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IBM And Tencent Team Up
Tencent Holdings Ltd announced that it would be teaming up with International Business Machines Corp (IBM) on a new cloud software business for corporate customers, a marked departure for one of the dominant forces in China’s consumer Internet industry.
Best known for its popular WeChat messaging app and its online games rather than business software, Tencent said its cloud unit would now target small and medium enterprises in the healthcare and “smart city” industries.
Many technology firms are jockeying for a slice of China’s enterprise software market, which promises to grow sharply in coming years as businesses modernize their IT operations and move data onto the cloud.
Tencent’s alliance with IBM, which has deep experience providing computing and consulting services to corporate clients, provides the Shenzhen company a competitive answer to its Chinese rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s nascent cloud efforts.
An e-commerce giant, Alibaba has been slowly building its cloud unit, which recorded just $38 million in revenue in the three months ended June 30.
Tencent said it would tap IBM for its “industry expertise and enterprise reach” but did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
For IBM, the Tencent deal is just the latest in a recent spate of new software partnerships in China, where its hardware sales have been sliding.
IBM announced a deal earlier this year to install its cutting-edge DB2 database software on Chinese rival Inspur International Ltd’s machines. Big Blue also agreed to license its database and big data technology to Chinese software vendor Yonyou Software Co Ltd.
Ericsson Acquires Fabrix Systems
September 25, 2014 by admin
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The distinctions between TV and mobile services continues to merge and in many cases that occurs in the cloud.
That’s the logic behind Ericsson’s planned $95 million acquisition of Fabrix Systems, which sells a cloud-based platform for delivering DVR (digital video recorder), video on demand and other services.
The acquisition is intended to help service providers deliver what Ericsson calls TV Anywhere, for viewing on multiple devices with high-quality and relevant content for each user. Cable operators, telecommunications carriers and other service providers are seeing rapid growth in video streaming and want to reach consumers on multiple screens. That content increasingly is hosted in cloud data centers and delivered via Internet Protocol networks.
Fabrix, which has 103 employees in the U.S. and Israel, sells an integrated platform for media storage, processing and delivery. Ericsson said the acquisition will make new services possible on Ericsson MediaFirst and Mediaroom as well as other TV platforms.
Stockholm-based Ericsson expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter. Fabrix Systems will become part of Ericsson’s Business Unit Support Solutions.
Other players usually associated with data networks are also moving into the once-specialized realm of TV. At last year’s CES, Cisco Systems introduced Videoscape Unity, a system for providing unified video services across multiple screens, and at this year’s show it unveiled Videoscape Cloud, an OpenStack-based video delivery platform that can be run on service providers’ cloud infrastructure instead of on specialized hardware.
Salesforce Goes Healthcare
Salesforce Inc, one of the first cloud-computing companies, is turning its focus towards healthcare with new software and services aimed at the largest hospitals.
Salesforce has announced a strategic alliance with Amsterdam-based medical technology company Philips, which it envisions as the first of many partnerships. These companies will announce two new medical applications later in the summer, called Philips eCareCoordinator and Philips eCare Companion.
The software is designed to improve health and cut costs. The apps are intended to be used by physicians to monitor chronically ill patients between doctor visits.
Salesforce said the goal is to make it easier for hospitals to collect and analyze data from medical devices, which patients with chronic conditions often use at home.
“In the United States, care providers are facing increasing demands and decreasing reimbursement,” said Michael Peachey, a senior director of solutions and product marketing at Salesforce.
“We want to improve efficiency for physicians by transmitting patient data in real time.”
Peachey said the Salesforce software meets security and privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA.
In the short term, Peachey said Salesforce intends to develop additional apps with other partners to help doctors and nurses monitor patients from the comfort of their homes.
“It’s an open platform,” he said.
Is IBM Going After HP?
IBM has announced a unified branding for its commerce cloud based enterprise products and services with a presentation at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Tampa, Florida.
Hot on the heels of HP, which unified its cloud offerings under the Helion brand last week, IBM Experienceone is designed to allow companies to improve engagement with their customers by leveraging big data through the cloud.
Deployment comes from a unified offer of consulting services, software and infrastructure from IBM subsidary Softlayer, which can be used to gather data, mine analytics and improve customer commerce via a mixture of traditional and cloud services.
IBM has already committed 1,000 new employees for its IBM Interactive Experience who will staff 10 “IBM Interactive Experience Labs” that are being set up to help customers understand the rules of engagement and hopefully increase their level of customer engagement.
IBM GM of Industry Cloud Solution Craig Hayman said, “IBM Experienceone provides a secure and simplified portfolio – including innovation from more than 1,200 partners – to help clients design and deliver more valuable customer engagements. With cloud, on premise and hybrid options, IBM Experienceone quickly scales to engage every customer in the moment while protecting their privacy.”
The IBM Experienceone brand is a coming together of many acquisitions that IBM has made in the field over recent years, including Sterling Commerce, Tealeaf, Coremetrics, Unica, Demandtec, Xtify and Silverpop. The only obvious omission from the top to tail offer is a specific CRM database, however IBM Experienceone is compatible with most of the leading solutions, including those of its arch rivals. This leads to the question, could a CRM be next on the company’s shopping list?
As well as on desktop and server equipment, Experienceone analytics will also be available through apps for iOS and Android.
Will IBM Realize Growth In 2015?
International Business Machines Corp said it is projecting growth in its hardware sector next year as the company invests in research and development and abandons low-performing ventures.
The comments come less than one month after the world’s largest technology service company reported its lowest quarterly revenue in five years, weighed by sluggish global demand for its hardware, which plunged 23 percent in the first quarter of 2014.
The company added that growth in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa remain strong, and blamed falling revenue in China on government reforms affecting state-owned clients, and on the country’s hardware-heavy portfolio.
“We move on and we spread ourselves out, more industries, more clients, cloud, data, et cetera, around there,” said IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty at an investor briefing on Wednesday.
Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter said to stabilize the hardware sector IBM would continue to “refresh” hardware and further invest in research and development.
“Quite frankly, we are seeing very good growth out of software, good growth out of services, but challenges in hardware,” said Schroeter. “We will stabilize that hardware base and I am comfortable we will make that happen in 2014,” he said.
He reiterated the company’s EPS target for 2015 of at least $20. He expects a shift to higher-value business to bring in $3.25 and share repurchases to add $2 in earnings per share by 2015.
HP’s Z-station Goes Nvidia
HP has added its Z Workstation family with a solution that delivers access via a virtual desktop route to workstation applications hosted in the data center.
Set to be available from next month, the HP DL380z Virtual Workstation enables organisations to provide remote access to workstation-class applications, even those calling for heavy-duty graphics, which allows them to keep data stored securely in the data centre wherever employees might be based.
As its name suggests, the HP DL380z is based on the same hardware as HP’s ProLiant DL380p server, a 2U rack-mount two-socket system based on Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 processors, which allows it to slot right into existing data centre infrastructure.
Where the HP DL380z differs is that it can be configured with up to two Nvidia Grid K2 graphics cards supporting the graphics firm’s Grid GPU virtualisation technology. This enables up to eight users to be hosted on each system, each with access to a virtual machine with GPU acceleration capabilities.
Jeff Groudan, worldwide director for HP Thin Client and Virtual Workstations, said, “For employees who work from A to B and everywhere in between, the HP DL380z allows them to access data that is securely stored in the data centre. Furthermore, the powerful HP DL380z is an always-on workhorse that can be used by businesses when not in use for virtual workstation sessions.
Remote access is delivered either by operating Citrix’s XenServer with its HDX 3D Pro technology, which the HP DL380z is certified for, or by utilising HP’s own Remote Graphics Software (RGS). The latest HP RGS release 7 adds the ability to have true workstation productivity from a tablet while bringing intuitive touch controls to non-touch applications, according to HP.
Either way, customers can provide engineers or other professional users with access to workstation-class applications from a variety of devices, including thin clients, laptops or tablets.
Pricing for the HP DL380z has yet to be confirmed.
HP & Foxcomm Head To The Cloud
May 20, 2014 by admin
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HP and Foxcomm have announced a joint venture to create a line of cloud optimized servers for service providers.
The venture involving a non-equity, strategic commercial alliance will see the pair offering a range of products. Particulars and specifications are yet to be announced but the companies are aiming to target low total cost of ownership (TCO), scale and service.
This announcement is separate to the existing HP Proliant server portfolio, which includes the software defined server codenamed Moonshot.
HP CEO Meg Whitman said, “With the relentless demands for compute capabilities, customers and partners are rapidly moving to a New Style of IT that requires focused, scalable and high-volume system designs. [The partnership] will enable us to deliver a game-changing offering in infrastructure economics.”
News of the alliance will raise eyebrows at Apple, which reportedly returned an eight million unit shipment of iPhones to Foxconn last year, describing them as “dysfunctional” and “non-compliant”.
HP has had its own troubles recently, after settling two lawsuits this month, one to the former shareholders of Palm over its handling of WebOS, and another that revealed that HP executives were guilty of corruption in negotiations for lucrative contracts. Total payouts across the two settlements totaled $165m.
The HP joint venture with Foxconn will take effect from 1 May, when we hope to find out more details about what it will entail.
IBM Goes BlueMix
IBM has put together a vast array of hosted cloud services, and now it has a single location to offer them for sale.
At IBM Cloud online marketplace, that went live on Monday, enterprises can find the full range of IBM’s offerings behind a single gateway.
“So many of our customers want to build new cloud-based, front-end systems, but they want to tie them into their back-end infrastructure. We’re delivering a whole set of integration components and control services to do the connection, and monitor and control what is taking place,” said Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president and group executive for software and systems.
The marketplace has more than 100 hosted IBM applications, as well as middleware components from IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service (PaaS). It also serves as a portal to IBM’s SoftLayer infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and houses a collection of services from IBM partners.
“It’s an open platform. It supports all the popular application development tools and structures. So it’s not uniquely IBM. There’s a lot of open source and partners,” Mills said. In addition to IBM’s own offerings, other services will be offered on the site by SendGrid, Zend, Redis Labs and other IBM partners.
IBM is banking heavily on the cloud. The company’s revenue has been declining lately, due in part to sagging hardware sales. The cloud is likely to be a good place to look for more money: Gartner expects 80 percent of organizations to use cloud services in some form by the end of 2014.
Although IBM got a late start in the cloud, at least compared with rivals Amazon and Microsoft, it’s aggressively repositioning itself as a one-stop cloud services company. It generated $4.4 billion in cloud-related revenue in 2013 and has made a number of additional investments in the area as well.
In January, the company announced it would invest $1.2 billion into expanding its SoftLayer cloud service, which it acquired last year for $2 billion.
It is also investing $1 billion in the effort to adapt its middleware software as cloud services, part of the Bluemix offering.
The new online marketplace ties together a number of these initiatives from IBM within a single portal. It can be accessed from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, and it can customize the service offerings based on the user’s needs.
Microsoft Updates Office Online
April 28, 2014 by admin
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Microsoft is updating its Web-based Office Online suite, closing the features gap with the main Office 365 and Office 2013 suites installed on users’ devices.
“We know you want features that allow you to move as seamlessly as possible between Office Online and the desktop,” wrote Kaberi Chowdhury, an Office Online technical product manager, in a blog post Monday.
Improvements to Excel Online include the ability to insert new comments, edit and delete existing comments, and properly open and edit spreadsheets that contain Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.
Meanwhile, Word Online has a new “pane” where users can see all comments in a document, and reply to them or mark them as completed. It also has a refined lists feature that is better able to recognize whether users are continuing a list or starting one. In addition, footnotes and end notes can now be added more conveniently inline.
PowerPoint Online has a revamped text editor that offers a layout view that more closely resembles the look of finished slides, according to Microsoft. It also has improved performance and video functionality, including the ability to play back embedded YouTube videos.
For users of OneNote Online, Microsoft is now adding the ability to print out the notes they’ve created with the application.
Microsoft is also making Word Online, PowerPoint Online and OneNote Online available via Google’s Chrome Web Store so that Chrome browser users can add them to their Chrome App launcher. Excel Online will be added later.
The improvements in Office Online will be rolled out to users this week, starting Monday.
Office Online, which used to be called Office Web Apps, competes directly against Google Docs and other browser-based office productivity suites. It’s meant to offer users a free, lightweight, Web-based version of these four applications if they don’t have the desktop editions on the device they’re using at that moment.
SkySQL Joins IBM On SQL Merger
SkySQL has announced a line of MariaDB products that combine NoSQL and SQL technology, offering users the ability to handle large unstructured data sets alongside traditional database features to ensure data consistency.
Available immediately, MariaDB Enterprise 2 and MariaDB Enterprise Cluster 2 are based on the code used in the firm’s MariaDB 10 database server, which it also released today.
According to SkySQL, the availability of an enterprise grade SQL database system with NoSQL interoperability will be a game changer for developers building revenue generating applications and database administrators in charge of large, complex environments.
The two new products have been developed with support from other partners in the open source community, including Red Hat, IBM and Google, according to the firm, and are aimed at giving IT managers more options for managing large volumes of data.
In fact, Red Hat will use MariaDB Enterprise 2 as the default database for its enterprise customers, while Google has also moved large parts of its infrastructure to MariaDB, according to Dion Cornett, VP of Global Sales for SkySQL .
Cornett said that customers have been using a wide variety of databases over the past few years in order to meet the diverse requirements of applications.
“The types of applications have evolved over time, and the challenge we now have today is that people have different IT stack structures, and trying to integrate all that has been very challenging and required lots of custom code to be created. What we’re doing with MariaDB is introduce an array of features to combine the best of both worlds,” he said.
The features are designed to allow developers and database administrators to take many different data structures and integrate them and use them in a cohesive application, in the same way that standard database tools presently allow.
These include the Connect Storage Engine, which enables access to a wide variety of file formats such as XML and CSV files, and the ability to run familiar SQL commands against that data.
A key feature is dynamic columns, which enables MariaDB to “smartly interpret” incoming data and adapt it to the data structure that best fits, according to Cornett.
“At a technical level what you’re actually looking at are files within the cells of information that can vary in size, which is not a capability you’ve traditionally had in databases and that flexibility is a big leap forward,” he said.
The new MariaDB products can also plug into the Apache Cassandra storage engine, which can take a columnar data store and read or write against it like it is a traditional SQL table.
An example of how MariaDB Enterprise 2 might be used is if a service provider has a large-scale video server and wants to combine that with billing information, Cornett said.
“The customer’s video history and what they’re consuming could be very unstructured, but the billing structure will be very fixed, and it has been something of a challenge to bring the two of those together up to this point,” he explained.