VMware strengthens cloud and software-defined datacentre portfolio at VMworld 2013

At VMworld 2013, virtualisation and cloud services provider VMware launched a slew of products and services designed to accelerate enterprise adoption of software-defined datacentre architecture.

VMware introduced the term at last year's conference, touting it as the next big thing in IT. In a software-defined datacentre (SDDC), all the elements of the infrastructure – networking, storage and security – are virtualised and delivered as a service, and the operation of the infrastructure is automated by software.

Moving to an SDDC architecture can help enterprises take advantage of virtualisation not just in servers, but also in networking and security, storage and availability, and management and automation, the company told 22,000 attendees at its tenth annual conference.

VMware launched VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN, VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 and VMware vSphere with Operations Management 5.5 to push the adoption of SDDC – a year after it introduced the architecture.

The new products will fundamentally redefine the hypervisor and its role in the datacentre, said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice-president, cloud infrastructure and management, at VMware.

These products, representing the next wave of innovation in the software-defined datacentre architecture, could enable IT to build infrastructure that is simple, efficient, agile and flexible, he said.

VMware NSX

The first product, VMware NSX, is a network virtualisation platform that will deliver the entire networking and security model in software, decoupled from networking hardware. With a virtual network, datacentre operators can break through current physical network barriers and achieve better speed and agility, while reducing costs, the company said.

VMware NSX combines the technologies of Nicira, which it acquired in 2012, and VMware’s cloud-based network and security services. The NSX platform will be available in the fourth quarter of 2013.

VMware Virtual SAN

VMware Virtual SAN will extend the capabilities of its virtualisation platform, vSphere, to pool compute and direct-attached storage for a resilient storage infrastructure. It will unlock a new tier of converged infrastructure to facilitate granular scaling of compute and storage resources.

The SAN product delivers “significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and test/development environments”, said the company’s executives. VMware Virtual SAN will be available via a free public beta program in the third quarter of 2013.

VMware vCloud Suite 5.5

The latest version (5.5) of its vCloud Suite includes new functionalities and broader integration features. The vCloud Suite will enable customers to build and operate a vSphere-based private cloud using the software-defined datacentre architecture. The integrated private cloud infrastructure solution will simplify IT operations while also delivering improved efficiency for all applications. It is licensed per processor, at a starting price of $4,995 per processor, and will be available in the third quarter this year.

“Thus far, customers have been underwhelmed with what they have seen from VMware’s hybrid cloud offering," said Gartner research vice-president Chris Wolf, ahead of the conference. "At VMworld, VMware needs to show that it intends to be a serious infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider to instil confidence in its customers, partners and investors."

VMware vSphere with Operations Management 5.5

Lastly, its virtualisation platform, VMware vSphere 5.5, features vSphere App HA that could help IT detect and recover from application or operating system failure. It also includes Flash Read Cache that virtualises server-side flash to lower application latency dramatically and a low-latency sensitivity feature.

VSphere with Operations Management 5.5 is offered in three editions: Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus at a starting price of $1,745 per processor.

According to VMware, enterprises that have moved to an SDDC architecture have experienced greater value than those that have not. Its research found that two-thirds of respondents generated new revenue when they expanded their use of virtualisation. Of those businesses able to take full advantage of a complete SDDC architecture, 85% were able to generate new revenue as high as 22%.

"The development of new software and services for the auto retail and the auto manufacturing industry globally is key to our business," said Bill Naughton, CIO of ADP Dealer Services. "The software-defined datacentre architecture enables us to deliver true infrastructure as a service and platform as a service to our lines of business."

Cosmetic company Revlon said it has saved $70.4m in expenditure with VMware infrastructure. “We have transformed IT with SDDC. VMware is core to our cloud infrastructure and has saved us money which can be used to grow the business,” said Revlon CIO David Giambruno.

Another highlight of VMworld 2013 was VMware’s collaboration with HP to deliver a “federated network solution” that can help enterprises gain unified automation of, and visibility into, their physical and virtual datacentre networks, to improve business continuity.

As companies embrace cloud and mobility, manual network configuration is resource intensive and error prone, according to VMware. Network virtualisation offers a centralised control plane, but does not automate configuration and provisioning of physical network devices, it said.

To solve this issue, HP and VMware are launching a joint networking product that will “federate the HP Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller with the VMware NSX platform to provide customers with an integrated approach to automating their physical and virtual network infrastructure”.

“Networks must be agile enough to enable the adoption of cloud and mobility while ensuring continuity,” said Bethany Mayer, senior vice-president and general manager for networking at HP.

The tool will provide a centralised view, unified automation, visibility and control of the complete datacentre network, improve agility, monitoring and troubleshooting. Available from the second half of 2014, the companies’ joint customers can create a unified network operations model that will simplify IT in the software-defined datacentre era, said VMware.

“A hybrid model blends the device-based and the overlay models, transparently mixing physical and virtual devices under a common control plane. This approach promises a rapid time to value, support for bare-metal endpoints – servers, networking, security appliances and so forth – and a smooth migration to an optimal mix of endpoints,” said Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa.

Fleet management firm LeasePlan embraces private cloud for BYOD

Fleet management company LeasePlan is implementing private cloud services to create a flexible and cost-efficient IT infrastructure and a centralised virtual desktop to support its bring your own device (BYOD) programme.

LeasePlan Information Services – a subsidiary of LeasePlan that operates as an internal shared service provider to all LeasePlan Group companies globally – is aiming to create a centralised, virtual desktop that can be delivered to a variety of workers in LeasePlan offices across Europe, accessible via any device.

The IT wants to create a true enterprise mobility solution to increase the company's staff’s productivity, providing employees the opportunity to work from anywhere on any device at any time.

To this effect, the IT team decided to deploy Citrix cloud services technology globally. According to the company, the private cloud setup will help it save more than €40,000 per group company per year as it will help remove duplicate and unwarranted IT costs

LeasePlan Information Services has begun the work with Citrix’s platinum partner Zinopy to deliver a private cloud service, based on Citrix XenApp, Citrix Netscaler, NetScaler Gateway and Citrix Receiver.

Citrix Receiver allows devices running on Windows, Windows Mobile, Mac OS X, iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Blackberry Playbook, Linux, Google Chromebook, thin clients, zero clients and embedded operating systems to connect to desktop virtualisation services.

The IT team selected Citrix’s cloud services as it already has around 2,900 users in the company running on Citrix desktop infrastructure and is planning to roll it out to an additional 1,200 users in 2013 and 2014.

Citrix technology has enabled LeasePlan’s global strategy and has allowed the company to consolidate data and applications from across the business into its central datacentres in Dublin and deliver it back out to almost 3,000 users as a service, said Ronan Murray, infrastructure manager at LeasePlan Information Services.

“We now have an IT team of six supporting thousands of users all over Europe," said Murray.

“We’ve seen significant efficiencies by transitioning to this model and the deployment and management of applications is far easier. Our users see a benefit because they can work whenever and however they like.”

The company plans to bolster its desktop infrastructure and BYOD policy with private cloud.

By creating a centralised cloud service, duplicated IT costs such as manually updating PCs with new software can be removed and the life of hardware can be extended, saving LeasePlan an estimated €40,000 per hosted organisation every year.

Among the other benefits of a cloud-enabled BYOD programme, LeasePlan can allow employees to work even if their local office is inaccessible to them because the data and applications are centralised. It also means employees can access work data and apps on the devices of their choice – tablet, smartphone or a personal laptop – and increase their productivity.

“LeasePlan’s decision to transform its workplace environment will invariably have a positive impact on employees and the business,” said Grace O’Rourke Veitch, Ireland country manager for Citrix.

Implementing a cloud infrastructure to break the shackles of office life, the fleet management company can increase its staff’s efficiency, whilst helping the business reap the rewards of a flexible, secure and cost-effective IT operation, O’Rourke Veitch said.

Attackers reported seeding cloud services with malware

LAS VEGAS -- Malware writers are ramping up their use of commercial file hosting sites and cloud services to distribute malware programs, security researchers said at this week's Black Hat conference here.

Traditionally, malware writers had distributed their malicious code from their own sites.

But as security vendors get better at detecting and blacklisting those sites, hackers are increasingly distributing their malware products from legitimate host sites. The technique has been used a bit for more than two years, but now appears be gaining steam, researchers said. (See also "When malware strikes: How to clean an infected PC."

Often, the owners of legitimate sites fail to properly scan the content they are hosting, which allows attackers to furtively post malicious code with relative ease, said Michael Sutton, vice president of research at ZScaler, a provider of cloud-based security services for enterprises.

Malicious content distributed from a legitimate site is more likely to make it past corporate defenses. Vendors are also unlikely to blacklist a legitimate hosted service, allowing malicious content hosted on one to stay up longer, he said.

defcon
Zscaler said he's heard reports of malicious files hosted on Dropbox, but the they appear to have been removed, the blog noted.

Sutton pointed to recent incidents were attackers posted and distributed malicious code on Google Code and Dropbox as an example of the trend. A blog on Zscaler's website lists nearly three dozen malicious files hosted on the Google Code site, which contains tools for software developers.

The message for IT managers: Don't blindly trust domains that seem to be secure, Sutton said.

"Attackers are starting to leverage hosting services" to stage malicious code, he said. "It used to be that [attackers] would set up their own servers," to host malware. "Then we saw them infecting legitimate third-parties. Now they are using hosting services. They are no longer paying for hosting [malware] and are less likely to get blacklisted."

Meanwhile, Firehost, a provider of cloud-hosting services for enterprises, has seen an increase in Web application attacks originating from the networks of legitimate Web hosting services, said CEO Chris Drake.

In its latest quarterly security review, Firehost observed a noticeable increase in the number of SQL injection attacks, directory traversal attacks and other Web application attacks launched from within cloud service provider networks, Drake said.

Cloud providers often have weak validation procedures when signing up new customers, allowing attackers to create accounts with fake information. The accounts are then used to deploy and administer powerful botnets that run in the cloud infrastructure, he said.

In the second quarter of 2013, the IP filtering system that Firehost uses to protect its customers against malicious attacks blocked about 1.3 million unique attacks. Of the total, a noticeable number of attacks originated from IP addresses belonging cloud services companies, Drake said.

European banking firm UniCredit to introduce cloud in its datacentres

European banking and financial services firm UniCredit has signed a multi-billion dollar agreement with IBM to introduce cloud-based infrastructure within its datacentres and to create new IT service models.

The 10-year deal also involves the creation of a joint venture firm between the two companies, which will sell cloud-based IT services to other European companies and institutions.

The long-term IT agreement is aimed at transforming UniCredit’s IT infrastructure that supports all its commercial and private banking activities in Europe. By introducing cloud-based services to its datacentres, UniCredit will gain dramatic IT efficiency and flexibility, according to the financial services firm.

As part of the agreement, a joint venture between UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions – the global service company of UniCredit – and IBM will market and deliver IT infrastructure services to other European companies and institutions.

The joint venture will have employees in Italy, Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Czech Republic representing both companies.

Together, IBM and UniCredit will establish a “Value Creation Center” that will aim to harness innovation to provide superior service and drive success for clients on a continuous basis. The centre will monitor trends in the banking and IT industries and identify emerging disruptive technologies to be rapidly introduced into UniCredit’s infrastructure, according to the financial firm.

Cloud-based analytics will enable UniCredit to better predict and understand trading in financial markets, manage spending and provide innovative services to its customers, according to IBM.

“UniCredit’s innovation-driven approach to sourcing reflects changing motivations in the strategic sourcing marketplace,” said Erich Clementi, senior vice-president of IBM Global Technology Services.

“When making sourcing decisions, organisations like UniCredit are moving beyond basic needs, such as cost-cutting, to higher-order business outcomes, such as growth, competitive advantage and, of course, innovation.”

According to the IBM Center for Applied Insights study, Why partnering strategies matter, which questioned more than 1,300 business and IT sourcing decision-makers worldwide, organisations that have made that shift are outperforming on a host of financial measures, including revenue and gross profit growth.

UniCredit operates in 20 different European countries. Its deal with IBM comes as the blue chip reported second quarter revenues of $24.9bn, missing market estimates. IBM’s $3.23bn profit was down by 17% compared with the same period in 2012, but its cloud revenue was up 70%.

In the previous quarter too, IBM's revenue and profit fell short of analysts' forecasts – for the first time in eight years. As a result of the poor first quarter, the company cut 3,300 jobs and turned its focus on cloud computing and data analysis to revive its business.

As part of its focus on cloud computing, IBM bought Israel-based virtualisation management provider CSL International to expand its cloud offerings by adding management capabilities.

It marked IBM’s second acquisition in two months as the company aims to achieve its objective of reaching $7bn annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015. In June, it acquired cloud computing infrastructure provider SoftLayer Technologies for a reported $2bn.

How will SAP's cloud and in-memory drive affect existing customers?

SAP is expanding its cloud and in-memory computing businesses, but how is the company adapting its strategy to market forces?

Hana is the new frontier for SAP. “We are the only company to have our entire portfolio in the cloud and running in-memory technology,” said SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe.

SAP's latest financial statement showed a decline in its software business for the second quarter of 2013 – down 7% to €982m – as the company expands into the cloud.

Total profit after tax for the quarter was up 10% to €724n, compared with €661m for the second quarter last year.

In a financial conference call, co-CEO Bill McDermott said: “The world is being transformed by cloud and in-memory. We are at a business inflexion point – businesses are shifting to the cloud.

"Cloud is a strategic priority for SAP. We are winning more deals over Workday than ever before, such as the US Weather Channel. We have a full portfolio of cloud CRM solutions and we recently won business with T-Mobile and Nespresso.”

In spite of having almost 4,000 fewer staff, after reducing its headcount by 7% over the past year, SAP's operating expenses were 3% higher year on year, totalling €3.07bn compared with €2.98bn in 2012.
SAP’s Hana in-memory database engine and cloud businesses were the company’s big growth areas.
Hana contributed €102m to SAP's software revenue during the second quarter, growing by 21% year on year. The company expects revenue from Hana to be in the region of €650-700m in 2013.

“The world is moving to in-memory to get a competitive edge. We saw strong adoption of SAP Enterprise Suite on Hana, which simplifies customers' IT landscape,” said McDermott. More than 500 startups are developing applications on top of Hana, he added.

SAP’s nearest rival in the enterprise market, Oracle, has yet to release its in-memory system, but since Oracle is the preferred database system for running large-scale SAP systems, Hana may be facing competition in the near term as users wait to see what Oracle can do. Gartner estimates that 40% of SAP installations run their SAP system on top of Oracle.

David Khan, an analyst at Berenberg Partnership, said: "The spectre of Oracle claiming to have an in-memory, columnar database by year end still looms. We still believe that Oracle’s product will not be comparable, as it will not be native columnar, and that announcing a product would mean it has given its seal of approval to the trend. However, Oracle could put short-term pressure on Hana signings, and SAP needs Hana to keep performing.”

Although Oracle is developing in-memory database capabilities, Gartner distinguished analyst Donald Feinberg suggested these may be limited to analytics and not support transactions, such as those required to run a system like SAP.

“Arguably, the nearest product to Hana is Microsoft SQL Server 2014, which is in beta,” he said. But users will have to wait to see if SAP certifies the new Microsoft relational database.

SAP’s biggest growth area was in the enterprise software company’s cloud business. Cloud subscription and support revenue for the second quarter of 2013 increased by 166% year on year to €183m. SAP reported annual revenue of €932m within its cloud business and said it had 30 million cloud subscribers. Much of this growth has come through the acquisitions of human resources cloud application SuccessFactors and Ariba.
Existing SAP enterprise software users will need to work out when and how they migrate to the cloud. “One big challenge for SAP customers is SaaS [software as a service] versus on-premises. Cloud computing is a realistic approach for SMEs, but even larger enterprises are looking at whether to move to an SAP hosted environment,” said Feinberg.

With SAP users now having to pay annual maintenance of 19% per year, as of June 2013, the biggest revenue streams for the company remain the support and maintenance businesses, which reported revenue of €5.5bn for the second quarter.

Blogging about the SAP support hike earlier this year, Forrester principal analyst Duncan Jones wrote: “Even if [users are] not directly affected by this change (for example because they’re on Enterprise Support) they may start to wonder, 'if SAP thinks it is acceptable to increase maintenance charges now without any real attempt at a business justification, what will it do when it is even more powerful than it already is?'.”

How will SAP's cloud and in-memory drive affect existing customers?

SAP is expanding its cloud and in-memory computing businesses, but how is the company adapting its strategy to market forces?

Hana is the new frontier for SAP. “We are the only company to have our entire portfolio in the cloud and running in-memory technology,” said SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe.

SAP's latest financial statement showed a decline in its software business for the second quarter of 2013 – down 7% to €982m – as the company expands into the cloud.

Total profit after tax for the quarter was up 10% to €724n, compared with €661m for the second quarter last year.

In a financial conference call, co-CEO Bill McDermott said: “The world is being transformed by cloud and in-memory. We are at a business inflexion point – businesses are shifting to the cloud.
"Cloud is a strategic priority for SAP. We are winning more deals over Workday than ever before, such as the US Weather Channel. We have a full portfolio of cloud CRM solutions and we recently won business with T-Mobile and Nespresso.”

In spite of having almost 4,000 fewer staff, after reducing its headcount by 7% over the past year, SAP's operating expenses were 3% higher year on year, totalling €3.07bn compared with €2.98bn in 2012.
SAP’s Hana in-memory database engine and cloud businesses were the company’s big growth areas.
Hana contributed €102m to SAP's software revenue during the second quarter, growing by 21% year on year. The company expects revenue from Hana to be in the region of €650-700m in 2013.

“The world is moving to in-memory to get a competitive edge. We saw strong adoption of SAP Enterprise Suite on Hana, which simplifies customers' IT landscape,” said McDermott. More than 500 startups are developing applications on top of Hana, he added.

SAP’s nearest rival in the enterprise market, Oracle, has yet to release its in-memory system, but since Oracle is the preferred database system for running large-scale SAP systems, Hana may be facing competition in the near term as users wait to see what Oracle can do. Gartner estimates that 40% of SAP installations run their SAP system on top of Oracle.

David Khan, an analyst at Berenberg Partnership, said: "The spectre of Oracle claiming to have an in-memory, columnar database by year end still looms. We still believe that Oracle’s product will not be comparable, as it will not be native columnar, and that announcing a product would mean it has given its seal of approval to the trend. However, Oracle could put short-term pressure on Hana signings, and SAP needs Hana to keep performing.”

Although Oracle is developing in-memory database capabilities, Gartner distinguished analyst Donald Feinberg suggested these may be limited to analytics and not support transactions, such as those required to run a system like SAP.

“Arguably, the nearest product to Hana is Microsoft SQL Server 2014, which is in beta,” he said. But users will have to wait to see if SAP certifies the new Microsoft relational database.

SAP’s biggest growth area was in the enterprise software company’s cloud business. Cloud subscription and support revenue for the second quarter of 2013 increased by 166% year on year to €183m. SAP reported annual revenue of €932m within its cloud business and said it had 30 million cloud subscribers. Much of this growth has come through the acquisitions of human resources cloud application SuccessFactors and Ariba.
Existing SAP enterprise software users will need to work out when and how they migrate to the cloud. “One big challenge for SAP customers is SaaS [software as a service] versus on-premises. Cloud computing is a realistic approach for SMEs, but even larger enterprises are looking at whether to move to an SAP hosted environment,” said Feinberg.

With SAP users now having to pay annual maintenance of 19% per year, as of June 2013, the biggest revenue streams for the company remain the support and maintenance businesses, which reported revenue of €5.5bn for the second quarter.

Blogging about the SAP support hike earlier this year, Forrester principal analyst Duncan Jones wrote: “Even if [users are] not directly affected by this change (for example because they’re on Enterprise Support) they may start to wonder, 'if SAP thinks it is acceptable to increase maintenance charges now without any real attempt at a business justification, what will it do when it is even more powerful than it already is?'.”

Cloud databases less of a leap for users now, but some hurdles remain

With the growing adoption of cloud-based applications, it's natural that cloud databases would follow. Not that long ago, cloud-based database offerings were very limited -- so much so that organizations really didn't have a compelling reason to embrace them, other than for exploratory purposes. But in recent years, the landscape has changed: The number of available products and services has expanded significantly, as have their capabilities, reliability and application support.

Initial cloud offerings often were nothing more than a service provider running a database for an organization in a virtual machine on the provider's network. That shifted the database system off-premises, eliminating the capital costs associated with it and converting the outlay still required to operating expenses -- i.e., the service provider's charges for hosting the system. The benefits were purely economic in nature, and the user organization typically still needed to manage the database itself.

Now there's a large variety of cloud database options for IT managers and data management professionals to consider. Oracle, IBM and other database vendors make their software available for deployment in private clouds or on public cloud services, such as Amazon's EC2 and Microsoft's Windows Azure. Database as a Service platforms let users set up databases in the cloud without having to install or manage any software. Managed hosting services blend those two approaches: Service providers deploy database instances on their systems for users and manage the environments as well.

Both commercial and open source databases are available for use in the cloud; the choices also include a mix of mainstream SQL-based relational databases and schema-less NoSQL technologies that increasingly are being embraced for use in big data analytics applications. Even data warehouses can be stood up in the cloud, a point embellished by Amazon's announcement of its Redshift data warehousing service in late 2012.
The primary business drivers for adopting cloud-based databases are anticipated cost savings, increased flexibility and reduced database administration and systems management requirements. Another common driver is a decision by corporate and IT executives that deploying and managing database technologies in-house isn't strategic to a company's business and can be farmed out to a service provider.

The vendor sales pitch that cloud databases are more cost-effective and less resource-intensive than on-premises products, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership, may well be true. But cloud services and tools do cost money (as they should), so it's incumbent upon IT managers to do a return on investment (ROI) calculation comparing the various options -- including sticking with on-premises software.

The deployment flexibility made possible by cloud computing can factor into the ROI equation. With cloud database services, organizations can scale their database instances and processing capacity up or down as business requirements dictate, paying for additional technology resources only when they're needed instead of having to worry about buying new hardware and software, installing it in time to meet increased demands and then being saddled with it if those demands dissipate. The diminished admin burden is another potential ROI booster: Database configuration, backups, mirroring, uptime and disaster recovery procedures, software updates, and other tasks can all be redirected from internal database administrators to cloud service providers, as can systems management workloads.

Of course, there are some issues to take into account as well. Data security, privacy and regulatory compliance concerns needn't be the cloud showstoppers they often were treated as in the past, but they still need to be addressed before taking the leap and putting databases in the cloud.

Many IT managers remain reluctant to send important business data outside the corporate firewall. In addition, privacy laws and security regulations, particularly in Europe, restrict where data can be kept -- a possible complication with cloud services that run on systems distributed across data centers in various locations, including different countries. As the use of cloud databases has increased, so too has the ability of service providers to support the levels of security and privacy needed by almost all enterprises. In fact, cloud services may well be more secure than many corporate networks are -- after all, a cloud provider's business reputation rides on having robust security and privacy protections. But companies looking to take advantage of the cloud need to determine their security and compliance requirements up front and work closely with providers to ensure successful implementations.

Other issues that must be addressed before deploying cloud database software or services include integration with on-premises databases and applications and ensuring that sufficient network bandwidth is available to support the data needs of business users. If a company is primarily running cloud-based applications or is looking to collect big data and other information from external sources, cloud databases are an attractive option, and integrating them with existing systems might not be a big hurdle to get over. But if most applications are still on in-house systems, the integration demands could be high -- and keeping databases in-house as well might be the more appropriate way to go.


Similarly, if network bandwidth is limited and users need to download significant amounts of data for business intelligence and analytics applications, on-premises databases likely are called for. Database location must be transparent to end users; all they care about is being able to access data when they need it, no matter where it's coming from. Assuming that there is enough bandwidth and the other issues can be dealt with, there's no reason why that place can't be the cloud.

Lower uptake of cloud, ICT limiting medium-sized enterprises' productivity: CEBR

Research from CEBR (Centre for Economics and Business Research) has shown that the productivity of medium-sized enterprises in the UK is lagging behind that of large businesses, because of lower adoption of technological tools,

But cloud can help them plug this gap, CEBR added.

The study, Adoption of ICT and cloud services by medium-sized businesses in the UK, France and the Netherlands by CEBR and cloud platform provider Cordys found that medium-sized enterprises generated £1,518 less per worker than a large enterprise.

According to CEBR, performance of medium-sized enterprises (between 50 and 250 employees)  in all three countries has taken a knock as a result of the financial recession. A comparison of productivity growth between medium-sized and large enterprises revealed that medium-sized enterprises have “suffered disproportionately more”.

“This is particularly the case in the UK and France where large enterprises have seen productivity rise by an average of 1.1 percentage points more per year than medium-sized enterprises,” according to CEBR.

The study attributed this lag to 18% lower ICT adoption by medium-sized enterprises in the UK.

Data from the European Commission (EC) showed that medium-sized enterprises' productivity in the UK declined by a significant 4.8% per year since 2008.

They demonstrated a structurally lower take-up of a range of different ICT-based activities compared with their larger counterparts, the study showed.

For example, 84% of large enterprises in the UK have adopted intra-company data sharing solutions, compared with only 66% of medium-sized enterprises, pointing to a lack of technology integration.

This gap was reflected across the board, including supplier-related processes (54% versus 34%); selling online (42% versus 28%); CRM (customer relationship management) applications (44% versus 29%); and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software (48% versus 24%).

In part, the productivity gap is explained by less agile and efficient business processes in medium-sized enterprises, which burdens them with additional costs and time-intensive processes, said CEBR’s senior economist, Shehan Mohamed.

Between the three countries, the UK medium-sized enterprises saw the sharpest productivity decline (1.7% more than larger businesses between 2007 and 2011) than elsewhere in Europe.

France saw a difference of 0.5% and Dutch medium-sized enterprises actually performed 1.4% better than the large firms.

This is partly explained by increased use of a range of ICT activities with French and Dutch medium-sized enterprises, the analyst firm estimated.

But this is not all – CEBR found that, in 2012, UK medium-sized enterprises had higher mobile internet adoption rates than France and the Netherlands, with around 80% using mobile email and 73% using mobile internet browsing.

But UK medium-sized enterprises’ use of mobile tools for strategic business purposes, such as document sharing or using business software apps, was significantly lower.

The report examined how cloud computing can help medium-sized enterprises to address this productivity gap. ICT activities can be implemented through the cloud, in turn making medium-sized enterprises more competitive.

The analyst firm outlined three benefits that medium-sized enterprises can yield with cloud adoption: cost savings, business development and new opportunities.

Cloud can help medium-sized enterprises eliminate their server and storage costs, cutting capital expenses (capex) and asset management costs and CEBR suggested that the implementation of a private cloud environment would lead to a 17.3% reduction in total IT capex, with a public cloud leading to a bigger reduction (39.9%).

Migrating to the cloud means that there’s also a reduced need for power and cooling, with CEBR suggesting a 44% reduction in energy costs in a private cloud and a 79% saving in the public cloud.

Cloud’s scalability features can help medium-sized enterprises better manage seasonal peaks, increasing output by 0.1% per year. In other words, this would increase the output of an average medium-sized enterprises by €21,528 (£18,605) in the UK.

Lastly, cloud adoption – and the subsequent lowering of the barrier to entry – will see the creation 35,000 new medium-sized enterprises in the UK.

"We see this in the market every day," said Art Landro, chief executive officer (CEO) at Cordys. “Medium-sized enterprises want to adopt enterprise applications like their larger counterparts, but find it tough to implement and support the required infrastructure and gain the same benefits as their larger competitors.

“However, solutions which previously would have come with off-putting upfront costs and slow deployment times are now available in the cloud in pre-packaged or custom solutions, underpinned by a business process platform as a service (PaaS).

“This enables medium-sized enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of a customised enterprise solution at a much lower cost. With this approach, they can combine cloud and on-premise systems in the same way that enterprises can,” Landro said.

IBM buys CSL International to expand cloud virtualisation capabilities

IBM is to buy Israel-based virtualisation management provider CSL International to expand its cloud offerings by adding management capabilities.

The financial terms of the deal will not be disclosed, IBM said. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2013, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

The IT assets from CSL will be integrated with IBM’s zEnterprise System portfolio. IBM says its System z products help enterprises integrate data with analytics and enables cloud delivery. With the zEnterprise System tools, businesses can host the workloads of thousands of commodity servers on a single system for simplification and cost savings.

CSL International’s software, CSL-WAVE, is used by enterprises to monitor and manage the virtual machine hypervisor z/VM and Linux on System z environments. The software provides drag and drop options to create, discover, visualise and connect virtual servers to resources.

"As clients create smarter computing environments, they are looking for ways to manage IT costs and complexity without sacrificing security or the ability to scale," said Greg Lotko, IBM business line executive, System z.

Virtualisation forms the basis of cloud computing. By combining CSL’s virtualisation technologies with the z System tools, IBM will be able to offer customers tools to manage all aspects of z/VM and Linux on System z virtualisation, including CPU, memory, storage, and network resources, according to the mainframe company.

The acquisition comes as IBM sold almost twice the number of Linux on System z systems in the first quarter of 2013 as compared to the same period the year before.

“With the acquisition of CSL International, IBM expands its cloud virtualisation capabilities, making it even easier for clients to take advantage of Linux on System z," Lotko said.

The acquisition further extends the “value of IBM's cloud offerings”, according to the company.

This marks IBM’s second acquisition in two months as the company aims to achieve its objective of reaching $7bn annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015. In June, it acquired cloud computing infrastructure provider SoftLayer Technologies for a reported $2bn.

With SoftLayer, IBM hopes to strengthen its position in cloud computing and help speed business adoption of public and private cloud solutions.

IBM intends to expand SoftLayer cloud to support OpenStack, the cloud operating system, supported by several major suppliers including IBM, Dell, Red Hat and Rackspace.

By 2020, cloud will be ‘like having a Formula 1 team running IT’

There is no doubt that cloud computing is changing the way organisations operate.

By 2020, many industry watchers believe the easy availability of commodity, on-demand IT will have dramatically disrupted the market to the extent of creating new ways of doing business.

However, there are issues such as security, open standards and culture, which need to be addressed before cloud can achieve its full potential.

Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum, says cloud in 2020 will be a standard part of the IT sourcing that CIOs use in their delivery of services, but he says the question of what adoption and use will look like depends on a couple of pivotal transformations – how cloud will be consumed and paid for; and the industry agreeing on an open standards approach.

“Will the funding of IT be transformed from the current centrally funded pot, to a more transparent pay-as-you-use approach? This depends as much on the organisation being ready to adopt a new way to pay for IT, as well as new skills in the IT department to think of internal IT as providing a service that competes with public/hybrid cloud computing,” says Illsley.

This potential cultural barrier is matched by an external barrier – the industry’s willingness to agree an open standards-based approach versus a small number of different vendor-specific approaches.

“If we have a single standard, like what happened in the browser wars of the 1990s, then adoption will become easy and will see greater acceptance. If the market remains fragmented then adoption will be slower,” says Illsley.

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Putting platforms in the cloudCan cloud computing push up profit?Case Study: Cloud computing and the benefits of elasticityThe realities of cloud formation
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But overall, cloud will just become another source of IT and people will not be overly concerned by the label.

Emma Rodgers, senior analyst at Clearwater Corporate Finance, believes cloud will be so pervasive that it almost doesn’t exist. “Everyone will adopt cloud and security issues will have been addressed by a range of technologies,” she says.

Peter Chadha, founder of advisory firm DrPete, is a fervent fan of cloud, as a user and as an analyst, and believes we will no longer be talking about “cloud”, just as we no longer talk about “e-commerce”.

However, he predicts there will be new approaches to cloud to suit different businesses. Although 90% of firms will be fine with public cloud, there will be some global corporations that will have their own cloud and other organisations in highly regulated environments that will form mutual clouds.

“Some organisations will never be satisfied with the data issues, and have hardcore reasons to stay as they are," says Chadha.

"Where IT forms a small amount of cost, there may be no huge advantage to be gained. For example, an insurance company in shipping where the minimum claim is £500,000 – IT is practically irrelevant as an expense. It may have an archive of 20 years of data and it is doubtful whether it would benefit from moving to the cloud. However, it might benefit from having a mutual cloud with other insurance companies, where the same degree of diligence and controls are mutually applied."

There are diverse views about how exactly cloud will evolve, but there is broad agreement on how businesses must be agile and efficient to survive – and cloud will play a role in this.

“Business in 2020 will be much more focused on controlling the cost levers and agility aspects,” says Illsley.

“The business landscape is changing fast and at different rates in different geographies and verticals, so businesses will need to move faster and change things faster – expand and contract. So any IT used must be scalable and capable of meeting local political regulations. Cloud will play a part, but will be only one such source of IT.”

Much of the thrust for change will come from users, as the spread of IT consumerisation increases.

James Herbert, managing partner, innovation and delivery at consultancy Methods, believes the browser will be the operating system by 2020.

“People talk about shared services and a multi-tenanted platform and there will be an even bigger push towards BYOD (bring your own device) from non-technical people. Employees will want to be able to use any device and for cloud to be successful in this scenario, you should just be able to log in via your browser, regardless of device,” he says.

Large business that have many on-premise business applications will move towards delivering applications via the web browser, and having a clear architecture and vision will present a challenge in the run-up to 2020, says Herbert:

“Organisations will gradually swap applications out from on-premise into the cloud, and the browser becomes viable on any device, but you need a good architect.”

Disruptive technologies will play their part in how cloud develops by 2020.

Illsley says the evolution of software-defined datacentres (SDDCs), where all infrastructure is virtualised and delivered as a service, will be particularly disruptive.

“It will change the way organisations view the value of the underlying physical infrastructure. Within the datacentre space, there will be the complete abstraction of services from infrastructure,” he says.

Simon Wardley, a researcher at the Leading Edge Forum, says the growth in innovation that cloud is undergoing is following a perfectly normal pattern of evolution, driven by competition by suppliers and users, which will lead to cloud becoming a commodity.

“We are in a state of punctuated equilibrium and a period of rapid change, where as a result of competition things will evolve to become even more efficient,” he says.

Peter Chadha, founder of analyst firm DrPete, believes there is a danger for many organisations embracing cloud services that may end up tied into a supplier or cloud service by future market consolidation.

The reasons for moving to cloud – to save money and become more efficient and flexible – may be undermined as the big cloud players have users locked in.

“The cost of systems may rise as competition is diminished and the bigger boys get bigger,” says Chadha. He points to the dominance of Visa and MasterCard, which almost have “a licence to print money” in their sector.

“This is the way cloud may go. Today cloud is economic, but it may not be as economic as it is now, and once you’re hooked in, it’s difficult to leave,” says Chadha.

He stresses that cloud is a powerful enabling technology which his business relies upon, but it is important to look at future implications for anyone subscribing to cloud services.

“It allows small businesses to behave as large businesses with great uptime, but once data is in the cloud, how easily can you exit?” he says.

While suppliers are scrambling for market share, it is not an issue that is prominent in organisations’ thinking, but by 2020, having an exit strategy will be an important consideration.

“It is all down to an economic decision, and the organisation’s risk profile. An insurance company may consider its own private cloud – where everything is under their control – to be the better option, for example,” says Chadha.

“Cloud is easy to go into, but the problem is getting out."

The new commodity systems will enable the building of innovative new services, but there will also be a fight for survival, so the period until 2020 will witness new entrants and the collapse of some well-known names.

“There will be explosions of higher-order systems and explosions of big data, new practices and new forms of organisation. Lots of companies will get disrupted as they have failed to plan for change,” says Wardley.

Although such a shift is predictable in terms of what will happen, it is not predictable in a precise way, as new products will be commodity-driven by consumers and suppliers.

“The platform shift to infrastructure utility has been clear, but we will reach an age of wonder and the genesis of new higher-order systems. We can say what will happen over the next few years, but we can’t say what will be generated,” says Wardley.

New things will be built using the components built in this era – the “age of wonder” has already begun, but there will be more casualties along the way.

“Look at Blockbuster and Netflix. Blockbuster is bankrupt because it was held back by its legacy of DVD shops, which is why Netflix could storm ahead with online rentals,” says Wardley.

Cloud will generate new levels of innovation because it is going to attract the most skilled people, says Chadha, which makes it a compelling proposition.

“Cloud will be better because it is like having a Formula 1 team running IT compared to having the local garage – at the end of the day no organisation could afford to employ these people. You see innovation on a daily basis and organisations will go to the cloud because that level of innovation can’t be matched,” he says.

It is not just the technical innovation cloud allows organisations access to – it’s the sheer scale it offers.

Chadha concludes: “The big cloud providers have points of presence all over the world as well as continuous innovation and Formula 1 standard engineers, which makes it irresistible in the run-up to 2020 and beyond.”

Infosys grows cloud business as US investigation looms

Services firm Infosys has reported a 13.6% increase in revenue to $2bn for the second quarter of 2013, ended 30 June.

Net profit for the quarter increased by 3.7% to $397m.

In its latest financial statement, the company said it had won more than 15 engagements across cloud services and big data projects. It was also invited to join the global Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) as a contributing member to help define and strengthen worldwide industry standards to support enterprise cloud and big data requirements.

In March 2013, Infosys opened a service delivery centre in Munich for BMW to provide maintenance and operations services for the car maker's web infrastructure, content management, SAP, business intelligence systems and internal IT system.

Faced with slowing growth in the business outsourcing market, technology services supplier Infosys has begun an ambitious strategy to transform itself into a global provider of consultancy and IT services.

Download this six-page special report from Computer Weekly for details on Infosys, its strategy, products and services and financial performance.

Infosys reported revenue of $160m in financial services, $110m in the manufacturing sector, and $100m in energy, utilities, communication and services (ECS). Its retail, consumer packaged goods, logistics and life sciences group reported revenue of $120m.

The company is currently being investigated in the US for visa fraud, the outcome of which could materially affect its business.

In the financial statement, Infosys noted: “In the event that the US government undertakes any actions which limit the B-1 business visa program or other visa program that the company utilises, imposes sanctions, fines or penalties on the company or its employees, or undertakes any other actions against the company arising from the investigations or discussions that are currently ongoing, this could materially and adversely affect the company’s business and results of operations.”

Today’s datacentres are not fit for the cloud, shows study

Many enterprises continue to depend significantly on antiquated datacentre infrastructures which are ill-equipped to serve user demands in the cloud and virtualisation era, a study has found.

A wide majority (91%) of IT decision-makers admitted that their current IT infrastructures still require substantial upgrades to meet the ever-changing and unique networking requirements created by virtualisation and cloud computing.

This was despite three-quarters of respondents saying they have updated their IT infrastructures in the past three years.

The study of more than 1,750 IT decision-makers, commissioned by networking service provider Brocade and carried out by research firm Vanson Bourne, also found that multiple network failures each week was common among one-third of the respondents.

As today’s organisations interact with data and applications constantly, whether through video-conferencing or accessing database applications on remote devices, the datacentre network has never been placed under greater strain, according to Brocade.

But still, 61% of IT professionals admitted that their corporate networks are not fit for the cloud era, with 41% saying that network downtime has caused their business financial hardship either directly – through lost revenue or breached SLAs – or from their customers’ lack of confidence.

“Many datacentres that exist today are based on 20-year-old technologies and they can no longer keep up with demand,” said Jason Nolet, vice-president datacentre switching and routing at Brocade.

“Virtualisation and cloud models require greater datacentre network agility and performance, as well as reduced operational cost and complexity.

“The findings clearly show that despite apparent investment in the past few years, most organisations are still ill-equipped for current business demands,” he added.

Datacentre hardware must be refreshed often to ensure that server utilisation is optimised and that workloads do not fail, experts have said.

Consulting engineer and datacentre energy expert Ian Bitterlin had previously argued that while web giants such as Facebook refresh server hardware every nine months, UK enterprises refresh theirs about every five years and the public sector organisations, on average, update their hardware once every eight or 10 years.

Some enterprises are beginning to deploy more scalable and resilient datacentre network infrastructures.

About 18% of IT decision-makers cited the use of fabric-based networks, while 51% said they are planning to roll out Ethernet fabrics next year to support their virtualisation strategies.

The study also revealed that some enterprises are looking at deploying software-defined networks (SDNs) by 2015 to increase productivity, deliver better access to real-time information and improve service delivery.

While SDN providers such as Brocade and Juniper Networks claim it offers benefits for the business, datacentre SDN is still in its infancy, according to experts.

A TechTarget study found that although 43% of respondents indicated that they plan to evaluate SDN technologies over the next 12 months, 78% believe SDN is not mature enough for their environments today.

Over two-thirds of respondents also expressed interest in on-demand datacentres – where physical and virtual networking elements are combined to provide the necessary capacity to deliver different applications rather than a standard capacity provided by legacy datacentre networks to deliver apps.

On-demand datacentre strategy provides a pragmatic route for the adoption of SDN, according to Brocade.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c gears up for the private cloud

For the latest update of Oracle Enterprise Manager, the company has taken additional steps to help organizations set up their own private clouds, using Oracle systems, software and even non-Oracle products.

"Our goal is to is to allow enterprises to take any [Oracle] platform and offer it as a service," said Sushil Kumar, vice president of product strategy and business development.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3, released Tuesday, comes with new workflow capabilities and new connectors for managing additional Oracle products and systems.

Oracle Enterprise Manager was originally created to deploy and manage groups of Oracle databases. Over the years, Oracle has extended the software to manage the Oracle Application Server and third-party software packages from Microsoft and others, through the use of plug-ins and connectors. Today, the Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility Exchange, a sort of app store for the software, offers more than 135 add-ons for third-party programs.

In addition to aiding in the deploying and managing software, Oracle Enterprise Manager also offers a number of operational health metrics, based on information collected by agents installed on the same server as the software being monitored.

To help organizations set up cloud services for internal use, Oracle has been adding more features to Oracle Enterprise Manager.

In this version, reporting capabilities for charge backs have been enhanced in the software. Organizations running internal clouds may want to bill individual business units for their cloud usage. Earlier editions of this software could provide reports of usage by processor, storage, database queries and other metrics. This version allows organizations to create their own usage reports based on other metrics provided by the software, which then can be used as the basis for internal billing.

OracleThe activity planner tool.
An activity planner has been added, which will allow administrators to set up workflows to automate a series of tasks, such as updating a set of databases. "The change activity planner helps administrators plan, execute, tracks and report on long-running operations," Kumar said. The software uses the built-in operational health metrics as a way to determine that individual steps of a workflow have been completed.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 also improves on a new capability introduced in the last version, the ability to build and manage a Java-based PaaS (platform as a service).The prior version of the software required administrators to provision and coordinate multiple WebLogic servers in order to build a service. This update eliminates that step.

"In a physical environment people had to pre-deploy the WebLogic software on the machines, and then Enterprise Manager could dynamically create the domains," Kumar said. A domain is any one of a number of logical containers that WebLogic creates to hold applications. "It goes one step further in that you do not have to pre-deploy the software."

The software adds more support for Oracle engineered systems. It now allows administrators to control multiple Exadata racks as a single entity. It provides the first full support for the Oracle Exalytics in-memory data analysis system. In addition to WebLogic, Oracle Enterprise Manager now can work with Oracle's other application servers, Glassfish (which Oracle acquired in the Sun Microsystems purchase) and Tuxedo (acquired in the BEA Systems purchase).

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c R3 will also "fully support" the newly released Oracle 12c database, Kumar said. Oracle 12c was released last month with little advance notice from Oracle, and features a number of new advanced capabilities, such as multitenancy.

Kumar, however, would not discuss in detail how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c R3 supports Oracle 12c, noting that Oracle will make another announcement within a few weeks. "We have all the capabilities for supporting database 12c," he said, including the ability to control individual tenants in the database, as well as the ability to manage Oracle 12c itself in the same way it manages prior versions of the database.

When asked about Oracle's reluctance to go into details about Oracle Enterprise Manager's support of the new Oracle database, Ovum principal analyst Tony Baer noted that, while the Oracle Enterprise Manager officially supports the database, the company may still have yet to work out all the particulars of assuring the management software works with the database across all possible scenarios, a large undertaking given the complexity of the new database and the wide variety of possible deployment scenarios.

Cloud providers offered cut-price data centre hosting to serve customers

Companies can be surer in getting what they're being promised by cloud data providers thanks to a new service offered by Virtus Data Centres.

 

Announcing CoLo-on-Demand, Virtus CEO Neil Cresswell said: "The promise of cloud services is that customers can turn-up or turn-down the amount of computing power they buy at very short notice, so that their costs track their needs very closely.

 

"Until now, however, cloud providers have had heavy fixed data centre costs - often on a three, five or even 10 year contract that typically only goes up and never down."

 

Virtus promises to change this with CoLo-on-Demand by allowing cloud providers to cut their costs and pass on real scalability and savings to end user companies.

 

CoLo-on-Demand allows "cloud providers to have a cost model which matches their revenue stream" and "enjoy the same flexibility that they promise their customers", said Virtus.

 

The problem for cloud providers with conventional colocation charging models, Virtus said, is that they are based on the peak power load. So even if cloud providers only need, say 3kW in their data centre racks initially, and maybe more down the line, they usually have to commit to having more power than is needed at the start of their contract with the data centre.

 

That can make it a very high cost in the early days of operations and a particularly big long term commitment for smaller cloud providers.

 

With CoLo-on-Demand there is no time commitment. At the end of each month the cloud provider pays for the space and power they have used, based on how many kilowatts they have consumed to provide services to end user companies.

 

Virtus has set aside one of its halls in its North London data centre to provide the service.

 

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Your child's data is stored in the cloud

Non-profit inBloom offers an Internet database service that allows schools to store, track and analyze data on schoolchildren. If you think about it, that information is more than just test scores. It's whether kids receive free lunch -- a telling indicator of the family's finances. It's the time a student got into a fight in the schoolyard. And it could be a child's prescription medication.

The upshot of storing all that data in one location is that it can be used to tailor specific curricula to each child. If Johnny's data suggests that he's a tactile learner and he's failing math, inBloom's analytic engine might suggest a particular teaching approach.

Teachers say that kind of insight can be helpful.

Jim Peterson, a teacher in Bloomington, Ill., says inBloom has helped break down the silos in his school system's data collection. His school district supports 50 separate data systems.

"This is all about building personalized learning environments for kids," he says.

Related story: Bill Gates' classroom of the future

Peterson also thinks having this kind of data will spur new innovation in education, encouraging entrepreneurs to build applications that can help teachers make use of their students' data.

But as more school districts team up with inBloom, including New York, parents are becoming increasingly vocal critics of the data collection.

"This information ... I have no idea what it is, I have no idea who's using it, I have no idea for what purpose," said New York's Karen Sprowal, mother of nine-year old Matthew.

Matthew has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Ms. Sprowal is concerned about who will have access to her son's medical records and whether any stored data about his behavioral issues will follow him for years to come.

InBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger is quick to point out the company isn't collecting data the school districts don't already have; it's just providing a one-stop shop to make the data accessible -- and usable -- to teachers.

"Schools and districts collect a lot of data but it's all over the place," Streichenberger says. "Its different systems are disconnected, so as a result, this data is not usable."

Streichenberger says inBloom is providing the "plumbing" to fix school districts' currently disjointed systems. He stresses that the school districts themselves are the only ones with access to the data -- schools are forbidden from sharing the information, and third parties can't tap in.

Related story: Bad at math? You're more likely to lose your home

That promise has offered little comfort to many parents in school districts that use inBloom. Some parents in those districts feel that there's not enough transparency around the data platform, what data will be stored, and who will have access to it. InBloom says it's up to the states to determine what data is stored and whether parents have access.

Sprowal says parents were not adequately notified before her son's school district started loading data on to the platform.

"I think if there was full disclosure, transparency, if they included us in the process, as they were developing it ... it would have been fine," she said. "It would have ... put some constraints on it."

A recent town hall meeting on student privacy in New York got heated.

"We will do whatever it takes to stop inBloom, [New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg, or anyone else when it comes to our children," one parent said to applause.

Pending legislation in New York would allow parents to opt out of this type of data collection.

InBloom represents just one of many tech companies capitalizing on data collection in the classroom.

A company called DreamBox Learning offers a computer program for teaching math. The technology assesses whether students answer correctly, and, more importantly, how they arrived at the answer. The data includes whether a child hesitates, and what strategy they used to arrive at that answer.

Sprowal acknowledges that personalized learning could be beneficial to Matthew. Still, given the option, she says she would opt out for now.

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Your Ultrabook and the Cloud: A Great Partnership

Ultrabooks are engineered for portability—they’re thin, light, and have an extended battery life that lets you work or play anywhere the moment takes you. They contain fast, durable solid state drives (SSDs) that let you whip through huge files and shrug off bumps and vibrations.

 

But those SSDs tend to contain a lot less storage space than their bulkier laptop cousins. And that can be a problem when it comes to installing software and having access to your data while on the go. With a little help from the cloud, though, you’ll never miss that extra storage space.

Acer Aspire S7

Traditional hard drives don’t fit into the Ultrabook equation. They’re simply too big and too power hungry.  That’s why Ultrabooks like the Acer Aspire S7rely on flash-based solid state drives which have no moving parts to break and require less space and less power and are faster than a traditional hard drive.

 

However, those SSDs hold a lot less data than most standard hard drives. 128GB and 256GB are the norm, as opposed to the 500GB and 750GB behemoths found in many traditional laptops.

 

That means your Ultrabook has only about a quarter of the local storage space for installing the applications you use, and for saving your files. If you’re not careful about what data you choose to store locally, your drive will quickly be filled to capacity. That’s where the cloud comes in.

 

The cloud is an all-encompassing term used to refer to most anything on the Web or online. If you’re using Internet-based services or online data storage, you’re operating “in the cloud.” Ultrabooks are equipped with wireless networking that enables them to connect to the cloud anytime you’re in range of a network. Here’s how that will help you get the most out of your new Ultrabook.

 

Today’s advanced software offers many advantages, but it takes up a lot of space. The operating system alone and the basic tools that make the PC functional will fill up much of your SSD, leaving you little room for documents and spreadsheets—never mind your photos, videos and digital music.

 

No problem. There are a wide variety of online data storage and file sharing options to choose from. Many offer free storage in the cloud, but generally only 5GB or 10GB. If you need more space than that, it will cost you.

 

What you need is a strategy that combines the best of both worlds. You can complement your limited storage with services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Box, DropBox, SugarSync, or Google Drive, and add a roomy external hard drive for backup and even more storage.

 

Cloud storage does more than just save space. When you store data in the cloud, it’s accessible from other devices as well. If your Ultrabook is lost or stolen, or you’re visiting a friend and don’t have your Ultrabook with you, you can still log in from virtually any Web-enabled device and get your data. Most cloud storage platforms also offer mobile apps that make it easy to access data with a smartphone or tablet.

 

If you want to really minimize the amount of data stored locally on your Ultrabook, you can used cloud-based services instead of installing many types of software on your PC.

 

No need to install the many gigabytes of Microsoft Office on your PC; you can instead use Office Web Apps to access nearly all of the same tools in the cloud. Rather than storing gigabytes of photos on your Ultrabook, you can use a service like Flickr, or use Facebook or Google+. Instead of filling your drive with MP3s, you can use ITunes Match or a streaming music service like Pandora to play your music from the cloud.

 

If you follow these simple, space-saving tips, you’ll have the best of both worlds: A svelte, responsive Ultrabook and access to your stuff -- whenever and wherever you want it.

 

Follow me on Twitter: @sajilpl

Oracle, NetSuite team on cloud services for mid-size customers

Oracle and NetSuite are to jointly offer cloud services to mid-size business customers.

 

The alliance announced Wednesday is the third this week around Oracle's technologies. The Redwood Shores, California, company announced earlier this week agreements with Microsoft and cloud computing company Salesforce.com.

 

Oracle's HCM Cloud, its human capital management software, and NetSuite Cloud ERP enterprise resource planning application will be integrated to connect human resources and finance systems for mid-size customers, the companies said. Deloitte will work with clients on the implementation of these systems.

 

Oracle reported last week that its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of US$10.9 billion was flat year-on-year, reflecting to an extent the competition for its large business applications from cloud-based applications from more nimble operations.

 

The company's CEO Larry Ellison told analysts during an earnings call last week that the company was planning a "startling series" of announcements this week.

 

Oracle said Monday that under a new agreement with Microsoft, customers will be able to deploy Oracle software, such as Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server on Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure and receive full support from Oracle.

 

By Tuesday, Oracle announced a deal with Salesforce.com that would see the companies integrate their clouds. Salesforce.com's customer relationship management software will be integrated with Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud and Salesforce.com will also use Oracle technologies for its infrastructure, according to the agreement. Customers expect application integrations to work right out of-the-box even if the applications are from different vendors, Oracle said.

 

Ellison and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on Thursday are due to hold a conference call to provide details of their new nine-year partnership.

 

A pioneer in the SaaS (software as a service) market, NetSuite has Ellison as an investor. Its software has typically run on the Oracle stack including the database. HR has not been a priority area for NetSuite, and the arrangement with Oracle could have some synergies.

 

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Microsoft is the big winner in new Oracle cloud partnership

Microsoft and Oracle are working together? Oh, wait. I guess that should be a statement instead of a question. The two companies have joined forces in a new cloud venture. It seems Larry Ellison has embraced the wisdom of that ancient Arabic proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The nuts and bolts of the deal are that Microsoft and Oracle are teaming up to deliver Oracle software via Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure. Azure customers will be able to run Java, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and even Oracle Linux on Windows Server Hyper-V or Windows Azure, and Oracle will deliver full certification and support.

Oracle will certify and support its software to work with Windows Azure.

It’s a dramatic reversal for Oracle, to put it mildly. Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison has been on a one-man quest to crush Microsoft for years. It’s always seemed a bit Quixotic, though, because Oracle isn’t in the same league and has never come close to achieving Ellison's goal.

So, why this partnership? Why now? In a nutshell, it just makes sense for both parties. It’s a win-win move that benefits Microsoft and Oracle; one positions both companies to compete more aggressively with their respective rivals.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, told me the marriage isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. “Microsoft really had no issues working with Oracle—or Sun for that matter," said Enderle. "it was the CEOs from both companies that decided they wanted to try to put Microsoft out of business.”

Enderle said that both companies have bigger fish to fry, and that the rank and file at Oracle have already been working closely with Microsoft for some time. Despite Ellison’s goal to destroy Microsoft, the reality is that Oracle can’t deliver for its customers without engaging amicably with Microsoft on some level.

Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, believes Microsoft’s Azure platform and Oracle are both winners in the short term. Over the long term, Microsoft wins and VMware loses as a result of the Microsoft-Oracle partnership. “Microsoft gains additional customers for Azure," said Miller. "Oracle gains customers who use or want to use their technology, but want to do so in the cloud.”

Windows Azure customers stand to benefit from Microsoft's alliance with Oracle.

As much as Ellison might want to best Microsoft, doing so would bite the hand that feeds him. Oracle makes software, and that software needs a platform to run on. Many of Oracle’s customers run Oracle software on Windows Server.

Al Hilwa, an IDC analyst, rationalized, “Since Azure now essentially runs virtual machines and provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service, it is effectively a cloud operating system. It only makes sense to see other popular technologies that need an operating system run on Azure.”

Hilwa added that he hopes this is just the opening salvo from Microsoft and Oracle. Ultimately, Hilwa thinks the two companies should partner at a deeper level and introduce added-value services that reduce the friction of migrating to the cloud and minimize IT costs for customers.

This new relationship between Microsoft and Oracle is good for all. Rivalries aside, many Microsoft customers rely on Oracle software, and many Oracle customers rely on the Windows operating system. Joining forces to ensure everything works smoothly in the cloud is the right thing to do for customers.

Tony is principal analyst with the Bradley Strategy Group, providing analysis and insight on tech trends. He is a prolific writer on a range of technology topics, has authored a number of books, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.
More by Tony Bradley

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Capgemini to orchestrate Microsoft cloud products with Skysight offering

Capgemini is introducing a hybrid cloud orchestration service focused on Microsoft products, although enterprises will be able to manage any load with the offering, including applications running on Linux, the company said.

The core of the service is Microsoft software, including Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Windows Azure, wrapped with billing, service management, dashboards and governance tools integrated by Capgemini, said Ron Tolido, the company’s CTO for continental Europe.

Two aspects of the cloud service are visible to the customer, he said.

First, there’s a set of dashboards that give financial oversight to the CFO, insight into operations to the CIO, and availability data to the CTO.

The second element is an online catalog of Microsoft apps such as SharePoint as a Service, Lync Online, or Messaging as a Service. The apps are available on a pay-per-use basis, and end users can provision them through a self-service interface. Provisioning a new service isn’t instantaneous because Skysight’s governance tools will route the request to a person for approval.

“If you want to launch a new service you should usually think in terms of a few hours, because someone in the enterprise has to authorize it.”

That will still seem quick to most users, though, he said: “Even a couple of hours is much better than what they are used to.”

Businesses in the U.K., France and the Netherlands will be able to sign up for Skysight by the end of September, using it to manage private, hybrid or public cloud workloads running on their own infrastructure or in local Capgemini data centers. Around the same time, customers in the U.S. will be offered a public cloud version of the service. Capgemini plans to roll out the service in other countries later, said Tolido.

The presence of a local data center in the countries where Capgemini is launching the service is important, because of the concerns some enterprises have about data privacy laws, he said.

“Data sovereignty is often a complex matter that goes beyond IT and business functions. We are able to guarantee that the data stays in the country. We are very sure and very clear about where the data resides.”