Category: News

Government says G-Cloud will shake up public sector suppliers

Posted on December 23, 2015 by - News

funny_faces_of_dogs_shaking_heads_640_17The UK government claims that its G-Cloud procurement makeover in the new year, will “revolutionise” the way suppliers work with the public sector.

The government is trying to make  procurement simpler for buyers and suppliers and is testing it on its Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) framework.

“Plain English” standards were applied to the DOS tendering process, which the government claims it has vastly simplified.

Writing in its bog the government said: “For the redesigned framework, we’ve reduced the length of the documentation significantly. The new documentation includes six tender documents rather than the 11 we had for Digital Services 2.

“The DOS tender pack, which includes the contracts, has around 50 per cent fewer words than the Digital Services 2 tender pack. It’s also 123 pages shorter. If the average adult reading speed is around 250 words per minute, the old documentation would have taken around nine hours to read, and that’s assuming a reader understands everything on a single read-through. We estimate that the new DOS documents will take around three-and-a-half hours to read.”

G-Cloud – which shares a place in the Digital Marketplace alongside the DOS framework – is next in line to get a procurement makeover.

The blog said that in 2016, the government will work in a similar way for the next iteration of G-Cloud (G-Cloud 8) as well as for any new or redesigned frameworks coming onto the Digital Marketplace in the future.

“We think that meeting user needs is important for all government procurement, not just for digital and technology services. We want to share our approach and the lessons we’ve learnt from delivering DOS for the Digital Marketplace.”

UK VARs unhappy with US Vendors

Posted on December 21, 2015 by - News

too_good_for_grumpy_catUK VARs are less happy with their vendor partners than their counterparts in the US, according to a new survey.

The research conducted by CompTIA surveyed more than 200 British channel firms earlier this year as part of its State of the UK Channel Report 2015 and compared the results to that of the same survey it carried out in the US.

According to the results only one in five UK resellers would give their vendors the highest possible satisfaction rating. In the US 40 percent thought their vendor is the bee’s knees.

Less than 12 percent of UK resellers were not satisfied with their vendor partners.

CompTIA’s senior vice president for industry relations Nancy Hammervik said it is “not surprising” the Brits were less enthusiastic than their US counterparts.

She thinks channel conflict could be partly to blame although geography does not help. The UK is not a primary indirect target for many US-based vendors. She said that UK partners may feel less satisfied due to vendors assigning less resources, communication, marketing support to regions compared to the US.

More than 40 percent of respondents said channel conflict with vendors has gone up in the last year.

“There are more vendors can do to ensure their channel partners are 100 per cent satisfied and happy selling their products,” Hammervik said.

“If a reseller knows that their supplier is reliable and offers a product that their customers will want, they will have the confidence to retain and expand the relationship, meaning more business and income for the vendor.”

Execs go as Kaspersky loses business

Posted on December 18, 2015 by - News

40153923-1-kaspersky1Two of Kaspersky Lab’s top US executives have cleaned out their desk after they failed to convince US government officials that not everyone in Russia is a pawn in Tsar Putin’s game.

The company’s leader of its North American operations and the head of a Washington-area office went as it struggles to win US government contracts.

Company Chief Executive Eugene Kaspersky confirmed the changes in an interview with Reuters during a visit to China but claimed the two personnel changes were unrelated.

Kaspersky said the North America head Christopher Doggett had gone to a competitor while Kaspersky “decided to change leadership in DC,” where the two-year-old office pursues work protecting government agencies and critical infrastructure.

Doggett and former Washington-area head Adam Firestone are not saying anything.

But the shakeup comes at a time when Kaspersky says it is hard for non-American security companies to win bids for federal jobs and big US corporate contracts. The Americans were not really loyal to any non-American products and only British companies are treated in the same way as the Americans.

Kaspersky has been the foremost researcher uncovering Western government spyware for the past several years. Earlier this year, it said it had itself been attacked by one of the most sophisticated strains uncovered to date, with an intrusion it hinted came from U.S. ally Israel.

Kaspersky has also come under US. scrutiny for other reasons after claims that it distributed malware samples that were designed to trigger false positives by rival companies, prompting them to isolate legitimate software on users’ computers. Kaspersky denied it.

But the stories apparently drew attention in the White House and intelligence agencies and decreased Kaspersky’s chances of getting significant government contracts.

Dixons Carphone coins it in

Posted on December 17, 2015 by - News

979583-scroogeDixons Carphone is finding itself rather flush in the run up to Christmas, and might even be able to afford to buy its staff a celebratory mince pie.

The numbers for the period up to 31 October show revenue increased up five per cent year-on-year to £4.39 billion and up three percent on what was expected.

The company was formed last year from the merger of Dixons and Carphone Warehouse and it has seen its rivals suffer badly in the months that followed. Not so for Dixons Carphone.

UK and Ireland markets grew two percent to £2.87 billion and the Nordics edged up one percent to £1.19 billion. The only dark spot was Southern Europe fell six percent to £257 million, but this was related to the weakness of the Euro rather than sales problems.

CEO Sebastian James said the market was flat but his company saw like-for-like growth driven by market share gains across all territories.

The British stores saw cost and what Dixons Carphone claims were “synergy savings” when it closed the Dixons HQ in Hemel Hempstead. White goods offset a “fall in demand” for tablets and PCs. The mobile business mopped up some share, it said.

A “strong” Black Friday was a decent opening to the Christmas sales season, the CEO said.

DixCar made “progress” on “price-matching” against the local Nordics retailers but this, coupled with forex pressures, had “inevitably had some impact on margins” there.

Pre-tax profit was up 35 percent to £135 million, but after finance costs and losses from discontinued operations, net profit for the year was £86 million, compared with £46 million a year ago

 

HP pouring cash into Scality

Posted on December 16, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1A few days after Scality and HPE storage announced a reselling deal, it has been revealed that the former maker of expensive printer ink wrote a cheque for $10 million into the object storage startup.

Scality’s mail product is its RING software storage which uses x86 servers and Linux with no kernel modifications. It can handle for hundreds of petabytes of data and continuous availability at scale, with the ability to serve the majority of storage workloads via file, object, and OpenStack-based interfaces.

The investment move adds to the story of the HPE Server-Scality reselling deal. It would appear that Scality has found its much needed sugar daddy.

Earlier this year, Scality announced a $45 million D-round of funding, taking total funding to $80 million so this HPE $10 million is part of it.

HPE’s move mirrors a similar push by Biggish Blue which bought Scality competitor Cleversafe.
All this money means that HPE likes Scality’s software and wants to help it in its bid to take on IBM in the business market.

Microsoft’s licence change means price hike

Posted on December 15, 2015 by - News

Scrooge-PorpoiseMicrosoft’s Window’s Server move to change from a per-processor to a per-core licensing model next year will mean that many customers will pay more.

Vole’ claims that its move will make it  simpler  for customers to use the software in hybrid cloud scenarios.

But it seems that customers that use virtualisation will have to either buy more Windows Server Standard licences or upgrade to the pricier Datacenter edition.

Microsoft is also switching to per-core licensing for System Center 2016, which the vendor said it also expects to release in the third calendar quarter of 2016.

Partners are muttering that the move will  add complexity to a Microsoft licensing scheme which needs more red tape like a hole in the head. Organisations will have to make sure that all of their processor cores are properly licensed, or face a visit from Microsoft auditors.

Vole so far has not made any comment about whether the new rules will result in higher costs for some customers, but it is hard to see how customers with heavily virtualised environments will not face price hikes.

Under Windows Server 2012 licensing rules, a server with four processors, each with four cores, will need two Standard licences to host up to four virtual operating system instances. Each Standard license, with a mandatory client access license (CAL), costs $882.

Under the new Windows Server 2016 rules the same server will require eight per-core licences for Windows Server Standard.

What might happen is that customers will upgrade to the more expensive Windows Server Data center version which costs $6,155 and can run an unlimited number of virtual OS instances.

 

Dell may continue to spin off RSA

Posted on December 14, 2015 by - News

Dell logoRSA President Amit Yoran has hinted that the long-awaited spinoff of RSA as a separate, private company might still be happening.

In an email, Yoran said that Dell had spent a few hours this week at RSA, discussing the RSA business and where that fits into the Dell “egosystem”. For those who came in late, Dell is going to buy EMC, the parent company of RSA, for $67 billion.

Yoran said that creating growth in security is a business that Dell clearly understands, and the relationship between Dell and Secureworks was also “thoughtfully constructed to create leverage”.

Dell announced earlier this month that it plans an initial public offering of the Secureworks business.

“Michael is also aware of our transformation activities at RSA and very supportive. He is keen to continue learning more about RSA and come up with meaningful ways EMC, Dell and he can contribute to our success in the future. It’s all about creating leverage and accelerating our growth.”

Dell was adamant about the benefits of taking a company private in order to foster growth, Yoran added.

“Dell was also very articulate about the benefits of operating as a private company, including our ability to plan and execute on a longer time horizon without the blinding focus on 90 day reporting cycles. Having spent a vast majority of my career running private companies, I couldn’t agree more.”

He did not say that RSA was in talks to spin off as a private company, but EMC was in serious talks to spin off RSA into an independent company for months before the Dell acquisition. What Yoran is saying fits very much into that concept.

Adobe’s cloudy subscription flowers

Posted on December 11, 2015 by - News

Cloud computing - photo Mike MageeAdobe’s cloud-based subscription model is doing wonders for its bottom line.

The outfit reported a profit that topped market expectations for the ninth straight quarter on strong subscriber growth for its Creative Cloud package of software tools, which includes Photoshop.

More than 833,000 subscribers signed up for Creative Cloud in the fourth quarter ended Nov. 27, more than the 678,200 additions analysts were expecting.

Creative Cloud includes graphic design tool Photoshop, web design software Dreamweaver and web video building application Flash, among other software.

Adobe, which has seen strong growth from Creative Cloud, has been nimble enough to attract users other than enterprises and professionals to the software suite.

More than half of its customers subscribe to the highest-priced full Creative Cloud while the rest subscribe to individual products. Photoshop Lightroom was the fastest growing.

Apparently this is because it is attracting new users from hobbyists and consumers and people that would never buy the Creative products before.

San Jose-based Adobe has been switching to web-based subscriptions from traditional licensed software to enjoy a more predictable recurring revenue stream.

Revenue from its digital media business, which houses Creative Cloud, jumped 35 percent to $875.3 million.

Revenue from its digital marketing business, which offers tools for businesses to analyze customer interactions and manage social media content, rose 2.3 percent to $382.7 million.

Total revenue rose to $1.31 billion.

Despite the 21.7 percent increase in fourth-quarter revenue only matching analysts’ estimates, a much lower 3.4 percent bump in total operating costs also helped Adobe’s profit beat estimates.

Adobe’s net income soared to $222.7 million, or 44 cents per share, in the quarter, from $88.1 million, or 17 cents per share, a year earlier.

 

Security breaches are the kiss of death for companies

Posted on December 10, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerCustomers are walking away from companies who have experienced a data loss due to hacking, according to a new survey.

Data security outfit Gemalto said that more than 64 per cent of consumers surveyed worldwide say they are unlikely to shop or do business again with a company that had experienced a breach where financial information was stolen.

Almost half – 49 per cent – had the same opinion when it came to data breaches where personal information was stolen.

Gemalto surveyed 5,750 consumers in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and United States.

It found that 60 percent of consumers thought that threats to their personal information increases during the festive season, and nearly 20 percent believe that they are likely to be a victim of a breach during the holiday season.

Only a quarter of all respondents feel that companies take the protection and security of customer data very seriously. More than twice as many respondents feel that the responsibility of protecting and securing customer data falls on the company (69 percent) versus the customer (31 percent). Of the employed respondents, only around two fifths (38 percent) feel that their employer takes the protection and security of employee data seriously.

A third of respondents have already been affected by data breach in the past. Around 40 percent were though visiting a fraudulent website (42 percent), phishing attacks (40 percent) or clicking a fraudulent web link (37 percent).

The survey found that customers were getting increasingly impatient with breached companies.

Around a quarter who have been a victim of a data breach, either have, or would, consider taking legal action against the breached company involved in exposing their personal information. Almost half of respondents said they would take or would consider taking legal action against any of the parties involved in exposing their personal information.

IBM makes Clearleap into cloud expansion

Posted on December 9, 2015 by - News

cloudBiggish Blue’s push into the cloud has continued with its purchase of the cloud-based video service provider Clearleap.

Clearleap owns a video platform which can be scaled in a big way and is used by leading media and entertainment companies.  It will be integrated into the IBM Cloud platform. The combined technologies will provide enterprises with a fast, easy way to manage, monetize and grow user video experiences, and deliver them securely over mobile devices and the Web, according to IBM.

Steven Canepa, general manager of IBM’s Global Media & Entertainment Industry division said in a a release that mixing Clearleap with IBM’s analytics and hybrid cloud capabilities will deliver new video solutions that will fundamentally change communications across every industry.

This is the sixth planned cloud-based company acquisition by Big Blue in as many months. In November, IBM revealed plans to purchase cloud-based software developer Gravitant  whose platform CloudMatrix allows companies to adopt a multi-sourced cloud operating model by making it simpler to create, manage and order a multi-cloud IT environment from a single console. Also in November, the company bought Cleversafe, a developer of object-based storage software and applications.

In October, IBM bought The Weather Co.’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based Web properties. The purchase would bring together IBM’s cognitive and analytics platform and The Weather Co.’s cloud data platform, which handles 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services each day, according to a release.

IBM wants  to buy Compose which provides database as a service offerings targeting the Web and mobile app developers.

Cloud phones wants to double resellers

Posted on December 8, 2015 by - News

Every silver has a cloudy liningCloud Telephones wants to double the number of resellers it works with pro-actively to market and sell hosted VoIP services over the coming year.

The company is currently working with and paying commission to 70 partners across the UK and wants to bring another 70 on-board through the course of 2016 to meet increased demand.

The outfit claims it has seen monthly income from voice services subscriptions grow by more than 200 percent with half of all monthly revenues going to the reseller. It predicts that the growth will continue with higher volume of new customer enquiries it is now generating, needs to engage with additional partners.

In a statement John Carter, Managing Director of Cloud Telephones, said: “The demand is there – we just need more resellers to get involved. Most customers understand hosted voice well enough now and we take all the hassle away from the reseller, so they don’t need to worry about the complexity of getting customers set-up. We generate the original leads, manage all the provisioning and provide support. We have managed thousands of installations already, so the customer gets a great experience and all the reseller needs to do is go out and sell.”

 

Microsoft moves server software to per-core licensing

Posted on December 7, 2015 by - News, Products

microsoft-in-chinaMicrosoft seems set to move its Windows Server 2016 to a per-core licensing system.

Windows Server will not arrive until the second half of next year, but Vole will probably change the way it licenses its server operating system.  Currently Microsoft uses a per socket licensing system, but now it wants to charge per core.

Windows Server 2012’s two main editions, Standard and Datacenter, had identical features, and differed only in terms of the number of virtual operating system instances they supported. Standard supported two virtual machines while the Datacenter product was unlimited. Licenses for both editions were sold in two socket units and a license was needed for each pair of sockets a system contained.

What appears to be happening with Windows Server 2016 is that this simple system is going to become more complex. There will be functional differences between Standard and Datacenter editions. Datacenter will gain additional storage replication capabilities, a new network stack with richer virtualisation options, and shielded virtual machines that protect the content of a virtual machine from the administrator of the host operating system.

More significant is that 2016 will use a two core pack, with the licence cost of each 2016 pack being 1/8th the price of the corresponding two socket pack for 2012. Each system running Windows Server 2016 must have a minimum of eight cores per processor, and a minimum of 16 cores per system.

In most cases with systems with up to four processors and up to eight cores per processor, this won’t change the overall licensing cost. But for heavier multi-processing and core use the prices will increase. Two or four processors with 10 cores per processor will cost 25 percent more to run Windows Server 2016 than they did 2012.

Those who know the black art which is Microsoft’s licensing will realise that this brings Windows Server’s licensing in line with SQL Server’s.  SQL Server has been using a per core model since 2014. BizTalk has been using the model since 2013. Azure is also licensed on the basis of virtual machine cores, rather than sockets.

What Microsoft appears to be doing is adapting its licencing to increased  processor core counts and a marked reduction of high socket count systems.

Some customers are going to lose money on the move, particularly those who are unfortunate enough to have Software Assurance agreements that cover systems that were licensed using 2012’s socket-based scheme.

HP Enterprise, Intel and Aruba team up

Posted on December 4, 2015 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudFormer maker of expensive printer ink, HP Enterprise (HPE) has announced a new IoT and Aruba solutions package aimed at better cloud data collection, analysis and beacon management.

The move will help HP partners come up with IoT packages for big corporate clients.

Dubbed Edgeline IoT Systems, the new product line is a joint venture between HPE and Intel. Two devices, Systems 10 and 20 are available in rugged, mobile and rack-mounted versions and sit at the gateways at the network edge. Built around Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite they will run Windows 10 IoT for industrial, logistics, transportation, healthcare, government and retail applications.

System EL10 is tailored to  entry-level deployments, EL20 comes with more features for higher compute capabilities and quick deployments. It’s can handle higher volumes. Both run on HPE’s Moonshot.

Aruba has released a cloud-based beacon management solution aimed at multivendor Wi-Fi networks.

The IoT Aruba Sensor crosses a  Wi-Fi client and BLE radio, so that users can remotely manage Aruba Beacons across wi-fi networks on a  Meridian cloud.

The new sensors are meant to help companies introduce location-based services.

HPE Edgeline IoT Systems are available now in the US and Aruba sensors are now available to order.

Dell mocks HPE’s composing efforts

Posted on December 3, 2015 by - News

Larry_Nickel_composing_in_2004HP Enterprises composing efforts were dubbed a minor effort which will soon b flat, by Dell.

HPE this week unveiled plans to release the new composable architecture early next year. It’s being called Synergy, and HPE CEO Meg Whitman claimed the product was revolutionary.

We were suspicious because it involved the non-word Synergy and the word composable which keeps getting underlined by our word processor as being made up.  Tech companies use the word synergy and made up words when they are describing a non-event and hope that managers will nod when they see the outfit is talking jargon.

Dell also slagged off HPE’s new “composable” Synergy architecture, saying the new infrastructure product is impractical, expensive and doomed to be one of the IT market’s “derelict big ideas”.

Writing in his Dell bog, Dell fellow Robert Hormuth attacked the idea of composable infrastructure and the fact that it is “being driven by a single company”.

Hormuth said punters don’t want their infrastructure composable. They want approaches that work across many vendors and many technologies.

“Organisations require solutions that are simple, inexpensive, agile and scalable over proprietary, monolithic and expensive,” he said.

He said that the HP idea was only supported by HP. It is not open so it lacks flexibility and choice. “We’re looking forward to the evolution of standards-based approaches for composable infrastructure – which will inevitably increase customer choices and leverage expertise by controlling cost. After all, the marketplace is littered with derelict big ideas that were pushed by a single enterprise technology vendor. Right now, composable infrastructure could be one of those big ideas.”

Hormuth, in his blog post, touted Dell’s Active System Manager architecture as more practical, affordable and flexible than composable infrastructure.

HPE Vice President Paul Miller told  CRN, “If you don’t have a composable infrastructure yet, then of course it is not practical for you to sell one. What is not practical about having a system that gives you fluid pools of compute, storage and fabric, that enables you to stand up infrastructure for a workload in three minutes or less?”

The new HPE architecture is being billed as the first ever designed to bridge traditional and cloud-native applications into fluid resource pools that can be deployed at “cloud speed.” That could eliminate the big advantage that Amazon Web Services has had over internal IT departments that have struggled to provision workloads instantly like AWS can.

Brown becomes Exertis channel supremo

Posted on December 2, 2015 by - Moving People, News

exertisDistributor Exertis has appointed Phil Brown to lead the commercial business units and IT reseller base for B2B and VAD solutions.

The official title on his business card is sales and commercial director for IT but he has a pretty wide ranging brief. Apparently Exertis wants to expand its company’s partners by aligning the sales and commercial units more closely.

Brown was previously B2B sales director which saw him look after the core IT and specialist sales teams, reseller partners and B2B vendors. Before this, he was commercial and marketing director at Exertis.

In a statement Brown said: “This position will enable me to help develop the Exertis proposition and ensure that all our partners have access to a wealth of great technologies, solutions and services we offer. I can’t wait to get started.”

Exertis UK’s managing director, Paul Bryan, added: “Phil has already demonstrated his skills and attributes in the course of his previous roles with us and I am confident he will build on this in his new role. This is an important next step in our evolution as we enhance our focus in the market.”

Exertis recently announced that is it has realigned the structure of its networking team ahead of the market trends it expects to unfold in 2016.