Volume LII, Issue 9

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In This Issue

DCIA Working Group to Advance DRM

Contact the DCIA for More Information

At the request of member companies, the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) is establishing a new working group to drive advancement of digital rights management (DRM) technologies, services, and business practices.

The Advancement of Digital Rights Management (ADRM) Working Group will create a conduit for processing, organizing, and focusing consumer feedback; a forum for providing legal oversight and influencing regulatory and legislative actions; and a platform for coordinating technical direction as these relate to access control in the digital ecosystem.

Rapidly increasing consumer acceptance of remote data storage, mobile cloud services, Internet protocol television (IPTV), social networking, over-the-top (OTT) video, Internet of Things (IoT), and similar trends, has brought with it corresponding growth in the need for improvement in Internet access control solutions to protect the integrity of high-value content and proprietary data, provide optimal usability, and ensure the security and privacy of consumers and enterprise end-users.

Unlawful digital infringement and encroachment now threaten even more than the economic insult inflicted by the pirating of music tracks or the hacking of company emails. Disrupting the networked computer systems of such advanced products as connected automobiles and embedded medical devices can result not only in data loss, but also in serious physical injury or death.

For answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) about the ADRM initiative or to join the group, please contact adrm@dcia.info.

SCC Selects castLabs for DRM

Excerpted from Business Wire Report

castLabs, a digital video technology and services company, today announced that it has been chosen by Siemens Convergence Creators (SCC), a global provider of over-the-top (OTT) video solutions, as a partner for digital rights management (DRM) and playback technology for premium video content.

“Adding castLabs to our partner portfolio expands the choice and flexibility for our customers when it comes to DRM protection. We recently implemented the castLabs Widevine solution into one of our customer projects and had the best experience with both the solution and the team,” said Markus Placho, Siemens Convergence Creators, Head of Business Unit Media.

Siemens Convergence Creators’ business customers can now benefit from the robust solutions provided by castLabs’ products and services to bolster their over-the-top offerings. The castLabs suite includes Android and iOS mobile player SDKs, the DASH Everywhere web player, and in particular the multi-DRM licensing service, DRMtoday. Selecting castLabs as a DRM partner gives Siemens Convergence Creators access to Google Widevine Modular/Classic, Microsoft PlayReady, Adobe Access, Marlin, and CMLA-OMA DRM schemes from one source.

Implementing multi-DRM service and DRM-enabled players complements Siemens Convergence Creators’ end-to-end OTT solution… Read More

The Quest for a Single DRM Platform

Excerpted from Verimatrix Blog by Steve Oetegenn

The whole pay-TV industry is undergoing the greatest disruptive change in its history as the tide towards multi-screen reaches its peak.

This has been evidenced by numerous consumer surveys, with the latest and largest from global IT services group Accenture reporting an extraordinary 33% year-on-year decline in accessing TV shows and movies from traditional TV sets among 14-to-17 year-olds, with a corresponding or even greater increase in viewing on multi-screen devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones.

There is a less startling but still significant switch from TVs to multi-screen devices among older age groups, spanning all major markets and all content types, including live sports as well as TV shows and movies.

To meet this challenge, pay-TV operators and broadcasters are investing heavily in the infrastructure to deliver premium content to an increasingly diverse range of target connected devices. While there are industry efforts to converge around common standards for streaming and encryption, notably MPEG-DASH, operators must cope with a fast expanding array of DRMs to enforce rights on the target multiscreen platforms. Various reports have highlighted the rapid growth in the global DRM market… Read More

Report from DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty

Click Here for Video

On the heels of the compelling Grand Prix of Monaco, covered live by NBC Sports last Sunday, DataCloud Europe will take place this week hosted by BroadGroup and sponsored by the DCIA.

The 2015 Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix offered a lesson on the importance of accurate data in real-time decision making.

As a result of Lewis Hamilton’s ill-timed pit-stop, Nico Rosberg took over first-place and held it to earn his third consecutive win in Monaco.

DataCloud Europe will take place on June 3rd and 4th at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo.

This is the successor event to DataCenters Europe and the Enterprise Cloud Forum.

DataCenters Europe was first held in London in 2005, and rapidly became recognized as the premier European networking conference.

The combined event will now make its home in Monaco, THE new Mediterranean locale for anyone engaged in information technology (IT), data centers, or cloud services.

The 2015 event is expecting attendance to surpass 1,800 executives from fifty countries, with 150 very high-caliber speakers, many of whom are enterprise infrastructure leaders.

The audience profile includes senior management of data centers, cloud services and hosting providers, system integrators, managed services companies, cloud brokers, broadband network operators, and critical infrastructure equipment vendors.

Added to the wealth of content and business opportunities, DataCloud Europe will provide an unparalleled opportunity to meet and talk with peers, prospects, and customers from all across Europe.

Last year’s pre-cursor to DataCloud Europe boasted transactions done at or as a result of the conference in the many hundreds of millions of dollars, earning this event the tagline “where deals are done in the cloud economy.”

Over the two-day conference, delegates will benefit from a very full agenda including keynotes, panel discussions, hands-on labs, workshops, and product demonstrations offering the very latest ideas, market developments, and practical solutions in this space.

And as an added attraction, on June 2nd, the eve of the conference, the DataCloud 2015 Awards Ceremony & Gala will take place.

This is truly an industry event that is not to be missed.

Please contact me for speaking, exhibiting, and sponsoring opportunities; or if you’d like to attend on a complimentary basis as a guest of the DCIA. Share wisely, and take care.

Vaultize Intros DRM in its Virtual Data Room Solution

Excerpted from PR Newswire Report

Vaultize, the leader in Enterprise File Sync & Share (EFSS), mobile collaboration and VPN-free anywhere access, today announced the availability of Digital Rights Management (DRM) fully integrated with its Virtual Data Room (VDR) offering.

“VDR provides a secure repository that enables the parties involved in a transaction to access confidential documents online in a secure environment. Due to the sensitive nature, it mandates stringent security and access requirements. Hence the traditional VDR solutions restrict the access to shared document only through web browsers making them accessible only when the user is online, creating friction for end-users. With the popularity of sync-and-share solutions, the end-users now expect the VDR documents to be available on any device and from anywhere — even while offline,” said Ankur Panchbudhe, CTO & Co-Founder of Vaultize.

Vaultize VDR combines best from both the worlds — security of VDR and consumer-like user experience of sync-and- share. It provides desktop sync to managed users such that they can sync the documents to device of their choice through a corporate authentication system (like Active Directory). And, it allows other parties to download the documents on their devices. The downloaded documents are DRM-encrypted using patent pending micro-containerization technology… Read More

Vitrium Integrates Protectedpdf 5.6 DRM Solution

Excerpted from Virtual-Strategy Magazine Report

Vitrium has released version 5.6 of Protectedpdf, the popular cloud-based digital rights management (DRM) and document encryption software solution. This latest version integrates the solution with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and MS OneDrive making it easier to upload files from these services and save secure documents to these services anytime.

Standard and Pro Edition Protectedpdf customers who share, or would like to share, their sensitive and valuable documents via Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and MS OneDrive services, can now use Protectedpdf DRM and encryption to secure these documents and easily store them directly onto these familiar cloud file-sharing platforms. Customers having accounts with these services will find it especially useful for sharing confidential, sensitive PDF documents to the cloud service they normally would use where they can distribute them at will.

The PDF document is uploaded from the cloud service of the administrator’s choice, secured, and then can be saved and shared out to that service easily.

Documents that have been protected within the Protectedpdf interface can be sent to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or MS OneDrive, cloud sharing services at any time via the “cloud upload” icon. The cloud-sharing feature is included with all Standard and Pro Edition… Read More

Creative Storage Conference Adds Keynote Speaker

Excerpted from CSC 2015 Press Announcement

The 2015 Creative Storage Conference (CSC 2015), co-sponsored by the DCIA, welcomes Aaron Passey from Qumulo as a keynote speaker. The conference agenda is now online and conference registration is open. CSC 2015 is Tuesday June 30th at the DoubleTree Hotel West Los Angeles in Culver City, CA.

Aaron Passey, Co-Founder and CTO of Qumulo will give a keynote talk on “Accelerating Digital Media with Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS.”

Media and entertainment organizations are constantly looking for ways to increase the business value of their media assets by merging creative talent with technological breakthroughs. Storage infrastructure plays a critical role in the ability to store, manage, and curate vast and rapidly growing libraries of media content.

Data-aware scale-out NAS is flexible in order to adapt to organizations’ business growth and takes advantage of new revenue opportunities, while providing uncompromising protection and availability; to ensure business continuity, manage millions or billions of digital assets, achieve cost containment and avoid hardware vendor lock-in, maximize price/performance and price/capacity with flash-first hybrid design, and support a wide range of workloads and file sizes… Read More

Telefonica Launches Quintuple-Play Service

Excerpted from LightReading Report by Paul Rainford

Telefonica is ushering in the “quintuple-play era” in Spain with the launch of a bundle that includes a home security service, as well as the quad-play combination of fixed-line voice, broadband, TV, and mobile.

The package, available exclusively to Movistar broadband customers, will deliver the home security service via customers’ fiber or ADSL connections and using a transmission system developed by Internet of Things (IoT) specialist Sigfox, which Telefonica reports is impossible to block.

Movistar VeriSure Hogar offers customers smarter security for their homes with a 24-hour, 365-day emergency service, access control, and video cameras with remote recording. It will be available exclusively for customers with Movistar broadband from June 17th onwards at a price of 16 euros a month (including VAT) for the service fee and another 9 euros per month for the equipment rental.

Users can install it at home themselves, in addition to self-managing the service via an application on their smartphones. Interested Movistar customers can try the service out free of charge, without any obligation, for 14 days.

Telefonica and Securitas Direct have decided to combine their experience and know-how… Read More

Verizon and Amazon Have This in Common

Excerpted from Seeking Alpha Report by Brian Nichols

Verizon and Amazon are companies that seemingly have nothing in common. One operates on mobile networks, the other is popular on mobile networks. One is a cash cow, the other can’t seem to produce consistent profits. Yet despite their differences, there’s one thing that both companies share.

That thing is innovation, getting ahead of major industries to command enormous market share. For Amazon, I am talking about cloud infrastructure services, and its near 30% share of a market with trailing 12-month revenue of $17 billion, one that’s growing at a 45% rate, according to Synergy Research.

Amazon is leaps and bounds ahead of its competitors. Microsoft holds the No. 2 position with a 10% share, followed by IBM and Google with 7% and 6% of the market, respectively. Just last week Gartner released its Magic Quadrant report for the cloud space.

It reported that Amazon’s AWS had 10 times more infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) computing capacity than the combined capacity of the following 14 service providers.

Gartner concludes that AWS has been able to attract the largest customer base because of its capacity… Read More

EMC Buys Cloud Software Firm Virtustream

Excerpted from Top Tech News Report by Shirley Siluk

By acquiring the relatively young but fast-growing cloud software and services company Virtustream, EMC says it is adding a “transformational element” to its cloud-focused customer strategy. EMC announced today that it was purchasing the firm in a $1.2 billion, all-cash deal.

Founded in 2009, the privately held Virtustream has grown quickly to serve customers including Intel, SAP, Barclays, Yum Restaurants, The Coca-Cola Company, Heinz and the National Institutes of Health. Virtustream specializes in deploying SAP software in the cloud.

Once the transaction closes, expected in the third quarter of this year, Virtustream will become EMC’s new managed cloud services business. EMC plans to offer those services both directly and through its provider partners.

“We’ve built some very unique intellectual property (IP) in a short period of time,” Virtustream CEO Rodney Rogers said. The company’s technology enables customers to automate a wide variety of IT functions both reliably and at a competitive cost, he said. By becoming part of the EMC Federation of businesses, “we think the possibilities are just awesome,” Rogers added.

The addition of Virtustream to EMC’s stable is a “game changer,” according to EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci (pictured)… Read More

IoT Market Will Grow 19 Percent in 2015

Excerpted from InformationWeek Report by Nathan Eddy

The market for the Internet of Things, which refers to the network of web-connected physical objects — this includes everything from Nest thermostats, to dishwashers, to heart monitors — is expected to grow 19% in 2015, according to IT research firm IDC’s second annual IoT forecast.

The digital signage market is projected to be a major driver of growth. Thanks to growing use in the retail market, the one part of IoT is expected to grow from $6 billion in 2013 to $27.5 billion in 2018, representing a 35.7% five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

The IDC report, which highlights worldwide spending across IoT use cases, for smart appliances, automated public transit, remote health monitoring, and connected vehicles, among others, focuses on growing IoT use in 11 vertical industries.

While the buzz around IoT is certainly gaining, it’s hard to tell what type of an affect this technology will have on corporate IT departments, as well as enterprises of all sizes. While certain segments of the consumer market are seeing some IoT infiltration, and companies are starting to collect data based on sensors, there are still a number of contentious security and privacy issues that need to be worked out… Read More

The Rise of IoT Clouds

Excerpted from Talkin’ Cloud Report by Mike Vizard

Instead of processing data in few large data centers, IoT applications will rely more on highly distributed clouds running on IoT gateways where data will be processed locally. Here are the details.

When the average person thinks about the Internet of things (IoT), he or she naturally assumes there will be billions of devices feeding data back to data centers where applications will centrally process that data. After all, that’s pretty much how existing cloud computing applications work today.

IoT reality, however, is going to be anything but centralized. Instead of processing data in few large data centers, IoT applications will rely more on highly distributed clouds running on IoT gateways where data will be processed locally.

At the recent Cisco Partner Summit 2015 Conference, Nick Earle, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Cloud Sales and Go-to-Market Strategy at Cisco, outlined how Cisco is betting big on this inversion of the traditional approach to cloud computing as we know it today. In its place will arise IoT clouds that make use of micro services based on technologies such as containers.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) will then be used to expose that data to the rest of IoT ecosystem, said Earle… Read More

The Cloud Gets More Physical

Excerpted from Talkin’ Cloud Report by Mike Vizard

Not too long ago the assumption was that all severs in the cloud had to be virtual in order to be elastic. The challenge with that thinking is not every application workload is ideally suited to run on a virtual machine. For that reason, Peer 1 Hosting, a unit of Cogeco Data Services, is now making a hybrid cloud option consisting of both virtual and physical servers available under a common portal.

Toby Owen, Vice President of Product Management for Peer 1 Hosting, said customers are making it clear they want to be able to dynamically assign workloads to both classes of servers as needed.

The On Demand Cloud Platform, True Native Hybrid Cloud service offered by Peer 1 is designed to give customers more control over not only what types of servers they can use in data centers located in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, but also more granular control over the amount of resources they consume.

In contrast, Owen said that cloud services based solely on virtual machines generally try to restrict customers to specific amount of IT infrastructure; resulting in a lot of over provisioning because customers can only choose between small, medium and large deployments… Read More

Overcoming Cloud Security Challenges

Excerpted from Information Week Report by Brendan Ziolo

To truly take advantage of cloud computing, enterprises must balance the capabilities of public and private, while focusing on security.

IT decision makers are under greater pressure today, more than ever, to deliver IT solutions that meet the expectations of company employees, partners, and customers, who are increasingly demanding innovative applications on the latest devices. In fact, it’s become imperative for CIOs to see IT as a key element of their competitiveness, rather than just a cost that needs to be managed — although keeping costs in line is a constant requirement.

This is where cloud computing comes in. Increasingly, IT organizations can lean on the cloud as a way to deliver the services their employees need almost instantly, while cutting costs and minimizing complexity. The ability to grow and shrink capacity as needed, while reducing the time needed to configure the required IT resources, allows DevOps teams to build and launch new applications and services quickly, and then do something totally different the next day with the same resources.

That’s one of the main reasons that high-performing companies are already harnessing the cloud to transform the way they do business. The cloud allows them to quickly launch new products and services that enable them to operate more efficiently… Read More

Which Social Media Do Millennial PR Pros Use?

Excerpted from PR News Report by Mark Renfree

On Wednesday, PR News brought together more than a dozen millennial communicators from PR agencies, corporations, and nonprofits to gather insights into how this rapidly ascending generation views the PR profession, and their own future within it.

One key finding from this wide-ranging conversation: when asked which social network they use most in their work lives, the nearly unanimous response was Twitter. In their personal lives, Twitter and Instagram are the most used social platforms.

Chloe Sharfin, Project Consultant with APCO Worldwide, put it bluntly: “I use Twitter because stakeholders are engaging on the platform.”

Facebook was cast as nearly irrelevant for brand communications. The participants said that Facebook’s latest algorithms penalize posts that are even vaguely promotional, making it difficult to justify any time spent with the platform (on the job, that is).

A couple of the participants urged their colleagues to use LinkedIn, which is viewed as more about networking and pitching. The site offers a more professional format than Twitter for reaching out to journalists and allows more space to market their messages… Read More

Open Internet Rule Faces Significant Legal Risk

Excerpted from US Telecom Blog by Anne Veigle

There are significant legal risks associated with the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) open Internet rule and a “strong likelihood” courts will find the Commission exceeded its legal authority, said Kathleen Sullivan, a noted authority on constitutional law who is leading USTelecom’s challenge of the rule. Speaking at a teleconference sponsored by the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), Sullivan said the FCC’s reclassification order is “legally tenuous.” Industry’s request for a stay has “an excellent chance of success” because there are clearly documented harms to industry, especially for small broadband providers, she said.

The Internet has grown up under a system largely free of regulation, a policy consistently laid out in FCC and court decisions, Sullivan noted. But the reclassification order reverses “decades of FCC precedent, DC circuit precedent and even Supreme Court precedent in reclassifying Internet access services as telecommunications services rather than information services.” It should be up to Congress, not the FCC, to regulate on behalf of the American people, she said, adding that the Supreme Court has looked with special skepticism on “abrupt changes” over the course of regulatory proceedings.

IIA Honorary Chairman Rick Boucher, a former Democratic Congressman with an extensive background in telecommunications legislative policy, agreed that investment will be harmed as a result of the Commission’s order… Read More

Coming Events of Interest

Data Center and Cloud Awards — June 2nd in Monaco. Europe’s most prestigious awards for data center and cloud achievements will be announced at an evening ceremony prior to the opening of Europe’s ‘must-attend’ DataCloud Europe conference and exhibition.

DataCloud Europe — June 3rd-4th in Monaco. This is eighth annual European Congress & Exhibition focusing on data center and cloud computing, and is co-located with the DataCloud 2015 Awards.

Freescale Technology Forum — June 22nd-25th in Austin, TX. FTF, this year focusing on the Internet of Things (IoT), is the heart of discovery, imagination and innovation. Together we will strategize and design the next market-shifting products.

Cloud World Forum — June 24th-25th in London England. This marquee event is presented by Informa Telecoms & Media. Co-located with the seventh annual major international conference will be Enterprise Apps World.

Cloud Computing Boot Camp — July 30th in Washington, DC. Designed for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and their counterparts in government agencies and healthcare organizations whose responsibilities include evaluating, purchasing, and implementing cloud-based solutions.

Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) — December 6th-8th in Dubai, UAE. IoTWF is an exclusive event that brings together the best and brightest thinkers, practitioners, and innovators from business, government, and academia to accelerate the market adoption of the Internet of Things.

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