Q-loud’s Data Hub for Techem Is a Prime Example of Telcos’ Platform Business Aspirations

by John Marcus, posted in Internet of Things
J. Marcus

Summary Bullets:

  • Q-loud developed an IoT solution for energy provider Techem, which it will deploy and operate.
  • Techem will offer IoT-enhanced smart building services to its customers in the real estate industry, leveraging Q-loud’s platform.

It seems like a pretty modest news item at first glance, a deal between a smaller German challenger in the IT and connectivity space and a specialist energy provider. Q-loud is the IoT unit of QSC AG, a business-oriented network operator and system integrator which has recently shifted its strategy away from traditional telco services for SMEs toward digital opportunities. The largest telcos in Europe, of course, are doing the same, trying to build new platform-based businesses. Some have made multiple acquisitions to get there (Orange invested EUR 1 billion in such acquisitions in 14 months), while the smaller QSC has taken a different approach: selling off a significant part of its telco assets to reinvest the proceeds in digital (the sale of subsidiary PlusNet earlier this year to EnBW Telekommunikation for EUR 229 million euros is funding development of its cloud and IoT businesses). Continue reading “Q-loud’s Data Hub for Techem Is a Prime Example of Telcos’ Platform Business Aspirations” →

Verizon’s 5G Analyst Event Details Strategy and Showcases Use Cases

by Kitty Weldon, posted in Mobilize
K. Weldon
K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • Verizon held an analyst event to highlight its 5G strategy for enterprises and demo a set of ‘real-world’ 5G applications.
  • The demos were credible and interesting, with some showcasing a very strong 5G value proposition.

Verizon’s 5G analyst event on September 4 at the operator’s Innovation Lab in Waltham, MA combined a presentation by Senior Vice President for Enterprise Innovation and 5G Solutions Toby Redshaw with a series of demos of 5G enterprise-focused applications. The event was aimed at giving analysts an updated perspective on Verizon’s approach to the market and showing that 5G applications are truly different from 4G applications due to the capabilities of the new network to support higher bandwidth, immersive experiences, and low latency. Continue reading “Verizon’s 5G Analyst Event Details Strategy and Showcases Use Cases” →

IBM Advocates Open, Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud in Helping Customers Transform their IT

by siowmeng, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable
S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

• IBM is poised to grow its cloud services business by helping customers to accelerate their migration of mission-critical applications to the cloud.

• IBM brings a lot of value by helping customers remove complexities in their cloud migration; and avoiding vendor lock-in through an open source, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategy.

IBM held its annual analyst event – IBM Asia-Pacific 2019 Analyst Insights – in August 2019. The event was held in Singapore and coincided with THINK Singapore 2019, which was the first THINK event in the country. The THINK event helped IBM showcase its capabilities to customers in the country as it starts to ramp up customer engagement. Over the past few years, companies have experimented with AI and moved non-critical workloads to the cloud. IBM now advocates moving from experimentation to more substantial transformation to gain speed and scale. This will involve moving mission-critical applications (80% are still kept on-premises) to the cloud for scalability and agility. While this is ideal, to benefit from cloud-native features, enterprises need to deal with many layers of complexity ranging from regulations and compliance through to re-architecting legacy systems, security considerations, underlying infrastructure, and change management (people and processes). Continue reading “IBM Advocates Open, Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud in Helping Customers Transform their IT” →

Technological Debt is More Than Just Money

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in IT Leader
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Managing technology change is more than just about the technology, it’s about business practices as well.

• Stagnation of technology leads to technological debt, which costs more than money to fix.

Far longer ago than I’m willing to admit, I worked for a now-defunct retail organization in IT. That organization prided itself on two things, its ability to fulfill business needs to a high standard without relying on external vendors or organizations, and its ability to extend the life of arguably ancient IT systems. Massive technological debt was accrued, all with the best of intentions.
Continue reading “Technological Debt is More Than Just Money” →

VMware Wants to Maximize Hybrid Cloud Choice for Customers but Coopetition will be a Key Challenge

by Chris Drake, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:

• VMware and Microsoft Azure are making speedy progress to commercialize their joint hybrid cloud offering, Azure VMware Solutions.

• Azure VMware Solutions forms part of VMware’s push to offer its customers a hybrid cloud option with all of the major cloud providers.

Amid the inundation of announcements and discussions at last week’s VMworld conference in San Francisco, one piece of news that received comparatively less coverage related to Azure VMware Solutions, a hybrid cloud offering from VMware and Microsoft Azure. Already generally available in some U.S. regions, it was revealed at VMworld that by Q1 2020 Azure VMware Solutions would be offered in eight global regions and would include Azure NetApp Files as an option for storage-intensive workloads. Continue reading “VMware Wants to Maximize Hybrid Cloud Choice for Customers but Coopetition will be a Key Challenge” →

Flexible Consumption Options for On-Premises IT Are Gaining in Popularity but Won’t Replace Traditional Approaches

by Chris Drake, posted in IT Leader
C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

  • Flexible solutions for consuming on-premises IT, including pay-per-use business models, vendor-managed private clouds, and flexible financing, continue to attract new customers and providers.
  • Although they will complement, rather than replace, traditional approaches, portfolio expansion, new channel incentives, and efforts to target new markets will all fuel future growth.

Recent months have seen growing interest and investment in more flexible consumption solutions for on-premises IT, including pay-per-use offerings, vendor-managed private clouds, and flexible financing for on-premises IT investments. IT vendors ranging from HPE, Dell EMC, and Lenovo to IBM, Cisco, and NetApp are all looking to tap into what they see as growing enterprise demand for more flexible ways of consuming on-premises IT. Public cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Alibaba, are also honing in on this emerging need for more adaptable IT delivery and contracting models with managed (or easy-to-manage) on-premises versions of their platforms. Continue reading “Flexible Consumption Options for On-Premises IT Are Gaining in Popularity but Won’t Replace Traditional Approaches” →

GlobalData Tracks the Evolution of the Enterprise IoT Platform Market

by Kitty Weldon, posted in Internet of Things, Mobilize
Kathryn Weldon – Research Director, Business Network and IT Services – Americas

Summary Bullets:

• Over the past year, changes in the market have led to changes in GlobalData’s rankings of the top ten enterprise IoT platforms.

• While SAP leads the pack, IBM, PTC and AWS are close behind; each vendor has added capabilities. Analytics, edge processing, go-to-market plans, and integration with other elements of vendors’ portfolios contributed to higher scores.

GlobalData has just completed its analysis and rankings of the top vendors in the Enterprise IoT platform market. For the complete report see here – vendors included are Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Google, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, PTC, and SAP.

Over the last 12 months, the enterprise IoT platform market has evolved; new capabilities were added by vendors, new partnerships established, changes were made in go-to-market strategies, and some vendors have largely dropped out of contention. The most significant example of such a change in direction was GE’s decision to sell off its Digital division last year, which included its Predix IoT platform, in spite of the fact that it was considered a strong contender in the manufacturing sector. For this reason we have eliminated GE from our analysis. Continue reading “GlobalData Tracks the Evolution of the Enterprise IoT Platform Market” →

In a Containerized World, Does the Cloud Really Matter Anymore?

by Brad Shimmin, posted in Cloud Enable
B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• These days, everyone is doing containerization in a mad, industry-wide rush toward what appears to be true cross-cloud compatibility.

• However, enterprise buyers need to be aware that when it comes to containerization and microservices, there’s a huge difference between compatibility and capability.

Back in 1964, media futurist Marshall McLuhan penned the often repeated but somewhat baffling phrase, “the medium is the message,” in an attempt to highlight the importance of the “where and how” of storytelling. To Mr. McLuhan, a film, a novel, and a comic may all tell the exact same story about a boy and his dragon, but importantly each would do so using very different conventions regarding the unfolding of the story, let’s say the manner in which each handles flashbacks. Those differences in turn shape our understanding of the story in unique ways.

Flash forward to the present and among technology providers, particularly those endeavoring to make the architectural leap from premises to cloud, Mr. McLuhan’s more than 55 year old notion seems strangely applicable if not downright prophetic. Let me explain: as a global market trend, the idea of abstraction through containerization technologies like Docker has entirely reshaped the global software landscape, forever altering the way developers create software. In short, abstractions allows developers to write once and run “virtually” anywhere by turning monolithic applications into a series of highly standardized yet extremely malleable microservices. Continue reading “In a Containerized World, Does the Cloud Really Matter Anymore?” →

Huawei’s Ascend 910 Chip and MindSpore Framework Underscore its Ability to Forge Ahead with AI, Despite Escalating Tensions with the U.S.

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data
R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Huawei announced the commercial launch of the Ascend 910, an AI chip optimized for model training, as well as MindSpore, a training and inference framework.

• The announcements come during escalating tensions between the U.S. and China, underscoring that Huawei will forge ahead in emerging technologies, with or without the U.S.

In the realm of AI, Huawei is readying itself to go head to head with global leaders, including Google and Amazon. The company’s recent commercial launches of an AI chip optimized for model training, as well as a training and inference framework, come hot on the heels of the unveiling of its internally developed operating system for mobile devices. The timing of the announcements is opportune; they come during a period of escalating tensions between the U.S. and China, serving to underscore that Huawei will forge ahead in emerging technologies, with or without the U.S. Continue reading “Huawei’s Ascend 910 Chip and MindSpore Framework Underscore its Ability to Forge Ahead with AI, Despite Escalating Tensions with the U.S.” →

Cisco’s Settlement Over Video Surveillance Flap Signifies a New Era in Vendor Accountability

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• After a protracted legal battle that spanned nearly a decade, Cisco settled a lawsuit accepting accountability for a security flaw in a video surveillance system sold to Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and other U.S. government agencies.

• As part of the settlement, the partner’s employee who originally reported the vulnerability will receive $1.5 million.

Eight years after the filing of a lawsuit against Cisco on behalf of U.S. public sector customers and more than a decade after a Cisco contractor initially called attention to a serious security flaw in one of the vendor’s video surveillance solutions, the IT equipment maker reached an $8.6 million settlement with the aggrieved parties and admitted culpability. In a blog posted in late July, Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler wrote that software developed by Broadware – a company acquired by Cisco – used an open architecture that could be vulnerable to a breach. The settlement amount equates to a partial refund to the U.S. federal government and 16 states that bought products between 2008 and 2013. And the $8.6 million settlement included a $1.6 million payment to the person who first identified the vulnerability, although ultimately, no breach ever occurred. Continue reading “Cisco’s Settlement Over Video Surveillance Flap Signifies a New Era in Vendor Accountability” →