The 1950s saw the introduction of automobile seat belts; in the 70s, airbags began showing up in cars. Electronic Stability Controlled rolled out in the late 80s, and the last decade has seen the deployment of radar and camera-based backup assist and blind-spot warning systems.Auto safety experts say network technology could be the next major car safety innovation. “Decades from now, it's likely we'll look back at this time period as one in which the historical arc of transportation safety considerably changed for the better, similar to the introduction of standards for seat belts, airbags, and electronic stability control technology," said David Freedman, administrator for the National High Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA) in 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As you’re brushing your teeth in the morning you monitor a digital display mirror that shows all your relevant information for the day: Schedule of appointments, weather and battery levels of all your devices, including your phone and BMW i3 electric car in the garage.As you walk into your kitchen and turn on your coffee machine, that’s the cue your car has been waiting for to turn itself on and begin to warm up. Time to go: With a swipe on your touch-enabled car key, the vehicle detaches from its charging unit, pulls out of the garage and up to your front door. It’s already calculated the best route to your first appointment, taking into account traffic and weather.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Application containers are all the buzz nowadays. They’re an easy way to package applications and their dependencies into Linux container boxes and run them anywhere – public cloud, a private data center or a developer’s laptop.The problem comes when managing a whole lot of containers together.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Everything you need to know about Google I/O 2016 | Will containers kill the virtual machine? +
There are a handful of platforms emerging for managing containers at scale. Docker – the company that is credited with generating much of the market buzz about containers – has its own tool called Swarm. Google – which has said that most of its internal apps run in containers – has open sourced its own container management platform named Kubernetes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As SAP holds its annual Sapphire Now user conference in Orlando this week, two of the leading IaaS providers are making the case for running SAP apps on their public clouds.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined SAP CEO Bill McDermott during the Sapphire keynotes on Tuesday to announce a broad partnership between the two companies that will optimize the Azure public cloud to run SAP workloads.Not to be outdone, early this morning before the keynote even kicked off Amazon Web Services issued a press release announcing a handful of customers – including General Electric, Brooks Brothers and Lionsgate are running SAP apps on its public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Recently released reports from two investment research firms call into question just exactly where IBM fits in the cloud computing market.Deutsche Bank’s Markets Research team issued a note titled “Why IBM Won’t Catch AWS,” which argues that IBM’s focus on hybrid cloud computing puts the company in a different, and smaller, market than Amazon Web Services.Another report from UBS Global Research focused more broadly on the cloud computing market and said IBM should be considered among the “Big 4” providers in cloud: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.The conflicting reports show IBM is sitting on the fringe of the cloud market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two of the most risk averse industries are health care and financial services. Yesterday I wrote about how banks are increasingly using public IaaS cloud services. A new study this week finds that health care are warming to the cloud too.Two years ago HIMSS Analytics and Level 3 found that 22% of health care providers planned to use cloud for back-office functions. This year, the number more than doubled to 46.7%. Just over one in three respondents said they have some sort of patient engagement tools hosted in the cloud. Another popular use case for cloud was Health Information Exchanges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the early 1930s Congress chartered a dozen federal loan banks across the country to help smaller banks provide liquidity for home loans. Today, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago holds $70.7 billion in assets. And Eric Gieger, vice president of IT operations for the bank runs this financial institution from the cloud.Just a few years ago it would have been rare to see financial institutions operating in the public IaaS cloud, but recently there have been more examples. Last year at Amazon’s re:Invent conference Capital One’s CIO Rob Alexander described how the bank is using Amazon’s cloud to host some of the company’s newest applications. Capital One and the FHLB of Chicago show that even the most risk-averse organizations are beginning to embrace public cloud computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After a tumultuous time period of executive transition, questions about whether the company would be taken private or sold, and debate about the future of its public cloud plans, managed hosting and cloud provider Rackspace made a big pivot last year.The company has always prided itself on “Fanatical Support,” meaning that it will help customers use its infrastructure services. Last year it did what would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago though: It began offering that fanatical support for other cloud providers too.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: IDC's pick for the best cloud consultant is... | Geeky ways to celebrate Friday the 13th +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing can be a difficult technology to wrap your head around so many users turn to consultants to help them. Who’s the best cloud consultant?IDC says its Accenture.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Commercial drones gaining altitude with top IT vendors +Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Accenture landed at the top of the list: The company is one of the top IT consultants in general and has aggressively pivoted toward helping customers embrace cloud technology. IDC
The size of each bubble represents market shareTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pivotal, the platform as a service company spun out from VMware and EMC three years ago, today announced plans to close a series C financing round worth $253 million led by Ford, Microsoft and its existing investors GE and its two parent companies.Pivotal is one of the leading vendors behind the Cloud Foundry PaaS, the commercialized version of the open source project. Cloud Foundry provides an environment for developers to build applications; it provisions the infrastructure needed to run and scale them.Perhaps most interesting about the announcement are the new investors: Ford and Microsoft. Ford follows GE as an investor in the company, indicating its heavy use of CF and its desire to ensure the company’s future viability and success. Ford last week launched FordPass, a consumer platform that the company says was built with Pivotal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For most retailers, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the holiday rush. For 1800Flowers, it’s Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.Complicating efforts in recent years has been the venerable online flower shop’s extended reach: The parent company acquired the Harry & David brand 18 months ago, which 1800Flowers CIO Arne Leap called a “watershed moment.”“We had a real need to change our order management to support omni-channel, and tie together our commerce platforms,” Leap said of the new combined companies.Through a partnership with IBM, 1800Flowers went to the cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 25 Mother's Day gifts with geek appeal +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
GameStop operates more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. and another 2,000 abroad. Between paying monthly rent, managing leases and searching for new properties, there’s a lot to keep track of for the company’s commercial real estate team.A few years ago GameStop began using a real estate management software as a service (SaaS), but Vice President of Enterprise Architecture Mark Patton says there was a problem. The software needed data from many of GameStop’s other business apps: ERP systems, financial platforms, etc.“We needed a way to glue these things together,” he says. “You need to be able to get data into and out of apps quickly.”Traditionally, the answer to this problem has been to use integration software on premises. In recent years a market has emerged in the cloud called integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS, which offers a hosted integration platform that can be a central cloud for connecting many apps and cloud services together. Gartner estimates it could be a $1 billion industry in a few years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bill Fathers, the former executive of Savvis who has been leading VMware’s hybrid cloud efforts for the past three years, is leaving the company. LinkedIn
VMware EVP and GM of Cloud Services Bill Fathers is leaving the company
VMware confirmed the news that was first reported by Fortune.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft, Google sweeten their cloud freebies | OpenStack then vs. now +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft and Google each this week increased incentives offered for joining their cloud platforms, highlighting the aggressive nature of this battle for market share.It’s not uncommon for cloud computing providers to offer free services. In the IaaS market all the big providers have free service tiers that allow customers to test their products before paying for them. The expanded freebies announced this week by these vendors goes beyond that though.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Free cloud storage options | How to store all your photos in the cloud for free +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Six years ago in July 2010 OpenStack held its first ever Summit; a group of 75 people, many from Rackspace and NASA, gathered in Austin, Texas to help launch the open source project.This week 7,500 attendees descended on the 14th semi-annual OpenStack Summit, which returned to its hometown since that inaugural event. Things are very different now than they were then.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: OpenStack users share challenges, benefits of open source cloud computing | Cool products from OpenStack Austin Summit +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A couple of years ago tech executives at FICO wanted to update their infrastructure. “OpenStack seems to be the wave of the future, so we gave it a run,” says Donald Talton, senior manager of platform operations and cloud engineering at the credit rating agency. SolidFire
Donald Talton
FICO considered using VMware, but felt that the “momentum” of OpenStack was stronger, Talton says. And so began FICO’s use of OpenStack’s IaaS open source private cloud software. Talton says it’s been great, though that doesn’t mean it’s been easy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four years ago tensions between OpenStack and Amazon Web Services were at a high. The open source cloud computing platform was being developed as an alternative to AWS’s and members of the community spoke despairingly about the public cloud behemoth.
Fast-forward to today, and the relationship between these two cloud platforms seems quite undefined.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AUSTIN, Texas – Today, 114 petabytes of data traverse AT&T's network daily, and the carrier predicts a 10x increase in traffic by 2020. To help manage this, AT&T is transitioning from purpose-built appliances to white boxes running open source software. And according to AT&T Senior Vice President of Software Development and Engineering Sarabh Saxena, OpenStack has been a key part of this shift.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: OpenStack Director: Why open source should be the core of your cloud | Cool products from OpenStack Summit +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New productsThe open source cloud computing market descends on Austin, Texas, this week for the OpenStack Summit, the twice a year conference that showcases the platform and plans for its future. Check out some of the coolest products and services from the show.HPE Helion OpenStack 3.0Key features: Helion OpenStack 3.0, HPE’s latest OpenStack platform release, features enhancements designed to deliver improved configurability and tighter controls to maximize operational efficiency, without vendor lock-in, for easier private cloud deployment. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The latest bi-annual survey data of OpenStack users shows a continuing march of the open source cloud software into mainstream of enterprises, but also the project’s continued challenges related to ease of deployment and management.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cool products at OpenStack Austin Summit +One thing that’s clear is that interest in OpenStack continues to grow rapidly. The project is made up of 20 million lines of code; more than 585 companies have supported OpenStack in some way, and the OpenStack Foundation counts almost 40,000 people actively engaged in the community.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brandon Butler