October 15, 2012
Volume XLI, Issue 4
Scayl Sponsors CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012
Countdown to CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012), the first joint activity of the Cloud Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), will take place as a strategic business summit on November 8th and 9th in Santa Monica, CA.
CCW:2012 will feature three co-located conferences focusing on the impact of cloud-based solutions in the industry's fastest-moving and most strategically important areas: entertainment, broadband, and venture financing.
Sponsoring firms are now making it possible for DCIA Member Companies and DCINFO readers to take advantage of an extremely attractive offer.
In lieu of the normal delegate registration fee for CCW:2012, with a sunset cruise reception as an add-on option; show sponsors have made financial contributions enabling DCIA Members to attend the entire summit (including general sessions and luncheon, its three co-located conferences and refreshment breaks, as well as all exhibits and roundtables) and the cruise at a very affordable cost.
Qualifying individuals will receive a personal e-mail with details early this week.
Meanwhile, please join the DCIA in wholeheartedly thanking Gold Sponsors Aspera, DataDirect Networks, Extreme Reach, Oracle, and SAP; and Silver Sponsors CSC Leasing Company, i3m3 Solutions, Kaltura, Scayl, Sequencia, and Unicorn Media for making all of this possible. We greatly appreciate their strong support of our inaugural effort with the CCA.
This offer will probably sell-out the event, and will certainly take-up the remaining spaces on the cruise, so if you'd like to attend CCW:2012, please don't wait: when you receive details of this special opportunity, please act right away.
CCW:2012 registration enables delegates to participate in any session of the three conferences being presented at CCW:2012 — ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
Ignore The Cloud at Your Own Risk
Excerpted from CEPro Report by Jason Knott
Panelists at the Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA) event this week said the cloud and other disruptive technologies will launch integrators into offering centralized management services, monitoring, filtered content, user location-based services, insurance data storage, and more.
There's been a lot of discussion about disruptive technologies, disruptive business models, and the cloud lately, but according to industry watchers, it's only the beginning.
Instead of fearing these technology shifts, integrators should embrace them as huge opportunities.
"The more confusion there is among consumers, the bigger the opportunity for integrators to become the go-to specialists," said Bob Hana, Executive Director of the HTSA, during the buying group's Fall Conference in Chicago, IL.
Disruptive technologies and the cloud were the topics of discussion for two panels at the event.
Brendan Morrissey, CEO of Netsertive, noted, "The key question to listen for is: 'What the heck do I need that for?' If you hear that phrase spoken, it's something to look for." He said technology leaps in 3D printing, nanotechnology, robots, virtual reality and other areas will soon enter the home.
Tamaryn Pratt, Principal at Quixel Research, brought technology advancements back to the present by focusing on Apple TV. Quixel recently completed research, entitled "Consumer Perspectives: Connected Devices, TVs, and Apple TV," that clearly shows Apple users are much more accepting of technology changes than non-Apple users. Indeed, 83 percent of Apple device owners "multitask" while watching TV, compared to just 66 percent of non-Apple device owners. She called it the "Applization" of the market.
In that same vein, Pratt focused on audio soundbars as a disruptive technology. She cited data that shows the category growing from 3.2 million units sold in 2012 to 9.5 million units by 2015. "Sound enhancement is now listed as being just as important as TV screen size among consumers when selecting a TV to purchase," she noted.
Kathleen Finato of InterCall said in the commercial arena "Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)" is the new reality. "Workers will own and use their own tablets and mobile devices for work. The IT department at a company will become less important and will no longer select and buy equipment," she predicted.
In the second panel, a trio discussed the effects of the cloud on integrators' businesses.
"Ignore the cloud at your own risk," said Michael Smith, Senior Vice President at Lutron. "The cloud has continual impact on how we do business. It is the new reality. It changes the economy, technology, and homeowners' expectations. Customers don't really care about 'the cloud,' they just care how those cloud services will affect their lifestyle."
He also noted that the cloud will unleash smaller, scalable technologies and installations, recurring monthly revenue, and other opportunities. Smith recommended that integrators position themselves as "the connected systems guy."
Pratt added that consumers mostly value Wi-Fi connectivity, built-in tuners, HD, and a built-in DVR as their top four most important desired features in a new TV.
"Basically, they are saying they want the cloud. They just don't know it," she commented.
Eric Anderson, Senior Vice President at Control4, sent heads collectively spinning by offering up a detailed future landscape where the cloud brings integrators into the world of offering centralized management services, monitoring, filtered content/subscriptions (i.e., automatically making sure clients don't have a separate Netflix account for their Blu-ray player, DVR, and TV), user location-based services, insurance data storage, and more.
"Don't panic," he said. "The cloud is still evolving." Anderson said there is still time to invest in IT training to become an expert on the cloud for your clients.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 As we continue the countdown to the inaugural CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) strategic business summit, the DCIA and CCA cordially invite all DCINFO readers to register now for what promises to be an enormously stimulating and valuable event.
Attend this event to jump-start a very successful 2013 for yourself as a best informed and prepared industry participant.
In last week's report, we provided a sneak preview of day-one of this very exciting program, scheduled for Thursday November 8th in Santa Monica, CA.
This week, we offer highlights of the sessions scheduled for Day 2 of CCW:2012 on Friday November 9th.
We'll start the day with a continental breakfast and exhibition hall activities, after which attendees may again continue or change their selection of topical break-out sessions as each of the three co-located cloud-computing summit conferences will complete PART II of a tactical examination of its subject area.
Specifically, at ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, a series of very-focused keynotes will explore cloud transcoding, cloud storage, cloud delivery, cloud data, and cloud analytics.
Meanwhile, at NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, keynotes will offer insights into and case studies of cloud architecture, cloud mobility, virtualization, interoperability, and scalability.
And at INVESTING IN THE CLOUD, keynote addresses will examine education clouds, big data, business intelligence, VC criteria, and exit strategies.
This will be followed by a mid-morning networking break in the exhibit hall for all attendees.
Then we'll bring all delegates back together for our conference closing plenary session: "The Future of Cloud Computing for Entertainment, Telecom, and Investment."
A panel discussion will address the following questions.
How will industry address concerns of security, downtime, access, dependency, and interoperability? How will it further capitalize on its most positive attributes — user-centric / task-centric / powerful / accessible / intelligent / programmable?
If you haven't already done so, please register now and book your travel. Share wisely, and take care.
Andy Burton's 2012 Cloud Prediction Recordings
The adoption of the cloud is at an all-time high and it's easy to understand why.
In a recent survey, cloud users reported a 98% satisfaction level. Of that number, 94% of them planned to further invest in the cloud in 2012.
So what's holding others back from adopting? One word: security. Watch this webcast and learn the trends of the cloud, including the primary driver: flexibility (not cost-savings, which came in second).
Discover the 2012 predictions for the cloud and then uncover a service to help you provide solutions to your clients — based on your policies — to best fill their needs.
Cloud-Computing Firm Workday's IPO Soars
Excerpted from Wall St. Journal Report by Don Clark
Workday's shares surged 74% in their public-trading debut, underscoring investor interest in cloud computing and rewarding the losers in one of technology's most hard-fought takeover battles.
The long-awaited IPO — which priced at $28 and ended trading Friday at $48.69 — propelled the start-up to a market capitalization of nearly $9.5 billion including unexercised stock options. That is well above the valuation of many better-known consumer Internet companies that have gone public, including Groupon and Zynga.
Workday's offering also enriched David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, its co-founders and co-CEOs, who ran PeopleSoft and unsuccessfully fought off a hostile bid for that software maker from rival Oracle, which purchased their company in 2005. They created a voting structure at Workday that would make such a takeover more difficult, leaving them with 67% of the company's voting shares.
According to a company prospectus, Duffield held voting rights to Workday shares that were worth $3.4 billion at the end of trading Friday. Bhusri held rights to shares valued at $1.3 billion.
The two men started Workday in 2005 in PeopleSoft's hometown of Pleasanton, CA, turning it into a sizable competitor of Oracle and other entrenched business-software providers, including SAP. It delivers web-based software that handles tasks such as human resources, payroll, employee-expense management, finance, and procurement.
Bhusri said targeting big customers was a key differentiator over most other cloud-oriented companies, so-called because they offer services delivered over the Internet rather than software installed on their customers' server systems. Most of those players targeted either small companies or niche features in the software systems used by large ones.
Workday, Bhusri said, instead goes after big SAP or Oracle customers at the time when they are considering upgrades to newer versions of those companies' software. "The consensus wisdom was those systems will not get replaced," Bhusri said in an interview Friday. But Workday, he said, offers them online services at a "fraction" of the cost of upgrading software from their incumbent vendors.
The 1,550-employee company also prides itself on emulating the kind of folksy corporate culture Duffield instituted at PeopleSoft, with frequent events for employees — including what it calls development Geekfests — and a weekly e-mail from top executives. "It turns out you can be nice and treat people well and still do well," Bhusri said.
Workday's revenue more than doubled to $119.5 million in the six-month period ended July 31, while recording a net loss of $46.9 million.
Like some other companies that offer subscriptions to services rather than selling software, Workday books expenses of cutting new-customer deals up front but recognizes associated revenue over the life of multiyear agreements. The company said it doesn't expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.
"The subscription model is just a healthier way to build a company," said Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite, another cloud-based software provider. "You make much more rational decisions as the leader of the business."
It sold 22.75 million Class A shares, raising $637 million. The IPO raised more cash than any launch in the US technology sector since Facebook's $16 billion offering in May, according to Dealogic.
The $28-a-share offer price was well above an expected range of $24 to $26 apiece. On Tuesday, Workday raised the price expectations for its offering from a range that topped out at $24.
Workday is the latest and biggest offering from the cloud-technology niche, which has produced some strong gains compared to the disappointing response that greeted Facebook's IPO. Shares of Palo Alto Networks, which provides network security, have gained nearly 50% since its July IPO. Eloqua, which uses the cloud for marketing data, is up more than 70% since its early-August IPO. Last Friday, Fleetmatics Group, which delivers truck-fleet tracking software through the cloud, jumped more than 30% in its trading debut.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group, Allen & Co., and J.P. Morgan Chase served as lead underwriters on the IPO.
5 Cloud Computing Companies that Hedge Fund Billionaires Love
Excerpted from Insider Monkey Report by Marshall Hargrave
We believe that a continued rapid consumption of network capacity, driven by a rising use of tablets and smart-phones, will propel companies operating in the cloud computing and wireless network optimization space.
In the interim, these companies are seeing a slowdown due to uncertainty in the economy, which has led to IT budget cuts. It appears that several funds are making moves into the cloud computing space in preparation for a future shift in enterprise technology that includes data center consolidation and virtualization.
The five companies below are some of the top ways to play cloud computing — and include shareholders such as Jim Simons, D.E. Shaw, Steven Cohen, and Ken Griffin.
The traditional data networking company, Cisco Systems is in competition with server and computing players for market share in cloud computing and wireless area network optimization. Cisco, being a $100 billion market cap company, has attracted some big name interest, including Ken Fisher and D.E. Shaw. Also, as of 2Q, Cisco was an Edinburgh Partners' Top Pick and saw five funds with over 5% of their 13F portfolio invested in Cisco. There has been a round of insider sales of late around $19, which is where the company currently trades. With Cisco's initiative to focus on data storage partnerships versus acquisitions, the company is expected to grow EPS by only 7.7% next year.
F5 Networks, even with an uncertain US and European outlook, is expected to grow 2012 revenues by 20%. The stock is down almost 24% over the last four months, but 2Q guidance showed a positive outlook. Analysts have mixed feelings on F5; the company recently saw a downgrade at Barclays Capital, a reaffirmation at Piper Jaffray and MKM Partners, and an upgrade at Deutsche Bank. Also worth noting, like Cisco, there have been a number of recent insider sales at F5. Jim Simons was the top fund owner as of 2Q, with almost 900,000 shares. Steven Cohen and D.E. Shaw were also prominent shareholders.
Riverbed Technology, to join the other companies thus far, has a prominent number of insider sales. Of these five stocks, Riverbed has some of the least interest from funds. However, a couple top names that own over 500,000 shares are Cliff Asness and Israel Englander. Sales growth is expected to expand by 15% in 2012, with strong demand for wide area network (WAN) application traffic management, which is expected to also drive 18% growth in 2013. Riverbed has a leading position in the under-penetrated WAN market, but the possible pull back on spending by enterprise customers is keeping the company under pressure.
Juniper Networks, recently announced plans to layoff over 5% of its workforce. Although the company has not said specifically, speculation is that the cuts will be in Juniper's QFabric line, which is its data center segment. This might be an indication that Juniper is losing the data center battle against Cisco, which entered the market earlier and already has an existing enterprise presence. The company currently trades at a 35 P/E, and is expected to post full-year 2012 EPS down 35% from 2011. Even with this outlook, Juniper has attracted Ken Griffin and D.E. Shaw as two of its top fund owners, with both upping their 1Q stakes by over 70% each. In addition to those two, Steven Cohen took a new position in the company during 2Q.
Ciena Corporation saw Empire Capital Management increase its stake over 70% to now own over 2.3 million shares. Other investors increasing their stakes were George Soros, Chuck Royce, and Steven Cohen. Ciena is expecting strong growth in the coming years, partly driven by its acquisition of Nortel's Metro Ethernet Networking business. Sales are expected to increase 9% in 2013 and 11% in 2014. Much like the aforementioned companies, Ciena's other growth driver is the continued rapid increase in network bandwidth consumption.
In general, communication equipment suppliers and cloud computing companies have seen weakness due to the macro-economic environment, but we agree with Gartner's assessment that cloud will be a top priority for companies in the coming years.
The idea being that IT can now provide value to a company, beyond just being a cost. Of the companies, Cisco trades the cheapest on a P/E basis at 12x, and pays the only dividend among all the companies — a 3% dividend yield. However, we believe that Cisco has the least number of growth opportunities, while F5 may have some of the highest. Next to Cisco, F5 is the cheapest on a P/E basis at 30x, but trades at a forward P/E of 20x.
Huawei Introduces Telecom Cloud-Based Platform
Excerpted from Telecompaper Report
Huawei has updated its core network strategy to introduce telecommunication cloud computing technologies, which will enable Huawei's core network products to migrate to the telecommunication cloud platform, delivering a convergence of IT and communication technologies (CT).
The service uses infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology based on an IT cloud platform for real-time voice and video. Carriers are able to deploy COTS equipment together with existing ATCA equipment
How Cloud Is Fueling Innovation
Excerpted from Information Week Report by Amrita Premrajan
Kick-starting the second day of INTEROP, Tushar Singhat, CEO, D-Link India, delivered an interesting keynote that discussed how the emergence of cloud computing is fueling innovation among the vendor community and is bringing revolutionary products and offerings in the market for Indian enterprises.
Cloud computing has been an area that has, of late, captured the imagination of vendors and the CIO community, sparking a lot of exciting discussions on the pros and cons of utilizing the technology.
Singhat, in his discussion, highlighted that the basis for cloud computing existed from the time e-mail emerged. And when the concept of cloud computing emerged, technology vendors sensed the inherent opportunity and started doing extensive R&D to leverage the technology in various different ways.
They started innovating, developing, and delivering different enterprise applications in a convenient and easy-to-use manner. He also pointed out another key trend shaping the market today — the marriage between the hardware and software industries, which have traditionally developed independently of each other.
He further talked about what CIOs should keep in mind while availing themselves of cloud-based solutions. Tushar highlighted that with a plethora of new cloud-based offerings, like security-as-a-service or enterprise-applications-as-a-service flooding the market, the CIOs have to first identify the specific need of the enterprise and then accordingly procure the required cloud-based offering that satisfies the specific need.
He highlighted that though CIOs can see the clear benefits cloud computing can bring to the organization, one of the major concerns that they still have is - how secure is the enterprise data going to be in a cloud environment?
And one of the key things that would help addressing this issue and in turn drive the adoption of the cloud solutions among enterprises is the trust factor, which solution providers build in the market. He asserted that unless CIOs are ensured about the security of enterprise data, they would remain skeptical towards this opportunity.
OpenNebula Cloud — Bigger than Expected in Business
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Barb Darrow
OpenNebula, the European-rooted open-source cloud platform is used by more businesses and in more countries than many might expect. At the ripe old age of 7, OpenNebula remains a quiet force compared to say, OpenStack.
OpenNebula — the open-source cloud behind the European Space Agency and CERN — may be bigger in private industry business than many may have anticipated.
According to new survey data from C12G Labs, the company behind OpenNebula, 43 percent of 600 users responding are in business accounts compared to 17 percent in research, and less than 10 percent in academia. Maybe this shouldn't be a shocker given that OpenNebula's customer page lists such companies as Akamai, Dell, IBM, SAP, and Telefonica.
Also a bit surprising was that geographic distribution was much more heterogeneous than expected for a technology born and raised in Europe.
Sure, nearly half (49 percent) of respondents are in Europe or Russia but a healthy 23 percent are in North America where the open-source cloud buzz is much more around the newer OpenStack cloud platform backed by Rackspace, IBM, HP, Cisco, and other tech powers and OpenStack's slapfight with CloudStack and Eucalyptus, two other open-source cloud platforms vying for the limelight (and customers.)
What gets lost in that hubbub — which will doubtless ramp-up next week at the OpenStack Summit, is that OpenNebula is more mature and battle tested than its competitors.
OpenNebula should get more credit, said Carl Brooks, Cloud Analyst for Tier1 Research. "I am a big fan because it's so organically driven. It's seven years old, it's parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without a massive wave of hype," Brooks said.
Most of the respondents (79 percent) are deploying OpenNebula in private not public cloud. The KVM hypervisor was most popular with 42 percent of respondents using it. VMware was second at 27 percent — although VMware was the preferred hypervisor of 55 percent of the big deployers — those with 500 or more nodes.
Ignacio Llorente, Director of OpenNebula will be at Structure Europe next week to discuss how truly interoperable cloud technology can transform business. Based on OpenNebulas traction so far, he knows whereof he speaks.
Verizon Brings Cloud-Based Unified Communications to SMBs
Excerpted from Fierce Telecom Report by Sean Buckley
Verizon on Wednesday unveiled a new cloud-based collaboration and hosted voice service that will deliver collaboration tools typically only available to large enterprises by combining the telco's VoIP solution with Broadsoft's cloud infrastructure.
Verizon said its Virtual Communications Express, which features a web-based console, will enable employees to "command and control how they communicate."
Ideal for both single and multisite businesses — retailers, franchise owners, and medical offices — the cloud-based offering can be used with Google Apps for Business.
By incorporating the Google business app into the service, an employee can specify where and how they want to be reached by phone, including the office handset or on their smart-phone, by Virtual Communications Express application from the Google Apps Marketplace.
This means they will be able to respond to their customers and co-workers with one click from Google's Gmail GChat and Google Calendar, regardless of their location.
The only requirement to get the service is that the small to medium-size business (SMB) has to have a Verizon-certified phone and an Internet connection from any service provider. Network administrators can also authorize and manage features through a dedicated online tool.
Because the new solution is cloud-based, customers don't need to purchase and manage an on-site PBX. However, the service will offer a host of advanced features such as simultaneous ringing, visual voice mail and call forwarding in addition to traditional PBX features such as enhanced hunt group and call queuing.
Already, the new service has gotten the attention of Montage Clothing in Farmingdale, NY, which is participating in a trial of the new service.
Nick Graziosi, owner of Montage Clothing, said the "Virtual Communications Express has allowed us to deliver a more professional experience to our customers when they call, and has also made it easier to communicate within our office."
With a number of CLECs and, perhaps more importantly, cable MSOs upping their focus on the SMB market, Verizon has the opportunity to use its well-known brand to sell these new capabilities to both existing and new SMB customers that may have left for another service provider.
O2 on How the Cloud Ushers a Brave New Future for Telcos
Excerpted from Silicon Republic Report by John Kennedy
It is an interesting time in the telecom world. Demand for mobile data via devices like smart-phones and tablet computers is one thing, but adding intelligence and robust services for businesses is really where it's at for telecom firms with an eye on the future, says Alan Brown, Business Director of Telefonica's Irish subsidiary O2.
A few years ago at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt peppered with questions from anxious telecoms CEOs about their future in a world where Internet giants like Google and Facebook held sway. Their anxiety was that their network capacity would see them relegated to providing 'dumb pipes' to the rest of the world.
As we talk in the comfortable surrounds of Wayra in Dublin, Telefonica's start-up incubator, Brown jokes that actually now telecom companies see the value of having this capacity and if anything the power is in their hands to provide the intelligent services that makes opportunities like the cloud and big data relevant to business leaders.
Brown points out that cloud computing is already in use in most Irish organizations, whether owner-managers of SMEs realize it or not, citing research his organization had published in May involving SME owner-managers.
"One of the statistics that stood out for me was that 20 percent of owner-managers said they were using cloud services. However, when we asked them what apps they were using in their business, the actual fact was 48 percent of them were using cloud services.
"That to me was a prime indication that people don't quite get what cloud is yet, and they are a little bit afraid of it."
Brown points out that cloud is really just an evolved way of consuming IT services and that it is potentially more secure for a small-to-medium size enterprise (SME) to host its apps and data in a secure cloud data center managed 24x7 by professionals rather than putting the company server under the MD's desk, as has been the case for many SMEs.
He points out that consumers' use of the cloud in terms of social media, e-mail, and services like Evernote and Dropbox is ahead of that by small firms mainly because consumers don't see the cloud as 'the cloud', but rather a set of apps that add value to their lives.
"Whereas with a business you quite rightly have to start with what's different, what are the dangers, so it usually starts with a negative attitude, particularly in terms of security."
Brown says the key, especially in terms of security, is the kind of partners SMEs can enlist when it comes to the cloud. The prerequisites are good security, robust and reliable data networks and the right set of apps and services that add value to workers in the office, in the field or at home. In O2's case, it is a partner with Microsoft and provides businesses with the software giant's Office 365 suite of services.
Data is protected and backed up with a 99.999 percent uptime guarantee and users can affordably access email, calendars and productivity apps, as well as interact with colleagues and customers via audio, video and desktop sharing.
"Your data will be secure provided you do it properly in the cloud and with the right kind of partners."
Brown says the fear factor is there so the key is education and understanding.
From the perspective of a mobile operator, the cloud is a crucial component in an array of network-centric services that prove mobile operators are becoming anything but providers of dumb pipe services.
As the fourth-largest telecom provider in the world, Telefonica is investing heavily in developing new services and working closely with start-ups.
As well as sophisticated cloud offerings, O2 is gearing up to provide machine-to-machine (M2M) services — also known as the Internet of things — where mobile connected devices and sensors provide firms with data on the go 24x7. For example, firms pioneering M2M are using M2M in fleet management roles with M2M boxes enabling real-time location updates, for example.
"That is why the cloud is so interesting and exciting for a company with a heritage in mobility and telecoms. It is really about enhancing mobility for customers, talking to customers and understanding what they do with their business, what their sales guys want to be able to do on the road and what tools might make a difference.
"It is interesting in the current economy, where the focus is on cost but the really interesting stuff is what you can do with cloud to drive your business.
"For example, your salespeople can take an order, including an electronic signature, and have it back in the back-end system before he leaves the customer's premises. That's where it gets exciting. It really is the cloud and mobility coming together.
"From a network perspective, the vision is to enable businesses to do anything, anywhere, and at any time. It's data everywhere," Brown said.
IBM and AT&T Team on Secure Cloud Services
Excerpted from Information Week Report by Paul McDougall
IBM has teamed up with AT&T to offer a service that gives customers access to Big Blue's back-end infrastructure over the telecom giant's secure private lines.
"It's an integrated, end-to-end solution that provides access to cloud computing resources, and a secure pipe over which to access them," said Dennis Quan, IBM's VP for SmartCloud Infrastructure. "It's going to unleash a lot of pent-up demand for cloud computing because we've made the consumption of cloud a lot simpler."
IBM and AT&T plan to formally launch the service, which will be aimed at IBM's Fortune 1,000 enterprise customer base, in the first quarter of 2013.
"AT&T and IBM are delivering a new, network-enabled cloud service that marries the security and speed of AT&T's global network with the control and management capabilities of IBM's enterprise cloud," said AT&T Business Solutions CEO Andy Geisse.
The service is available only to customers who sign-up for IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise+ service.
Quan declined to say whether customers would be charged a premium for access to AT&T's private VPN network, over which the service will run, but said that both compute and network resources available through the partnership would be sold on a "pay as you go" basis.
IBM's pitch is that the service will make it easier for enterprises to establish a secure, one-to-one connection to its SmartCloud platform, which include access to virtual machines and storage, as well as application and security services.
"When a customer requests access to these virtualized resources, the IBM back end is able to tap into AT&T's services and automatically set up all the necessary networking connections and deliver that as a single service," said Quan. "Some of these things would require an extensive amount of configuration and overhead to manually piece together in terms of networking and compute capabilities."
The partnership with AT&T is a sign that IBM wants to ramp up its presence in the cloud computing market.
Despite offering a wide range of cloud services, the company is often left out of vendor conversations that typically include Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Windows Azure.
"We're offering a general cloud computing platform that supports enterprise applications running on a variety of platforms, Windows being one of them," said Quan. "But we're also including Linux, and other popular platforms for running applications, like higher-end Unix systems. We're providing a series of platforms that suit the large enterprise customer and the diversity of IT platforms that their applications need to run on."
Quan said IBM is committed to posting $7 billion in cloud-related sales by 2015, a year in which the company has also promised to deliver earnings per share of $20.
Savvis Marketplace Features Apps that Run on its Cloud
Excerpted from Network World Report by Brandon Butler
A few weeks ago Amazon Web Services announced a marketplace for its cloud services in which users could order a variety of applications to run on the company's cloud servers. Not surprisingly, other cloud providers are now rolling out almost the exact same feature, with Savvis being the latest.
Savvis, which telecommunications company CenturyLink bought last year for $2.5 billion, this week announced the beta launch of Savvisdirect, aimed at mid-market enterprises as a public cloud service that includes an app marketplace. It's meant to complement enterprise-grade cloud and managed service offerings from Savvis, and it will operate as a new business unit within the company.
Whereas Savvis is aimed at enterprises because of its focus on virtual private clouds and managed services, Savvisdirect is meant to provide easy on-board, swipe of the credit card access to public cloud resources.
To start, Savvisdirect's marketplace will include applications from a variety of vendors, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and security programs from Symantec and McAfee, for example. "It's critical to have fluid, frictionless click-to-buy cloud services," says Andrew Higginbotham, President, Savvisdirect, noting that the Savvisdirect offering is aimed at IT administrators, developers and business users who want to rapidly onboard cloud-resources and commonly used enterprise applications, but have them hosted in a public cloud-like environment.
In addition to the app store, Savvis will also have virtual servers that can be rented by the hour, month or annually that can be used as a development platform for building new or customized applications, creating a platform as a service layer on top of the traditional Infrastructure-as-a-service offering from Savvis.
Savvisdirect is announced as a public beta now and is expected to be rolled out in general availability in the fourth quarter of this year.
Funambol Gets $5.75 Million to Fuel Mobile Carriers' Cloud Services
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Kevin Fitchard
Funambol's first round of funding in four years comes just as mobile operators are mounting a challenge against the cloud storage services offered by Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Funambol provides a white-label cross-platform service, which several of the big carriers have already tapped.
Funambol just got a $5.75 million vote of confidence that it can help mobile carriers that want to challenge the likes of Apple's iCloud, Google Drive and Microsoft's SkyDrive. The later-stage funding round was led by previous investors HIG Growth Capital, Nexit Ventures, and Castile Ventures.
Funambol won't just get the $5.75 million cash infusion — its last round in 2008 raised $12.5 million — it will also have access to a working capital line, which it will use to expand into new international markets.
The company started out as a cross-platform mobile e-mail synchronization service, but it's evolved into a white-label cloud services company that lets wireless and wireline operators, ISPs, and device makers to launch their own branded cloud storage services.
It's biggest growth, however, has been among mobile operators who are pitting Funambol's platform against the growing number of "siloed" clouds that limit storage to particular set of devices, operating systems or apps. Funambol and its carrier partners figure that they can carve a niche for themselves by opening up cloud content storage to any device or platform.
Funambol has already signed deals with Sprint, Clearwire, Telefonica, BT, and a handful of smaller international operators, but its biggest customer is still unnamed. Funambol claims that customer is among the global top 5 in both customers and revenues. The only operator to fit that definition besides Telefonica is either China Mobile or Vodafone.
Cloud Computing Company Hits New Fundraising Heights
Excerpted from The Chronicle Herald Report by Brett Bundale
A Halifax cloud computing start-up has raised $1.1 million to advance its file-sharing technology and expand into new markets.
TitanFile's latest round of fundraising is backed by Innovacorp, the provincial government's high-tech funding body, the First Angel Network, and a handful of private donors.
The fledgling firm, which specializes in encrypting data to help organizations and individuals share documents securely over the Internet, has diluted its shares by 30 per cent as a result of the financing.
Co-founder and chief executive Milan Vrekic, 27, said the cash will help the start-up break into the lucrative United States market with its latest technology.
"We want to hire more people in the marketing and sales side and expand our US presence," he said Wednesday, noting that TitanFile's key clientele are professionals such as lawyers, accountants, and investment bankers in the Boston and New York areas.
TitanFile was selected by two of Atlantic Canada's largest law fi rms, McInnes Cooper and Stewart McKelvey, as a secure communication solution with their clients, he said.
"Professionals can now communicate with clients and colleagues without worrying about privacy and security, while avoiding the complexity of traditional enterprise solutions," said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Tony Abou-Assaleh, a former Google engineer.
The cloud computing company has three employees in its Nova Scotia office and another two in its satellite office in Waterloo, Ont.
The company has its Canadian data center in Halifax, which helps clients comply with Canadian rules about information shared over the web.
Vrekic said he hopes to double the workforce over the next year, either by adding staff in the Halifax location or opening a new office in the US.
The company's latest product helps customers group their contacts into real-time communication channels and then add encrypted files into those channels.
TitanFile works on multiple devices, including personal computers and tablets.
Unlike similar products, TitanFile customers do not need to install special plug-ins, configure computers, or add custom hardware.
So Far, So Good: Fortune 500 CIOs Seem Happy with Cloud Computing
Excerpted from Forbes Magazine Report by Joe McKendrick
Many organizations are still in the early stages of their cloud computing journeys, and the reports are: so far, so good. No major flaws or "gotchas" have emerged in nascent cloud engagements, and CIOs are saying full steam ahead. Still needed, however, are more security assurances, and more vendor flexibility.
That's the key takeaway from a new report just published by Navint Partners, which finds large companies are seeing mainly positive results from their cloud computing efforts. The consulting company convened a roundtable with 20 CIOs from Fortune 500 companies to discuss their progress and concerns about cloud computing.
Nine out of 10 respondents, for example, say they have received 100% of the savings they expected from their cloud computing projects. In addition, four out of five say their cloud efforts have helped their organizations achieve some sort of competitive advantage, and two-thirds say cloud has helped their organization's efficiency and effectiveness.
These are all vague terms, of course, and the Navint report dug a little deeper into CIOs' heads to see where they see these benefits unfolding. Robert Summers, CIO of tax preparation firm Jackson Hewitt, cautions that while positive, these are likely very preliminary results. "Many executives and business managers think it will take five or more years to fully realize the tangible benefits of cloud implementation." Summers' points are borne out in another recent study from the Cloud Security Alliance and ISACA, which estimate that cloud maturity is still at least three years out at most organizations.
Close to half of the CIOs participating in Navint's roundtable even indicate they already have a dedicated budget for cloud computing. A majority of cloud budgets, then, are discretionary, and Summers states that "many organizations regard cloud expenses as research and development. Organizations are analyzing how the cloud demand differs across departments before appropriating fixed funding for long-Â term contracts."
Another possibility not mentioned in the report is that because cloud may be tightly baked into business processes, to the point that spending often occurs outside the IT department. Many analysts, including Gartner, predict that soon, business units outside of IT will spend more on technology than IT itself, and cloud will be a big part of this.
Nevertheless, more money will be going into private cloud efforts than public cloud resources over the next two years — which is not surprising, given the huge internal IT inventories within Fortune 500 companies. Close to half of the CIOs contributing to the Navint report expect to boost their private cloud budgets by more than 20%, and about a third will be increasing spending on public cloud services.
Fortune 500 CIOs, then, seem happy with cloud, but there are still issues — security is still the most pressing concern — but, surprisingly, CIOs also complain about cloud vendor inflexibility. "Despite highly advanced security and fraud countermeasures employed by cloud vendors, CIOs and other executives regard security guarantees and redundancy policies with guarded pessimism." This concern still holds back a lot of companies from moving mission-critical applications to the cloud. "The security seems to be there today; it will become less of an issue, but people want to see it," as Summers put it.
However, while one of the most profound advantages seen with cloud is the ability to scale up to spikes in demand — such as the seasonal demand a tax preparation firm may see, this option seems to be lacking in cloud vendors' offerings. Jackson Hewitt's Summers, for example, found that in general, cloud vendors offered very few options for firms and industries with peak business activity condensed into certain parts of the year. "None of the major players [we] spoke to had a pay-as-you-Â go option," he says. "All the agreements were about the same: you pay a standard amount for the entire year, and the provider agrees to handle some spikes in usage as percentage of the base. We needed a more custom arrangement."
David vs Goliath: Is Cloud Computing the New Slingshot?
Excerpted from The Guardian Report by Sarah Goff-Dupont
That software is everywhere is so commonly accepted that it hardly needs repeating. Take, for example, Getaround. To consumers it's a marketplace where the car-having and car-needing come together to work out short-term rentals mano a mano. But the people at Getaround aren't running a car rental company — they're running a software company. And a small one, at that.
They, along with lots of other small firms and start-ups, are competing against giants in their fields: established, mature, enterprise-type companies that not only have market share, but the capital and cash resources that come with it. We'll call them Goliath.
So what's a young David-like up-start to do, armed only with a brilliant idea, raw talent and a willingness to put in long hours? How do they deliver quickly, and on a shoe-string budget? They reach for the slingshot in their back pocket: cloud computing.
If there's one lesson you couldn't miss from our recent tech boom and bust cycles, it's that burn rate matters. So it's no surprise to see small new firms embrace the lean philosophy. And we're now at a point where that philosophy can extend to software development tools of all stripes: issues trackers, build servers, code repositories, even integrated development environments (IDEs) are now available as pay-as-you-go services.
"The maturity of open source software development tools alongside the low cost and high availability of cloud-based services have combined to level the playing field and change the technology industry forever," said Neil Butler, Director and owner of Clearvision, a leading software change and configuration management consultancy based in the UK. "Small companies already had bright ideas, focus and innovation but now they're taking on established giants by rapidly producing high quality software solutions that are immediately available to a global audience."
Instead of spending tens of thousands of pounds on hardware to host your code, you can pay a much smaller amount each month for online repository hosting — anywhere from $0 to $200, depending on the size of your team.
GitHub has become the darling of the open source development community for this reason, while businesses are gravitating toward Atlassian's own Bitbucket for the free private repositories. The same is true for less technical teams, too — instead of buying perpetual licenses for collaboration software like a private wiki, you can use an online service that offers the same content and user management capabilities. The savings are realized right away, allowing companies to budget more for staff and product development.
"We've seen our customers reduce their overall cost of development by 10 to 25%, not to mention the fact that they are bringing the product to market faster and generating higher revenue as customers are able to access the service immediately," added Neil.
Using tools offered up in the cloud also encourages agility. Because hosted development tools shelter their users from the sys-admin burden (installation, upgrades and so on) users can focus on getting their product to market, then responding to customers' needs quickly. And platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers like Heroku, Amazon Web Services, or MS Azure make it possible to spin up environments in a few minutes, for just a few pennies an hour. The feasibility of giving each developer a full environment to deploy and test their changes means more innovation and fewer defects.
And speaking of developers, you may have noticed that companies are struggling to fill all their openings (got a friend laid off from a manufacturing gig? Get them into programming classes now!)
Cloud-based development tools give you the freedom to look beyond your local area for candidates. No need for them to be near a corporate network; they just log in to the tools online and go. It means managers get to hire the right person for the job.
At the extreme end of the spectrum, some companies are even choosing to forego a central office altogether. Cloud-based tools allow them to work together even when they're not in the same room, which makes leasing a room in the first place less important. Another cost-saving coup.
There are many providers of hosted development tools and other complimentary cloud-based services that teams of any size can get started with. Our own OnDemand service offers a full suite of development and collaboration tools; Hosted Projects and WushNet have similar offerings. Cloud9 can round out your collection with a browser-based IDE. Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Linode, and Microsoft's Azure all offer on-demand servers and infrastructure services.
The promise of controlled costs, higher product quality, and greater staffing flexibility make cloud-based development a compelling option for small firms. The next few years will provide a fascinating spectators' sport as they build rocks to put in their new slingshots, pull back, take aim and... pow!
Coming Events of Interest
ITU Telecom World 2012 - October 14th-18th in Dubai, UAE. ITUTW is the most influential ICT platform for networking, knowledge exchange, and action. It features a corporate-neutral agenda where the challenges and opportunities of connecting the transformed world are up for debate; where industry experts, political influencers and thought leaders gather in one place.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 8th-9th in Santa Monica. CA. CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
INTELLIGENCE IN THE CLOUD - December 4th in Washington, DC. This workshop continues the NAB's series of programs developed for military and government professionals to demonstrate how advances in the commercial industries can benefit the military and government sectors. The atmosphere for the workshop is interactive with attendee participation welcome.
Third International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery Using Cloud and Distributed Computing Platforms - December 10th in Brussels, Belgium. Researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia, government, and industry will discuss emerging trends in cloud computing technologies, programming models, data mining, knowledge discovery, and software services.
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