy business consists of current customers who use a company’s databases and software applications, and can generally be counted on to buy the new versions. They fund new development, by providing a reliable cash stream.
Coming off legacy stuff is complicated for customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS Introduces Kinesis Firehose To Move Sensor Data To Cloud
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/aws-introduces-kinesis-firehose-to-move-sensor-data-to-cloud/
Today at AWS re:invent, Amazon introduced a new service called Kinesis Firehose to move data streaming from sensors and other locations directly to the cloud.
As Andy Jassy, SVP at AWS, pointed out, the company launched Kinesis a few years ago to take this kind of streaming data and build custom applications on top of that to handle the data. Amazon found that was taking customers far too long, and some customers didn’t have the resources to build it themselves.
This new service essentially eliminates the need for creating the application by using Firehose as a service. Jassy claims that with a single API call to Firehose, customers can now put the data into Amazon Redshift or S3 and immediately begin working with the data.
The system is of course is completely elastic, meaning Amazon will be more than happy to sell you as much storage as you need to process the incoming data. The service compresses and encrypts on the way in, and the company does give you the ability to set time intervals of when to upload the data or to set limits on how much data to suck in.
Once the data is in the system, customers can decrypt it with the same key and load it into Hadoop clusters (or wherever they wish) to process it and begin to analyze it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon launches Inspector, a tool that automatically finds security and compliance issues
http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-inspector-a-tool-that-automatically-finds-security-compliance-issues/
Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced Amazon Inspector, a sort of bot service that looks for and identifies potential security and compliance vulnerabilities.
Amazon Inspector is available in preview today. A blog post has more detail on the service.
Amazon Inspector – Automated Security Assessment Service
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-inspector-automated-security-assessment-service/
The EC2 instances and other AWS resources that make up your application are identified by tags. When you create the assessment, you also define a duration (15 minutes, 1 / 8 / 12 hours, or 1 day).
During the assessment, an Inspector Agent running on each of the EC2 instances that play host to the application monitors network, file system, and process activity. It also collects other information including details of communication with AWS services, use of secure channels, network traffic between instances, and so forth. This information provides Inspector with a complete picture of the application and its potential security or compliance issues.
The initial launch of Inspector will include the following sets of rules:
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
Network Security Best Practices
Authentication Best Practices
Operating System Security Best Practices
Application Security Best Practices
PCI DSS 3.0 Assessment
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Amazon’s AWS Is Now A $7.3B Business As It Passes 1M Active Enterprise Customers
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazons-aws-is-now-a-7-3b-business-as-it-passes-1m-active-enterprise-customers/
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Amazon Launches Snowball, A Rugged Storage Appliance For Importing Data To AWS By FedEx
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-rugged-storage-appliance-for-importing-data-to-aws-by-fedex/#.ojwuxm:l5yj
Amazon surprised developers today with the launch of Snowball, a new physical appliance that will allow AWS users to ship huge amounts of data for import into AWS by shipping the device back and forth between their offices and the AWS data centers.
The appliance is a bit larger than an old-school desktop case and it can hold up to 50 terabytes of data. It has a Kindle on the side, which functions as an automatic shipping label.
Amazon says the case can withstand a 6 G jolt and is entirely self-contained, with a 110-volt power supply and 10 GB network connection built-in.
Every import/export job will cost developers $200. The first 10 days of onsite usage are free, each extra day on site will cost developers $15 days. Amazon won’t charge for importing the data from Snowball into S3, but it will charge $0.03 per GB for export.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Amazon announces AWS IoT cloud platform that lets connected devices interact with cloud applications and other devices, launching in beta — Amazon Announces AWS IoT — A Platform For Building, Managing And Analyzing The Internet Of Things — Make way for another big player entering the Internet of Things space.
Amazon Launches AWS IoT — A Platform For Building, Managing And Analyzing The Internet Of Things
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/amazon-announces-aws-iot-a-platform-for-building-managing-and-analyzing-the-internet-of-things/#.ojwuxm:CdBp
Make way for another big player entering the Internet of Things space. Amazon today is announcing its long-awaited IoT platform for AWS at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas.
As Amazon describes it, it is a managed cloud platform “that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.” The platform, which is launching in beta, will be able to support billions of devices and trillions of messages, “and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely.”
AWS IoT will integrate with Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, Amazon Machine Learning, and Amazon DynamoDB to build IoT applications, manage infrastructure and analyze data.
“Connected does not necessarily mean useful,” said Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels during the keynote today, and indeed this is what Amazon is aiming at tackling with its mega platform: a place where the many different strands of creating services for disparate connected objects can come together into one place to be run in a cohesive way (all ultimately bring traffic and revenue to one consolidated company, too: Amazon).
The company acquired IoT platform 2lemtery earlier this year, so today’s announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise, especially given that some of Amazon’s competitors like Microsoft have recently made IoT support one of the cornerstones of their cloud computing strategies.
The platform will make it easier for developers to ingest incoming data from devices using standard gateways and protocols like MQTT and HTTPS.
As with other AWS services, pricing for the IoT platform is based around what you use with no minimum fees. Prices are based the number of messages published to AWS IoT (Publishing Cost), and the number of messages delivered by AWS IoT to devices or applications (Delivery Cost). As a sweetener to keep you in the AWS ecosystem, pricing does not include deliveries to certain AWS services, specifically Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis,Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS.
https://aws.amazon.com/iot/pricing/
The AWS IoT free tier gets you started with 250,000 free messages (published or delivered) per month, for 12 months.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Amazon Launches AWS Mobile Hub To Help Mobile Developers Build Back-End Processes — Amazon today announced the launch of its AWS Mobile Hub based on AWS Lambda at its re:Invent developer conference, a new tool that makes it easier for mobile developer to build the back-end processes for their apps.
Amazon Launches AWS Mobile Hub To Help Mobile Developers Build Back-End Processes
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/amazon-launches-aws-mobile-hub-to-help-mobile-developers-build-back-end-processes/
Amazon today announced the launch of its AWS Mobile Hub based on AWS Lambda at its re:Invent developer conference, a new tool that makes it easier for mobile developer to build the back-end processes for their apps.
As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels noted during today’s keynote, AWS has long offered developers all of the services to run a backend for mobile apps, but those weren’t always easy to use. “What we see often is that mobile developers are really good on the device,” he said. “They find that backend stuff really hard. So we asked ourselves: what can we do to make mobile development much simpler.”
Instead of having to set up lots of different services, the new Mobile Hub will allow Android and iOS developers to pick and configure the services they need for their apps and Amazon will then run those features on Lambda. Options here include the ability to set up user logins, user data storage, app analytics and other features.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teradata’s moon-on-a-stick approach: Floats on AWS and Microsoft Azure
Enterprise giant up against Amazon’s Redshift
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/07/teradata_on_aws_azure/
Teradata is throwing its enterprise-class analytics database onto the public cloud, starting with rival Amazon and then Microsoft’s Azure.
Teradata Database on AWS will be offered as a service in the first quarter of 2016, and sold on a pay-per-use basis, Teradata was expected to announce Wednesday.
Until now, the publicly-held analytic data company had offered its database as a service through its own cloud as well as on prem, via its hardware for a princely sum.
Teradata has offered an Express version of its database for AWS, but this was aimed only at developers working in non-production environments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS welcomes MariaDB and new services with added Spice
Cumin up gingerly from behind to take over your store cupboards
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2429676/aws-welcomes-mariadb-and-new-services-with-added-spice
AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) has made several announcements as part of the Amazon re:Invent 2015 event taking place in Las Vegas. The company now accounts for 29 percent of the cloud infrastructure market.
Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that will build visualisations, perform ad hoc analysis and pull business insights. It’s designed to be suitable for anyone, regardless of skills.
QuickSight incorporates a new in-memory calculation engine called Spice which Amazon hopes will “make queries run lighting fast on large datasets”.
“In a world increasingly dominated by connected devices and mobile users, and where corporate data is moving to the cloud, our customers continue to collect and store massive amounts of their data across a wide range of AWS’ data services,” said Raju Gulabani, vice president of database services at AWS.
“These customers have been asking AWS for an analytics solution that can enable every one of their users to gain insights and make rapid decisions using this data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snapshot overview of on-premises and off-premises IT supplier situation
https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/10/08/it_industry_state_chart.jpg?x=648&y=446&infer_y=1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/08/the_onpremises_it_supplier_problem/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The National Law Review:
In-depth look at how EU’s Safe Harbor invalidation affects US companies, and three primary alternatives they can use to comply with EU data protection laws —
European Court of Justice Invalidates U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Agreement – See more at: http://www.natlawreview.com/article/european-court-justice-invalidates-us-eu-safe-harbor-agreement#sthash.4WPosgeb.dpuf
Yevgeniy Sverdlik / Data Center Knowledge:
After EU Safe Harbor ruling, Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, others use Model Clauses for compliance, but these contract changes are cumbersome for many
Safe Harbor Ruling Leaves Data Center Operators in Ambiguity
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/10/09/safe-harbor-ruling-leaves-data-center-operators-in-ambiguity/
Europe’s annulment of the framework that made it easy for companies to transfer data between data centers in Europe and the US while staying within the limits of European privacy laws has caused a lot of uncertainty for businesses that operate data centers on both sides of the Atlantic.
US cloud services giants have taken steps to make sure they continue to provide services legally using means other than the Safe Harbor framework, but actual consequences of the European Court of Justice ruling earlier this week remain unclear.
“One is that Safe Harbor is dead,” he said.” The other, which I think is actually the accurate answer, is that the European Union, and the European Commission in particular, need to figure out how to interpret the ruling.”
Internet businesses will continue to operate in ambiguity until the commission issues its interpretation.
“It is unrealistic to think that all transatlantic data is going to have to stop as a result of this decision,” Snead added. “The European Commission is likely to figure out a way to accommodate it, and the US is as well.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Stakes Claim in IoT Cloud Services
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327955&
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is well established as a provider for a wide variety of cloud-based capabilities, including analytics, data storage, computation, databases, and application hosting. Now, the company is expanding to embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) with a new, integrated service that connects devices with its services as well as other devices. Further, developers can try AWS IoT for a year, for free.
“The promise of the Internet of Things is to make everyday products smarter for consumers, and for businesses to enable better, data-driven offerings that weren’t possible before,” said Marco Argenti, Vice President, Mobile and IoT, AWS in Amazon’s press release announcing AWS IoT. “World-leading organizations like Philips, NASA JPL, and Sonos already use AWS services to support the back-end of their IoT applications. Now, AWS IoT enables a whole ecosystem of manufacturers, service providers, and application developers to easily connect their products to the cloud at scale, take action on the data they collect, and create a new class of applications that interact with the physical world.”
AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that forms a bridge between IoT devices and AWS services such as AWS Lambda compute services, Amazon Kinesis data streaming, Amazon S3 data storage, and Amazon DynamoDB. The platform also supports device-to-device communications, device management, and user apps that can connect to devices, even when they are temporarily offline. Software development kits (SDKs) for a variety of hardware options are also available for creating devices to work with the AWS IoT platform.
https://aws.amazon.com/iot/
Tomi Engdahl says:
An Amazon cloud exec accidentally showed a picture of Google’s data center
http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-boss-shows-google-data-center-2015-10?r=US&IR=T
Last week, Amazon had its gigantic Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, presenting the latest developments in its mammoth cloud computing platform to a crowd of thousands of IT professionals.
Except that during one presentation, extolling the virtues of Amazon’s super-efficient data centers, Jerry Hunter, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of infrastructure, used a picture of one of Google’s data centers instead.
Whoops.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google Launches Cloud Datalab, An Interactive Tool For Exploring And Visualizing Data
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/google-launches-cloud-datalab-an-interactive-tool-for-exploring-and-visualizing-data/#.ojwuxm:cxVJ
Google today launched Cloud Datalab, a new interactive developer tool for exploring, analyzing and visualizing data with just a few clicks. As Google tells us, the service is meant to help developers “get insights from raw data and explore, share and publish reports in a fast, simple and cost-effective way.”
The service uses Jupyter notebooks (previously known as IPython), a format that allows you to create documents with live code and visualizations. Jupyter is pretty well-known in the data science world, and a thriving ecosystem has grown around it, which should make getting started with this new Google tool easier, too.
Using Cloud Datalab, developers can explore, transform, visualize and process data that sits in Google BigQuery, Compute Engine and Cloud Storage. To do so, they can use Python, SQL and JavaScript (using BigQuery user-defined functions). Based on this, they can then use this data to build their data pipelines for deployment to BigQuery or create machine learning models, for example.
To visualize this data, developers can use Google Charting or the matplotlib Python library.
https://cloud.google.com/datalab/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon’s jump start for the IoT
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-iot-/4440535/Amazon-s-jump-start-for-the-IoT
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a well-established provider of cloud-based capabilities, but now has set its sights on the IoT. The company is looking to invigorate IoT development with a new, integrated service that connects your devices with its cloud services.
AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that forms a bridge between IoT devices and Amazon’s other AWS offerings such as compute services, data streaming, data storage, and the like. The platform also supports device-to-device communications, device management, and user apps that can connect to devices, even when they are temporarily offline.
The platform has multiple components. Devices link to the service through a gateway using secure communications based on mutual authentication and encryption. The system registers each device that connects with it, assigning a unique identity and storing metadata about the device
The gateway exchanges messages with the device using a publish/subscribe model that allows one-to-many communications.
After data enters the network, a rules engine allows users to build applications that gather, process, analyze, and act on the data their devices generate. Functions can be as simple as triggering an alert when a reading passes a threshold, or be context-based using other device data such as triggering the alert only when a device’s reading exceeds the average reading of several devices. The rules engine also allows definition of when and how data should be passed to other AWS services for handling.
Network connectivity may not always be 100% reliable, so the AWS IoT offers what it calls “device shadows” to simplify the interaction between user apps and the devices on the network. The device shadow serves as a stand-in for a device when it is offline, retaining the last known state of the device for apps to read and preserving any desired future state for the device. The system will then update both the shadow and the device when connection resumes. Developers thus don’t need to provide for the possibility of a device being offline; the shadow device is always available.
Amazon has partnered with a variety of hardware vendors to offer starter kits for AWS IoT. The kits, available through Amazon.com (naturally) as well as direct from vendors, contain the hardware and the SDK needed to create an IoT device and connect it to AWS IoT. Many cost less than $100, and some, like the TI kit based on the CC3200 SimpleLink Launchpad, are available for under $30.
To get developers started, Amazon is offering a Free Tier account that lets developers use the AWS services for one year without cost, subject to some limitations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
On its way: A Google-free, NSA-free IT infrastructure for Europe
Take open source. Enlist Euro carriers. How hard was that?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/14/for_wed_europes_googlefree_nsafree_it_infrastructure_begins_to_take_shape/
This really wasn’t in the script. All conquering, “disruptive” Silicon Valley companies were more powerful than any nation state, we were told, and governments and nations would submit to their norms. But now the dam that Max Schrems cracked last week has burst open as European companies seek to nail down local alternatives to Google, Dropbox and other Californian over-the-top players.
They don’t have much choice, says Rafe Laguna, the open source veteran at Open Xchange.
What the Schrems vs Facebook decision in the European Court means, Laguna argues, is that any data protection guarantee that a US company makes in Europe is worthless, and so any business processing a European individual’s data on US servers exposes them to lawsuits they can’t win.
“Suppose I’m a German business, and I get an agreement from Google, which says everything is good, and I put that into my file. When a customer sues me, I go to court and find that agreement isn’t worth a dime. Google cannot guarantee what they’re guaranteeing.
“This takedown of Safe Harbor will be remembered as a historical event. It’ll be patched, but it’ll be a bad patch. The real patch is you do business with a trusted supplier operating in a country whose laws you trust. And that doesn’t mean the over-the-top big boys from California,” says Laguna.
Data from consumers and businesses routinely touches dozens of US internet services – and replacing them all with European-hosted alternatives is obviously going to take time. But piece by piece, they’re getting there. What’s interesting and perhaps surprising to US readers, is that European telcos are playing in a vital role in European data independence.
Unprotected email? You must be joking
The industry-wide Trusted Email (TES) Working Group that Open Xchange helped establish is part of the vision of an independent, European open source infrastructure. Mikko Linnamäki, co-founder of Dovecot explains:
“There are 2.9 million IMAP servers on the surface of this planet. The transfer of email between them is unprotected. The storage is unprotected. it’s a total disaster. And that’s for the whole world, for 20 years. Google and Apple and Microsoft don’t care – they want everyone to come to them. There is nobody who is solving this problem, and it’s a very delicate problem. If an IMAP server’s emails are searchable, like the Sony emails were searchable, then that’s a disaster.”
OX acquired Dovecot, a tiny outfit that maintains the IMAP software used by 60 per cent of the world’s email servers, and Dutch DNS outfit PowerDNS, which provides the software for 90 per cent of the world’s secure DNS.
The intention is to encrypt email on your behalf, with the minimum of technical end-user intervention.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hurd clings to Oracle’s cloud growth as overall revenue declines
We’re still in the ‘early innings’ of this game
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/14/hurd_bullish_about_oracle_cloud_growth/
Mark Hurd, joint chief exec at Oracle, has come out as predictably bullish on the company’s cloud prospects, stating in an interview that customers can’t get enough of its fluffy white stuff.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Hurd said compared with 12 or 15 months ago “the customer is more excited about and open to the cloud”.
He said: “Almost everybody is now thinking about doing something, whereas 15 months ago you probably would have had a lot more uncertainty.”
He said: “Our forecast for this fiscal year is in excess of $1.5bn [£1bn] … which would make us the largest cloud company in the world [and] so when you look at the numerical evidence of our performance it’s quite good. I still think we’re in the early innings of this.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s Watson Analytics adds new capabilities as it hits 500,000 users
Now you can create your unethical fantasy football team with Watson
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2430452/ibms-watson-analytics-adds-new-capabilities-as-it-hits-500-000-users
IBM HAS BEEN celebrating the 500,000 user mark for its Watson Analytics service by adding a new range of question and answer capabilities that will allow business users to ask natural questions in English and get business insights.
The new features add a number of new capabilities shoved firmly up its supercomputer sleeve.
Watson will have access to a number of new data connectors that will allow it to be even more certain of its responses. These include data from IBM DB2, IBM Informix, IBM Netezza, IBM SQL Database, IBM dashDB and popular third-party data sources.
Additionally, internal data will be made even more secure thanks to integration with IBM’s Dataworks refinement and access service. Using secure gateway technology, Watson can build a tunnel between on-premise data and its mega mind, transferring information in secure Docker containers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Walmart to open-source its cloud-hopping code
Retail giant offers skeleton key to escape cloud lock-in from … oh, no cloud in particular
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/15/walmart_opensources_its_cloudhopping_code/
Retail colossus Walmart has open-sourced its own cloud operations code.
Walmart is a big cloud user but says that come the year’s fourth quarter its online retailing operations are too big for any one cloud to handle. Portability is therefore something it prizes, hence its 2013 investment in cloud automation startup OneOps, to help it move workloads among diverse public clouds and to automate its in-house operations. That outfit’s code, still called OneOps, will soon be available at an eponymous website.
The code offers continuous lifecycle management tools and code to model the behaviour of complex workloads.
The feature Walmart’s making the most of, however, is cloud portability code that makes it possible to “cloud shop” so that workloads move among different public and private clouds to take advantage of price differences or to reach scales a single public cloud can’t deliver.
OneOps code will appear on GitHub before the end of the year, so it will be a while before we can assess whether the code really does work around proprietary APIs.
OneOps enables continuous lifecycle management of complex, business-critical application workloads on any cloud-based infrastructure.
http://oneops.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
No change in US law, no data transfer deals – German state DPA
Look for non-US alternatives, say Schleswig-Holstein officials
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/15/data_protection_safe_harbor_schrems_facebook/
The data protection authority at the German federal state of Schleswig Holstein has declared that any and all data protection workarounds for the transfer of data to the US after the European Court of Justice’s Schrems v Facebook judgment are going to be illegal.
In its first declaration on the post-Schrems legal landscape, the influential DPA says in a written opinion (in German) that only a change in US law can make US companies compliant with European legislation and has advised companies to adjust their business relationships accordingly.
Following the ECJ’s Schrems decision, US companies have invoked “model clauses” , or template contracts, in the hope of legitimising the transfer of personal data to countries regarded as unsafe… such as the US. Microsoft and Salesforce have invoked the clauses.
But the ULD (Schleswig-Holstein DPA) says these are no cover – at least not in the northern German state.
“A decision of the Commission on the adequacy of the level of data protection in the United States requires a comprehensive change in US law as well as the conclusion of an international agreement. Because neither changes are currently [under way], both options are eliminated in the short – or medium term,” the DPA reckons.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Deborah Gage / Wall Street Journal:
Cloud computing company Bracket raises $45M from Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and others, bringing total funding to more than $130M
Bracket Raises $45 Million to Make Cloud Computing Easier
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/10/14/bracket-raises-45-million-to-make-cloud-computing-easier/
A year after emerging with technology to protect corporate customers from some of the downsides of cloud computing, Bracket Computing Inc. has added $45 million to its coffers, taking total funding in the young company to more than $130 million.
Fidelity Management and Research Co. and Goldman Sachs GS +3.04% participated in the round, along with several current investors. Valuation wasn’t disclosed, but it is less than $1 billion, the company said.
The company has developed software, called the Computing Cell, that envelops a customer’s applications, data and associated security, networking and data management into a single construct. The cell can run across multiple public clouds and in the customer’s own data center, offering security and protection from the performance changes that can occur in cloud computing.
Customers hold the digital keys to their data, which is encrypted, and Bracket runs it, reserving hardware at cloud providers when necessary and distributing the data across multiple machines to smooth performance and improve speed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dropbox pushes Paper, a new way of group working
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2430866/dropbox-pushes-paper-a-new-way-of-group-working
STORAGE DUMP Dropbox is twanging a new string in its bow, a thing called Paper that represents a new way of working together in groups.
Group working depends on a number of things, and one of them is personalities. You can sign up for Dropbox Paper now, if you have a Dropbox account and the whim, and get the news on it as and when it all happens.
In the meantime, Engadget is party to the meat of Paper, saying that it is a ramping up of something called Notes that the firm announced last year.
“Capture and build on ideas, together,” is the hook, and the bait is: “Be one of the first to try Dropbox Paper beta, the best way for teams to create and work together.”
This is not the only group work in which Dropbox finds itself involved. It has also been cuddling up to Adobe in an attempt to sort out how the heck people are expected to deal with PDFs in their storage lockers.
Officially the firms are partnering to bring people a rival service to Google Documents that makes the most of the Adobe document safari park, and makes it usable.
The plan is to “simplify the way people and organisations work across mobile, web and desktop”. Yes. Because new is always simple.
We are curmudgeonly cynics, but the people who write official press releases are not. As far as the information is concerned we are in wheel reinvention territory and people are about to walk down a road paved with golden Adobe software and enjoy the easy management of things like PDF documents and the editing of things while on the toilet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP Cloud 28+ guru: 1,000 users in 6 months? Piece of cake
Single cloudy marketplace hits EU in December
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/hp_cloud28_customers/
HP is forecasting 1,000 mid-market and corporate enterprises in Europe will buy tech services under its Cloud28+ initiative in the six months after it goes live.
A beta launch of the cloud catalogue and certification programme for punters in the EU – all 28 countries – came this month ahead of full blown commercial release in December.
The wonderfully named Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps, veep of HP Helion Cloud EMEA, told us the company is currently filling the catalogue with services.
“Eighteen months ago I was trying to figure out how we grow an ecosystem of cloud suppliers in Europe, mapping services providers with ISVs and resellers.”
“With 28 countries there are 28 regulations, and with a single digital market we want to ameliorate these flows,” said Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps.
He said 120 suppliers including BT Engage IT and OCSL have signed up to Cloud28+ and cloud taxonomy is being written to ensure it is compliant across the region with varying national regulations. The target is 200.
“I want us to have, within three to six months of launch, 1,000 users,” said PGB.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Azure now goes with Google’s Go
It’s already used in YouTube
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/microsoft_azure_goes_with_go_google/
Microsoft has added “experimental support” for the open-source Go programming language, developed by Google, on the Azure App Service, part of its cloud platform.
Go, announced in 2009 and released in 2012, was designed for programming large software systems. In common with languages such as Java and C#, it was born out of the conviction that C++ is too complex and hard to scale, with build times that are too slow.
Go has C-like semantics but designed with cleaner dependency management, automatic memory management, and built-in concurrency support.
According to co-inventor Rob Pike, “Go’s use is growing inside Google”, including within YouTube and on its download service, while other users include BBC Worldwide, Canonical and Heroku.
Now, the “Go binary is installed with the Azure App Service platform”, said Microsoft software engineer Xiaomin Wu. The supported versions are 64-bit Go 1.4.2 and 1.5.1. You can deploy Go applications using the Git source code management system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM has a secret weapon in the cloud wars with Amazon
http://uk.businessinsider.com/ibm-watson-is-ibm-clouds-secret-weapon-2015-10?r=US&IR=T
IBM is going through a painful transition.
Just this week, the 104-year-old company announced a miss on its quarterly earnings — the fourteenth quarter in a row that IBM posted lower revenues than a year ago.
But IBM insists there’s a bright spot: Its cloud computing business, which it says grew 65% in this last quarter versus the same period in 2014.
At the same time, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been aggressively growing their own cloud businesses, slowly but surely eating the market. Amazon Web Services alone is a $7 billion beast of an IT business.
But IBM Corporate VP of Cloud Robert LeBlanc thinks that the company has a secret weapon in the cloud wars: Watson, the company’s hyper-smart, Jeopardy-playing supercomputer.
Basically, LeBlanc says, the whole “cloud” thing has moved on from just providing IT infrastructure. IBM has that part down, in a variety of ways, across a variety of situations. So do Amazon, and Microsoft, and Google.
IBM is also making a big bet on “hybrid” cloud, which is where it lets customers mix-and-match their own data center infrastructure with its cloud services. But Microsoft (in particular) is also in that space.
That’s why Watson is such a big deal, LeBlanc says, and why it gives IBM a “leading edge” in the cloud. IBM calls it “cognitive computing.”
When IBM Watson was on Jeopardy, it had 5 “key modules,” LeBlanc says. Which is to say, it could process 5 different types of data.
Nowadays, Watson has 28 key modules
“We’re making it easier to get access,”
Unstructured data can be hard for computers to make sense of.
Over 85% of all data that IBM deals with is unstructured, LeBlanc says. It’s such a problem that its developers have taken to calling it “Dark Data.”
Watson is getting better at guessing the significance of our emails, phone calls, questions, and videos. Since it’s hosted in the IBM Cloud, companies don’t need to have their own supercomputer on premises to take advantage.
Microsoft has started working on this problem with the Cortana Analytics Suite, which takes a similar approach to helping customers sift through their data likes sales and revenue forecasts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft re-writes the cloud service playbook
Old Azure storage APIs stay. So what happened to the ‘one codebase for every user’ idea?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/22/microsoft_stays_execution_of_early_azure_storage_apis/
Microsoft has extended the time it will support some of Azure’s early cloud storage APIs.
Explained here by Azure principal program manager Dinesh Murthy, Redmond seems to have a couple of motivations for the changes.
One is to give users more time to switch to newer APIs, suggesting users feel they’re being rushed. But some APIs have had their day of doom postponed indefinitely, suggesting customers want to keep using code Microsoft thought they’d be happy to dump or upgrade. That suggests Azure has won some very sticky incumbencies that Microsoft dare not disrupt.
Microsoft’s made it plain that it will constantly add features and services to its cloud offerings. These extensions of old APIs, which keeps older versions of storage services alive for longer, suggests that as users spend more time in the cloud they find they don’t always want new features. Or perhaps they’ve made the mistake of building apps with tight coupling to particular services. Again.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell and Microsoft team up for Azure-based hybrid cloud service
Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft will break down barriers for cloud migration
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2431498/dell-and-microsoft-team-up-for-azure-based-hybrid-cloud-service
AUSTIN: DELL HAS TEAMED UP with Microsoft to expand its cloud service with a new hybrid cloud offering based on Azure.
Featuring technology jointly developed by the two companies, Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft was announced by the two firms’ CEOs, Michael Dell and Satya Nadella, on stage at Dell World 2015 in Texas on Wednesday.
The offering has been designed to break down the barriers of a path to the cloud, and is built around the new Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard.
Touted as “the industry’s first integrated, modular hybrid cloud solution”, this new converged system combines servers, storage and software in an integrated box and is claimed to connect easily to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, breaking through the hybrid cloud adoption barriers of complexity, cost and control.
The new hybrid cloud service is also said to provide customers with three main benefits: on-premise private clouds with consistent Azure public cloud access; the ability to build and provision workload templates via out-of-the-box integration with Dell Cloud Manager; and unified, simplified private-with-public cloud management across Windows Azure Pack.
The CEOs agreed on stage that their hybrid cloud plans will make up a large portion of IT for a long time to come.
As part of the announcement, Dell has also joined Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider Programme, meaning it can act as a reseller of Azure services, the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite and Office 365.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s SoftLayer cloud beats AWS, Azure … at spreading spam
Mal-mail mavens say Big Blue’s got some security scraps to fight in near future
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/23/ibm_softlayer_king_of_spam/
IBM’s US$2 billion acquisition SoftLayer is the world’s largest source of spam, according to email vanguards Cloudmark and Spamhaus.
Big Blue acquired the cloud company in June 2013 and since then net forums have been filled with chatter about the amount of cyber-chaff the Dallas-centred outfit’s users are spewing.
Spam clearing station Spamhaus puts SoftLayer at the top of its 10 worst offenders noting it has 685 spam block list issues as of the time of writing.
These included Dridex bots and hundreds of “massive sources of malware-distribution spam”.
SoftLayer says it is working with authorities, SpamHaus, and IBM to end the spamming.
“Current spam layers from SoftLayer are 600 percent higher than they were one year ago,”
“Spam continues to plague the internet because a small number of internet service providers knowingly sell service to professional spammers for profit, or do not enough or nothing to prevent spammers operating from their networks,” the organisation says in a note that doesn’t mention SoftLayer.
“Although nearly all ISPs claim to be anti-spam, some executives factor revenue made from hosting known spam gangs into corporate policy decisions to continue to sell services to spam operations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP To Shut Down Its OpenStack Based Public Cloud
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/10/23/125231/hp-to-shut-down-its-openstack-based-public-cloud
Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016. in a buzzword-laden blog post, the company says its building out support for interoperability with Amazon and Microsoft public cloud offerings to provide options for customers who require such functionality.
Hewlett-Packard throws in the towel on public cloud
http://fortune.com/2015/10/21/hp-public-cloud/
Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016.
Hewlett-Packard, which has spent the past year downplaying what had once been an aggressive push into the business of providing a “public cloud,” is exiting that business altogether.
The company will “sunset” its product, HP Helion Public Cloud, on Jan. 31, 2016, according to a new blog post by Bill Hilf, senior vice president of HP Cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg Business:
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s strong earnings highlight the benefit of a head start in cloud services over legacy IT firms
The Cloud Is Raining Cash on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/the-cloud-is-raining-cash-on-amazon-google-and-microsoft
Each company’s impressive earnings can be attributed to a shift in the industry that’s punishing a slew of legacy firms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A more open Oracle: We do not lock customers – lower prices than the cloud from Amazon
Enterprise software giant Oracle to tilt the strategy deeper and deeper into cloud services.
Oracle’s goal is to provide software, databases, and platforms to the cloud at the same price or cheaper than the Amazon, the company’s founder and currently the technology leader responsible for keeping the title of Larry Ellison tells held in San Francisco Open World conference.
The company does not want any more to lock its customers in IT software. The aim is that customers can choose to transfer their data by competitors, including Microsoft, or Amazon’s cloud. This is helped by the fact that Oracle offers the possibility to use open standards, which also act as services of competitors.
“It’s good for you and not so good for us. We must work so that we can keep you as our customers, “Ellison says.
The change can be regarded as significant, since Oracle has been criticized for the company’s strict licensing policy, which is bound customers the company’s products.
Cloud has also brought a lot of new Oracle customers. According to the company 70 percent of its cloud customers have not had the company’s customers in the past.
Oracle’s strategy change can be seen due to the enormous pressure on competitors such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services’ direction. Amazon announced in early October to work in the cloud database product, which challenges Oracle equivalent.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/avoimempi-oracle-emme-lukitse-asiakkaita-pilvea-halvemmalla-kuin-amazonilta-6060716
Tomi Engdahl says:
Katherine Noyes / PCWorld:
Oracle pushes into AWS territory with new IaaS services
Oracle pushes into AWS territory with new IaaS services
Pricing and perceived security will be key differentiators, one analyst says
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2998311/oracle-pushes-into-aws-territory-with-new-iaas-services.html
Oracle set its sights on a bigger piece of the cloud pie Tuesday with new IaaS services that put it in more direct competition with Amazon Web Services.
The new IaaS services were introduced by Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s president of product development, at its OpenWorld show in San Francisco.
First, Oracle Elastic Compute Cloud allows customers to chose between elastic and dedicated compute options. Elastic Compute offers the ability to run any workload in the cloud in a shared compute zone, while the dedicated option adds capabilities such as CPU pinning and complete network isolation.
Compute Cloud supports a variety of operating systems, including Linux and Windows, and features robust monitoring capabilities, Oracle said.
Two new Storage Cloud services, meanwhile, focus on different types of storage. An archive option provides storage for applications and workloads that are accessed infrequently and require long-term retention, with predictable SLAs for data retrieval. A File Storage service, on the other hand, offers file-based NFS v4 network protocol access to both Object Storage and Archive Storage tiers in Oracle Storage Cloud Service.
Oracle Network Cloud is designed to provide secure and high-performance connectivity from customer data centers to the cloud following a software-defined network configuration approach. Connectivity options include VPN, Oracle Cloud Connect and network bonding.
A Container Cloud offering allows customers to run applications within Docker containers, which can be easily deployed within the Oracle Compute Cloud.
Finally, Oracle and its partners have certified a number of technology stacks on the Oracle Cloud; they’re available in a standard service catalog to simplify deployment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Empires of the mind: Oracle digs deep on cloud
Back-pedalling fast, but where’s the difference?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/29/oracle_hard_cloud_digger/
Larry Ellison laughed off the cloud seven years ago. If anything, cloud meant nothing more than taking out a new full-page ad on the back of The Economist.
Nothing would change for Oracle, he laughed. Nothing.
Well, it’s changing now, with Oracle’s people digging fast to extract their firm from the hole their captain’s hubris laughed them into.
While Amazon was building a revolutionary business in the late 2000s, Larry bought a dying one – Sun Microsystems.
At Oracle OpenWorld this week, Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd envisioned a future where Oracle and one “other” would carve up the enterprise cloud market, like colonial powers from the Victorian age lazily apportioning chunks of Africa or China.
But if OOW has proved anything, it’s just how fast Larry’s crew are shovelling to get Oracle even remotely in shape as a cloud service provider. And not all of their efforts are entirely unique. Rather, Oracle has joined the ranks of others trying to be AWS or like it.
Oracle yesterday released its Big Data Preparation Cloud Service – Spark-based analytics that it reckoned combine natural language processing with Linked Open Data Sets.
Oracle is following in the footsteps of IBM on Spark and machine learning. There’s a GoldenGate cloud service to move data into Oracle’s database, Exadata and Big Data cloud services. GoldenGate is Oracle’s real-time data replication and integration software for use in heterogeneous environments.
There is also an Archive Storage service, following on the heels of Amazon’s Glacier.
There’s also a File Storage service for NFS v4 network protocol access to object and archive storage and a network cloud for secure, high-performance connectivity via VPN – already offered by Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds.
There’s a nod to DevOps, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Ellison: IBM and SAP are so over in the cloud
Analysis Cloud’s definitely not gibberish anymore at Oracle
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/analysis/2432324/larry-ellison-ibm-and-sap-are-so-over-in-the-cloud
SAN FRANCISCO: LARRY ELLISON took to the stage on Sunday evening at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco in an effort to convince his audience of thousands, the firm’s customers and the world at large just how far Oracle has come in its efforts to transform into a cloud-first technology provider.
“It’s been 10 years since Oracle realised that we’re going to have to rewrite virtually all of our applications and make them run on the cloud as a service,” Ellison explained.
“We started the Fusion project about a decade ago. It was a lot of work. It wasn’t simply a matter of rewriting our applications. We had to rewrite our middleware for the cloud. Then we realised the database itself had totally different requirements to be a database for the cloud; it had to be a multi-tenant database.
“Also about a decade ago, Amazon announced EC2, the Elastic Compute Cloud known to us now as AWS. They started renting compute services on the internet. We came to realise that if we were going to be in the PaaS business, we also had to be in the infrastructure-as-a-service business. If we wanted people to use our database in the cloud, they wouldn’t with just our applications.”
Of course, long-term Oracle followers will remember that Ellison once took a very different, slightly less enthusiastic view of cloud computing. Famously at one financial briefing he referred to the whole concept of cloud as “gibberish”, downplaying its significance on the future business of the company he founded more than 30 years ago.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
IBM to buy Weather Co’s digital and data assets but deal doesn’t include traditional TV channel business
IBM to Buy Weather Co.’s Digital, Data Assets
Deal doesn’t include the traditional TV channel business
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/ibm-to-buy-weather-co-s-digital-data-assets-1446039939-lMyQjAxMTI1NDIyODYyNjgwWj
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the deal could be valued at more than $2 billion, citing a person familiar with the matter.
IBM is particularly interested in Weather Co.’s forecasting group, WSI, which houses the technology and weather data that the Weather Co. collects, manipulates and licenses to companies ranging from airlines to utility companies to insurance providers.
Weather Co. and IBM already have an alliance, struck earlier this year. The idea was to combine Weather Co.’s weather data and forecast information with IBM’s cloud computing skills and analytics know-how, so the two could come up with new ways to package and sell weather data and business solutions to different industries. IBM’s artificial intelligence service, Watson, is central to that arrangement.
IBM believes that it can enhance the Weather Channel’s forecasts to build new products. Retailers, for example, could better manage their supply chain by knowing when sales might slump because of snowstorms. Another example the companies have touted is the ability to sell insurance providers a way to alert policyholders via their smartphone that there was a hailstorm coming and notify them to move cars to a safer location. That type of service could help save insurers millions of dollars in claims.
Over the past year, IBM has worked hard to secure new data sources for its software, forging new relationships with Twitter Inc., Apple Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic Inc., and the Weather Channel’s WSI division, which generates more than 10 billion weather forecasts a day.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell and Microsoft buddy up for Azure-based hybrid solution
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/hybrid-cloud/5477/dell-and-microsoft-buddy-up-for-azure-based-hybrid-solution
Announcement at Dell World 2015 will bring managed Azure to companies of all sizes
Not content with acquiring EMC and all the cloudy goodness that brings with it, Dell has announced another new hybrid cloud system of its own, jointly developed with Microsoft.
The snappily named Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft was introduced by Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the Dell World opening keynote and is built around the new Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard.
“We have had a very successful launch of the premium Cloud Platform System and now we’re going to democratise it and make it more accessible to every business [of] any size, by bringing a standard edition of it,” said Nadella.
“We’ve talked a lot about converging hardware [and] this really brings that and hybrid computing to really everyone. So the combination of the work that we’re doing between Azure and CPS I think is the way to deliver hybrid computing and its future to all our customers,” Nadella added.
Michael Dell explained that the two companies have delivered “a number of these larger Cloud Platform Systems together to some of the world’s largest companies and that’s gone very well.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM buys cloud brokerage software developer Gravitant
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-buys-cloud-brokerage-software-developer-gravitant/
IBM plans to integrate Gravitant’s software capabilities into the IBM Global Technology Services unit, in an effort to boost its hybrid cloud and enterprise services.
IBM on Tuesday said it has acquired Gravitant, an Austin, Texas-based developer of hybrid cloud brokerage software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
IBM plans to integrate Gravitant’s software capabilities into the IBM Global Technology Services unit, in an effort to boost its hybrid cloud and enterprise services.
Gravitant’s technology allows businesses to plan, buy and manage — or “broker” — software and computing services from multiple suppliers across hybrid clouds.
The main appeal with this type of software and service brokering is that it allows mixed environments of private and public clouds to be integrated and digitally managed as one.
IBM was likely attracted to Gravitant’s single management console, which it could pitch to customers as a way to improve performance and efficiency. IBM already has plans to integrate Gravitant’s capabilities into the Software-as-a-Service offerings of IBM Cloud.
“The reality of enterprise IT is that it is many clouds with many characteristics, whether they be economic, capacity or security,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google Apps For Work Passes 2M Paid Users, Now Vets And Recommends 3rd-Party Apps
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/google-apps-for-work-expands/
Last month, Google made a bold move to win over more business customers using cloud-based apps by making Google Apps for Work free for any company that is still under contract with a rival like Microsoft of Amazon. Today, Google — which now has 2 million paying businesses using Google Apps for Work (5 million+ if you include free users) — is raising its enterprise game again.
To attract more customers — and more software makers to develop apps for the platform — Google is announcing a new program for vetting and recommending third party apps alongside the native apps and products made by Google itself.
It’s starting with recommendations for eight apps that it says have passed security and performance tests: ProsperWorks for CRM, Smartsheet for project management, Ringcentral and Switch for cloud-based communications, AODocs and Powertools for document management, and Ping Identity and Okta for identity and access management.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft and Red Hat Reach Linux Deal
Red Hat’s version of the Linux operating system to be available to users of Microsoft Azure cloud service
http://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-red-hat-reach-linux-deal-1446642000
Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc., longtime rivals from conflicting camps of the software industry, plan to collaborate in the cloud.
The companies are announcing a partnership Wednesday to make Red Hat’s version of Linux operating system available to the users of Microsoft Azure
Tomi Engdahl says:
SPECIAL REPORT: CIOs Say Hybrid Cloud Takes Off
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/10/20/special-report-cios-say-hybrid-cloud-takes-off/
CIOs say they are knitting together a new IT architecture that comprises the latest in public cloud services with the best of their own private data centers and partially shared tech resources. Demand for the so-called hybrid cloud is growing at a compound rate of 27%, far outstripping growth of the overall IT market, according to researcher MarketsandMarkets.
For now, adoption of the hybrid cloud is motivated by the need for improved collaboration and greater flexibility and efficiency, CIOs say. Over time, Gartner Inc.IT +0.29%’s Ed Anderson says, “I start to think of a multi cloud environment as a foundation for a next wave of applications.” He envisions mashups of cloud-based analytics with customer data or data collected by sensors embedded in machines and other objects.
CIOs are demanding a way to combine the best of the cloud with their own localized data centers. Few companies or organizations are willing or able to move all of their IT to the public cloud, yet most of them are eager to move past the anachronism of the isolated, on-premise data center. “We are actively working on our hybrid cloud architecture. It is a high priority for us,” says Ted Ross, CIO of the City of Los Angeles. Benefits include the ability to “virtualize” more hardware by substituting it with less expensive and more versatile software
“The path forward is the cloud. That said, not everything belongs in the cloud, and we are actively sourcing services that allow for a hybrid architecture to acquire best-of-breed solutions that can extend our existing on-premise application base, and ensure privacy and security.”
MarketsandMarkets said it expects the hybrid cloud market to reach $85 billion in 2019, up from $25 billion in 2014, a compound annual growth rate of about 27%. Gartner surveyed attendees at one of its tech conferences and found that nearly 75% of large enterprises represented there planned to have hybrid IT deployments, as it refers to the hybrid cloud, by the end of 2015.
“Hybrid cloud is our foundation and focus,” says Steve Daheb, Oracle Corp.
Cloud pioneer Amazon Web Services says there’s a need for public clouds to integrate into a broader, hybrid environment. “That has been the reality of the work we have done with enterprise customers over the last nine years,” said Ariel Kelman, vice president of worldwide marketing at AWS, a unit of Amazon.com Inc
Hybrid cloud adoption often reflects security preferences. “We have student information, research information, financial information that we feel better about putting under our own peoples’ tutelage,” says Danny Miller, CISO at Texas A&M University System, which uses a hybrid cloud file-sharing platform from Syncplicity.
“Think of the hybrid container as a mixing pot for information coming from the public world with information that you might pull out of your CRM [customer relationship management] system or your ERP [enterprise resource planning system]. There is just stuff that is proprietary that you really don’t want to put out on the Internet,” said Michael D. Rhodin, senior vice president, International Business Machine Corp.’s IBM Watson unit, a hybrid-cloud based decision support system for professionals in a range of industries such as health and wealth management.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GE CTO On Moving 9,000 Apps To the Public Cloud
http://slashdot.org/story/15/11/02/2249252/ge-cto-on-moving-9000-apps-to-the-public-cloud?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
The Wall Street Journal recently published a special report on the staggering growth of the hybrid cloud, citing research from multiple sources, including survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Slashes OneDrive Storage Allotments
by Brett Howse on November 3, 2015 5:05 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9759/microsoft-slashes-onedrive-storage-allotments
Microsoft’s OneDrive team put up a blog post today outlining some changes coming to OneDrive, and the news is not good for pretty much anyone using the service. Just barely a year after announcing that OneDrive would offer unlimited storage for subscribers to Office 365 consumer and business, the Redmond company has decided to back out on that commitment. Here are the changes.
First, subscribers to Office 365 consumer will have their storage allotment reduced from unlimited to 1 TB. This is clearly a significant downgrade, and any users who are using more than 1 TB will be notified, and their data will be kept for “over 12 months” before it is reduced.
The bad news doesn’t stop there though. The paid 100 GB and 200 GB tiers are now gone, and have been replaced with a single 50 GB offering for $1.99 per month. So you get half the storage now for the same price.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS announces UK region offering local cloud storage in wake of Safe Harbour ruling
But what effect is May to December?
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2433763/aws-announces-uk-region-offering-local-cloud-storage-in-wake-of-safe-harbor-ruling
AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) has announced a new UK region for its cloud services. It is expected that the UK operation will be complete by the end of 2016, and that the facility will bolster the current AWS regional offerings in Dublin and Frankfurt.
The news has a double impact for customers in the UK. On an operational level, it will create a lower latency, higher speed
The second aspect comes from the continuing controversy surrounding the Safe Harbour ruling. UK companies will now be able to store data in the UK, thus avoiding any unpleasant laws governing access to files that may exist in other countries.
Of course, the news comes in the same week that the so-called Snoopers’ Charter was revealed, which includes a number of clauses that will make UK-based storage less appealing.
Theresa May delivers onerous Snoopers’ Charter surveillance promises
Investigatory Powers Bill wants your internet history
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2433307/theresa-may-delivers-onerous-snoopers-charter-surveillance-promises
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matt Weinberger / Business Insider:
AWS, an early mover in cloud services space with a broad feature set, makes it hard for competitors to catch up
The cloud wars explained: Why nobody can catch up with Amazon
http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2015-10?op=1?r=US&IR=T
The market for cloud computing continues to defy all expectations.
Even as the startup craze starts to cool in Silicon Valley, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all reported bang-up earnings last quarter, not least because of their big bets on the cloud.
What exactly are these companies selling? Who’s buying it? And why is one company that wasn’t even in enterprise technology a decade ago — Amazon — beating the pants off everyone else?
Here’s the state of play in the cloud game.
Why everybody’s going to the cloud
The most important concept in cloud computing is “hyperscale.”
To support their websites and service, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have all built a ton of computing infrastructure. The data centers these companies use are vastly bigger — and way more efficient — than any server room or data center that most other companies could build or run on their own.
These giants now rent some of this capacity to developers and companies anywhere in the world. A developer or a company can swipe a credit card and get access to fundamentally unlimited computing power.
On the surface, all the major players offer the same basic set of services to developers.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and most other cloud players offer two different “layers” of cloud:
Infrastructure as a Service, or “IaaS,” which lets you set up virtual servers and storage in someone else’s data center. This is the most basic layer.
Platform as a Service, or “PaaS,” a set of tools and services which make it easier for developers to build an application without worrying about the servers they’re running on.
(There’s a third layer, “Software as a Service,” or SaaS, which refers to application software like Salesforce’s products for sales and marketing, or the competing productivity products in Microsoft Office 365 and Google At Work. These are cloud products, but they’re not generally what people mean when talking about “cloud computing.”)
Amazon got there first, which is why it’s so far ahead
Amazon Web Services sits at the top of the mountain, going from a Jeff Bezos-approved experiment in 2006 to a part of the company that’s on track to generate at least $7 billion in revenue this year.
“It’s kind of a ‘Field of Dreams’ scenario,” says Gartner Research VP of Cloud Services Ed Anderson. “They built it, and everybody came.”
At first, Amazon Web Services was primarily used by smaller developers as a cheap way to test things or run a simple website.
But a lot of those customers, including Netflix, Airbnb, and more recently, Slack, went from running small experimental apps in Amazon Web Services into making it the core of their booming businesses.
This trend kicked off Amazon’s virtuous cycle. With the revenue brought in by early customers, Amazon was able to invest in more enterprise features and higher-performance services, drawing in ever-larger apps, beyond the startups and the experiments.
Microsoft pulled off an epic pivot
One would think that in the famously competitive tech industry, the giants would have raced to compete with Amazon.
Not so. Microsoft had been playing with cloud concepts since the mid-2000s, but it didn’t introduce Azure, its formal competitor to AWS, until 2010.
Microsoft’s key advantage isn’t necessarily in technology, but rather in its enterprise know-how and established customer base.
Microsoft Azure is optimized for applications built in the .NET programming run time — Microsoft’s standard for Windows programming for the last 15 years or so. It’s easy for an enterprise to move their Windows apps over to the Azure cloud, compared with the competition.
Google could’ve been Amazon
Google is in a funny place when it comes to the cloud.
Nobody doubts that Google Cloud Platform has the scale or the technology, since it runs out of the same data centers that hosts Google’s search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and all of its other services. Those services reach billions of people every day.
Similarly, nobody doubts that Google can innovate.
But Google has been struggling to find traction with the larger, more lucrative customers it needs to compete in the cloud.
In 2008 — two years before Microsoft introduced Azure — Google unveiled the Google App Engine, a similar platform to help developers build their apps.
Google added competitive features over the years, and in 2013 renamed the whole product the “Google Cloud Platform.” The company started to win over big customers like Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Best Buy as it added more enterprise cloud features.
Google has an edge among certain developers, who trust it more than Microsoft. Google has historically embraced the open-source philosophy and released a lot of technology that it’s built to the world.
Everybody else struggles
It could be worse. Just about everybody else has had a lot of trouble competing in the cloud. They started later, and so were not able to create the kind of virtuous cycle Amazon got ahead with early on.
“It’s not quite clear what place there is for the legacy players in the public cloud,” Forrester’s Bartoletti says.
IBM has invested heavily in technology like IBM Bluemix and IBM Watson, which makes it easier for developers to build apps in the cloud. But at the same time, the overall cloud trend has seriously damaged IBM’s legacy hardware business,
Oracle also says its cloud business is growing, but there’s a catch: Oracle is going to its existing customers
HP tried to compete with its own HP Helion public cloud, but it had trouble getting it to run at the necessary scales to really make it viable. The HP Helion public cloud will shut down in January 2016.
Rackspace Hosting, which pivoted into competing with Amazon Web Services in the late 2000s, couldn’t keep it up. After years of disappointing earnings, Rackspace announced just a few weeks ago that it was pivoting again into providing support and services for the Amazon cloud.
Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are slowly enticing customers away from the legacy companies with their shrinking prices and higher-grade features.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kristen Mosbrucker / San Antonio Business Journal:
Rackspace Q3: revenues up 11% YoY to $509M, profits up 42% YoY to $36.5M; beats analyst expectations as company closes new enterprise deals
Rackspace reports 11 percent more revenue amid hiring spree, collecting on enterprise deals
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/news/2015/11/09/rackspace-reports-11-percent-more-revenue-amid.html?page=all
Rackspace Hosting Inc. reported a nearly 11 percent increase in revenue in the third quarter, and the market responded as its stock rose 8.4 percent in after-hours trading. Still, the price per share remains relatively low at $27 compared to its peak of $53 in May.
Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) reported $509 million in net revenue or the third quarter, up from $459 million during last year’ s third quarter.
“What we benefited from in [the third quarter] was closing those enterprise deals and getting them online and seeing materialization on the revenue from those,”
In July, Rackspace launched Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure, a public cloud platform that is geared toward optimizing performance for businesses. That same month, Rackspace opened its Intel Corporation OpenStack Innovation Center that’s headquartered in San Antonio. By September, Rackspace offered its cybersecurity operations center, and in October began support for Amazon Web Services cloud. Rackspace also made what it described as a “significant” investment in CrowdStrike, a company that specializes in cybersecurity this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace beats The Street with strong Q3
No sign of AWS squeeze in financials
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/10/rackspace_q3_fy_2015_results/
Rackspace topped analyst expectations for Q3, pulling in $509m revenue, up 10.7 on same time last year and net income of $37m or 26c a share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Anything AWS can do: Microsoft announces UK data centre region for Azure cloud
Plus: MoD takes up private Office 365 offer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/10/microsoft_uk_data_centre_azure_cloud/
Microsoft’s CEO has announced it will build a UK data centre for its Azure cloud – just days after a similar announcement from AWS CTO Werner Vogels.
It seems the race is on. Azure will have cloud services based in the UK “beginning in 2016″ says Nadella’s slide, whereas Vogels stated that the AWS installation will be online “by the end of 2016 (or early 2017).”
The wording leaves wriggle room for both companies.
An early customer for Microsoft in the UK is the Ministry of Defence. CIO Mike Stone told attendees of the Future Decoded conference that the department will be migrating to a “private instance” of Office 365, hosted in part by HP and in part by the new UK Azure region.
London’s status as a financial hub makes it a particularly attractive market for cloud vendors, and having a local region (composed of multiple data centres) mimimises latency and may have compliance benefits, though since Microsoft is a US corporation there may be circumstances when the US government can demand access to data, a point which is currently being argued in the courts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cory Bennett / The Hill:
Microsoft opens first data centers in UK, to keep users’ data within the country, following EU ruling on Safe Harbor
Microsoft opens UK-only data center following EU ruling
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/259656-microsoft-opens-uk-only-data-center-following-eu-ruling
Microsoft will open its first data centers in the United Kingdom, following a European court ruling that struck down a widely used program allowing U.S.-based companies to handle Europeans’ data.
The move will allow Microsoft to keep UK citizens’ data within the country at all times and avoid any potential legal ramifications by transferring it to the U.S.
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“By expanding our data centre regions in the UK, Netherlands and Ireland we aim to give local businesses and organisations of all sizes the transformative technology they need to seize new global growth,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday at an industry conference in London, The Guardian reported.