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Tag: cloud

  • Brightcove unveils product enhancements

    Brightcove unveils product enhancements

    Brightcove unveiled a series of product enhancements and technology innovations for its video platform and gave a sneak peek of its upcoming roadmap for the remainder of the year at its annual conference, PLAY 2016.

    The following products and enhancements were announced. First, the turnkey OTT solution for media companies and content owners — OTT Flow — which enables customers to rapidly deploy high-quality, direct-to-consumer, live and on-demand video services across platforms with no up front development costs.

    Second, Zencoder UHD Support now provides media companies with the ability to deliver 4K UHD content to devices of all types by adding support for UHD features.

    Third, Brightcove Audience has added a Salesforce integration that alerts sales teams about the viewership behavior of  individual prospects and customers. It also now enhances marketers’ ability to drive conversion and ROI from their video marketing initiatives by delivering new custom forms with call-to-action capabilities.

    Fourth, Brightcove customers can now easily provide their viewers with personalized programming to grow audiences and increase engagement through a new partnership between Brightcove and IRIS.TV.

    Fifth, the Brightcove Player now features support for 360 video. The feature is available now in beta for desktop browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and IE 11/Windows 8.1.

    And sixth, media companies can now expand their content libraries and create incremental revenue streams through a new content marketplace integrated into Video Cloud.

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  • Nepal Telecom lays fiber to Nepal-China border

    Nepal Telecom lays fiber to Nepal-China border

    Nepal Telecom has revealed it has completed a project to lay fiber at the Nepal-China border, paving the way for an interconnection with China Telecom.

    The company has deployed fiber from Kathmandu to the Rasuwagadhi border point via two other Nepalese districts. The deployment uses all-dielectric self-supporting (ADSS) technology, which allows fiber to be deployed without the use of a support or messenger wire to save on deployment costs.

    A spokesperson for Nepal Telecom told that the operator has already commenced installation of equipment for an interconnection with China Telecom’s extensive fiber footprint.

    This will allow the operator to directly link to the Hong Kong Data Centre – one of the two largest data centers in the Asia region – and to establish global connectivity through Hong Kong via China. The company will also connect with a hub in Singapore via India.

    Through these arrangements Nepal Telecom plans to improve the speed and increase the price of its services.

  • AWS to be anchor customer for Hawaiki cable

    AWS to be anchor customer for Hawaiki cable

    In March, the Hawaiki cable project announced its contract with TE Subcom had come into force. They had raised the necessary funds to kick off the construction phase, and yesterday we learned where some of those funds came from.

    Amazon’s AWS division has stepped up for a large chunk of capacity on the system, becoming a high profile anchor customer on a submarine cable system for the first time.

    The Hawaiki cable is the latest project aimed at hooking up Australia and New Zealand directly with the west coast of the USA, stopping in Hawaii and branching off to American Samoa with options to reach several more.

    It’s a route dominated today by the longstanding Southern Cross cable system, and one on which we have seen several failed attempts to build an alternative – especially by partisans on the New Zealand side. This is the first time the money has finally added up though. As currently planned, the cable will stretch 14,000km and deliver as much as 30Tbps of capacity.

    Amazon AWS joins Vodafone, REANZ, and American Samoa Telecom as anchor customers. It’s Amazon’s first foray into the world of submarine cable systems, but surely not its last.

    The cloud giant is merely joining its tech brethren like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft in taking an active role in the underlying infrastructure they all depend on, taking up some of the slack as global telecommunications operators themselves continue to shy away from undersea investments in favor of wireless and terrestrial fiber.

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  • ZALORA Ties the Knot with Customers through Oracle Marketing Cloud

    ZALORA Ties the Knot with Customers through Oracle Marketing Cloud

    ZALORA, the largest e-commerce fashion company in Southeast Asia, has extended its partnership with Oracle Marketing Cloud. ZALORA has relied on Oracle Marketing Cloud technology since 2013 to send its customers targeted and personalized marketing communications at scale.

    ZALORA is the fastest growing online fashion retailer in Asia, operating across eight countries (Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia & Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Taiwan). The e-commerce platform works with a good mix of over 500 international and local labels, providing consumers with a diverse range of apparel, footwear and accessories, tech products, beauty essentials, sporting equipment and more.

    “We are happy to have achieved the success we have today, and want to continue offering the best-in-class customer experience across our digital channels. For us it is not just about understanding our customers preferences, but making sure we listen and respond to their digital body language to develop a personalised dialogue with each and every customer,” said Joshua Tan, Head, Regional CRM, ZALORA.

    ZALORA communicates with more than 10 million app users, 7 million Facebook fans, 500,000 Instagram followers, 120,000 Twitter followers, and over 2.2 million email, call and online chat requests. Today, the platforms cater to the varying customer profiles where ZALORA provides individualized experiences for each of their customers’ interests.

    “Our earlier marketing efforts were batch and blast, but as the business evolved, we saw the need to respond to increased expectations from our customers for a personalized dialogue. Being able to orchestrate individualized communications and make informed, data-driven decisions is key. Having the right tools makes our job much easier, that’s why we chose to extend our investment in Oracle’s Marketing Cloud technology,” said Mr. Tan.

    With Oracle Marketing Cloud, ZALORA is able to speak to customers in a relevant and personalized way. Automated programmes equip ZALORA with the ability to analyse customer behaviour and better understand how to incentivise customers.

    ZALORA has since managed to half the time needed for lead conversion to capture a larger customer base, which has resulted in a multifold increase in revenue. Oracle’s marketing cloud technology allows ZALORA to create automated programmes that have helped reduce the resources previously required.

    “ZALORA is an innovative company that appeals to a young, constantly engaged audience. We are happy that Oracle Marketing Cloud is able to support their marketing organisation with a platform that allows them to intelligently and creatively communicate a cohesive brand message across channels, and deliver a world-class customer experience,” said Paul Cross, Group Vice President, Customer Success, Oracle Marketing Cloud Asia Pacific.

    ZALORA currently has 10 automated programmes in place and has plans to expand the number of triggered touchpoints with customers, to further enhance cross-channel marketing and grow their customers into strong brand advocates.

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  • Apple, SAP enter cloud apps partnership

    Apple, SAP enter cloud apps partnership

    Apple and SAP have teamed up to combine native apps for iPhone and iPad with the capabilities of the SAP HANA platform.

    This joint effort will also focus on developing a new iOS software development kit (SDK) and training academy.

    According to the companies, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK will provide businesses, designers and developers the tools to quickly and efficiently build their own iOS apps for iPhone and iPad, based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP’s open platform as a service.

    These native apps will provide access to core data and business processes on SAP S/4HANA, while taking full advantage of iPhone and iPad features like Touch ID, Location Services and Notifications.

    A new SAP Fiori for iOS design language will advance the SAP Fiori user experience by combining it with a consumer-grade iOS experience to deliver on the robust user needs in the enterprise and enable developers to build next-generation apps.

    SAP will also develop native iOS apps for critical business operations. These apps for iPhone and iPad will be built with Swift, Apple’s modern, secure and interactive programming language, and will offer a familiar user experience with the SAP Fiori for iOS design language.

    “This partnership will transform how iPhone and iPad are used in enterprise by bringing together the innovation and security of iOS with SAP’s deep expertise in business software,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

    “Through the new SDK, we’re empowering SAP’s more than 2.5 million developers to build powerful native apps that fully leverage SAP HANA Cloud Platform and tap into the incredible capabilities that only iOS devices can deliver.”

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  • AWS still dominates cloud infrastructure market

    AWS still dominates cloud infrastructure market

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure services market with a 31% worldwide market share, dwarfing the chasing pack, according to new Q1 data from Synergy Research Group.

    The big three followers – Microsoft, IBM and Google – in aggregate accounted for 22% of the market, while the next 20 top-ranked cloud providers accounted for another 27%. The good news for Microsoft and Google is that they both achieved growth rates of well over 100% so they are at least slowly gaining some ground on the market leader.

    Outside of the big four, the next 20 cloud providers are growing at an average 41% per year, but in a market that is growing at over 50% that means that most of them are losing market share.

    The next 20 providers include Alibaba, CenturyLink, Fujitsu, HPE, NTT, Oracle, Orange, Rackspace, Salesforce, and Vmware.

    With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q1, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) have now comfortably passed the $7 billion milestone.

    Growth rates remain somewhat similar across the major regions meaning that the United States continues to account for around half of the worldwide market.

    “This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group.

    “The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business. This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

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  • Alibaba Cloud launches IoT platform

    Alibaba Cloud launches IoT platform

    Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a series of new products aimed at expanding its IoT, hybrid cloud, storage and security capabilities.

    At its Shenzhen Summit last week, Alibaba Cloud launched version 1.0 of IoT, its one-stop platform for IoT and cloud computing. The service will provide infrastructure for IoT deployments in areas including medical, energy, smart home and intelligent campus networks.

    IoT Version 1.0 combines an IoT foundation kit, an intelligence dissemination platform and smart device and ecosystem functionality. It is compatible with a range of protocols to allow devices to connect quickly to the cloud and other devices.

    At the event, Alibaba Cloud also launched Apsara Stack, a dedicated cloud platform for hybrid clouds. Apsara Stack can be used to obtain public cloud capabilities in a fully-isolated environment within an enterprise data center.

    For enterprise level database and storage needs, the company unveiled a number of services including data migration, storage engines, access protocols and usage models.

    The company also introduced a concept it calls “light computing”, involving providing a cloud storage application interface that allows users to create “instant-on”data processing applications or modules.

    Finally, Alibaba Cloud revealed it has upgraded its AliCloud CDN to support HTTPS encrypted communication, certificate authority services and other enterprise-class security services.

  • CenturyLink expands cloud platform to Australia

    CenturyLink expands cloud platform to Australia

    CenturyLink has announced the availability of CenturyLink Cloud in Australia.

    The CenturyLink Cloud platform delivers enterprise-class control, agility, scalability and security backed by an industry-leading global network.

    Businesses based or operating in Australia can now turn to a single, trusted provider for public and private cloud infrastructure, managed services, colocation, network connectivity and support for advanced hybrid solutions.

    The Sydney cloud node joins the company’s other available cloud locations in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Singapore.

    Gery Messer, CenturyLink managing director, Asia Pacific, said “Launching the CenturyLink Cloud node in Australia signals our strong commitment to this key growth market.

    “We’re seeing increased customer demand for IT services in Australia, which is one of the most connected countries in the world. Thanks to our continued investment in Asia Pacific, many more organizations are achieving success on their hybrid IT journeys,” the executive said.

    Business research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan predicts cloud spending in Asia Pacific will reach $20 billion in 2018.

    CenturyLink’s presence in Asia-Pacific dates back to 1999. Numerous regional and multinational corporations in Australia are customers.

    The Australia cloud node is one of several recent cloud advancements for CenturyLink. In early March, the CenturyLink Development Center opened in St. Louis with a focus on building cloud-based managed services that help drive increased value for businesses. In January, the company launched Relational Database (DB) Service, a MySQL-compatible database-as-a-service designed to meet application developers’ rapid software requirements and drive more agile IT.

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  • Telstra to launch Cloud Gateway in June

    Telstra to launch Cloud Gateway in June

    Australia’s largest operator Telstra will launch a product for businesses needing to connect to multiple cloud environments.

    The company has also added Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its list of supported cloud platforms. The service, named Cloud Gateway, will launch in June 2016.

    Cloud Gateway aims to provide private and secure connectivity directly into multiple public cloud platforms. This one-to-many “gateway” model connects an IP network service to the cloud with data carriage, cross connect in the hosting data center, configuration and support.

    Organizations are expected to be able to access their chosen cloud platform from around the world simply and securely, with increased application performance via Telstra’s IP network.

    Initially, Cloud Gateway will offer customers around the world connectivity to AWS and IBM SoftLayer, while Australian customers can also connect to Microsoft Azure, Office365 and VMware vCloud Air. More infrastructure and SaaS platforms are expected to join over time.

    Telstra executive director for global products and solutions Philip Jones said Cloud Gateway aims to help customers take full advantage of multiple cloud-based workloads.

    “Most organizations don’t realize the full value of cloud out of a single service. Instead, our customers are investing in sophisticated hybrid cloud environments, which come with their own range of fragmented networking challenges,” said Jones.

    “These include managing multiple vendors, portals and contracts, while trying to maintain a high level of security, performance and operational efficiency. We believe that just because these solutions are sophisticated, doesn’t mean that they should also be complex. Cloud Gateway is Telstra’s simple way to connect multiple clouds, and create hybrid environments.”

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  • LinkedIn opens data center in Singapore

    LinkedIn opens data center in Singapore

    LinkedIn has opened its first data center in Singapore, spanning 23,500 square feet in Jurong. This is one of six data centers for LinkedIn globally, and the first outside the United States.

    LinkedIn has invested S$80 million ($587.4 million) so far in the new data center, which was established to enhance the experience for the fast-growing base of LinkedIn members and clients across the Asia-Pacific region.

    With the facility the enterprise social media company aims to imrpove speed and reliability of APAC members’ access to LinkedIn’s services as they connect to professional opportunities on the network.

    Since January 2013, the number of LinkedIn members in APAC more than doubled to reach over 85 million members at the end of 2015. This includes more than 1 million members in Southeast Asia (of which more than 1 million are in Singapore), 34 million in India and 7 million in Australia.

    LinkedIn also counts prominent leaders as its influencers, including Narendra Modi (Prime Minister of India), Piyush Gupta (CEO of DBS Bank), Tony Fernandes (Group CEO of AirAsia), Shinzo Abe (Prime Minister of Japan) and Andrew Penn (CEO of Telstra). Over the same period, LinkedIn’s revenue in the region more than tripled.

    The new data center in Singapore processes all of LinkedIn’s online traffic in the Asia Pacific region and will also handle about a third of global traffic. It will also complement the continuing growth in LinkedIn’s storage and processing needs globally – in 2015, this growth was 34%.

    The smart design features are also expected to reduce the annual energy consumption of the data centre by a magnitude that is equivalent to powering about 100 private homes in Singapore. For more information about the data centre, please click here.

    “Asia Pacific is our fastest growing region in terms of member base outside of the US,” said Olivier Legrand, managing director of LinkedIn in Asia Pacific. “Singapore is the natural choice for us to locate this new data center, as it is already our Asia Pacific headquarters, and it offers the cutting-edge infrastructure and talent we need,” said Legrand.

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  • Tata Comms to provide MPLS WAN for Air France-KLM

    Tata Comms to provide MPLS WAN for Air France-KLM

    Europe’s second largest airline Air France-KLM has handed Tata Communications a multi-million dollar deal to provide next-generation network connectivity to 170 sites.

    Tata Communications will provide Air France-KLM with an MPLS WAN in the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, supported by the operator’s global subsea cable network.

    The multi-year contract will see Tata Communications roll out a fast, intelligent network which will power Air France-KLM’s mission-critical systems, including passenger check-in, flight operations and departure control applications, as well as corporate programs in the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.

    Air France-KLM, which carried 87.4 million passengers in 2014, is the first major European airline group to move away from the legacy networks widely used in the airline industry.

    Tata Communications’ global network – which today connects more than 300 locations for leading airlines worldwide – will enable Air France-KLM to offer a range of digital services in regions that have been identified by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as the future growth drivers of the industry.

    Currently eight of the ten fastest growing airline markets are located in Africa. By 2034, IATA expects 1.3 billion passengers to touch China – up from 850 million at present – and India is set to see an additional 260 million passengers. Europe will act as key transfer hub to these emerging markets, with 1.4 billion passenger journeys in 2034 – nearly 600 million more than today.

    “Investing in emerging markets and cutting-edge digital technologies is at the heart of our growth strategy. We’re introducing a range of innovative services, such as travel apps for smartwatches, to provide a seamless, personalized travel experience for our tech-savvy passengers,” Air France-KLM CIO Jean-Christophe Lalanne said.

    “Tata Communications’ global next-generation network will act as the foundation for these services in the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, empowering us take customer service to the next level and capitalize on the huge growth opportunities that these markets offer.”

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  • Alibaba Cloud AI aims to predict singing contest winner

    Alibaba Cloud AI aims to predict singing contest winner

    Alibaba Cloud’s “Ai,” an artificial intelligence program was put on the spot to predict the winner at the grand finale of “I’m a Singer,” the popular Chinese reality television produced by Hunan TV.

    The competition is major annual event and attracts significant public participation in China. Ai predicted the winner by using neurological networks, social computing and emotional perception.

    Min Wanli, chief scientist for AI at Alibaba Cloud said the result was jointly created by TV audience, public judges, as well as the seven contestants.

    “It is very random and almost impossible to predict using human intelligence, and we aim to achieve real-time prediction by Ai,” said Min.

    “In a previous round, Ai predicted two of the top three winners on April 1,” said Min. “We believe that it will achieve a better performance after learning and evolving over the past week.”

    The program has the potential to understand human emotions, gather insights in real-time, and evolve through strong computing and machine-learning capacity.

    With this capability, Ai identified and assessed factors that may affect the result, including popularity of the songs, the singers’ voice pitch and energy, audience response and online discussions, to name a few.

    The program created and used a dynamic computer model to predict the result by computing both fact-based logical data and subjective emotion-based data.

    Ai’s prediction and the judges’ voting were processed independently and did not affect each other.

    In the future, Ai will be applied to areas such as personal assistance, weather analysis, smart cities and social trend predictions.

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  • Equinix launches data hub service

    Equinix launches data hub service

    The ways in which enterprises assemble their network infrastructure have been evolving rapidly as the industry-wide shift to the cloud accelerates. This week Equinix offered another piece of its ongoing response to that shift, unveiling a new Data Hub service that lets enterprises store their data next to the clouds they use but keep control over it.

    Equinix already has Cloud Exchange, providing connectivity to an ecosystem of cloud providers, as well as Performance Hub, which gets the enterprise WAN into the data center.

    This new offering simply bundles the space and power needed to house big data in a pre-configured package and with partners lined up to help with the particular storage technology.

    The idea is to let folks put their data as close as possible to the cloud services that use it, while at the same time not ceding control or access to it.

    That might be for compliance reasons, it might be to leverage a common data store from multiple cloud providers, it might be simply for data protection or replication, or simply to keep latency as low as possible for things like IOT.

    It’s all part of the industry shift toward caring where data actually is on the internet. From low latency trading, to sovereignty issues, to the caching of content at the edge, to small cells, to proximity to renewable energy, the recurring theme in this era of internet infrastructure has been the old real estate saying, ‘location, location, location’. It’s a quite different theme from the prior decade, in which everything was about achieving scale.

  • Fujitsu switches on Tatebayashi Data Center

    Fujitsu switches on Tatebayashi Data Center

    Fujitsu has commenced operations at its new Tatebayashi Data Center. The newly opened Annex C, featuring optimized air conditioning systems and operating environment, meets Japan’s highest environmental performance standards.

    Fujitsu built the facility with a particular focus on support for hybrid clouds to support burgeoning demand, as well as for robust security and resiliency to disasters.

    Fujitsu is using the data center as the core facility for its digital business platform MetaArc, which supports the digital business of customers, and is helping to bring greater dynamism to the businesses of its customers.

    By optimizing the air conditioning systems, operating environment, and the ICT equipment environment, the new annex increases the use of outside air for cooling to roughly 7,000 hours per year, from roughly 3,250 hours for previous data centers.

    In addition, Fujitsu developed a new architectural structure and air conditioning method that maximizes the use of natural convection for airflow, thereby reducing the amount of electricity used for air conditioning and other equipment by approximately 60%. It is designed to achieve power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.20, the most efficient level in Japan.

    In addition to connections with other Fujitsu data centers throughout Japan and Fujitsu’s cloud services, the new annex uses standard equipment for closed networks to enable connections with third-party clouds, thereby providing fast support for hybrid cloud usage needs.

    The new annex is equipped with three different types of server rooms to meet diverse customer needs. The Standard rooms are high-quality server rooms equivalent to Tier 3. The Cloud rooms are for the exclusive use of clouds and use new air conditioning methods and support high integration and high power supply capacity.

    Thirdly, the FISC-compliant rooms are for customers in the financial services industry. The new annex complies with the Center for Financial Industry Information Systems (FISC) security standards, and uses an electricity distribution system with a UPS with reliability that exceeds Tier 4 standards.

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  • Oracle aims to remove cloud adoption barriers

    Oracle aims to remove cloud adoption barriers

    Oracle has launched a new family of services designed to help remove some of the biggest obstacles to cloud adoption.

    While organizations are eager to move their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements that have prevented them from being able to adopt the technology.

    To address this, Oracle aims to make it easier for organizations to adopt Oracle Public Cloud Services and run them wherever they want – in the Oracle Cloud or their own data center.

    Oracle Cloud at Customer enables organizations to implement Oracle’s cloud services in their own data center. This is the first offering from a major public cloud vendor that delivers a stack that is 100% compatible with the Oracle Cloud but available on-premises.

    Customers can adapt the public cloud services for a number of use cases, including disaster recovery, elastic bursting, dev/test, lift-and-shift workload migration, and a single API and scripting toolkit for DevOps.

    By extending the Oracle Cloud into their data center, customers can have full control over their data and meet all data sovereignty and data residency requirements that mandate customer data remain within a company’s data center or contained within a geographic location.

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