September 29, 2014
Volume XLIX, Issue 10
Don't Miss CLOUD DEVELOPERS SUMMIT & EXPO 2014 This Week
The Cloud Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) will present the CLOUD DEVELOPERS SUMMIT & EXPO 2014 (CDSE:2014) this Wednesday and Thursday, October 1st & 2nd, at the Hilton Austin in Austin, TX.
CDSE will cover Mobile Cloud, DevOps, and Big Data, the most powerful trends in the cloud computing industry today, and the three economic sectors that continue to lead migration to the cloud: Government & Military, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Media & Entertainment.
Please click here for biographies and photos of speakers, here for the full agenda, and here to register.
CDSE:2014 is the must-attend event of the fall season.
Over 50% of the World Will Be Online by 2017
Excerpted from Total Telecom Report by Nick Wood
More than half the global population will have access to the Internet by 2017, driven by the rapid adoption of mobile broadband.
According to a report published over the weekend by the United Nations Broadband Commission, there were 2.3 billion people online at the end of 2013 and the figure is expected to rise to 2.9 billion by the end of the year.
The growth is being driven by mobile broadband uptake, which the UN expects to surge from 2.3 billion people by the end of 2014 to 7.6 billion within the next five years.
77 countries have already seen uptake exceed 50% of the population. The top 10 consists entirely of European countries, with Iceland leading the way at 96.5%. The lowest-ranked countries are still generally found in sub-Saharan Africa, with Eritrea propping up the rest of the world at 0.9%.
"Broadband uptake is accelerating, but it is unacceptable that 90% of people in the world's 48 least developed countries remain totally unconnected," said ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure, who also serves as Co-Vice Chairman of the Broadband Commission alongside UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova.
"With broadband Internet now universally recognized as a vital tool for social and economic development, we need to make connectivity a key development priority, particularly in the world's poorest nations," said Toure.
According to the Broadband Commission, the number of countries that have developed a national broadband plan has grown from 102 in 2010 — when the Commission began its work — to 140 today.
However, "there are still too many people who remain unconnected," said Bokova.
"As we focus on infrastructure and access, we must also promote the right skills and diversity of content, to allow women and men to participate in building and participating in knowledge societies," she said.
The IoT Will Include 99 Percent of All Objects by 2020
Excerpted from Baseline Report by Samuel Greengard
Over the last few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from an intriguing concept into an increasingly sophisticated network of devices and machines.
As more and more "things" get connected to the Internet — from Fitbit activity monitors and home lighting systems to industrial machines and aircraft — the stakes grow exponentially larger.
Cisco Systems estimates that approximately 12.1 billion Internet-connected devices were in use in April 2014, and that figure is expected to zoom to above 50 billion by 2020.
The networking firm also notes that about 100 things currently connect to the Internet every second, and the number is expected to reach 250 per second by 2020.
Eventually, the IoT will encompass about 99 percent of all objects, which currently totals approximately 1.5 trillion things.
"The IoT holds potential for disruptive change," says Gilad Meiri, CEO of tech startup Neura. "The evolution of the technology will likely be faster than the Internet." Please click here for a brief timeline of important IoT events.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 This Wednesday and Thursday, October 1st & 2nd, the Cloud Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) will present the CLOUD DEVELOPERS SUMMIT & EXPO 2014 (CDSE:2014) at the Hilton Austin in Austin, TX.
We're especially pleased to have a stellar line-up of enormously skilled and highly accomplished speakers for the conference sessions, workshops, and special seminars at CDSE:2014.
Here's a sampling of who's who among keynote speakers:
Keynoting for Amazon Web Services will be Brigadier General Steve Spano USAF, Retired, the General Manager, Defense and National Security, for Amazon Web Service's Global Public Sector. General Spano retired from the USAF in September 2011. He was formerly the Director of Communications, Headquarters Air Combat Command, Langley Air Force Base, VA, responsible for IT vision, policy guidance, and resource allocation supporting the command's warfighting mission.
Google's solo presenter will be David Mihalchik, who leads US Government Solutions for Google. Since joining Google in 2007, David Mihalchik has helped establish and rapidly expand Google's cloud computing footprint in the public sector. He led the effort within Google to certify and accredit Google Apps under FISMA, and was part of the team that launched Google Apps for Government in 2010.
For Microsoft, the keynote speaker will be Haishi Bai, a Technical Evangelist for Azure at Microsoft. Haishi Bai is an active technical writer with two published books on cloud computing and a blog with 0.5 million views yearly. He has been working in the industry for 17 years, and has been accumulating software development skills since he was 12, when he wrote his first programs in BASIC. At Microsoft, his focus has been on promoting Azure adoption, creating samples, guidance, frameworks and tools as well as engaging with customers to guide their cloud computing projects.
IBM's solo address will be given by Sal Vella, Vice President, Rational Product Development and Customer Support, at IBM. In this role Sal Vella oversees worldwide product management, development, and support of the extensive IBM Rational Product portfolio. In his previous position, he was CTO for IBM's Software Group, where he was responsible for the IBM Software Group Technical Architecture including architectural standards, support of industry standards, and setting standards and guidelines for IBM's large software development organization.
Presenting a keynote for Dell will be Enterprise Cloud Evangelist Michael Elliott, with over 20 years of enterprise technology experience. Michael Elliott consults with companies throughout North America on their cloud architecture. He started his career as a mainframe programmer for General Electric and served as Adjunct Professor of Marketing at the University of Akron. He has a mathematics degree from the University of Cincinnati and an MBA from Pennsylvania State University. View his blog here.
Rackspace's solo presentation will be given by Software Engineer Kyle Kelley, who has worked at the Open Cloud Company since 2013 assisting customers with APIs, SDKs, and DevOps tools. Kyle Kelley is a core developer of the IPython/Jupyter project. He helps build environments for collaborative analysis, development, and production workloads for entities ranging from small teams to massive scale. He previously served for three years as a United States Department of Defense Applied Mathematician, and before that as a Threat Prevention Engineer at eSoft.
Representing NetSuite will be Ranga Bodla, its Wholesale Distribution Industry Lead. Ranga Bodla boasts more than 15 years of combined product management and marketing experience, with expertise in the software technology industry. In this role, he is constantly ahead of the latest trends in the industry and how they impact customers. Additionally, because of the nature of NetSuite's customer base, he works with innovative customers who are challenging the status quo in their respective industries.
Oracle's keynote speaker will be Stan Defilippi, who serves as Senior Director in Sales Engineering, where he has driven business execution across North America Sales in various senior roles in business development, sales, pre-sales, enterprise architecture, consulting, operations and program management. Stan Defilippi is currently focused on DBaaS Private Cloud solutions with Oracle Engineered Systems. Prior to his 17 years at Oracle, Stan spent 13 years at Unisys. At his last assignment at Unisys, he ran a $25 million start-up US law enforcement telecommunications systems business.
Giving the solo presentation for SAP will be Scott Campbell, Senior Principal for Media, Sports & Entertainment Industries. Bringing over 25 years operational and business leadership experience to SAP's Industry Value Engineering practice in North America, Scott Campbell is a true pioneer of digital media and digital supply chain initiatives. He has held leadership roles over Video Operations, Content Management and eBusiness Platforms at companies including Scripps Networks and the Associated Press.
Tim Hayden's new book "The Mobile Commerce Revolution" will debut at the summit and expo. With more than 20 years of marketing and business leadership experience, Tim Hayden has been both a founding member of new ventures and a catalyst for innovative change in some of the world's largest brands. Part social anthropologist, part strategic marketing executive, he studies communications behavior and how new media and mobility are reshaping all of business.
A fascinating case study from Sense Corp. Partner Wes Carberry will be provided on the role of OutSystems in the College Bound cloud initiative. Wes Carberry leads the vision for the Technology Practice at Sense Corp. He has more than 50 success stories with clients that range from startups to the largest companies in the world. He understands the breadth and depth of technology, and he communicates and brings a fresh energy to the workplace.
Joining panel discussions and conducting a workshop will be Edwards Wildman Palmer Partner Larry Freedman, who is a member of the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Group, and leads the firm's Cloud Computing Group. Edwards Wildman has an active technology and communications regulatory and transactional practice. Larry Freedman previously served as president and CEO of WorldNet Telecommunications.
Please click here for biographies and photos of additional CDSE:2014 speakers representing such innovative organizations as Adjacent Technologies, Applied Geographics, Aspera, DigiCert, Flux7, Front Porch Digital, Iron Mountain, JW Secure, Kinetic Concepts, Mediafly, MyDirectives, NTT Data, OnRamp, Paragon, Prime Care Technologies QRhythm, RealEyes Media, SERC, SoftServe, Talend, VDI Space, and Xvand.
Please click here for the full agenda.
CDSE will cover Mobile Cloud, DevOps, and Big Data, the most powerful trends in the cloud computing industry today, and the three economic sectors that continue to lead migration to the cloud: Government & Military, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Media & Entertainment.
Please click here to register. Share wisely, and take care.
Venture Capitalists Head for the Cloud
Excerpted from WhaTech Report Cloud computing has topped the list of industry sectors in which venture capitalists feel most confident about investing, for the second year in a row, according to the 2014 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey, from Deloitte and the US based National Venture Capital Association.
The tenth annual survey, conducted in May and June of 2014, questioned more than 300 venture capital, private equity, and growth equity investors in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. It sought to assess investor confidence in the global venture capital environment and understand market factors shaping industries and investments in specific geographies and industry sectors.
Investors were asked to rate their confidence levels in a variety of different market sectors in specific geographies and industry sectors on a scale of one to five.
"For the second year in a row, US venture capital investors named cloud computing (4.29) as the area they were most confident investing in followed very closely by mobile technology (4.28), enterprise software (4.00) and health care IT and services (3.87)," Deloitte said. "US VC investors are very confident in cloud computing, mobile and enterprise software sectors."
Globally the result was similar. "Global venture capital investors showed the greatest confidence in cloud computing (4.11), mobile (4.02), and healthcare IT and services (3.94). Cloud computing/SAAS was the most confident sector of all sectors surveyed," Deloitte said.
It added that the favorite status of cloud and mobile was due in part to these sectors being less capital intensive than others. "The survey found that global investors continued to invest and expressed the greatest enthusiasm for information technology-related sectors that are less capital intensive, particularly technology, mobile and cloud computing."
Analyst Zeus Kerravala from ZK Research said: "This is great. Typically, innovation comes from start-ups, not the huge IT companies. These smaller, more nimble companies can bring innovative solutions to market. VC investments help drive new ideas."
According to a blog on the MSPmentor website, "It's not a coincidence that investors are confident in the mobile and cloud space simultaneously. Solid financial backing will help converge the mobile and cloud computing spaces in a way that broadens the set of cloud solutions available to us. We can expect to see many opportunities for change and innovation in the cloud and managed service provider (MSP) arenas, as venture capitalists put their funding into new cloud resources and solutions."
5 Cloud Funding Stories You Might Have Missed
Excerpted from Talkin' Cloud Report by CJ Arlotta
Each week Talkin' Cloud compiles a list of cloud computing financing stories for readers who might have missed the news earlier in the week. This week's column features funding news from Duo Security, EdCast, Numerify, DroneDeploy and Magnitude Software.
Duo Security Raises $12M for Cloud-based Two-factor Authentication Service. Duo Security has secured $12 million in venture capital from investors for company growth and product expansion. Benchmark led the Series B funding round, with participation from Google Ventures, True Ventures and Radar Partners.
EdCast Secures $6M in VC Funding for Cloud-based Knowledge Platform. The Mountain View, CA based company has raised $6 million in venture capital funding to further promote its cloud-based knowledge platform to educators, enterprises and governments worldwide.
Numerify Raises $15M in Venture Capital for Cloud-based Business Analytics. Numerify has raised $15 million in funding to continue building out its cloud-based business analytics product portfolio. Sequoia Capital led the Series B financing round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners; Amit Singh, President of Google for Work; Deep Nishar, Senior Vice President of Products and User Experience at LinkedIn; and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks.
DroneDeploy Raises $2m to launch to Cloud Control for Commercial Drones. DroneDeploy said it has raised $2 million seed financing. SoftTech VC led the funding round, with DataCollective, Redpoint, DFJ and Angelpad. For those of you unaware, DroneDeploy offers a cloud platform to simplify commercial drone operation.
Newcomer Magnitude Software Raises $100 Million in VC. The Austin, TX based cloud-based enterprise information management software secured up to $100 million in capital investment to expand its product offering footprint by building and buying products that complete the end-to-end information management experience for customers.
Verizon Takes Workload-Driven Approach to the Cloud
Excerpted from Telecom Ramblings Report by Kevin King
Verizon Enterprise Solutions, this month, will release a new service model and a set of new features and functionality for the company's cloud infrastructure and storage platform, designed to help enterprises move business critical workloads into the cloud.
This updated Verizon Cloud will include a variety of services tiers, onboarding and workload migration services, seamless integration with third-party cloud services and several deployment options ranging from public cloud to private on-premise cloud.
Verizon Cloud is the centerpiece of Verizon's strategy to tightly bond the company's core cloud platform with network and security capabilities aligned to enterprises' specific risk sensitivity and service management expectation for each workload. These cloud services and features will be available in a unified, easy-to-operate user console.
"We're building on what makes Verizon unique — a heritage in cloud and a unique set of network, security and managed services assets," said Siki Giunta, Senior Vice President of Cloud, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. "The goal is to provide enterprises with the technology solutions they need —in the manner they need them — to drive business transformation."
Enterprises are looking to put more business-centric applications in the cloud. This requires an approach that builds cloud-based solutions that specifically fit each workload — taking into account geography, security, networking, etc. Enterprises must create individual cloud spaces that correspond to the individual needs of their workload. Verizon Cloud provides businesses with the flexibility to directly align the capabilities of the cloud infrastructure and surrounding services, such as management and onboarding, to the workload.
The unified Verizon Cloud portfolio delivers a range of cloud products supported by a collection of service capabilities. Enterprises can develop the solution that best fits their specific needs — choosing from public cloud infrastructure with limited support to a private, on-premise cloud that is fully managed by Verizon, and any option in between. This offering gives enterprises performance flexibility and control over their cloud environment to address specific workload needs, network protocols, etc.
All Verizon Cloud clients are able to leverage Verizon's comprehensive global network technologies and implicit understanding of the hybrid cloud challenges. Secure Cloud Interconnect, for example, provides Private IP (PIP) access to an increasing number of major cloud service providers, enabling enterprises to easily connect a PIP-enabled location to a cloud deployment including Verizon Cloud. Also, Verizon understands the end-to-end challenges of delivering applications and maintaining high performance and reliability.
Moreover, Verizon's cloud data centers and cloud solutions are designed with built-in security features, such as firewalls, load balancers and network segmentation, as well as third-party penetration testing and remediation. Verizon's managed security services can be added to meet more rigorous and custom enterprise requirements.
Most enterprises want private clouds for key workloads and they need a source that can augment the work they are doing. Verizon Cloud was built for the enterprise and while the flexibility of the platform and service tiers means it fits a variety of cloud needs, the company's focus is on enterprise private clouds. That is where the cloud platform, market knowledge, security and networking all intersect for Verizon enterprise clients. Few companies are as well positioned to help build and manage enterprise private clouds — either in a Verizon data center or on site with the customer.
Verizon Cloud is installed in Verizon cloud data centers in Culpeper, Va., Englewood, Colo., and Santa Clara, Calif. Additional data centers in the United States, Latin America and Europe and Asia will be added over the next several months. For more information on Verizon Cloud click here.
Telefonica and Huawei Get Closer
Excerpted from Light Reading Report by Paul Rainford
Telefonica and Huawei have signed a collaboration agreement which, they say, "contemplates the joint analysis" of three fundamental areas, namely: the transformation of Telefonica's next-generation networks, with a particular nod to technology for the connected home; the improvement of Telefonica's business processes and its customers' experience; and network virtualization.
Experts from the two companies will create working groups where knowledge about these common areas of interest will be shared. (See Telefonica Unveils Aggressive NFV Plans and Huawei & Telefonica Jointly Accomplished the PoC Testing for the UNICA Infrastructure.)
Elsewhere on Planet Huawei, the vendor says it has successfully completed a trial of VoLTE with Poland's Polkomtel, using Huawei's Ascend P7 smartphone. Users were able to make HD calls and send SMS text messages over the network. (See Huawei Preps for VoLTE Explosion.)
The French competition authorities have rejected Orange's complaint about the network-sharing agreement formed between Bouygues Telecom and SFR , Reuters reports. Bouygues and SFR are planning a joint venture to operate 11,500 mobile towers, allowing them to eliminate 7,000 towers between them.
A study commissioned by BT Group has found that half the companies it surveyed are adopting mass-market cloud services rather than services tailored for enterprises, raising concern about data security. Many respondents to the survey felt that cloud offerings for the enterprise were too expensive. For more facts and figures from the study, see this BT press release.
A group of Telecom Italia investors has told the company that it should not be selling its 22.7% stake in Telecom Argentina to investment company Fintech, Reuters reports. The deal, agreed last year and worth US $960 million, is still awaiting regulatory approval.
Cisco: Hand Us the Keys — We'll Drive Intercloud
Excerpted from The Register Report by Joe Fay
Cisco will announce tie-ups between its Intercloud platform and the major public cloud vendors over the coming quarters, the network giant's EMEA partner boss said today.
Snagging the likes of incumbent telecoms operators, and ensuring full bi-directionality with the likes of Azure and Google is crucial if it is to establish its Intercloud Fabric as the default platform for moving workloads between data centers, while promising CIOs and partners that security and policy restrictions will not be compromised.
Cisco has characterized the existing public cloud services as islands between which it is hard to shift workloads - much as there were once networks which were cut off from each other in the pre-Internet era. And what connected those islands in Cisco's view? Well, Cisco.
The firm is now looking to pull off the same trick, and put itself in the same central position, in the cloud era.
Milo Schacher, VP for Cisco's EMEAR partner organization told journalists at the Canalys Channels Forum today, "The strategy is to have all the big public clouds included customers want to have choice."
Schacher said it had already thrown a bridge into Amazon Web Services, and workloads could be moved between customers' data centers and AWS. It recently announced a tie-up with IBM's Softlayer cloud operation, but this is still being spun-up. Schacher added that IBM's shedding of its x86 server business had removed overlap between the firms, and IBM was an increasingly key partner.
He said that it could already connect into Amazon and Google, but "the question is how much appetite there is there to use global Intercloud much more bi-directionally."
More announcements were due over the next few weeks, said Schacher, and he predicted that over "the next few quarters" it would establish links with "all the key platforms".
"When I talk about global players, I mean the traditional incumbent service providers," he added. Telstra recently came on board, and again, further partners are expected over coming months.
Cisco's channel partners will also be expected to buy into the concept. Its accredited data center specialist partners will be expected to invest in the hardware and software package that underlies Intercloud, which will allow their customers to shift workloads with confidence.
Telecom Services Evolve to Meet Cloud Needs
Excerpted from Talkin' Cloud Report by Mike Vizard
Look under any cloud computing environment and what you find is a lot of dependency on telecommunications and networking infrastructure. Many solution providers, however, historically have had to deal with provisioning times of weeks, sometimes even months, for these services.
To address that issue carriers such as AT&T and Verizon are embracing open application programming interfaces (APIs) that make their telecommunications infrastructure programmable. AT&T, for example, just announced it will be providing a range of self-service networking capabilities enabled by the APIs the company is exposing across its recently launched User-Defined Network Cloud (UDNC).
Currently only available for customers looking for Ethernet services in Austin, the goal is to expand those self-service capabilities as rapidly as possible across multiple classes of networking services, said Josh Goddell, Vice President of Network on Demand for AT&T.
"We transforming the way we provision network resources," Goddell said. "We moving toward delivering dynamic network capacity."
Verizon, meanwhile, is extending its reach into the channel in anticipation of extending its market reach by enabling solution providers to resell network services that they and their customers can provision themselves. Helen Donnelly, Chief Marketing Director for Verizon, said the carrier obviously prefers its own networks, but in terms of the cloud services it provides, the telecommunications giant is "carrier-neutral."
As part of that effort, Verizon is becoming more cloud-neutral as well. The company just announced a new services model under which it will offer different tiers of cloud services, including virtual private network (VPN) connections to Amazon Web Services in support of a growing hybrid cloud computing trend across the enterprise.
The implications of having programmable network services in terms of the level of competition that will create will be nothing short of profound. Given the fact that the cost of switching drops substantially in world where network infrastructure becomes programmable, in the not-too-distant future customers will pit carriers against one another to provide network bandwidth on demand.
"As cloud computing continues to mature I think you'll see a more peaceful coexistence," noted Donnelly. "The days of a single source providing all things in the cloud are gone."
In fact, there already are a number of interesting initiatives that have the potential to reshape how telecommunications services are used and sold.
For example, Global Capacity buys network bandwidth wholesale and then makes that bandwidth available on demand to customers via a One Marketplace platform. Most recently, Global Capacity acquired the Network Services business unit of MegaPath to help ensure it has access to network bandwidth to offer its customers, while also continuing to buy available network bandwidth wholesale.
Global Capacity's President Jack Lodge said it's critical to be able to have as much control over networking services as possible.
"You could think of us as an Uber for data connections," Lodge said. "In our case we're buying network bandwidth based on the demand we see from our customers."
Meanwhile, Pertino, which just launched a channel program, has taken the whole networking-services-in-the-cloud concept one step further. Todd Krautkremer, Chief Marketing Officer for Pertino, said the company's software is designed to allow users to create their own virtual private network leveraging software-defined networking (SDN) software to logically segment wide area network (WAN) bandwidth that multiple cloud service providers make available.
"We're building WANs in the cloud," said Krautkremer. "We have our own SDN stack that we deploy to create a control plane and then we make the data plane programmable."
Given all these technological advances, it's pretty clear competition is coming to the once-staid telecommunications space in a way that clearly benefits the channel. Understanding how to leverage programmable networks in the age of the cloud will be nothing short of crucial. Without it, most solution providers will find it increasingly difficult to succeed in an age where the line between programmable networks and the cloud itself is rapidly becoming indistinguishable.
Ericsson's Move to Cloud Services
Excerpted from CloudTech Report by James Bourne
Earlier this week, it was confirmed that Swedish telecoms provider Ericsson had bought a majority stake in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Apcera.
The deal, to close in Q4, sees Ericsson strengthen its position in the cloud market. Apcera will continue as a standalone company, with Ericsson shoving funds into Apcera's technology and sales operations.
The telco cloud is an expansive opportunity and market place. One only needs to look at the initiatives Verizon is introducing with Verizon Cloud, for instance, or how CenturyLink is beefing up its portfolio.
Ericsson's route, on the surface, looks similar. The Swedish telco's offering, Ericsson Cloud System, adds cloud capabilities to an existing operator network. Yet Ericsson sees PaaS as key to success in cloud — hence the buying of Apcera. But Apcera's USP is one of policy and governance — a vital cornerstone to larger enterprises using the cloud.
"Cloud technology is disrupting the global ICT infrastructure market, and service providers must modernize to provide more value to their customers," an Ericsson press release trumpeted. And this realignment is becoming prevalent elsewhere in the business, too. Only a week ago, Ericsson announced discontinuation of its modem business, "redirecting investment from modems to radio networks."
This all leads in to how Ericsson is going to change its strategy through 2015. Ericsson's portfolio will comprise three arms: operator telecom cloud, with network functions; operator IT cloud, with OSS/BSS, media and IT functions; and operator commercial cloud, with commercial anything-as-a-service (XaaS) offerings.
Offering cloud services appears, on first glance, to be a straightforward value-add for telcos, who already leverage a huge network. Take CenturyLink, for example. The communications firm slashed their prices on cloud storage, in line with competitors, back in May. More recently they launched a private cloud, but with the aim of private cloud security and public cloud agility.
Richard Seroter, Director of CenturyLink Cloud, told CloudTech at the time the company was "bullish" in the public cloud market. It's an indication of how seriously telcos are taking this — and for more evidence, look no further than Verizon.
Verizon Cloud has got some serious weight behind it, including integration with AWS and partnerships with Oracle. It's clear that stakeholders from both sides see the benefit, and it helps keep mobile operators and telcos agile — a key point made by Ericsson earlier this week.
Juniper's Cloud Gains Traction with New Orders
Excerpted from Trefis Report
Juniper is steadily making progress in the cloud computing market with its software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) solutions. The company's open source network virtualization solution, Contrail, was recently deployed by Czech cloud computing provider tcp cloud to improve orchestration and automation in its physical and virtual cloud infrastructures. This is expected to help tcp cloud in faster deployment of high-density private cloud solutions for its customers, reducing the build time drastically from six weeks to just seven days.
Juniper's cloud networking solutions were also recently deployed by global communications service provider BroadSoft for its Unified Communications (UC) service called BroadCloud. Juniper will provide comprehensive networking solutions including routing, switching and security products to help BroadCloud provide flexible and scalable cloud-based infrastructure to deliver a variety of UC services including instant messaging and presence, audio conferencing, video calling and Hosted PBX.
The products deployed in this project are Juniper's MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers, EX Series Ethernet Switches, QFX Series Switches and SRX Series Services Gateways.
In an effort to improve the security of its cloud offerings and virtualization services, Juniper recently also upgraded its Spotlight Secure threat intelligence platform to enable customers to protect their networks and data from a variety of threats and viruses. This essentially integrates the Spotlight Secure platform with the firewall feature in Juniper's SRX Series Services Gateways. We expect the recent orders and enhancements in virtualization security to help Juniper win more clients and improve its presence in the rapidly expanding and competitive cloud computing and virtualization market.
Juniper launched the Contrail SDN controller for enterprises and service providers last year, leveraging its $176 million acquisition of Contrail Systems in December 2012. SDN is transitioning the networking world towards more scalable and manageable architectures where a robust software system can be managed independently of of the physical hardware. As the company describes it, Contrail interoperates with not only enterprise open cloud orchestration environments such as OpenStack and CloudStack, but service provider Operations and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS). It thus acts as a robust, reliable and manageable platform unifying these disparate network environments. And it demonstrates the advantages offered by an infrastructure that is increasingly software-defined.
The networking vendor also made the Contrail source code open in a bid to attract developers and build a vibrant ecosystem around its SDN products. Although this increased the risks of commoditizing the SDN controller even further, it gave Juniper a better chance of competing against the likes of Cisco, which has a much more substantial share in the data center market. Juniper will likely continue with its strategy of using the open source Contrail platform — the increasing use of which is likely to drive traffic and increase demand for its routers and switches due to the proprietary support.
In the second quarter this year, Juniper's switching sales grew by an impressive 25% year-over-year (y-o-y) to about $200 million driven by sustained strong demand for QFabric products. This followed the 46% y-o-y growth recorded in the business in the previous quarter.
Cloud computing has been an important factor driving this momentum as more and more enterprises look to create scalable virtual networks. In the second quarter, Juniper delivered two large cloud projects using its Contrail platform. One of the projects was in the Asia-Pacific region and the other was CloudWatt, the largest cloud in France. Sales were also driven by the growing demand for next generation data center transformation projects, coupled with a need to deliver at a high degree of operational simplicity.
Juniper's switching business has performed impressively in the last few years, with sales increasing 15% and 12% y-o-y in 2013 and 2012, respectively. Going forward, the introduction of new products, expansion in SDN and NFV and its ability to promote the open converged framework (OCF) concept could help Juniper gain share in the global switching market.
NIBMG Deploys DDN Storage for Genomics Research
As the first research institution in India devoted to genome-based research for human health and disease, the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG) is taking a bite out of oral cancer with its world-class research into the most common cancer among males in India with the help of state-of-the-art solution comprising block, file, and object storage solutions from DataDirect Networks (DDN).
To fuel its cutting-edge cancer research, the institute has deployed a full-platform solution that includes DDN SFA High-Performance Storage, the massively scalable GRIDScaler parallel file system and WOS object storage platform, to better handle Big Data ingest, processing, storing, collaboration and disaster recovery.
NIMBG uses massively-parallel DNA sequencing to process huge amounts of DNA sequence data to perform meaningful scientific interpretations and analyses, generating up to 500TBs of data on 500 oral cancer patients as part of its initiative under the aegis of the International Cancer Genome Consortium. With its legacy storage platform, it became increasingly difficult to ingest large datasets from next-gen sequencers and feed them to High-Performance Compute (HPC) clusters fast enough, and then securely share both raw data and results for collaboration and publishing purposes.
After deploying DDN's high-throughput, highly scalable and reliable storage solutions, NIBMG scientists have achieved a significant improvement in data ingest time over its previous storage platform, enabling the team to run concurrent sequence analysis of twice as many patients, while translating results for broader research benefits in as little as three-to-four months.
As a result, a team of Indian scientists has identified new genes and biological pathways specific to oral cancer associated predominantly with smokeless tobacco consumption in India. Further detailed study on these discoveries may lead to finding better therapies for oral cancer faster.
BitTorrent Seeks to Revamp Image with Bundle
Excerpted from ClizkZ Report by Emily Alford
BitTorrent has long been associated with Internet copyright infringement, but the company hopes to rehabilitate its image and lure advertisers with Bundle, its new publishing platform.
Torrenting has a reputation for infuriating artists and terrifying advertisers, but BitTorrent is hoping a new suite of products can rehabilitate the company's image by luring publishers interested in the authorized side of file sharing.
There's nothing inherently unlawful about BitTorrent's platform, which makes it easier to move large files from one computer to another using minimum bandwidth by breaking down and distributing files in small chunks. However, the file-sharing system's association with infringement is one that BitTorrent's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, believes isn't fair. Even though the BitTorrent platform is used by unauthorized torrenting sites like The Pirate Bay, the company is not associated with such sites and is making an effort to help the public understand the separation between unlicensed torrenting and BitTorrent.
"We have always been on the opposing side of copyright infringement," says Kaykas-Wolff. "There's an open-source version of the BitTorrent protocol that's being exploited, but there's nothing inherently unlawful or infringing about the protocol."
The file-sharing system and the company share the same name, but BitTorrent hopes two new products, Sync and Bundle, will help to clear-up the confusion.
BitTorrent Sync is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file synchronization tool akin to Dropbox, while Bundle uses BitTorrent's file-sharing technology to allow publishers to distribute a combination of free and gated content. Kaykas-Wolff calls Bundle the company's "bright and shining star" and believes that this will be the product that will finally change the way advertisers and artists alike see BitTorrent.
Bundle offers marketers more space to create unlimited content. The system "isn't just about streaming video. It isn't just about streaming music files. It's about giving the immersive experience. This is a very unique proposition for creative brands."
Bundle also gives advertisers access to a wide audience. BitTorrent boasts 140 million monthly users, mostly male techies 18 to 24 years old, a notoriously difficult-to-reach demographic.
GE is one of the first major brands to advertise with BitTorrent. The company recently created a Bundle with musician Matthew Dear featuring a song made from the sounds of thousands GE machines like turbines and medical equipment.
The campaign has been largely successful, especially with BitTorrent's built-in audience, who downloaded the song more than 1.5 million times from BitTorrent. The same song was downloaded just 38,000 times on competing platform SoundCloud.
In the future, Kaykas-Wolff hopes to see Bundle used for all types of publishing, from short films and branded video content to books. The company will also soon allow artists and businesses to sell their content directly. Currently, the site has a gate that allows brands to collect e-mail addresses from potential customers. But soon, Bundle users will have the ability to "create content and charge whatever they think they should be able to charge."
Kaykas-Wolff is confident that Bundle will change the way the public views the company. "When folks first heard what an mp3 was, it was 'Oh my gosh, be afraid of it' because it was being misused, but then the point of view matured, and all these businesses figured out how to make tons of money off of it."
Now, BitTorrent is betting on businesses figuring out the same thing with Bundle.
BitTorrent Bundles Are Awesome
Excerpted from Wil Wheaton Blog
I've written before about how useful I believe the BitTorrent protocol is, and today I wanted to share something with you guys that you may not have known about (I'm pretty with it, as the kids say, and I didn't even know about this until a couple of weeks ago): BitTorrent Bundles. The BT Bundles are all licensed, official, and released by artists to promote and share their work with their audience. Instead of paying for server space and bandwidth, artists seed files, and let the BitTorrent community do the rest.
You can find tons of bundles at https://bundles.bittorrent.com. Here's Moby's Innocents, De La Soul's Smell the Da.I.S.Y, and Thom Yorke's newest solo work, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes.
Most of the artists release a couple tracks for free, with the option to pay them for the full album. These are incredibly fast torrents, too, because so many people seed them.
Whenever someone tries to argue that torrents are just for infringing, I show them the BT Bundles, because it's such an effective way for artists to promote themselves and share their creations with their audience.
Binge Alert: Subscribers Watch 90:00 of Netflix Each Day
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Janko Roettgers
Just one more episode: All of your binge watching is adding up, to an average of 93 minutes of Netflix viewing per day, and around 45 GB of data every month.
Netflix subscribers around the world watch more than 90 minutes of video from the streaming service every single day on average, according to new estimates from The Diffusion Group, which also reported this week that the overall amount of Netflix streaming has increased 350 percent over the last ten quarters.
The Diffusion Group's new Netflix Report bases its estimates on streaming volume data released by Netflix. In January of 2012, Netflix said that its subscribers had watched a total of two billion streaming hours in the preceding quarter, which translated to a little less than an hour of average viewing time per day. In Q2 of 2014, that number had grown to seven billion hours, which equals 93 minutes of average viewing time per day.
As Netflix continues its international expansion, more and more of that streaming time comes from outside of the United States. In Q3 of 2011, 94 percent of all Netflix streaming hours were coming from US subscribers, according to the report. Fast forward to Q2 of 2014, and the US contribution to Netflix's total streaming hours declined to 72 percent. Expect that number to go down even further in coming quarters as a result of Netflix's most recent expansion into big broadband markets like Germany and France.
And with the amount of daily viewing increasing, subscribers are also consuming ever more bandwidth. Recent numbers from Netflix's ISP Speed Index show that US subscribers stream their movies and TV shows with an average speed of 2.57 mbps, which roughly equals 1 GB of data consumption per hour streamed. This means that on average, a U.S. Netflix subscriber is burning through 45 GB of data every month.
Of course, in reality, each consumer's data consumption may vary widely. Netflix performs a lot better for customers of some ISPs, and worse for others. The individual service plan as well as the type of programming viewed can also impact a user's data consumption. For example, Netflix advises its subscribers that 4K streams can consume up to 7 GB of data per hour. As the amount of 4K programming on Netflix increases, one should expect the average amount of data consumed to go up as well.
Where Do Most People Go for TV Online? YouTube
Excerpted from CNET Report by Joan Solsman
A Magid survey found more people report going to Google's video site YouTube to watch television shows than Netflix or Hulu.
Netflix calls itself the world's leading Internet television network, but as is often the case, who's leading really depends on whom you ask.
Frank N. Magid Associates, a research and consulting firm, asked 2,400 people to check off a list of online sources they use to watch TV shows, and found the most common response - with 38 percent of respondents - was YouTube.
That compares with 33 percent who listed Netflix, 17 percent for Hulu, and 14 percent for Amazon Prime, according to data from a June survey released exclusively to CNET by Magid.
(Note that doesn't mean that the time spent watching TV on Google's massive site necessarily exceeds time spent on any of those other services.)
"The joke in the industry is it's all babies burping and cats meowing, and maybe YouTube was that," said Mike Vorhaus, President of Magid Advisors. "When they actually go and use it, people are surprised by the breadth of content that's there."
Online television viewing is growing -- the number of people who say they watch video online daily jumped 10 points to 32 percent in two years, according to Magid. The services with the most eyeballs will have the best shot not only at cashing in on new status quos for watching video, either through advertising or subscriptions, but also at getting the most coveted content to bring to viewers.
Vorhaus also noted a trend of consolidation in how consumers approach online video, with "the big guys getting bigger and not many new guys coming in."
In rankings for the sources people turn to for TV and movies, iTunes came in relatively low for both: seventh for movies and eighth for TV, despite the platform's massive reach - Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook earlier this month touted the platform's more than 500 million customers when the company released U2's new album to all of them free of charge.
But cost is likely a factor in iTunes' low stature in the survey responses, Vorhaus said. Sites like YouTube and Hulu are free with advertising, and Netflix and Amazon Prime are inexpensive subscriptions given the amount of content and services they deliver. Under iTunes' model of selling and renting shows and movies individually, the costs of watching video there can add up quickly.
Respondents of the Magid survey also called out YouTube as a top source for viewing movies, with 24 percent of those surveyed saying they go there for film. Netflix was No. 1, at 35 percent, with Amazon Prime, Hulu, and HBO Go trailing YouTube.
"If you think of these services as brands, the brand of YouTube has the most people," Vorhaus said. "The big message I get is that people have changed their brand perception of YouTube."
That change, from a Google point of view, is one in the right direction. And the company's announcement last week that it would start paying its "YouTube Stars" to stay there takes on a whole new light.
Harnessing the Cloud
Excerpted from Develop Report by James Batchelor
Leading experts tell Develop there's a lot more potential in the technology than current titles might suggest.
Developers already know about the most prominent examples and uses of cloud computing in games. From streaming services like OnLive and the upcoming PlayStation Now to the use of offloaded AI in Titanfall and Forza 5, it's already clear that the technology opens up new possibilities for games.
But this is just an overview, according to Microsoft's CTO of Cloud Services Rob Fraser, who doesn't think the development community fully understands the potential and specific practical uses of cloud computing in the games they make.
"First off, the cloud is still misunderstood, probably because of the way in which the tech industry initially positioned the concept," he tells Develop. "The traditional view is one of a stack — infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) — and some basic characteristics like elasticity from pooled/shared resources, accessed over the Internet and paid for by usage."
"Some companies think the primary audience for cloud is IT looking to reduce costs."
"But if we look at gaming specifically, we believe that there are narrow and broad views of what 'cloud gaming' means. The narrow view was established by companies like Gaikai and OnLive, focusing on the video-streamed games on-demand scenario."
"The irony is that this 'cloud gaming v1' doesn't have much of what we'd call 'cloud' behind it. It's still a compelling proposition but the issue is that by restricting 'cloud gaming' to the narrow game streaming scenario, we are missing the broader applicability of cloud to gaming. We need to think beyond 'cloud gaming' and look at the cloud and gaming."
The broader view that Fraser alludes to can be summed up as two key concepts: using the cloud as a platform to power games-as-a-service titles, and using it to enable larger and more enhanced game experiences. These two premises lend themselves to a myriad of new technical solutions.
Perhaps the most obvious is the ability to store save data and sync across multiple devices.
Many mobile and Facebook titles already do this in a general way, keeping track of a player's overall progress through the game, but there's still room for more ambitious applications of this technique in games. UK start-up Gateway Interactive, for example, has built the Nomad cloud service, which enables players of its mobile racer Spectra to pause mid-session and pick up from the exact same point on a different device.
Cloud computing also offers new possibilities for both synchronous and asynchronous gameplay. In the case of the former, multiple screens and apps can be used to display maps and tactical displays while the main action takes place on the primary screen.
Please click here for the full report.
Coming Events of Interest
CLOUD DEVELOPERS SUMMIT & EXPO 2014 — October 1st-2nd in Austin, TX. CDSE:2014 will feature co-located instructional workshops and conference sessions on six tracks facilitated by more than one-hundred industry leading speakers and world-class technical trainers.
IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing for Emerging Markets — October 15th-17th in Bangalore, India. The third annual CCEM, will address the unique challenges and opportunities of cloud computing for emerging markets in a high quality event that brings together industry, government, and academic leaders in cloud computing.
CloudComp 2014 — October 19th-21st in Guilin, China. The fifth annual international conference on cloud computing. The event is endorsed by the European Alliance for Innovation, a leading community-based organization devoted to the advancement of innovation in the field of ICT.
International Conference on Cloud Computing Research & Innovation — October 29th-30th in Singapore. ICCRI:2014 covers a wide range of research interests and innovative applications in cloud computing and related topics. The unique mix of R&D, end-user, and industry audience members promises interesting discussion, networking, and business opportunities in translational research & development.
GOTO Berlin 2014 Conference — November 5th–7th in Berlin, Germany. GOTO Berlin is the enterprise software development conference designed for team leads, architects, and project management and is organized "for developers by developers". New technology and trends in a non-vendor forum.
PDCAT 2014 — December 9th-11th in Hong Kong. The 16th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (PDCAT 2014) is a major forum for scientists, engineers, and practitioners throughout the world to present their latest research, results, ideas, developments and applications in all areas of parallel and distributed computing.
Storage Visions Conference — January 4th-5th in Las Vegas, NV. The fourteenth annual conference theme is: Storage with Intense Network Growth (SWING). Storage Visions Awards presented there cover significant products, services, and companies in many digital storage markets.
International CES — January 6th-9th in Las Vegas, NV. The International CES is the world’s gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. Held in Las Vegas every year, it has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for more than 40 years — the global stage where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace.
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