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Scaleway thinks the future of cloud hosting is ARM-based servers … – TechCrunch

Iliads cloud hosting division Scaleway is launching a new type of server today. In just a minute, you can launch your server with its own dedicated ARMv8 processor, 2GB of RAM, 50GB of SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth. And it only costs around $3.25 per month (2.99).

If youre not familiar with processor architecture, your computer and your smartphone use two different chipsets. Your laptop uses an x86 CPU manufactured by Intel or AMD, while your smartphone uses an ARM-based system-on-a-chip.

ARM-based devices dont need a lot of cooling and are quite efficient when it comes to power usage. And they are also becoming increasingly powerful. Thats why its a smart bet to use those chips for servers.

In many ways, using Scaleway as your cloud hosting provider feels like using DigitalOcean, Linode or any typical VPS provider. But theres a big difference as Scaleway provides BareMetal servers (and a few virtual server options as well).

For the past few years, the main trend in cloud computing is that you dont rent actual physical servers if you dont have insane needs. Cloud hosting companies run multiple virtual servers on the same physical server, and you can rent those virtual servers.

By splitting up servers into tiny chunks and pooling resources, it has become much more flexible for developers. For instance, you can create a virtual server, install a VPN on it while you travel to China and destroy your server a few days later. Youll only get billed for the hours of usage, making it much more flexible than signing up for servers with a 30-day commitment.

Similarly, if you face big spikes of new users and traffic, youll be able to adjust your server infrastructure in no time. Ive been using Scaleway for my weekend projects and it works well.

Scaleway wants the best of both worlds the reliability of physical servers with the flexibility of virtual private servers. So it means that you can create a server in just a few seconds, assign an IP address, load up an image and attach SSD storage to it.

But youre also the only one using your ARMv8 cores. You wont get any performance surprise as you dont share your CPU raw power with your server neighbor you dont have a neighbor.

Scaleways systems-on-a-chip are provided by Cavium ThunderX. For 2.99 per month, you get 2 ARMv8 cores and 2GB of RAM. You can also choose 4 cores with 4GB of RAM or 8 cores with 8GB of RAM for 5.99 and 11.99 respectively. Scaleway already had ARMv7 servers, so this is a major update of these options.

Scaleway is launching its new ARM-based servers in its French data center first with Amsterdam following course in a few days. I hope the company is also planning to launch new data centers in the U.S. and Asia to make it more compelling for users outside of Europe.

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Cloud Produces Sunny Earnings at Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet – New York Times


New York Times
Cloud Produces Sunny Earnings at Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet
New York Times
The impact of cloud computing was particularly noticeable at Amazon, far and away the leader in this still-young business. The profit Amazon can make on cloud-computing services is significantly bigger than in its retail sales, and that has helped turn ...

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Serverless computing might finally deliver on the promise of the … – GeekWire

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels discusses serverless computing at the AWS Summit in April. (Credit: Amazon)

The original promise of cloud computing was simple: no longer would you need to buy, configure, and maintain racks and racks of servers in hopes of growing a tech business into that capacity. All you needed to get up and running was a credit card and some code; if you started slow, you were only on the hook for the resources you consumed, and those resources were limitless.

As with most technology advances, the reality turned out to be a bit more complicated.

A current customer of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platforms infrastructure-as-a-service products still needs to do quite a bit of work to provision servers, monitor performance, and make sure their costs arent running out of control. And customers running legacy applications that would like to move to the cloud have to do even more work to ensure nothing breaks in the transition.

But serverless computing might just be the technology that delivers on that original promise. Serverless technologies allow application developers and technology organizations to account for unpredictable spikes in demand without having to specify the resources theyll need from their cloud provider.

Serverless is thelatest in a long line of confusing tech marketing terms. Put another way: the servers are still there, but youll never know it.

Last year, people were looking to explore. This year will be the year of great maturity, said Sam Kroonenburg of A Cloud Guru, who will be hosting the Serverless Conference today in Austin, Texas, where 450 serverless enthusiasts will hear presentations from all the major cloud providers on their approaches.

Serverless computing is relatively old as a concept inside forward-thinking elite technology companies, but its only been about three years since it has started to gain traction.

The spark behind this movement was the preview release of AWS Lambda in 2014, which Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recently called the last crucial piece in the promise of the cloud. Lambda became generally available almost exactly two years ago.

Lambda really brought to life a managed computing environment, where you no longer need to think about managing instances, or managing servers or managing any type of infrastructure: you could just write code and deploy it, Vogels said at the AWS Summit in San Francisco last week.

Almost all cloud providers now offer serverless capabilities for their cloud customers. Lambda is probably the gold standard, thanks to its early debut and the healthy market share enjoyed by AWS, but Azure Functions have been generally available since last November and Azure CTO Mark Russinovich recently gave an update on the state of Micrsofts serverless efforts.

Ahead of the Serverless Conference on Thursday, IBM announced new capabilities for its Bluemix OpenWhisk product, including a new API Gateway that allows developers to target multiple endpoints. Google just elevated Google Cloud Functions to beta status, but has not announced a time frame for general availability.

Their approaches can be a little different, but they all allow a developer to upload code once and set a trigger that instructs the application to behave a certain way in response to certain inputs.

A classic example of an application that can benefit from a serverless approach is one that might experience rapid, unpredictable spikes in demand, such as when DJ Khaled posts something to Snapchat. Serverless tools can automatically execute code in response to a flood of incoming traffic, or a pre-determined event such as when a file is uploaded to a database. (This well-written primer from Martin Fowler covers all the technical bases.)

One of the things that has come out of this serverless movement is the recognition that an event-based or trigger-based programming model is actually a very powerful model one where I can get code activated very quickly and respond to it, Russinovich said earlier this month.

Along those lines, Algorithmia CEO Diego Oppenheimer will discuss how the benefits of serverless computing could enable the next generation of machine learning at our Cloud Tech Summit in the Seattle areathis June.

And because serverless functions can be spun up and taken down in fractions of a second, a cloud provider is able to charge its customers accordingly, rather than charging them for computing services by the hour, week, month, or even year.

You only have to pay for what you use. This is a tremendous change in the way people are developing applications; build highly scalable environments and only build what they are paying for, Vogels said last week.

This is still early-adopter territory. After all, there are so many companies that are just getting started designing applications for the cloud, let alone embracing something like serverless computing.

You have to be a bit of a self-starter to put serverless computing at the heart of your application strategy. The biggest complaint among early adopters of serverless computing is the lack of proper tools optimized for this style.

Some of the basics of software development were not there in early days, like being able to properly debug and deploy, said Kroonenburg, noting this has improved a lot in just the last year. Google hopes to address this problem by working with the open-source community to develop serverless tools instead of building its own Google Cloud Functions-oriented tools, said Alan Ho, a product marketing manager for the company.

Serverless can also get very complicated, very fast, if youre using it for Internet of Things applications.

The Next Web recently published an account of how iRobot is using serverless computing to run its robot vacuum cleaners, and while there are a lot of benefits, with any technology, here are the places where it works and where it doesnt, you are always trying to find a balance with how pragmatic the solution is to meet your goals, said Ben Kehoe, cloud robotics research scientist, in the profile.

However, thisis clearly an exciting cloud technology one that could really drive the promise of cloud computing to the next level.

To me, this has strong potential for being the future model of compute, said Michael Behrendt, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, because you really dont have to pre-buy or pre-allocate; with serverless that goes away. Were used to that already in other domains, like with APIs: you pay by the API call. Serverless is applying that notion to compute in general.

[Editors Note: This story has been corrected to properly spell the last name of IBMs Michael Behrendt.]

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How serverless computing affects a cloud operations team – TechTarget

Virtual resources have always created a challenge for operations teams. Most IT professionals learned their skills...

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in an age where organizations deployed servers, maintained consistent operating systems and middleware on each, and assigned applications to those servers in a way that could optimize efficiency and performance. But virtual resources -- particularly those in the cloud -- break the connection to the physical world. They require a cloud operations team to plan hosting, and view redeployment, in new ways.

The emerging concept of serverless computing in the cloud demands even more change of IT admins and cloud operations teams, ranging from the way they track cloud costs to the management tools they use.

Serverless computing is a model for public cloud services in which users pay to run application components, rather than for the resources on which they run. With serverless computing, cloud providers don't charge for standby resources, and applications aren't assigned to a specific hosting environment. Cloud providers decide where to run an application component when it's needed, based on service-level agreements and their own resource efficiencies.

IT operations practices for bare-metal or virtual machines work fairly well with the traditional pay-as-you-go cloud pricing model. You build a machine image that contains the right operating system and middleware version, combine that with the application images and deploy it on a cloud server that has the specific characteristics you need.

Serverless computing takes the explicit notion of a cloud server away. Instead of paying a fixed price for the server instance, you pay when your application runs. That means applications with spotty usage would likely cost you less, and those that run continuously might cost more.

For serverless computing, a cloud operations team needs to rethink application costs based on the usage of each separate application component. To start, deploy traditional monitoring tools to find out how often your applications are used. Used, in this sense, means given work to do -- not just being available. Those usage rates, combined with the serverless pricing models of cloud providers, will tell you which provider will run serverless applications at the lowest cost and which applications may be unsuitable for the serverless model.

Cost isn't the only big change serverless computing brings to a cloud operations team. The primary drive behind serverless computing isn't price -- it's flexibility. Most legacy applications are transactional, meaning a specific set of users generates specific inquiries or updates that the applications process.

Serverless computing in the cloud is driven by event-based applications. These applications may be linked to not only a few users, but to millions of mobile users or billions of internet-of-things devices. At certain times, there may be no events at all for these applications, and at others, they could be flooded. To handle this application model, it's best to spin up processing resources on demand, which is why serverless computing fits well.

When you select cloud providers for serverless, remember that their operations data and tools are just as important as their pricing.

However, the flexibility and elasticity of serverless computing creates cloud operations issues, too.

First, it's not possible to scale all applications or their components on demand. You have to ensure that two copies of the same application can run side by side without colliding in database updates. Also, make sure that when you spin up a host of serverless components to handle increased load, it doesn't bog down performance of core business applications, such as the database system.

Serverless applications are a mix of different components, constantly spinning up and disappearing. A cloud operations team can't determine the sum of their capabilities and costs by measuring virtual machine usage. This means cloud administration teams, as well as operations and development, have to forge a new partnership to optimally use serverless computing.

These IT teams also require new data to successfully deploy and maintain applications in serverless computing. Old-style virtual machine operations data isn't useful, or even available, in the serverless cloud. Instead, the cloud provider's own tools and statistics on serverless applications become the critical operations resource for day-to-day use. When you select cloud providers for serverless, remember that their operations data and tools are just as important as their pricing.

It's still possible to supplement cloud provider data with your own. Through cooperation with developers, IT teams can include some statistics-gathering features into the serverless components of each application. The applications themselves may also be able to provide you with end-to-end response times and quality-of-experience (QoE) data. The operations focus for serverless computing in the cloud is on application performance, not virtual machine performance, so focus on this new data for proper administration.

Serverless computing is still in its infancy. Traditional IT and cloud operations tools have only limited applicability to serverless environments. Even DevOps tools that focus on deployment can't operate as usual when the deployment is entirely virtual. Most users will probably overlook the need to customize applications for serverless use and, as a result, gain little or no benefit. Plan every step carefully for serverless adoption, and validate that you can sustain QoE and cost-effectiveness.

Compare serverless services from AWS and Azure

Learn how to create a Lambda function

Explore Azure Functions and if it's right for you

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Unplug the Bitcoin miner and do us all a favour: Antminer has remote shutdown flaw – The Register

A new branded bug (sigh) has landed, specific to an ASIC-based Bitcoin miner: dubbed Antbleed, it allows remote shutdown of hardware sold by a company called "Bitmain".

Bitmain's Antminer cryptocurrency-mining hardware performs a start-up with a remote server, handing over MAC address, serial number and IP address but as this site details, there's also a curious piece of code in the current firmware:

The upshot is described by the Antbleed site is that at each check-in (a random time between 1 minute and 11 minutes), the firmware expects a response true from Bitmain.

If the response is false, the device will stop mining Bitcoin and that could be applied to any device, which the Antbleed site claims could be up to 70 percent of the global hashrate.

Not to mention that the information Bitmain collects is personally-identifiable, and as Bitcoin Magazine says, mining is a small industry, so it shouldn't even be hard to connect the machine to specific pools, or blocks.

Since the device runs an unauthenticated API, MITM, DNS or domain hijack attacks make it possible that third parties could exploit the same problem.

The Antbleed site suggests users force the API to treat localhost as the unit's connection to the Bitmain server (auth.minerlink.com) to block the issue at least until the firmware is patched.

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What’s Really Behind the Feds’ Raid of Bitcoin Trader Morpheus Titania’s Home? – Phoenix New Times

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 at 10 a.m.

A local trader of bitcoins, the popular online cryptocurrency, was a focus of a federal task force raid in Mesa last week.

BTC Bitcoin via Flickr

A multi-agency federal task force raided the Mesa apartment of local bitcoin trader Morpheus Titania last week in a case that seems ready-made for one of the suspect's anarchist-leaning blog posts.

Morpheus, whose real name is Thomas Mario Costanzo, is being held at least until Thursday, when his case has a detention hearing scheduled.

Federal court records show he's been charged so far only with possession of three boxes of Winchester ammunition, for a total of 60 cartridges "in different calibers." He denied they were his, but admitted they were in his apartment, records state.

Costanzo's not supposed to possess any firearms or ammunition because of a 2015 conviction in Maricopa County for felony marijuana possession.

Yet the April 20 raid, led by Homeland Security Investigations, had nothing to do with Costanzo being a prohibited possessor.

Thomas Mario Costanzo, a.k.a. Morpheus Titania, was detained after his April 20 arrest for 60 Winchester bullets. He's a prohibited possessor because of a 2015 felony conviction for marijuana possession.

Maricopa County Sheriff's Office

A warrant signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge David Duncan sought evidence that Costanzo may have operated an "unlicensed money transmitting business," engaged in illegal drug sales, and tried to hide any profits.

Agents were authorized to seize illegal drugs, bitcoin records and other financial documents, computers, cellphones, and other items. A separate search warrant asked Costanzo's cellphone company to produce tracking information about his prior whereabouts.

The warrant records were obtained and published on Tuesday by Freedom's Phoenix, an offbeat news-and-conspiracy website run by local Libertarian activist Ernest Hancock.Costanzo works for Freedom's Phoenixas sales and marketing manager and has been Hancock's friend since they met in 2003, Hancock said in a podcast on Friday.

Hancock didn't return an e-mail seeking comment.

The site also published photos from the raid at 417 North Loma Vista Circle in Mesa, showing heavily armed SWAT team members and other officers, and an armored vehicle.

The apartment landlord told agents that Costanzo has lived there by himself for about a year.

In various online articles, Costanzo touts himself as one of the area's most prolific traders of bitcoin, the popular crypto-currency currently trading online for nearly $1,300 per coin. Online records show he's made more than 100 trades in the past four years.

"Awesome to work with!" one of his customers wrote in a review.

"Because of his rock-solid reputation, he is one of the biggest sellers in the Phoenix area," Costanzo wrote about himself in 2014 on one of his web sites, Titanians.org. "Morpheus is now semi-retired as a bitcoin trader / entrepreneur."

The site has been a venue for writers including "visionary" physicist Bob Podolsky, and features anarchist essays, 9/11 conspiracy rants, advice on business and ethics, and plenty about bitcoin.

Costanzo ran into trouble with Arizona's stiff felony cannabis-possession law with a trio of offenses during April to December 2014. Without a medical-marijuana card, possession of any amount of pot is a felony, but prosecutors usually knock it down to a misdemeanor or offer drug treatment instead of prosecution.

Costanzo has had numerous prior arrests in recent years and served eight months in prison in the mid-1980s for fleeing from police. He wasn't offered any sweet deals. Following guilty pleas in 2015, he received probation after being convicted of misdemeanors in two of the marijuana cases and of a felony in a third, records show.

Still, despite Costanzo's bad luck or bad judgment, the heavy hand of the government that Morpheus writes about shows through in the cannabis cases. Eight states and Washington D.C. have now legalized marijuana for adults 21 and older, and if Arizona had a similar law, Costanzo wouldn't have been charged and convicted of possession three times, nor been stripped of his gun-and-ammo rights.

However, as local Homeland Security spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe tells New Times, the investigation is "open and active" meaning it's possible thatadditional charges could be forthcoming.

Where are Neo and Trinity when you need them?

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Cryptocurrency Ecosystem Now Worth $32 Billion as Top Altcoins Jump Over 50% – Finance Magnates

This is a stellar week for cryptocurrency traders with both bitcoin and many altcoins reaching record highs based on some very strong trading volumes. The first and leading blockchain is now worth in total more than $21 billion, with the BTC/USD exchange rate above the $1300 price level.

The London Summit 2017 is coming, get involved!

Despite this amazing feat by bitcoin (priced higher than an ounce of gold while the threat of a hard fork is still looming over it) its dominance in the overall crypto market is in fact diminishing. This is due to the rapid rise of competing cryptocurrencies, which some bitcoin purists are calling the altcoins bubble.

While BTC increased by about 7% over the last week, sometop ten blockchain tokens by market value grew in a much greater rate. Ethereum grew over 11%,Ripple over 8%,Litecoin about 50%,NEM (XEM) over 67% and Ethereum Classic (ETC) jumped over 57%.

For the first time ever the market cap of all cryptocurrencies is now worth $32 billion and there are now sevencryptocurrencies with a market cap of near or over half a billion USD each. Besides Bitcoins previously mentioned$21 billion market cap,Ethereums market cap is now $5 billion, Ripples market cap is $1.2 billion, Litecoins market cap is $750 million, NEMs market cap is $470million and Ethereum Classics market cap is over $450 million.

Due to this, Bitcoins market value dominance now stands at just 65%. And even more so, its trading volume dominance is at just about 47% with a daily trading volume of $355 million out of over $755 combined daily trading volume for allcryptocurrencies in circulation.

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Survey hints at cloud computing consolidation, staffing woes – ZDNet

Does security continue to be a drag on cloud adoption? About half of the IT professionals participating in a recent survey say yes, but their nervousness isn't on the data itself -- it's about the lack of cybersecurity skills available to manage cloud-borne projects.

That's one of the takeaways of a recent survey of 2,009 IT managers and professionals from Intel Security, which finds that, unsurprisingly, 93% of organizations now employ cloud services in some form. However, 49% reportedly have slowed their cloud adoption due to a lack of cybersecurity skills.

The survey report's authors speculate that this slowdown is creating an increase in shadow IT services, which only increases security risks. Increasingly, the report states, "IT departments are working with users to find and secure acceptable solutions, instead of just blocking them. While good news for those users and departments, this is increasing the burden on security teams."

Any slowdown in cloud adoption is being accompanied by moves to hybrid architectures, the survey also shows. The majority (57%) are running a hybrid public/private architecture, up from last year's 19%. Those using private-only clouds went down, from 51% last year to just 24% this year. Public-only architectures also recorded a big drop, from 30% to just 19%.

This shift to hybrid architecture was accompanied by a decrease in the average number of cloud services in use, which dropped from 43 in 2015, to just 29 in 2016, as organizations appear to be consolidating their cloud applications and services.

The survey also finds a consolidation beginning within the cloud sector, which favors top-tier providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. These vendors may be helping to address cybersecurity skills concerns as well. Executives are more favorable to storing their data in public clouds, seeing these as safer havens than their own data centers. In fact, 74% say they now store some or all of their sensitive data in public clouds. "Trust in public clouds as a safe place to work and store sensitive data continues to increase, and most senior management now appear to have a reasonable understanding of the risks involved," the report's authors state. "The top-tier providers, have been improving their security posture and expanding their security resources, increasing the differences between them and smaller cloud service providers."

High costs and poor value is now the number one operational issue that IT professionals have experienced with their cloud providers in the past year, followed by poor customer service at number two.

Lack of visibility into cloud provider operations remains the top technical issue, as it was last year. Poor availability and uptime has moved up into the top five, increasing from 17% last year to 22% this year.

Shadow IT is another issue looming on the enterprise landscape. IT departments appear to be moving towards more active methods of monitoring and employing technology in an effort to gain better visibility. Next-generation firewalls have replaced database activity monitoring as the most likely method being used this year,increasing from 41% to 49%. Use of web gateways increased from 37% to 41%, and use of cloud access security brokers (CASBs) increased slightly from 32% to 33%. At the same time,more passive methods of detecting Shadow IT activity, such as working with finance, checking license usages, or word or mouth, dropped significantly.

Usage of Platform as a Service (PaaS) is on a growth path, surpassing Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the survey also shows. Overall, PaaS is now in use by 40% of organizations surveyed, up from 21% last year. PaaS usage and hybrid architecture are strongly related, with more than half of those running a hybrid architecture also using PaaS as part of their cloud services. This year's investment plans are 66% SaaS, 64% IaaS, and 59% PaaS, which is consistent with their relative usage rankings.

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Microsoft’s latest Azure customers revealed; Hershey, Maersk, UBS, and more – Cloud Tech

Microsoft has announced a slew of new customers using its Azure cloud services at its Digital Difference event in New York, including financial services provider UBS and confectioner Hershey.

The customer announcements came alongside the release of a new study, sponsored by Microsoft and put together by Harvard Business Review (HBR), which found less than half of business leaders have a coherent digital strategy despite 80% saying their industry will be positively impacted by digital transformation within three years.

The message from Microsoft was clear: one, digital disruption is happening, through cloud computing, the Internet of Things, machine learning, and much more besides; two, your organisation needs to keep pace; and three, heres how were helping organisations keep pace. As a result, the primary interest here is not the fact Hershey, Maersk, UBS and others are using Azure, but how they are using them.

Hershey, for example, is using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors which feed data into the cloud, which is then analysed via Machine Learning in Azure, in order to gain greater insights and trends. UBS is using Azure to power its risk management platform, which can ultimately save 40% in infrastructure costs, while Maersk who readers of this publication may also recognise through their blockchain initiatives with IBM is doing various things, from its supply chain business Damco building solutions on Azure, to building an app store on Microsofts cloud.

Other companies announced as being Microsoft shops at Digital Difference were clothing provider Fruit of the Loom, with the company developing predictive models for consumer behaviour through Azure, and automotive insurer GEICO, who is opting for more of a hybrid cloud strategy.

Companies are choosing Microsoft to empower their digital difference, said Judson Althoff, EVP of Microsofts worldwide commercial business in a statement. Microsoft has the edge in development in the cloud, IoT, advanced analytics, mixed reality and artificial intelligence. We understand companies needs for innovation, speed to market, and the importance of continually transforming and re-evaluating how business is done.

Elsewhere, the HBR paper argues the models and strategies for digital disruption are still evolving, but once companies go all-in with a major commitment to digital as a primary revenue driver, they are more likely to elevate and centralise digital efforts. Most respondents recognise the opportunities the digital revolution is bringing, with the two biggest prizes being enhanced customer relationships and greater value chain integration, the report notes. The highest digital priority, by far, is creating an exceptional, highly relevant customer experience.

You can read the full report here (pdf).

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CLOUD COMPUTING Oracle Hits Suiteworld with Cloud Plans and NetSuite Initiatives – CIO Today

Coming only five months after its acquisition by Oracle, NetSuites SuiteWorld 2017 event was always going to be a different affair from previous years. For one thing, Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd was in attendance for the first time, joining NetSuite EVP and former president Jim McGeever. The event, running from April 24-27, also shifted locales from its usual San Jose location to Las Vegas.

But both Oracle and NetSuite took pains to underscore continuity following the merger, rather than highlight any changes. McGeever emphasized that all sales, services, customer support, and development will be maintained within the NetSuite business unit, meaning that customers should expect to see minimal changes.

Double the Data Centers

On the other hand, NetSuite and Oracle leadership talked about the benefits customers will see as a result of the sale, such as greater investment in international expansion and less pressure from public shareholders.

Hurd (pictured above) also addressed the question of whether Oracle had plans to sell off any parts of the newly acquired business. To the contrary, the company announced plans for a major global expansion that will include more data centers, field offices, development centers, international product functionality, and a broader partner network.

"Leveraging Oracle's global scale, we are able to massively accelerate NetSuite's vision of bringing a single unified suite to companies all over the world," McGeever said in a statement. "Oracle's technology infrastructure and global reach enables us to help ensure customer success no matter where they are located in the world."

Under Oracle, NetSuite plans to more than double the number of data centers it operates globally, from five to eleven. The new data centers will be located in Chicago, Frankfurt, Australia, Singapore, Japan, and China. The company said the addition of the new data centers will provide customers with greater security, redundancy, performance, and scalability.

New Products

The business unit will also be expanding its field offices from 10 countries to 23, with plans to increase headcount by 50 percent to better address rising global demand for cloud enterprise resource planning services.

One new cloud service NetSuite will be offering is a core human resources service called SuitePeople, which the company is adding to its cloud suite. SuitePeople will offer core HR capabilities, HR analytics, compliance, and security services, according to the NetSuite.

The company is also reconfiguring the way it delivers its cloud solutions. NetSuite is calling the new platform SuiteSuccess, and marketing it as a unified industry cloud solution to address the unique needs of a number of sectors, including advertising, media and publishing, financial technology, manufacturing, retail, software and Internet, and wholesale distribution businesses.

Meanwhile, NetSuite also took advantage of this weeks event to launch of several new artificial intelligence apps for the customer experience. The new services, known collectively as Adaptive Intelligence Apps, analyze large data sets, such as customer behavior, in real time.

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