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SAP continues cloud shift with new cloud bookings up 49% year on year – Cloud Tech

April 25, 2017 | Author: admin

SAP has announced its cloud subscriptions and support hit 905 million (768.7m) in the first quarter of 2017, up 34% from the previous year, with new cloud bookings up 49% to 215m.

Its the continuation of a long-running theme for the German software giant, with the company trying to shift its revenue base over from traditional software to cloud for the past few years. Software licenses and support remains strong however, up to 3.42bn from 3.17bn this time last year at an 8% increase. Overall, cloud and software revenue was at 4.32bn and total revenue at 5.28bn, each up 12% from Q116.

Despite this, operating profit was down 17% year on year at 673m, while profit after tax was down 7% to 530m. SAP increased its employee base from 78,230 to 85,751 over the past 12 months.

Discussing the cloud figures, Luka Mucic, SAP chief financial officer said in a statement: This outstanding achievement further validates our investment decisions to drive further growth. Were off to a good start to reach our full year targets and we are confident that we will grow our profitability in 2018 and beyond.

SAP reiterated its 2017 outlook, which argues full year 2017 non-IFRS cloud subscriptions and support revenue will be between 3.8bn and 4bn.

One of the areas SAP has been looking into of late is artificial intelligence, announcing in February the latest offering for S/4HANA, its public cloud, which aimed to provide a roadmap for the next generation of cloud ERP, as the company put it. S/4HANA was updated with a new architecture of in-memory in combination with contextual analytics, digital assistant capabilities and machine learning, aiming to help customers adopt and adjust business processes based on real-time data and insight.

Bill McDermott, SAP CEO, added: SAPs outstanding first quarter results are a decisive follow-on to our record setting 2016. Led by S/4HANA, we are seeing mass customer adoption of our solutions globally.

Our inspired workforce is firmly committed to staying focused on the success of our customers and shareholders.

You can read the full financial statement here (pdf).

Picture credit: SAP

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Councils ‘must be prepared’ to make switch to cloud computing – Public Finance

April 25, 2017 | Author: admin

An academic study, published last week, tracked what happen when local authorities shift their in-house IT services to internet-based providers.

Researchers at Brunel University London focused on three councils, including Warwickshire County Council and the London Borough of Hillingdon, which were among the first to make the move.

While the move to cloud brought with it several advantages for councils, such as making it easier for staff to work from home and better information management, drawbacks were also identified.

Researchers noted that the move tended to be made too rapidly, and there was a loss of control and governance, with a lack of clarity over who was responsible when things went wrong.

One of the councils studied found itself immediately hit by hackers.

Council workers also told the researchers they felt the move had been rushed because of a need to meet a political agenda.

Uthayasankar Sivarajah, lecturer in operations and information systems management and part of the research team at Brunel, said the teams findings contained messages for both local and central government.

There are huge black holes between what the councils are trying to do and what they are achieving, Sivarajah said.

In particular, councils needed to ensure the right person is driving and leading the implementation and ensuring staff buy in.

At operational level they could all see real benefits in cost savings, he added.

But it is still early days and we dont know what the long-term impact will be. That may take 10 years to find out. It might reduce the headcount in IT departments, but I cant see it cutting out the need for them altogether.

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How just 30 machines beat a warehouse-sized supercomputer to set a new world record – ZDNet

April 25, 2017 | Author: admin

An IBM/Nvidia cluster completed a one-billion cell Echelon petroleum reservoir simulation (shown above) in 92 minutes.

A high-performance computing record set by a cluster of more than 22,000 compute nodes has been shattered by just 30 machines.

The massive reduction in computing infrastructure needed to set a new record for simulating oil, water, and gas flow was made possible by tapping into the huge parallel processing ability of graphics-processing units (GPUs).

While the original record, set by ExxonMobil just a few months ago, used a cluster of more than 716,000 CPU cores to run the simulation, this new approach by IBM and Stone Ridge Technology relied on 30 IBM OpenPower servers equipped with 120 Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU accelerators.

The IBM/Nvidia cluster completed a one-billion cell Echelon petroleum reservoir simulation in 92 minutes, faster than ExxonMobil's approach and using what IBM says is one 10th of the power and 1/100th of the space.

The IBM Power System S822LC machines used in this latest test pair two IBM POWER8 CPUs with four Tesla P100 GPUs, using the high-speed, bidirectional 40GBps NVLink.

Sumit Gupta, IBM VP of high-performance computing and analytics at IBM, said the result demonstrates the strengths of this tightly coupled GPU/CPU architecture.

"The bottom line is that by running Echelon on IBM Power Systems, users can achieve faster runtimes using a fraction of the hardware," he said.

"One recent effort used more than 700,000 processors in a server installation that occupies nearly half a football field. Stone Ridge did this calculation on two racks of IBM machines that could fit in the space of half a ping-pong table."

GPUs excel at tasks that can be broken into subtasks, which can then be handled in parallel by the thousands of power-efficient cores within each GPU. Each of the P100 GPUs has 3,584 cores that can be used for parallel compute, with more than 460,000 cores across the cluster used to run the simulation.

While the types of tasks suited to the massively parallel processing offered by GPUs are still limited, Nvidia says the number continues to grow, and today includes computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, climate modeling, and other tasks related to manufacturing and scientific discovery.

Nvidia recently began pushing its GPUs as a technology suited to training machine-learning models, particularly the Tesla P100 GPU and its own DGX-1 server.

This month, IBM also added the Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU to the IBM Cloud, providing the option to equip individual IBM Bluemix bare-metal cloud servers with two P100 accelerator cards.

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Why Salesforce’s Focus on Japan Is Opportune – Market Realist

April 25, 2017 | Author: admin

Could Salesforce Outshine Its Peers in the Cloud Space? PART 2 OF 19

Earlier in this series, we discussed Salesforce (CRM) opening adata center in Japan (EWJ) to cater to its expanding customer base in the Asia-Pacific region. Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), Alphabet (GOOG), Salesforce, and other cloud providers are competing in adding new data center facilities.

According to Cisco Systems (CSCO) Global Cloud Index, the global count ofhyperscale data centers is expected to grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020, which would amount to 47% of all installed data center servers by 2020. This growth could comprise 83% and 86% of the public cloud server installed base and public cloud workloads, respectively, in 2020. This trend explains tech giants billion-dollar investments towards data centers and IT (information technology) infrastructure.

In fiscal 4Q17, Salesforces revenue grew in all geographies, as the above presentation shows. Salesforce derives the bulk of its revenue from the Americas. However, it is the Asia-Pacific (FAX) region that grew the most, growing 35%, or 30% in constant currency, in 4Q17. The Americas region posted ~$1.7 billion in revenue, Europe (EFA) posted ~$361 million, and the Asia-Pacific region posted ~$215 million. Salesforces continued growth in the Asia-Pacific region indicates its success in and keenness on implementing its diversification plans.

President Donald Trumps proposed tax reductions are expected to bring in more than $2 trillion parked overseas by US companies. This move is likely to benefit Salesforce, which, unlike peers Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle (ORCL), generates a substantial portion of its revenue from the Americas.

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OFFSITE Cloud Computing And Data Center Operator Announces Integration Of Palo Alto Security Platform To Its … – Yahoo Finance

April 25, 2017 | Author: admin

KENOSHA, Wis., April 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --OFFSITE, an innovative cloud computing and data center hosting company, is integrating Palo Alto Next Generation Security Platform and firewalls into its network and private cloud infrastructure. This security platform will offer the industry leading threat protection with deep visibility and predictive analytics for OFFSITE network infrastructure and all clients that utilize it.

"Our approach to IT is to provide the best and most innovative platforms to serve our clients. As network threats increase, the Palo Alto Security Platform was the clear choice to continue providing our clients with the very best infrastructure available," said OFFSITE president, Steve Borucki. He added, "We build highly customized solutions for each client and the rich feature set of the Palo Alto platform allows us to deliver customizable and unique security solutions one client at a time."

Anthony Portee, OFFSITE chief technology officer said, "The fully customized private cloud solutions being envisioned and commissioned by our client base demand a highly scalable and efficient NGFW solution which can satisfy a wide range of business and security needs. From application inspection and content enforcement to executive reporting and traffic visibility, the Palo Alto solution satisfies all of the unique and challenging technical requirements our customers look to OFFSITE to resolve. The high performance and tightly integrated ecosystem provided by the Palo Alto product family fulfills a critical role for OFFSITE's customers."

About OFFSITE

OFFSITE redefines the data center experience for mid-tier IT organizations with its high performing environment for managing data operations. Operating since 2001, OFFSITE offers private cloud services, IaaS, colocation services, disaster recovery services, network operations center (NOC) services, and hosted and managed solutions. OFFSITE's spacious facilities and customized services enable mid-market businesses to solve their IT challenges and discover new managed services, hosting and private cloud computing solutions. OFFSITE is a privately held company headquartered at its own 50,000 square foot facilities in Southeastern WI with redundant data center operations in Chicago, Illinois. For additional information about OFFSITE, call 262-564-6400, email info@off-site.com, or visit http://www.off-site.com

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/offsite-cloud-computing-and-data-center-operator-announces-integration-of-palo-alto-security-platform-to-its-private-cloud-infrastructure-300444593.html

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The future for Cloud First industry reaction – Diginomica

April 25, 2017 | Author: admin

SUMMARY:

Three leading cloud services providers to the UK public sector give their response to techUKs new report calling for Cloud First to be more prominent on the government tech agenda.

As part of its new report Cloud First: Policy Not Aspiration technology industry association techUK calls for greater communication between public sector buy-side and cloud services vendors on the sell-side to support greater adoption of cloud computing in the UK public sector.

It also queries whether the Cloud First message of several years ago still resonates as strongly and is being pushed as hard as it was by central government policy makers.Sue Daley, head of cloud, data, analytics and artificial intelligence at techUK, says:

The next wave of our digital revolution is being powered by the internet of things, big data analytics and artificial intelligence cloud computing underpins all of these developments. Given the importance of this technology to the UKs digital future, it is vital that users understand the security benefits of the Cloud and that advice delivered today addresses the users concerns. We want to take away all the confusion around cloud and highlight that cloud services can actually offer much greater levels of security and resilience as required by users.

diginomica asked a number of UK public sector cloud providers for their own views on the techUK report and its conclusions, beginning with Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud, whos a big supporter of the Cloud First mantra:

Cloud First is a policy that has served us well and should not be dropped. It conveys a simple message one that with the right support can gain traction and act as a catalyst for transformation just as we have seen with exemplar projects from HMRC to DVLA. Theres a lot more to do though with thousands of workloads that are virtualised and would be cheaper and better run in the cloud.

Typically, you find poor leadership and oversight behind failures to implement cloud first. Without a champion or widespread support you can struggle to overcome resistance resulting from a lack of education to benefits of cloud. After all we still see people moving to Crown Hosting or issuing tenders to build data centres.

That said, Hansford is also supportive of the emergence of the Cloud Native message alongside Cloud First:

Cloud Native is equally important and becoming the new mantra for many, but its a much harder message to convey and requires a lot more education. Cloud Native means that the application is written for the cloud from the ground up its not a just a virtualised app. Knowing what is involved 12 Factor App, etc. requires enough understanding to see beyond the headline or sound bite. If youre not careful, you run the risk of ending up with a Cloud Native app that is locked in to a cloud vendors propriety technology stack and therefore falls foul of open government and government procurement policies.

Gavin Mee, Senior Vice President and Head of UK, Salesforce, picks up on the skills aspect of the techUK report:

The TechUK report highlights the issues government faces in rolling out cloud services and echoes theGovernment Digital Service Advisory Boardfinding that the internal skills of employees is a significant challenge to governmentsdesire to move away from legacy IT systems. Whatever the technology involved, culture and employee adoption are critical success factors for any tech project.

At Salesforce we recognise that a gap in digital skills is a key barrier to the adoption of cloud technology, in both the public and private sectors. This is why we believe that the education and upskilling of the entire workforce is of the upmost importance, not only for the success of each organisation, but more widely for the sake of innovation and the future of Britain.

Beyond giving employees the skills they need to succeed, its up to leadership to build a culture of innovation and cloud confidence where employeesat all levels and experience have the tools and culture to learnWe should be empowering all public sector workers, to feel confident using cloud and other technologies to better serve citizens. Its about putting the tools and resources in their hands to boost digital innovation in the public sector.

MeanwhileStuart Provan, Head of UK Public Sector, Oracle, points to the progress that the UK public sector has made in its cloud adoption to date, but adds:

To continue this strong momentum, public sector bodies must ensure that not only are they implementing cloud technologies, but also adapting their business models, processes and organisational culture alongside this change. In doing this, they will be able to fully realise the benefits of cloud particularly when it comes to leveraging cost savings, the latest technical updates and security patches.

Its also vital that the public sector is vocal about, and builds on, the successes it has already seen when using sloud. By highlighting the myriad of use cases for cloud, the benefits for other organisations within the sector will become clear and encourage more to adopt the technology take and advantage of it.

Its a small sample, but cloud services providers to the public sector are clearly supportive of the Public Cloud First message that was set down several years ago. Its up to the buy-side to engage in conversations with the sell-side to ensure that the promise of cloud computing is fully realised in public services delivery.

Image credit - freeimages.com

Disclosure - At time of writing, Oracle, Salesforce and UKCloud are partners of diginomica/government.

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Vocareum Deploys Cloud-Based Online Learning Lab With University Of Notre Dame To Educate The Next Generation … – PR Newswire (press release)

April 25, 2017 | Author: admin

Embedded within the curriculum for Notre Dame's new online Master of Science in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics: Data Science Specialization, Vocareum will be used for multiple aspects of student learning and assessments including: creating practice problems, hosting homework sets, recording grades in the Learning Management System (LMS), and communicating grades and feedback to students.

By using Vocareum, Notre Dame will be able to deploy its online classes much faster and more cost effectively until recently, the big challenge in supporting such classes has been the cost and complexity of setting up labs and compute clusters to meet the need for an up-to-date range of programming languages and analytics tools. Student work, big data sets, computation and visualization environments all present additional administrative burdens. Now with Vocareum, Notre Dame faculty and graduate students get everything in one place.

"We need learning solutions that are current, easy to use, and scalable across a large number of technical disciplines. Vocareum really fits the bill," says Elliott Visconsi, Chief Academic Digital Officer at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Steven Buechler, Faculty Director of Notre Dame's new online data science graduate program, adds that "we were attracted to Vocareum because it offers an extensive set of utilities built on top of AWS, giving us the flexibility to configure a cost-effective computing hub for the diverse tools we'll be teaching across our Data Science program."

About VocareumVocareum is a learning management system (LMS) built specifically for coding instruction. With capabilities like grading automation, plagiarism detection and learning analytics that are missing in horizontal LMS offerings, Vocareum significantly improves assessment efficiency, student engagement, collaboration strategies and learning analytics. By moving student work to the cloud and leveraging cloud computing resources, we make it possible to deliver cost-effective and current computing labs to our partners.

Learn more about Vocareum.

About Notre Dame's Online Masters of Data ScienceThe online Master of Science in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics: Data Science Specialization program from the University of Notre Dame is designed to prepare graduates for immediate career growth and long-term success as data scientists. Shaped by Notre Dame's mission to be a force for good in the world, the 21-month degree program, offered at half-time pace to fit the schedule of working professionals, features the flexibility of online learning, small classes led by Notre Dame faculty and exclusive in-person weekend immersions with faculty, industry experts and thought leaders at Notre Dame and in Silicon Valley. In addition to essential foundation courses in statistics, mathematics and computer science, the multidisciplinary curriculum also features data science ethics, storytelling and communications; data science as a business process; behavioral data science; case studies; and practical applications drawn from industry. Offered by the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, with the collaboration of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Mendoza College of Business and the Department of Psychology, this degree program is designed to prepare graduates for careers as data scientists in a wide range of industry fields including management, marketing, information technology, government policy, health care, finance, education and scientific research.

Learn more about Notre Dame's online data science graduate program.

Media Contact:David Lin VP Business Development david@vocareum.com +1.408.471.4114

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vocareum-deploys-cloud-based-online-learning-lab-with-university-of-notre-dame-to-educate-the-next-generation-of-data-scientists-300444775.html

SOURCE Vocareum

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Gains from encryption continue to outweigh the pain – AMEinfo

April 24, 2017 | Author: admin

The benefits brought forth by digitisation surround us and have a positive impact on virtually every aspect of our modern lives. This progress is only set to expand further as connectivity proliferates and smart cities and Internet of Things environments abound.

This progress, however, comes at a cost, which is that increasingly interconnected, intelligent, and instrumented eco-systems are more open to cyber and other threats.

In much the same way as we believe the gains from digitisation far outweigh the negative consequences of a widening cyber threat surface, we also believe resilient encryptions serve a greater positive role in society than they do a negative or potentially menacing one.

There are by far more progressive things being protected by strong encryption than there are foreboding activities being perpetuated behind the protection offered by encrypted communications.

We advise the establishment of a good implementation of End-2-End Encryption (E2E), which means that nobody in between whether its the device manufacturer, the Internet Service Provider, the telecom companies nor any eavesdropper should be able to decrypt the data.

Such an encryption technique could be further improved with the use of Perfect and Future Forward Secrecy, where the encryption keys and the exchange keys are used only once, then destroyed forensically and never used again, and in which future keys cannot decrypt past messages.

In addition to encryption, we advise enterprises and governments to look at all the end points that might affect data in transit and at rest. It is just as critical to know who and what touches the data in the internal network, the storage network or cloud, as it is to secure the data in transit.

(By Leo Cole, Vice President of Marketing at DarkMatter. He may be contacted on Twitter @coleleoj)

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Enterprises have accelerated adoption of encryption strategies – MIS Asia

April 24, 2017 | Author: admin

Anuradha Shukla | April 24, 2017

Escalating threats accelerate encryption deployments: Thales Global Encryption Study

Enterprises have accelerated adoption of encryption strategies, according to the 2017 Global Encryption Trends Study.

The report, based on independent research by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Thales, indicates that 41 percent of organisations have an encryption strategy applied consistently across the enterprise.

Organizations continue to show a preference for control over encryption and key management when those activities migrate to the cloud, business unit leaders now enjoy a higher influence over encryption strategy than IT operations.

The accelerated growth of encryption strategies in business underscores the proliferation of mega breaches and cyberattacks, as well as the need to protect a broadening range of sensitive data types, said Dr Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute.

He stressed the report found that the stakes were too high for organisations to stand by and wait for an attack to happen to them before introducing a sophisticated data protection strategy. Encryption and key management continue to play critical roles in these strategies.

Of the report highlights, 67 percent of respondents indicated they performed encryption on premise prior to sending data to the cloud, or encrypt in the cloud using keys they generate and manage on premises.

Reflecting wide adoption of cloud computing, 37 percent said their organisations turn over complete control of keys and encryption processes to cloud providers. And as many as 31 percent are currently using or planning to use Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) deployments.

Overall, usage of HSMs with Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) is expected to double in the next 12 months (from 12 percent to 24 percent).

This years findings align with key trends demonstrating an increased reliance on the cloud, ever-evolving internal and external threats, and new data sources mandating stronger protection, said John Grimm, senior director of security strategy at Thales e-Security.

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