The worldwide energy as a service (EaaS) market size is projected to reach $147.56 billion by 2029, exceeding an estimated $70.46 billion in 2022, according to a recently published report by Fortune Business Insights.

A compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.1% is anticipated for the market within the forecast period (2022 to 2029).

The budding growth is attributable to reduced energy costs, decreased carbon emissions, and rising demand for renewable energy resources. Swift growth in charging stations and higher production rates are other factors leading to increased EaaS adoption.

That said, the industry growth is expected to be hindered by heavy capital investments in infrastructure and switch to advanced grids.

Schneider Electric, Siemens, Honeywell, and Veolia are among the top vendors influencing the EaaS market.

By region, North America is anticipated to lead the EaaS market. The region accounted for $28.49 billion in 2021 and is predicted to witness significant growth in the years ahead.

As for Europe, the installation of significant power generation technologies, coupled with favorable organizational and governmental policies, is expected to foster EaaS adoption.

Lastly, EaaS adoption in the Asia Pacific region is expected to be encouraged by increasing government financiers, clean energy awareness, and the fulfillment of demand and supply.

The last few years have seen a number of changes in consumer behaviour and business practices, brought on by the disruptions of the pandemic. In response, organisations need to ensure they’re set up to make their data work for them and continue to deliver engaging customer experiences.

With data at the heart of innovation, leveraging it requires the right technology to get it where it’s needed, so companies are investing in integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to reach their DX goals in less time and streamline their workflows.

Download this guide to see why adopting iPaaS is one of the most forward-thinking initiatives a business can do, and discover its range of capabilities, including:

• Integration
• API management
• Workflow automation
• and Data catalogue and preparation

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ANSecurity has rolled out its BYOD platform to Northern Doctors Urgent Care (NDUC), aiding teleworking doctors to provide patients with the care they need more effectively.

The NDUC, part of the Vocare Group delivers out of hours care to 1.5 million people in Northumberland, Teesside, North and South Tyneside and Newcastle, also managing the area's 111 NHS service. It required a system that allowed its 3300 staff, 9 call centres and over 40 additional sites to communicate better, while supporting its small IT department.

"The number of remote users we have had to support has grown from under 10 to over 200 over the last 9 years and this pattern looks likely to accelerate in the next few years,” David Harrop, Network Manager at Vocare, said.

“We are a highly technical, multi-skilled team but what we wanted was some expert advice around specifying the right equipment, configuration advice and an external validation of our security policies. ANSecurity provided just what we needed in terms of skills and were able to help us with implementation to ensure the solution was secure and meeting best practice.”

ANSecurity was drafted in to implement Juniper SRX Series Firewalls with Pulse Secure Connect Secure appliances, working alongside its endpoint integrity assessment technology to ensure devices operating on the network are correctly provisioned.

Additionally, Connect Secure ensures devices are protected against the latest malware threats using SSL VPN access and two-factor authentication and Pulse Secure Access portal to ensure user policies are adhered to.

NDUC also implemented Shoretel's VoIP solution to allow call centres to communicate with doctors using an internet connection.

“The end result is that we have a system in place now that makes it easier for us to connect our clinical staff with patients to deliver the highest quality care,” says Harrop, “The system is secure, easy to use and able to scale and it’s fair to say that ANSecurity played a vital role in helping us achieving this successful result.”

Barratt Developments has adopted Wax Digital's web3 eSourcing to help streamline its tendering and risk management processes.

The cloud-based platform enables Barratt to create tender packs for suppliers and subcontractors, then receive responses to the tenders in a standardised format, which can be analysed and scored before being sent to individuals in the company.

Much of this relies on the correct drawings being sent to suppliers and one of the key concerns of Barratt was that any platform should integrate with the Conject drawing portal.

“Version management of our drawings has been an ongoing challenge for us so Wax Digital will create a single point of integration between web3 eSourcing and our drawing portal using web 3 connect so that only the most up to date versions of drawings are sent to suppliers and contractors," Matthew Paul, group commercial manager at Barratt Developments said.

"The combination of a highly configurable and intuitive supplier onboarding and maintenance process and web3 Connect as an integration layer means that we can achieve this very efficiently right across our complex supply chain”.

Additionally, web3 will also ensure Barratt Developments is adhering to health and safety requirements, with enhanced supplier risk management. Companies working with Barratt can submit their Occupational Health and Safety certificates and Public Liability insurance details when they begin working with the housebuilder and Barratt will be advised when they are due to end.

Paul Ellis, managing director, Wax Digital said: “We are delighted to be working with Barratt Developments as it takes its first steps to the implementation of eSourcing. Organisations in a variety of sectors are already reaping the benefits of web3 eSourcing and Barratt’s vision as to how it will revolutionise its own tendering processes means that the construction sector can now too realise its potential.”

As a UK charity coming into increasing national focus, the Alzheimer’s Society has used cloud computing based technologies from Salesforce.com to transform its IT infrastructure and position it for a future where increased demand for its services is a certainty.

Starting life as a community-based organisation and now a fully networked national body, the Alzheimer’s Society has worked with the non-profit Salesforce Foundation division to create a technology stack to help support the needs of the 800,000 people in the UK who have a form of dementia. With more than half of that figure diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, the total number of dementia patients is further projected to soar to 1.7 million people by 2051.

Faced with this huge challenge in terms of increasing growth, the Alzheimer’s Society first adopted Salesforce as a tactical platform to address a direct need for data management. Onward from this point Salesforce has markedly evolved to become a strategic platform for future operations managed by a ‘Computerised Record System’ known internally as a CRS.

The UK’s move to encourage a process of "personalisation" where individuals (and families) take control of their mental health recovery has imposed yet further change upon the Alzheimer’s Society.

In effect this has meant that in some areas the organisation has had to think about changing itself from being a business-to-business entity, to what is essentially a business-to-consumer body. This transformation, matched with the need to form a more technically integrated national operation, meant that not only would new technology need to be deployed, but a new base of user skills would also have to be developed.

In terms of its technical shopping list, the Alzheimer’s Society used Saleforce.com’s own Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) to build its Computerised Record System. The CRS was also tailored with and integrated to the central Salesforce.com cloud and application portfolio using the firm’s Java-like programming language Apex - and the Visualforce XML-style syntax for building graphical user interfaces in HTML or Flex.

To skill up to its new system the Alzheimer’s Society used a dedicated training professional who went around the country performing tuition and learning services. With 300 sites and over 2000 users (some with comparatively limited technical skills) this was deemed as a necessary expense thrown up by the move to Salesforce. There was also a massive data import task to undertake in order to bring 100,000 somewhat ‘fragmented’ patient records over from Microsoft Excel and other local systems.

Cloud data responsibility

"Looking after 100,000 patient records and protecting that data as it moved to a cloud computing based environment was a big responsibility and we faced a lot of scepticism from many quarters. So there was a strict process of due diligence where we spoke to the Information Commissioner’s Office and undertook an internal formal risk assessment before even an initial move to Salesforce.com could be considered," said Phil Shoesmith, head of corporate infrastructure, Alzheimer’s Society.

The society confirms that one of the central functions it uses Salesforce.com for is to control individual 'service user' tracking. With a remit to cover a wider spectrum of dementia than just those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease alone, the society needs to record who has been given what care and advice, where it has been given and what an individual’s timeline of engagement with the charity is as a whole. Customised assessment forms were developed using Apex from Salesforce so that staff could record every individuals’ needs and state of being at any one time.

"Training was very critical so we produced a number of videos using a screen capture tool with overlays and soundtracks to show users how to use the system,” said Shoesmith. "A key factor for us was usability. Where our staff do have IT experience they use Facebook and other similar applications - and Salesforce really is about as straightforward as these apps to pick up. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once described Facebook as something like ‘500 million users with no training courses’ - and he has a point."

Dementia doesn’t centralise around cities or transport networks; it is spread around the entire country, so this is where the Alzheimer’s Society carries out its work. Due to its nationwide footprint, the society knew that it needed a cloud-based system as it didn't want to install software on its 1500 PCs spread right across the UK.

Shoesmith’s group started off by using the free 10-user licence and worked upward to expand in 2009 to the 200 user system. In 2010 they then moved to put out a tender for a 2500 user system, which Salesforce won beating Microsoft and others.

"On Force.com we found many good technologies but some challenges in terms of change management. We found that there were some manual steps that were frustrating when taking sandbox development through to live production. Plus, the licence options seem to be ever-expanding and increasingly complex. I would also say that there are some reporting limitations,” said Shoesmith. “We would also like see the development and construction of an EU-located data centre for Salesforce,” he added.

On the plus side, Shoesmith confirms that up-time has been superb and it's not a huge “quantity” of software to install, so it’s an easy mountain to approach. Also on the positive side of the equation, the society says that it recognises how Salesforce.com keeps on constantly developing with every new version bringing new technologies.

"The cloud model has worked particularly for us and this is largely down to its major defining characteristics ie we were able to focus on the application rather than the underlying infrastructure throughout the build and deployment process. The cloud’s web-based architecture also of course supports an extremely geographically distributed user base – and the PaaS model also allows us control our pricing payment as we expand usage throughout the organisation," said Shoesmith.

Shoesmith also confirms that the deployment scenario his organisation has worked with should and could be suitable for any other similar charity due to cost control considerations in the face of what is always limited funding. “Salesforce.com’s foundation-level pricing means we can get hold of software with cutting edge features an affordable price point,” he added.

Looking beyond 2012 and onward, the Alzheimer’s Society is now looking to expand and build programme management tools into its IT framework using Salesforce.com’s AppExchange app portal - some of these tools are free.

The organisation also wants to build in mobile usage options based on HTML5 and also see how we can make some of its data available externally.

The overall experience appears to be positive and having been purchased via the non-profit Salesforce foundation, there is clearly a strong philanthropy message here that is benefitting real people with real dementia challenges in their life.

In light of PM David Cameron’s recent Challenge on Dementia, moves to tackle mental health via any route are arguably now in greater focus than ever before. Although the Alzheimer’s Society has had to work hard to pass a US-based cloud solution through its due diligence procedures, the reality of the installation that has been executed is surely testimony to the cloud model’s applicability and usefulness.

Legacy banking institutions continue to face stiff competition from the agile fintech companies that have been rising to challenge them in recent years. As such, these institutions have come to realise they must digitally transform to stay competitive.

COVID-19 has, unsurprisingly, expedited this process, with the demand for digital banking solutions surging during the pandemic. During this period, the European Banking Authority (EBA) identified a sharp acceleration in the digitisation of both front-end systems and back-office processes as organisations fast-tracked development. Its report on the use of digital platforms noted financial institutions were increasingly reliant on digital platforms to market their services, as well as close customer contracts for products and services.

Customer preferences are evolving, too, and young people, in particular, prefer easier access to digital services and a wider range of financial services. A YouGov poll published in July, commissioned by IBM, reported that 61% of 18 to 24-year-olds wanted their bank to offer tailored support, while 54% approved of banks using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide this. The growth of digital platforms looks set to continue, in response to this demand, with legacy banks increasingly developing, or engaging with, third-party technologies to respond to customers’ desire for convenience.

Banking at your service

The first manifestation of the digital banking revolution is banking as a service (Baas), which lets a bank offer some, or all, of its capabilities to developers to iterate upon or integrate with other systems through application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows banks to back products and services designed and built by third parties, expanding their opportunity to acquire customers or engage with their own customers in new ways.

A bank can also use a platform model – such as a marketplace – for other firms to offer their products and services through them, giving external businesses the opportunity to sell directly to the bank’s customers. “Banks, for example, may not only want to provide loans, but also become matchmakers in helping customers buy homeowner insurance, house maintenance services or even furniture on the bank’s platform,” explains Gartner’s senior director analyst, research engagement services, Ali Merji.

“It’s where third-party developers can build products and services for bank customers,” adds Nick Maynard, lead analyst at Juniper Research. “Essentially the user’s bank account is leveraged as a platform to offer a multitude of services to them. It’s piqued interest for a number of reasons – bank accounts are very common, meaning there’s a large addressable market. For banks, it means they can broaden the offering to their users, without having to develop their own addition products.”

The good, bad and ugly of platform banking

There are several benefits to both using BaaS and platform models, with 83% of respondents to the EBA’s report noting it can support business growth and market diversification, for example. There’s also the ability to save development time and costs, as Forrester’s principal analyst, digital business strategy, Jacob Morgan, points out. “Instead of having to build everything yourself, you can pick the services you’d like from the ecosystem of providers and weave them into a constellation of value for your customers,” he says.

According to Capgemini’s World Retail Banking Report 2020, meanwhile, platform-based firms can achieve up to double the operating profits, higher market values and steady growth. Platform-based banks can also take advantage of a two-sided network effect, whereby incremental customer growth will attract more suppliers – and vice versa.

“Platform-based banks, as a result, can achieve close to an average 1.7x increase in ease of achieving viral strategic priorities such as upgrading customer journeys, offering personalised products, enhancing operational efficiencies and managing compliance,” notes Sankar Krishnan, executive vice president at Capgemini for banking and capital markets.

While these benefits make the move appealing, transforming into a platform-based bank does bring challenges. The EBA cites new forms of risk and regulatory and supervisory challenges as key issues from a market perspective, while Capgemini’s report notes that close to an average of 70% of banking executives highlight that budget constraints, lack of strategic roadmap and outdated systems all hinder the path towards “platformification”.

And for those who move into the area, what happens if a partner pulls a service or application? “That’s quite interesting,” says Morgan, “because like any ecosystem this is essentially a connected network. So, what happens when one of the players fails, is acquired by a rival or turns off a platform? As you start to see more and more capabilities interwoven then you start to get more points of failure.”

Light at the end of the tunnel

Although this is very much a nascent market currently, traditional banks are waking up to the platform-based approach. “Top banks such as US-based Goldman Sachs (Marcus), UK-based Standard Chartered (Mox) and Israel-based Bank Leumi (Pepper) are spinning off digital-only arms that use data and expertise from the parent bank while integrating the latest technologies and ecosystem players to drive platformification,” says Krishnan. “We could see more banks joining the bandwagon in the short term, as seen in the recent announcement of JP Morgan launching Chase in the UK.”

Forrester’s Morgan expects a far more aggressive march of banks into this area over the next five years. Merji, meanwhile, predicts that, over that same period of time, banks adopting platform business models will see up to 20% of their transaction flow initiated from outside their own channels.

Looking at the longer-term horizon of three to five years, Krishnan believes banks will move out into other business lines including treasury, trade finance, payments and lending. The experts, however, all agree on one thing – we’re going to see the sector get progressively larger in the next five years.

Mutualink has announced the launch of its multifaceted and intelligent communications platform, LNK360.

LNK360 by Mutualink combines voice, video, internet of things (IoT), and data communications into a single platform to improve situational awareness through instant incident-based communications.

In addition to providing radio interoperability, the platform allows for real-time video sharing, geospatial access, and data sharing. Most notably, LNK360 offers freedom of choice. Users can choose between or connect across any device, system, or application. Additionally, LNK360 scales on-demand to accommodate new devices via public or private long-term evolution (LTE), satellite, or terrestrial broadband.

Public safety agencies, schools, hospitals, and smart cities are among the beneficiaries of the platform. LNK360 connects all types of government and commercial land mobile radios (LMRs), mobile phones, and push-to-talk (PTT) apps. Organizations may choose to automate alerts and share data across agencies.

LNK360’s other interesting features include LMR and LTE PTT integration, PTT-to-PTT interoperability, group messaging, real-time location tracking and mapping, drone and robotic platform sharing, and more.

As for security, LNK360 offers secure end-to-end communications encrypted with federally approved advanced encryption standard (AES) ciphers.

“This is an innovative collaboration tool that spans the entire community. Our schools benefit from the experience our first responders have on the platform. Our goal is to connect with law enforcement more quickly, creating better situational awareness before they even reach the school. We’re also seeing a better way to work between schools,” said Philip Thorton, superintendent of schools in Warwick.

LNK360 is compatible with Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices.

Continuing its partnership with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Palantir will help distribute COVID-19 vaccines for the second straight year.

In the U.S. and abroad, Palantir has been instrumental in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting more than 100 organizations, including the UK's National Health Service, the US government and military, and more.

The HHS commissioned Palantir to develop Tiberius in mid-2020. Using the Tiberius platform, federal health officials could track the production, distribution, and administration of vaccines across the country.

The renewed contract will continue Palantir's support for Tiberius. In collaboration with HHS's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Palantir will help strengthen the US’ COVID-19 vaccine distribution strategy, facilitate international distribution, and improve the equity and efficacy of vaccine programs.

Palantir's Tiberius integrates disparate data sources into a common operating picture, allowing organizations to make informed decisions. Additionally, as part of its one-year contract with the government, Palantir will help distribute US-donated vaccines worldwide.

“We are proud to have supported HHS in administering one of the most successful and rapid vaccine rollouts in the world,” said Akash Jain, president of Palantir USG.

Jain added, “As new variants emerge and pose a renewed risk to public health in the United States and around the world, we are humbled to have earned the confidence of HHS once again to help support its lifesaving work.”

Earlier this year, New York state officials unveiled Excelsior Pass, a free smartphone app that verifies recent negative PCR test results or vaccination records.

On the contrary, the head of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has warned that plans to introduce COVID-19 vaccine certification are unlikely to succeed until ministers gain public trust.

Microsoft has lowered its marketplace transaction fee from 20% to 3% in a bid to help partners get to market faster and build apps for every customer need.

Speaking at this year's Microsoft Inspire, the tech giant said it wants to demonstrate its commitment to the success of its partners on its platform and help them keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. The reduction in the fee applies to every transactable application published in the commercial marketplace, including its digital storefronts, Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource.

“This reduced transaction fee demonstrates our commitment to the success of partners creating value on our platform—and helps partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth,” said Charlotte Yarkoni, chief operating officer of Microsoft Cloud and AI.

Microsoft is also expanding the payment instruments available in Microsoft AppSource, to give customers the flexibility to purchase using credit card or invoice, and independent software vendors (ISVs) can offer custom pricing using private plans.

Furthermore, ISVs will soon be able to sell their apps within Microsoft Teams. This aims to expand the ability for ISVs to monetise their offerings and provide a simplified experience for Teams IT admins to purchase apps and subscriptions directly from the Teams admin centre.

Starting in the summer, customers will be able to buy applications within Microsoft Teams with either credit card or invoice, giving ISVs access to the platform’s 145 million daily active users.

From next autumn, publishers with transactable Microsoft commercial marketplace offers will also be able to set one price for customers and another for Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners of their choice. This is meant to allow publishers to provide a margin to CSP partners upfront while CSP partners can also add a price markup when reselling to customers outside of the commercial marketplace. Essentially, publishers can develop their channel with partners in the CSP programme and compensate them for generating sales.

Microsoft hopes this new flexibility will create stronger connections among partners and incentivise ISVs to share margin with resellers. The overall goal is to make it more profitable for partners to engage and sell Microsoft commercial marketplace offers.

Hyperlink InfoSystem today announced that it has developed a new vaccine management solution to help individual companies, government, and healthcare organizations distribute potential COVID-19 vaccines worldwide.

Built on Salesforce, the cloud-based management platform covers every step in the logistics, delivery, and administration of a vaccine, including local/healthcare organizations registration, inventory management, supply chain management, analytics reports, and wellness surveys.

"After COVID-19 pandemic situation, the number of healthcare organizations and the government started working on Vaccines to make Corona free world. At the start of distributing Vaccines they will need the help of tech solutions to plan their execution process of delivering and even distributing Vaccine needs to be done in a proper manner that will help organizations and governments to reach every person,” said Harnil Oza, CEO of UK-based Hyperlink InfoSystem.

Healthcare companies and government organizations can customize the solution as per their needs. Alternatively, the solution can be integrated into an existing API.

Hyperlink said it will launch the full solution by the end of December 2020 and individual solutions will be delivered within 20 working days after order confirmation.

“Healthcare businesses and government officials can share their requirements or get more details about the platform by sending an email at info@hyperlinkinfosystem.com. We can deliver any vaccine solution in 15-20 days based on individual requirements,” Hyperlink said in its blog.

Microsoft has announced the launch of a fully managed service that allows developers to add an array of communication tools to existing applications in a bid to help improve how businesses connect with their employees and customers.

Described by Microsoft as a first of its kind from a major cloud provider, the fully managed service, dubbed Azure Communications Service, lets businesses add voice and video calling, SMS text messaging, and instant chat support to mobile, desktop, and web apps, regardless of platform or device.

It's currently possible for developers to add chat capabilities to existing applications, for example, by using Azure Functions. However, this is a fairly lengthy and laborious process involving sourcing code from GitHub and manually testing the application.

Microsoft claims the new set of APIs cuts much of the complexity out of the process, allowing for new integrations to be created "in a matter of minutes" using "just a few lines of code".

Perhaps its biggest selling point is that these functions can then be integrated alongside other Microsoft services, including Azure Cognitive Services. This means businesses will be able to deploy tools like sentiment analysis and translation on top of any chat functions they add to their apps.

New chat functions will also benefit from any tools the base application has access to, which could be particularly powerful if those apps already have access to wider business operations, such as the company's website.

Azure Communications Service will run off the same global network that underpins Microsoft Teams, the company added, allowing for much of the backend work and ongoing maintenance to be handled entirely by Microsoft.

Microsoft also confirmed that all communications, regardless of how they are delivered, will be encrypted and adhere to GDPR and similar frameworks.

The Azure Communications Service is the latest move from Microsoft to try and expand its footprint across business communications, having already opened up Microsoft Teams to third-party applications – apps that customers may have been reluctant to abandon in favour of Teams.

According to Nick McQuire, senior vice president of Enterprise Research at CCS Insight, Microsoft has managed to position itself as a major player in what is traditionally a telecommunications role.

"Azure Communications Services takes all the experience Microsoft has gained from its remote development and communications solutions during the pandemic and turns them into key developer services," said McQuire.

"The shift to remote everything during the pandemic has meant that developers are now more attracted by communications-based features in their applications. It's an area of opportunity that telcos worldwide have failed to grasp over the past few years and above all, shows that Microsoft has ascended to become one of the world's most important communications companies as well."

Voice and video calling and live chat functionality are available today, and support for both SMS text messaging and dedicated phone numbers will arrive in October.

Mendix has optimised its platform for IBM Cloud, adding support for Kubernetes and single sign-on onboarding.

Mendix now works with IBM’s Watson AI capabilities, allowing developers to take advantage of its low-code system to create AI-ready applications and services. Developers can integrate a range of services into their creations, including Weather Channel content, App ID, and App Launch on IBM Cloud.

Integrated support for Kubernetes means developers can use containerised infrastructure to build their apps, too, whether a business is deploying apps on private, public, or hybrid cloud services. Mendix explained it will reduce costs associated with cloud app development, with automatic scaling across environments.

All applications businesses built on IBM’s cloud service using Mendix can be monitored from a single dashboard, making it much easier to develop and maintain multiple applications, the company claimed.

“The goal of the Mendix-IBM Alliance is to place the ease of drag-and-drop, low-code application development into the hands of the Enterprise cloud market, leverage Watson’s AI capabilities for the largest number of users, and vastly accelerate the time-to-value deployment of business innovation,” said Erno Rorive, senior product manager at Mendix.

“The integration of the Mendix platform with IBM Cloud and Watson represents a golden triangle of enterprise-ready solutions that will power the next wave of smart applications to focus the power of AI on vertical industry solutions.”

The final addition to Mendix on IBM Cloud platform is support for integrated billing. Because Mendix is integrated into the IBM Cloud catalogue, businesses can be invoiced for all their IBM services together.

Silver Peak has made a strong stand in the SD-WAN world, announcing a partnership with Google Cloud to become one of the only companies of its kind to have ties with the four leading public cloud businesses in the world.

Before this announcement, Silver Peak had already partnered with Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, but this latest news means Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect platform is certified for use across the big four’s platforms.

One of the benefits of having such a strong network is that geographically-distributed businesses can now take advantage of Silver Peak’s platform to ensure all locations, across any of these cloud services can run their services securely and with stability. This is the case even if different workloads are offering on different public cloud platforms.

“Enterprise customers gain choice and control in how they execute multi-cloud strategies in alignment with their business requirements,” said Chris Helfer, senior vice president of strategic alliances at Silver Peak.

“By harnessing the full power of the Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, they can deliver the highest quality of experience to their users whether applications or services are hosted in their own data centers or across any combination of leading public cloud provider’s data centers.”

As well as reliability, Silver Peak’s cross-platform SD-WAN solution also offers reliable broadband services utilising last mile broadband and simple migration between services, without affecting running applications.

Using a multi-cloud strategy will allow businesses to cut costs by giving them the flexibility to choose different cloud providers on a case-by-case basis, with the knowledge that their resources will be running on the most efficient cloud platform for that particular scenario.

We spend such a large proportion of our lives working. As such, it makes sense to work somewhere where not only are your talents appreciated but you are treated well. This is especially true in the tech industry where creativity, innovation and a can-do and relaxed culture is prized almost as much as the benefits that might be on offer.

It's not just free food in the canteen, a football table and boozy Friday afternoons that's important here, Indeed, the organisation in question must demonstrate trust and respect between employees and management, a dynamic working environment and camaraderie.

IT Pro has put together a list of 12 of the best places to work in IT. The list covers not just hard-core tech companies but also IT roles in cool companies known to treat employees well.

Company name: Facebook

Number of employees: 25,105 (December 2017)

Although one of the biggest tech companies out there (and it's had its fair share of negative news headlines of late), Facebook is also one of the most satisfying to work at according to employees.

Benefits include the option to work from home every Wednesday, six months paid maternity and four months paid paternity leave. You'll also get money towards transportation, gym allowance and free food.

From a fun point of view, Facebook offers its employees a whole range of games to play in their breaks, such as chess, ping-pong, arcades, and guitar hero.

The open-plan set up makes it more relaxed and if you're feeling a little sleepy, nap pods can offer a little bit of rest when you most need it.

Company name: Hubspot

Number of employees: 1,960

Hubspot is a pretty big company with a small business mentality. According to Glassdoor, it offers all of its employees' a voice, allowing them to contribute ideas to the company's growth.

You can take advantage of unlimited holidays - you can decide when to take time off and however you want to use it is fine. You're encouraged to work from home as much as you like, as long as you get the work done.

Every five years, you'll get a four-week sabbatical, with a $5,000 grant to do with whatever you wish. It could be used for training, a holiday or even improving your home.

Hubspot takes the health of its employees seriously and its Hub Care programme offers access to key health services, such as mental health advice, emotional support and access to doctors via online chat or over the phone. It will give you money towards your gym membership and offers free healthy snacks for employees.

Company name: Attenda

Number of employees: 284

A leading service and cloud platform provider, Attenda was founded in 1997 and is based in Staines-upon-Thames, Middlesex. They employ over 250 people.

Why is it a good place to work? Employees at Attenda get to enjoy the extensive charity work done by the company, as well as a good social life and focus on employee development. Trust in co-founder and chief executive Mark Fowle is also very high, with teamwork key to their strategy.

Interesting fact: Attenda co-sponsor the EMC Silicon Cup, with all money raised at the Isle of Wight sailing regatta going to charity.

Company name: Box

Number of employees: 900

Why is it a good place to work? Box doesn't do cubicles to allow for a collaborative and communicative workspace where teams can interact and share ideas.

What role does IT play here? According to box, IT is all about innovation and development. It says it is constantly striving to grow, build and disrupt the collaborative cloud space. As such, IT is central to day-to-day work.

Interesting fact: Aside from the giant slide in the US office, Box has a London taxi as a meeting room in the London office.

Other info: Box expanded its operations into Europe in 2012, with the opening of its first office in London.

Company name: Google UK

Number of employees: Approx. 2,250 in UK

Why is it a good place to work? It has three offices in London and one in Manchester. It's the company's second-largest engineering office in Europe and home to its global sales and marketing teams.

What role does IT play here? Engineers work on Voice Search, Local Search, Maps, Google TV, YouTube and core infrastructure.

Interesting fact: There are old-fashioned red telephone boxes so staff can make private phone calls. Meeting rooms can be found by looking at Underground-style maps.

Other info: Engineers voted to have their office designed to look like a sci-fi spaceship interior, and the company has just built a cinema in one of its offices.

Company name

Memset Hosting

Number of employees: 36

Why is it a good place to work? The firm offers in-house and external training as well as assistance with exams/qualifications, purchase of relevant literature and a bonus for each qualification obtained. It hires about 10 employees per year and has a very low staff turnover.

The company has just moved to a new office in Dunsfold Park, Cranleigh. Memset runs a shuttle bus service with free Wi-Fi on board to Guildford station and it also has a fleet of electric bikes for staff.

What role does IT play here? All technical staff have 'tinker time.' That is, up to 10 per cent of their working week can be spent on personal projects or development. The company says it is a huge driver of innovation. Indeed, many of its services have started out as 'such 'tinker' projects initially.

Interesting fact: Its office is based in Dunsfold Park which is home to the famous Top Gear track and production studio.

Other info: Memset managing director Kate Craig-Wood is championing the cause to get more women into the industry and often gives talks and wins awards in this area. Furthermore, Memset is a member of The UKRC's Chief Executive Officer Charter, which promotes the employment of women in science, engineering and technology roles.

Company name: Ocado Technology

Number of employees: Approx. 350

Why is it a good place to work? According to the company, it is the world's largest online supermarket that acts like innovative software start-up. All software is developed in-house. Employees are able to make a direct contribution to the design and architecture of software systems.

What role does IT play here? From the real-time control systems that drive Ocado's automated warehouse and route optimisation software, to robotics, 3D vision systems and the algorithms embedded within its inference engines, every single system is developed in-house.

Interesting fact: Ocado ships more than 150,000 orders a week - the equivalent of 1.1 million items a day.

Other info: Separate benefits include team hackathons for staff that wish to develop projects, which aren't directly related to their day-to-day activities.

Company name: Peer 1 Hosting

Number of employees: Over 500 employees in 14 cities across Europe and North America

Why is it a good place to work? Aside from good pension and private healthcare benefits, there is also gym membership and 275 to buy gym equipment for employees. The EMEA office has pool and football tables, slides, swings, a pub and even a cinema onsite.

What role does IT play here? The firm hosts websites for major high street retailers such as Debenhams, Waitrose, The White Company, Boo-hoo and Misguided.

Interesting fact: During Hurricane Sandy employees and clients of Peer 1 managed to keep its datacentre going for 72 hours while the storm passed.

Other info: Staff can carry out volunteering for two days a year on full pay.

Company name: Skype

Number of employees: 2,000

Why is it a good place to work? The firm has flexible working hours and the ability to work from home as well as travel opportunity between various offices. Staff now also benefit from the rewards on offer from Microsoft, its parent company, too.

What role does IT play here? Engineers can expect to code, test, deploy, teach and learn using the latest technologies. Product managers work on product lifecycles and development with an eye on driving growth.

Interesting fact: In April 2013, Skype users spent more than two billion minutes using the service.

Other info: Skype was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennstrm from Sweden. It was purchase by Microsoft in 2011, having previously been owned by eBay and venture capital firms.

Company name:

Skyscanner

Number of employees: 279

Why is it a good place to work? The firm offers formal training sessions through its Skyscanner University. In addition, staff can access external training courses and have informal "brown bag' training sessions at lunchtimes.

What role does IT play here? IT is pivotal as Skyscanner is a flights, hotel and car hire search engine that enables users to check for options by location and price. Skyscanner offers free online tools to enable developers to download and integrate flight information into websites.

Interesting fact: The Edinburgh-based company was formed in 2001 after its founders became frustrated at how difficult it was to find cheap flights to ski resorts.

Other info: The website also features travel and flight industry news and travel tips.

Company name: Stripe

Number of employees: 100

Why is it a good place to work? Benefits include: open vacation policy (Stripe doesn't count the days) and annual "hacktrips" to get staff out of the office environment and work together.

What role does IT play here? Stripe is a web and mobile development tool. It provides businesses with instant access to a platform for online payments that enables new types of transactions to move online.

Interesting fact: Stripe, recently valued at $1.75 billion, was only launched in 2011 by two Irish brothers John Collison (23) and Patrick Collison (25).

Other info: The company processes billions of dollars a year in transactions for some of the fastest growing companies on the web.

Company name: The Outside View

Number of employees: 10

Why is it a good place to work? The Outside View is a start-up working on big data and says it is free to embrace new technologies and conduct associated research.

What role does IT play here? IT plays a central role. "We are a predictive analytics company working on big data. Every facet of our work involves IT in one way or another. Whether we are deploying new algorithms on the cloud, or working on software locally," according to the firm.

Interesting fact: The firm builds itself as being data agnostic, assuming no prior knowledge on information provided from clients. It also develops on everything (devices) and using anything (programming languages).

Other info: The whole company is tracking, visualising and analysing three core aspects of our lives: health, wealth and happiness, to become elite performers. In the company's own words: "We're proving that there is a gap between what science knows and business does." Translating that to the real world, the firm says it wants to help organisations replace "I think" with "I know" using big data and associated analytics and tools to do so.

IBM has announced partnerships with six European firms using its cloud services to grow their AI, blockchain and analytics businesses.

It will work closely with Dutch logistics firm Koopman Logistics to build its track and trace solution using IBM's blockchain technology. Koopman transports consignments across Europe and it needed to implement a secure technology to replace its paper-based tracking process. Now it's using IBM's blockchain to track consignments using digital records.

The second partnership IBM announced is with Italian multimedia organisation Gruppo 24 Ore, which is using the company's IBM Watson AI services hosted on the IBM Cloud to help tax professionals respond to questions about the Italian tax coding system. IBM Watson was implemented to process 1.5 million documents relating to the financial system and glean the data it needs to advise professionals.

French bank Crdit Mutuel is also using IBM Watson on IBM's Cloud environment in France (with a back up in Germany) to power its virtual assistants that help the company's 20,000 relationship managers advise their customers.

Digital health company Teckel Medical is running its digital health checker on IBM Cloud, while RS Components is making use of IBM's Cloud platform, building its peer-to-peer marketplace in IBM's London Cloud Garage, enabling startups to promote, test and sell their inventions online.

Finally, IBM has announced a partnership with Osram AG, a lighting solutions company that has switched its operation to a digital environment powered by IBM Cloud, resulting in greater operational savings and flexibility.

"Enterprises across Europe are gravitating to the IBM Cloud because it helps them modernize their existing infrastructures by gaining access to exciting technologies like AI, blockchain, IoT, analytics and more," said Sebastian Krause, general manager IBM Cloud Europe.

"At the same time, these companies value IBM's deep industry and business process expertise, along with IBM's commitment to the responsible management of their enterprise data."

Image credit: IBM

Out of the three main components of cloud computing - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - the latter is probably the least well-known, and certainly the least understood.

While SaaS is cloud-hosted software that can be accessed anywhere and IaaS refers to hosting of data on third-party infrastructure, PaaS doesn't have such a defined role in the cloud ecosystem.

Although its purpose and function are a little complicated, this doesn't mean it's an element of the cloud that can be ignored or overlooked. In fact, it's one of the cornerstones of modern application development, offering a platform on which to produce innovative and effective applications and services.

PaaS includes well-known platforms such as Heroku or Microsoft Azure, allowing developers to produce, test and deploy applications as rapidly as possible, ensuring they work as they should and can be rolled out already fit for purpose. Keeping them separate from an organisation's core operation means nothing else will be affected should something go wrong during the development process.

Another benefit of using PaaS is that it can be used as needed, rather than having to be left running all day, every day. This means they can be switched on during development and then turned off again when the app is ready to be deployed and migrated to a business's own environment, saving significant costs compared to an always-on dev environment.

If preferred, however, the application can continue to be hosted on the cloud platform where it was developed for as long as it's in use. This can have several advantages, including accessibility, particularly if you want to allow a certain person or group access to the app but not to corporate infrastructure.

There's also less maintenance involved, as the PaaS provider will manage the hosting and backend, choosing the best infrastructure for the individual application, while developers and those less experienced can focus on creating great, well-functioning products without worrying what’s going on in the background.

Ease of use isn’t the only reason businesses are switching from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. PaaS offers significant cost savings compared to traditional set-ups, without the associated running costs such as backup and restore services and cooling, because the PaaS provider will take care of that.

They’ll also ensure the platform is secure and will guarantee a reliable level of uptime via service level agreements (SLAs), which will give you complete peace of mind that your data is safe and protected and your applications will keep on running.

Other essentials, such as analytics and monitoring are also normally offered by the PaaS provider. This means you can get detailed feedback on how many customers are using your web applications and how they’re using them. Web dashboards provide details on key metrics such as load times and bandwidth usage, so that companies can always check on the current status of their applications and be instantly notified of any failures or downtime.

PaaS providers normally offer a much greater level of scalability than is possible by hosting applications on a company’s own server infrastructure. Many PaaS providers offer features such as auto-scaling, allocating increased resources and bandwidth to your applications to cope with traffic spikes as they occur. That means customers won’t be left with blank screens or long load times if demand for a web app grows quickly or unexpectedly. The risk with auto-scaling is that fees can ramp up very steeply if there’s a huge spike in demand for the application, so it’s prudent to check that upper limits and notifications are in place beforehand.

PaaS offers businesses a great deal of flexibility. It can be used for rapid app deployment, in-house testing, or collaborative development between geographically dispersed teams. Virtual OS features can normally be changed or upgraded quickly. And when apps are ready to be shared with the public or customers, there’s normally no delay: they can be put live without any downtime.

On the downside, the choice of provider can be limited depending on what development languages or platforms they support. That increases the risk of vendor lock-in, making it difficult to jump ship to another provider if your current PaaS provider suddenly increases their prices. Developing applications in the most widely used languages mitigates this risk, to an extent.

Some companies may choose to go for a hybrid PaaS solution, with some data and services retained on the company’s own servers and some hosted in the cloud. This allows companies to continue eking the maximum value out of their current infrastructure, whilst enjoying the scalability benefits of the cloud. Indeed, some may choose to use PaaS as a capacity-on-demand fallback for applications running on their own in-house servers. This is only appropriate for selected types of application, however, and can increase complexity.

GTT has announced it will buy cloud networking provider Interoute for €1.9 billion (£1.7 billion) in cash, adding an additional 72,000km of fibre network coverage to its European operation.

The acquisition will also mean GTT is able to reach a much larger area, making use of Interoute's 126 cities across 29 countries, plus its extensive resources, including 15 data centres, 17 virtual data centres and 51 colocation facilities.

GTT will also take onboard Interoute's 1,000 strategic enterprise and carrier clients, the majority of which reside in Europe, offering an enhanced selection of infrastructure, edge and hosted services.

“The acquisition of Interoute represents a major milestone in delivering on our purpose of connecting people, across organisations and around the world,” said Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO.

“This combination creates a disruptive market leader with substantial scale, unique network assets and award-winning product capabilities to fulfill our clients’ growing demand for distributed cloud networking in Europe, the U.S. and across the globe."

Calder added the deal is estimated to close in three to six months and the businesses merged fully within three to four quarters. Many of Interoute's employees, including its sales, operations and customer service teams will transfer to GTT, enhancing its existing resources on a global scale.

“This is an exciting next chapter for Interoute, GTT, our customers and our team,” added Gareth Williams, Interoute CEO. “The combined assets and strengths of our two companies create a powerful portfolio of high-capacity, low-latency connectivity, and innovative cloud and edge infrastructure services to support our customers in the global digital economy.”

Google is attempting to change the way businesses monitor and manage IoT devices with the introduction of Cloud IoT Core in public beta, built to bring IoT data and insights together in one place.

The latest release of Google Cloud IoT Core is now available to those that have signed up to the trial, helping businesses connect and centrally manage all their IoT devices from one dashboard, at scale, wherever they may reside.

This data can then be turned into actionable insights using Google's suite of IoT services including Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

"At Google I/O, we introduced Google Cloud IoT Core, a fully managed service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help securely connect and manage IoT devices at scale," Indranil Chakraborty, product manager at Google Cloud said. "Since then, many customers across industries such as transportation, oil and gas, utilities, healthcare and ride-sharing have used the service and provided us with insightful feedback."

New features in the latest iteration include the ability for businesses to "Bring your own IoT certificate", allowing them to manage their own device key signed by their Certificate Authority (CA). Cloud IoT Core will verify the signature, provisioning them all at once. This authentication is then transferred with the device public keys to Cloud IoT Core.

Another new addition to the platform is a secure connection to existing IoT devices and gateways using HTTP as well as MQTT. The final new addition is logical device representation, which communicates the last state and properties of an IoT device, providing APIs for applications to update the device properties even when it's not connected.

"Our devices are heavily used and constantly send us a huge volume of data," John Heard, Group CTO of Google Cloud IoT Core customer Smart Parking said. "By connecting these devices to Cloud IoT Core, we have a secure and reliable way to not only ingest that data but then also use it to gain valuable insights. We know exactly how our systems are performing and can push updates to devices to ensure we deliver the best products and services as cost effectively as possible."

Secure wallet manufacturing startup Secrid has taken on Dell Boomi to help it achieve better efficiencies across its entire organisation.

Secrid originally opted to use Boomi's integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solution to help link its existing applications with the NetSuite enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool it was already using. However, the relationship was taken to the next level with Boomi then being onboarded to improve automation and workflows.

The platform has now been implemented to analyse how customers are interacting with the brand, how resources are being managed internally, to create revenue forecasts, keep on top of billing and manage its production factory to ensure it's keeping up with demand.

"If you want to maintain personal customer relationships during rapid growth, you need technology to help you do this," Secrid COO Paul van Diepen Dell explained.

"Boomi enables us to maintain one view of every customer and communicate with them effectively and efficiently. With their technology, we draw a circle around all of our software, maintaining everything through one language, using one platform and with one consultant and that's Boomi."

Secrid is now using Boomi to run 50 applications at once, including its e-commerce platform, customer support tools and databases.

"Dell Boomi's technology has supported Secrid to significantly reduce the time spent on manual processes in some cases by upto 50%, putting integration at the heart of its growth," Ian Currie, Dell Boomi's EMEA director added.

"By enabling the company to connect devices, data, applications and processes, we are delighted to have helped Secrid spend less time connecting the dots and more time on building a better business."

UKCloud and Red Hat have teamed up to address one of the public sector's most pressing IT needs – better access to services build on open standards.

UKCloud listened to its customers, who were seeking a stable platform that could scale and grow as demand warrants. Choosing an open source option was essential, because it offers more flexibility, the company explained.

"As we developed a suitable platform, we also shared the government's view in the benefits of using open standards," Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud said. "We wanted to ensure that any extension to our existing platform provided our customers with the same level of ease of adoption as our current platform as well as making it to be easy to leave in other words without any lock-in."

The company decided that OpenStack, with its breadth of features, strong and open API, wide adoption and commitment to open standards was the platform to choose. Hansford explained that UKCloud found OpenStack's level of maturity to be higher than other options too, making it more robust for enterprises and perfect for hosting high-performance applications for the public sector.

Choosing Red Hat

UKCloud tested solutions from a number of OpenStack commercial vendors to minimise the risks associated with the use of open solutions and maximise the ability to migrate workloads from other OpenStack distributions.

"Red Hat stood out for its experience in this arena and the level of support that it could offer," Hansford said. "Red Hat's OpenStack distribution was certainly 'enterprise-ready' and we had confidence not only in its technical capabilities and support teams, but also in the support [the company] could provide to us as it has for other partners and clients."

He added that Red Hat's OpenStack distribution was the only one that supported multi-tenant capabilities at the time it was looking to implement a new solution. Crucially, the platform also delivered the necessary security and data assurance that is essential for any technology consideration in the public sector thanks to its locally hosted infrastructure.

"This immediately answers questions about the jurisdiction of UK public sector data and with recent swings in currency exchange rates, has allowed UKCloud to offer a stable pricing model to its UK customers in a time of considerable flux," Martin Percival, senior solutions architect at Red Hat, said.

A fast turnaround that allows for innovation

The implementation of Red Hat's distribution took seven months, which was significantly faster than the 24 month average that's often associated with projects of this size.

"To a great extent [the speed of delivery] was due not only to the quality of our team, but also to the quality of the support provided by Red Hat professional services," Hansford said.

The intensive phase of testing for the Red Hat's OpenStack distribution and its implementation at UKCloud took four months, Hansford said. However, to ensure the platform is constantly evolving to accommodate customers' needs, Red Hat and UKCloud are running a constant beta programme within a test environment, so enhancements can be trialled as soon as they're needed.

Constantly evolving to address customer needs

UKCloud plans to keep evolving its OpenStack Platform by keeping on top of advancements in the technology, as demonstrated by its recent upgrade to the OpenStack Mitaka release.

"We are also looking to add additional enhancements and innovations along the way," Hansford said. "Many of these will be revealed in our forthcoming G-Cloud 9 offering."

As a result of Red Hat's OpenStack implementation, UKCloud has experienced a dramatic improvement in its ability and speed to on-board clients.

"Red Hat's OpenStack Platform has also enabled us to achieve marketing leading performance – with an external benchmark against both Azure and AWS showing that we out performed them in everything from instance boot times and disk IOPS to network throughput," Hansford added.

Red Hat said that its partnership with UKCloud is a perfect example of a successful delivery of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, combining the skills of UKCloud with those of the company's own services team to ensure a good early design is matched by a strong platform for future growth.

"The multi-tenant nature of our solution makes it suitable not only for customers building private cloud architectures, but also for a partner like UKCloud to offer it as a fully serviced platform for multiple end customers of their own."

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), has announced it's using Red Hat's OpenStack Platform to drive forward its collaborative research project, known as the Embassy Cloud.

The project's aim is to collaborate with researchers worldwide on life science experiments to find the answers to many worldwide problems, such as pan-cancer analysis.

EMBL-EBI needed to find a platform that could scale dramatically to respond to the greater data demands it was experiencing. The organisation was previously using VMware’s vCloud, but it needed a more responsive solution and because the EBI has already been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it decided to look at other solutions Red Hat offered.

"Many global research collaborations would not be possible without the functionality of Embassy Cloud," Steven Newhouse, head of Technical Services at EMBL-EBI said. "We are now using the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to support these collaborations - it has the flexibility and scalability needed to allow people working on different projects, in different locations, to access the information they need, as and when they need it."

As well as being an open standard in the research community, EBI knew Red Hat's OpenStack could deliver the scalable, flexible cloud platform needed to process the worldwide research. With local IT teams available to offer support to all of the research institution's in-house teams when they need it, it also meets the EBI's global footprint.

“It’s an honor to work closely with EMBL-EBI, whose collaborative and open approach to solving some of the world’s most challenging problems strongly resonates with the Red Hat approach to transforming enterprise IT," Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack, Red Hat added.

"We’re excited about role of open source solutions and in particular, production-ready Red Hat OpenStack Platform, in helping to truly define and accelerate the future of science and discovery.”

Channel 4 has chosen M2A Media’s Live To VoD Service, running from the public cloud, to enhance its live events video on demand, helping it get the footage to viewers as fast as possible.

The platform has reduced the broadcaster's video processing and delivery times significantly. It now takes just a few minutes to get live footage to viewers' screens, meaning All 4 On-Demand viewers are getting better value every time they start watching the service.

M2A Media made it simple to integrate its service into Channel 4's regular workflow, allowing them to capture, package and deliver video from the live streamed broadcast event, making it available almost immediately.

One of the main reasons Channel 4 wanted to use M2A Media's solution was to speed up the delivery of Formula 1 reporting.

The broadcaster is now able to show the action live streamed from the track, removing linear advertising breaks from the video, adding log points for inserting on-demand advertising breaks and delivering multiple formats and DRMs for on-demand platforms, which it was previously unable to do.

"Formula One is all about speed and our viewers want to be able to watch our F1 action on demand as soon as each programme is over," Andy Bell, Channel 4’s video engineering manager for All 4, said. "With M2A Media’s Live To VoD solution F1 fans can now see the whole race, from start to finish, on-demand only minutes after the chequered flag.”

M2A Media's Live To VoD service works by ingesting the transcoded live stream in eight bit-rates into Unified Origin with a 24-hour cache. This video is trimmed, converted to MPEG-DASH, HLS, Smooth and HDS VoD, DRM’d with Widevine, Playready, Fairplay, Access and Marlin and then delivered to Channel 4 for distribution to its VOD platforms.

Microsoft partners are now selling Windows 10 Enterprise E3 subscriptions to businesses via its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme.

The cloud-based platform costs $7 per user per month and offers enhanced enterprise-grade security and management functionality to make it easier for businesses to roll it out to employees.

Microsoft said it built E3 around its partners' feedback, with customers increasingly demanding a partner-managed, cloud-based subscription service that would simplify security and device management for the organisation.

It has been specifically designed for companies that handle sensitive data and need a secure platform on which to store or transfer it. Offering it on a subscription-based plan, meanwhile, means businesses aren't locked in to a long-term deal if they realise it doesn't quite their needs or they can't afford it.

"Windows 10 Enterprise E3 was designed for businesses that handle sensitive customer data (such as credit card or social security numbers), operate in regulated industries, or create and monetise intellectual property," Microsoft said.

"These businesses need enterprise-grade security and management capabilities found in the Windows 10 Enterprise edition such as Device Guard, Credential Guard and Managed User Experience."

Microsoft's launch partners include European company ALSO and US partners Tech Data and Synnex Corporation. These partners can also offer customers add-ons including Azure, Dynamics, Office 365, and Windows if they wish to tag them on to offer a fully-managed solution.

Windows 10 Enterprise E5, which additionally includes Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection will be rolling out to businesses via Microsoft's partners from 1 October.

Blockchain platform provider Credits has become the first Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider to tout its wares on the government's G-Cloud, helping the public sector roll out identity management and data security using blockchains.

The provider was chosen by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to provide its distributed ledger technology (DLT) on the Government Digital Services' Digital Marketplace, allowing the UK's public sector to build and deploy secure, enterprise-grade and interoperable DLT services.

Credits hopes the solution will be used across central and local government departments including devolved administrations, health, education, emergency services, defence, and not-for-profits such as housing associations and charities.

"Credits is pleased to have been awarded a place on the G-Cloud 8 platform," said Nick Williamson, CEO and founder of Credits. "We are excited by the huge potential of Distributed Ledger Technology for many different government and public sector applications, and are looking forward to working with UK public sector organisations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their services for UK taxpayers."

The CCS acts on behalf of the Crown to try and save money for taxpayers and boost the quality of commercial and procurements. It does this by ensuring any services it selects has outstanding customer service and provides value to the departments using the services it selects t be added to the Government Digital Services' Digital Marketplace.

Credits' BaaS platform runs on secure cloud infrastructure provided by partner UKCloud (formerly Skyscape Cloud Services). It will ensure departments utilising the tools are able to implement more robust identity management tools, preserve data security, reduce fraud and costs for the public sector.

Red Hat has announced a new Ansible-native container workflow and administration tool to help its customers better manage their containerised applications on the automation platform.

Ansible Container lets users create Docker-formatted Linux containers within Ansible Playbooks rather than having to use external tools.

According to Red Hat, this will overcome the problem of fragmentation in the area of tools for containerisation, which it said persists despite the emergence of standards for container formats driven by the Open Container Initiative.

The company has also launched new modules for the Kubernetes container management cluster alongside Ansible Container, which can create Kubernetes templates also directly from Ansible Playbook. These two offerings together, Red Hat said, will streamline the container creation process and deployment to Kubernetes-based container application platforms.

Doing this can increase efficiency within IT departments, which can automate routine tasks and adapt to new needs and DevOps workflows.

Greg DeKoenigsberg, director of the Ansible community, said: "Many users in our community have already grown accustomed to using Ansible to deploy and manage their containers, and the Ansible Container project is an encapsulation of many of the community’s best ideas, brought together into a single tool. The user traction we’ve received in a fairly short period of time indicates to us that we’re targeting a critical need in the container tooling space."

Ansible Container and the new Ansible modules for Kubernetes all work with Red Hat's container infrasructure stack, which includes Red Hat Linux Atomic Host, OpenShift, CloudForms, Insights, Satellite, Ansible Tower, OpenStack Platform and Cloud Suite.

Ansible Container is available in technical preview from today.

IBM and Portico Consultancy have teamed up to provide enterprises with a range of cloud solutions to transform their digital presence.

The IBM Digital Experience on Cloud user experience platform comprises the tools CMOs, CIOs and CHROs need to build, test and deploy applications to their organisations faster than using other technologies, IBM said.

The managed cloud platform enables organisations to analyse their audience's needs, whether customers, partners or employees across technologies including mobile platforms and IoT devices to deliver "compelling, socially aware, and omnichannel digital experiences."

Orgaisations can then use these insights to create the content and applications their end-users are demanding to leverage the company's position.

The IBM Digital Experience on Cloud runs on SoftLayer and comprises dedicated compute, storage and network infrastructures, with optional integration with IBM Digital Data Connector and script portlets.

"Our customers are telling us they need more functionality in digital experience software delivered in the cloud today," says Dennis Rot, founder and director of Portico Consultancy.

"Businesses want configurable software that integrates with existing IT infrastructure and new applications to power their consumer, partner and employee portals without having to worry about installation, configuration and maintenance. They want to change customer applications on the fly, and have them work on any platform, especially mobile."

Marie Wieck, general manager of IBM Software added: "The collaboration with Portico shows how companies can use an agile software environment in the cloud to better serve users, enter new markets and test-drive new ideas before taking them to customers."

Confectionary manufacturer Cloetta has chosen to partner up with Interoute to help make the move to a cloud-based infrastructure, including implementing Microsoft 365 app and to help it manage its global mobile working drive.

Cloetta chose Interoute's Cloud Connect, which optimises application data flows between local office IT and the head office private cloud, plus public cloud if required.

The platform has been implemented Cloetta’s 26 sites across Europe, each integrated into the existing VPN, which means it takes full advantage of the company's local internet network without breaking the bank.

“We are a bold company and we require a provider as forward thinking as us, which is why we work with Interoute," Magnus Nilsson, Operations Manager at Cloetta, said.

"Interoute Cloud Connect helps reduce costs, is fast, flexible and gives us the best of both worlds: a secure network with QoS as well as accelerated, secure local access to the open internet and applications in the cloud."

Cloetta employs more than 2,500 employees worldwide, making a solid and secure mobile working and cloud-based apps environment for everyone to use essential, no matter where they work.

To aid this, Interoute's Cloud Connect boasts a built-in firewall for extra security, while prioritising application traffic via network acceleration software and dynamic path selection to ensure the user experience is as efficient as possible.

“Cloetta is extremely successful at acquiring and merging regional confectionery brands," Mark Lewis, Interoute VP of communications and connectivity, added.

"However, its increasingly mobile workforce was struggling to interact with its digital systems via Microsoft 365, because of unpredictable local internet. Interoute Cloud Connect improved the performance of Microsoft 365 by optimising local internet breakout and direct access to Cloetta’s core business applications in the Interoute cloud.”

Gatwick Airport has selected Anaplan to predict when it will see spikes and fluctuations in passenger numbers, allowing it to plan its operations better.

The cloud-based platform means staff can access all the data they need about passenger numbers and demands from one place, with the ability to model potential future scenarios in order to future-proof its services.

The platform allows for information to be simulated on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis, meaning short-term, medium-term and long-term plans can be made to ensure the staff and facilities are in place at all times throughout the year to meet the rapidly changing demand.

“Passenger forecasting is at the centre of everything we do and with Anaplan, we now have the potential to run intricate scenarios in a matter of seconds. Anaplan will also provide greater robustness and the integrity of data we desire,” David Harpur, head of sales and operations planning at Gatwick Airport, said.

“One of the major factors, beyond the product itself, was finding a partner that would work at the same velocity and with the same ambition to grow as us," he added.

"In Anaplan, we have found this match and the ‘get up and go’ culture they have, constantly supporting us to be bigger and better, is certainly something that resonates strongly with the team here.”

Around 41 million passengers are expected to pass through Gatwick Airport in 2016 and the addition of technology such as Anaplan means the facility can ensure it is able to address everyone's needs equally.

Ian Stone, UK and Ireland managing director at Anaplan, added: “Global travel is a dynamic and complex industry in which forecasting has rapidly risen to the top of the agenda to model and optimise processes efficiently. We are excited to work with Gatwick Airport and support their growth ambitions.”

The City of Helsinki has implemented Bullion for SAP HANA, with the help of Atos as its IT partner, to help cut costs, boost security and offer flexibility for the city's management.

The City of Helsinki started working with Atos almost five years ago when it opened up an eco-efficient data centre in the city.

“We are pleased to be able to extend the existing service agreement with Atos," Jaakko Salavuo, CIO, City of Helsinki said. "With the contract, we can ensure accurate and cost-efficient continuation of SAP services to the city stakeholders and enable the deployment of new HANA-based SAP technologies."

The City of Helsinki is one of the first Atos customers to be using the SAP Business Suite on HANA on the cloud platform. It will ensure the organisation is future-proofed and its real-time computing features will ensure the area is using big data to its full capabilities.

“This contract proves that Atos provides a unique SAP HANA end-to-end offering – also on the Finnish market – based on its large experience in SAP projects associated with bullion unique features," said Harri Saikkonen, Managing Director at Atos in Finland.

"We are extremely proud to support the City of Helsinki on its digital transformation and are confident that the excellence of the bullion server will provide a secure and reliable platform for the customer’s SAP HANA –based future roadmap."

The City of Helsinki is embracing new cloud technologies to help it boost its infrastructure at a time where security, IT modernisation and big data are paramount to help it offer more services to citizens.

“It is truly our pleasure to acknowledge that the City of Helsinki has an advanced and candid view on benefiting from new technology SAP has brought to market," Taira Tepponen, Country Manager at SAP in Finland Oy added. "Atos as our global partner has proven global capabilities and it’s great to see the company as a forerunner also in Finland.”

Huawei has partnered with 11 fintech firms to help develop an open cloud platform to boost the financial industry's digital transformation.

The companies working with Huawei include Accenture, Beijing Advanced Digital Technology, Beijing Yucheng Technologies, Beiming Software, DHC Software, Deloitte Business Advisory Services, Digital China System Integration Service, First Data, Infosys Technologies, Micro Focus, and Worldline Technologies.

Huawei will contribute its Business-Driven ICT Infrastructure (BDII), using its skills as a hardware supplier to help the banking industry realise the potential of the cloud.

“The new ecosystem is designed to address the IT transformation needs of financial organisations [and] promotes BDII within the financial industry by enabling our partners to focus on their core competencies,” David He, president of marketing and solution sales at Huawei’s enterprise business group said.

“For example, consulting firms, application vendors, and system integrators will be able to leverage their in-depth understanding and practical experience around industry applications, while Huawei, as a hardware platform provider, will focus on ICT infrastructure.”

The new initiative will allow traditional financial orgaisations to embrace open source cloud-based solutions for applications including creating an online banking cloud, a credit loan cloud, a direct banking cloud, a micro-and-small-loan service cloud, a core account cloud, a credit card core application cloud, as well as mobile teller and home banking capabilities.

"Huawei facilitates IT architecture transformation within the finance industry by providing highly reliable x86 cluster systems to support core transaction systems, in addition to cloud architecture for finance that supports the transformation of the business and processes of banks,” Wang Hongfeng, general manager of finance solutions at Huawei added.

"Through cross-practice cooperation, Huawei hopes to speed up the evolution toward open platform architecture in the financial services industry.”

Capgemini's Sogeti division has chosen IBM Bluemix as its platform of choice to help integrate Internet of Things (IoT) device management, collaboration and app programming.

The department's job is to test technology and software for sectors including retail, healthcare, transportation, energy and utilities for and on behalf of clients.

Capgemini said the platform will allow the company to centralise its IoT device database on the IBM Cloud and use analytics to uncover trends and patterns in the data. This in turn could help the company's clients work more efficiently, whether that's by saving energy or ramping up production using a certain piece of connected equipment.

To do this, it will use Sogeti's own Smart Engine and IBM's IoT service on Bluemix. Additionally, IBM Bluemix will allow teams around the world to collaborate with clients worldwide to build applications in real-time and, in doing so, helping speed up time-to-market for products and services.

The final reason Capgemini chose IBM was because it allows the company to access IBM's partner API marketplace to build more functional apps and scale them when needed globally without the need to introduce additional infrastructure, using IBM's data centres around the world.

"As cloud continues to transform how we collaborate and work with technology, many of our clients are looking to build more and more of their apps and systems with cloud," Andreas Sjöström, vice president and global head of digital at Sogeti said.

"However, many are still hesitating to make such a transition, due to requirements around data privacy, security and performance in the cloud. With Bluemix Dedicated, we are able to help address these concerns by offering dedicated servers and cloud data centers, while still offering the highly valuable benefits of a cloud infrastructure, such as accelerated business speed, collaboration and visibility," he added.

Vodafone and EMC have invested €2 million (£1.4 million) into an IoT platform to help enterprises build and test industrial applications.

Infinite, as the platform will be known, is designed for large-scale applications such as manufacturing, machinery, household appliances and fleet management. The companies will also encourage healthcare and higher education establishments to test their devices and technologies on the platform.

It will be hosted across three datacentres in Ireland - one owned by Vodafone, another by EMC and a third by local cloud provider Cork Internet eXchange (CIX).

“EMC Federation is leading an industrial partnership encompassing rich data and Internet of Things. The digital age’s IT transformation – cloud, big data, social, mobile and Internet of Things, is continuously and increasingly changing the way we live and work,” said Orna Berry, corporate vice president innovation, EMC Centres of Excellences (CoE).

“EMC Federation and Ireland’s CoE are excited to take a dynamic and influential part in this important eventuation, with the creation of the Infinite innovative IoT platform.”

The project has been approved for use by cloud standards group Industrial Internet Consortium, which comprises a wide range of companies in the tech space, with the aim of streamlining interoperability across IoT devices and systems.

Richard Soley, executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium, said: "Infinite will prove to be a valuable Industrial Internet testbed for a countless number of industries including smart cities and healthcare. As the need for more dynamic systems continues to grow, organisations will turn to utilising mobile networks to connect to virtual system.

“This testbed is going to prove the viability of doing all this with systems that require the utmost security – such as those used by hospitals and emergency medical services.”

T-Sytems is set to launch AppAgile, a new cloud platform for integrating separate applications, at this week's CeBIT expo in Germany.

The Deutsche Telekom subsidiary designed the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) tool to enable further cloud adoption on an industry-wide scale.

In order to better integrate diverse applications into an existing IT infrastructure, AppAgile analyses applications for cloud compatability and then allows you to migrate them into a single cohesive cloud.

The platform works with clouds regardless of their individual privacy levels, and across various providers.

The platform allows for the exploration of growth vectors such as Big Data analysis or proximity marketing, and enables enhanced workflow and productivity. This will allow businesses to more effectively manage their IT deployments without having to juggle multiple cloud patforms, the firm claims.

Another advantage of a unified cloud solution is that all the data within it passes through servers in T-Systems' own data centres.

Certified and maintained in accordance with the stringent German data protection laws, these data centres are meant to ensure than all information is kept secure and private.

In addition to this, the platform is also available to customers on an hourly Pay-As-You-Go basis, requiring them only to pay for what they actually use. This could potentially be of substantial help to cash-strapped start-ups struggling to establish a financial foothold.

T-Systems also caters to more specialised needs, providing custom-developed solutions ideally suited to specific industries. These are intended to speed up the data delivery between relevant departments with minimal supervision.

The platform will be available for enterprises from April, when they will be able to trial different partners services in the cloud before deciding on a combination that suits their business needs.

NoSQL database giant MongoDB has announced a new $80 million funding round, as it counts more than 2,000 customers.

The cash brings the firm’s total funding to $311 million, and comes hot on the heels of a $25 million funding round (contributing to a $57.5 million total) for Basho, another NoSQL database company, yesterday.

NoSQL's got momentum

The money is “no major surprise” to Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom, who believes that NoSQL (Not-only-SQL) is proving to be a thorn in the side of large SQL incumbents such as Oracle, Microsoft and HP.

SQL relational databases are traditionally seen as places to store structured data, like phone numbers, while the rise of non-relational databases, like MongoDB’s, deal well with unstructured data like social media.

Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO of MongoDB, said in a statement that modern applications must be built on NoSQL databases if they want to make use of unstructured data.

“The market has reached a tipping point where most developers and IT organisations realise that modern applications cannot continue to be built on relational database technologies. They are shifting to MongoDB in a big way,” he said.

“MongoDB was designed to make it easy to develop applications that require rapid change, massive scale, always-on operation, and support for a large variety of unstructured and semi-structured data, all at significantly lower costs.”

Basho CEO Adam Wray offered up a similar statement, saying: “Worldwide demand for NoSQL technologies is driving our growth and greatly expanding our large enterprise deployments.”

Basho's then-CTO Justin Sheehy told Cloud Pro in 2012 that customers use the firm's database, Riak, to store their typically unstructured critical data.

"For example, in the case of an online retailer, that would be your session and your shopping cart. Not necessarily everything else, but that bit, because without it nobody gets to give you money! If it’s a health service, it’s all the data about patients – what they are allergic to, what prescriptions they have, and so on," he added.

SQL, NoSQL and Hadoop: The three-legged stool

Longbottom, however, said existing applications based on SQL databases shouldn’t move to NoSQL, even if NoSQL is best for unstructured data.

He instead recommends a three-pronged approach, the first two prongs of which see existing apps continue to use SQL, and new applications dealing in unstructured data using NoSQL databases.

“However, you don’t want to stick everything that isn’t SQL directly into MongoDB, as it gets a tad large and slow to deal with,” he added.

He recommends a third prong in which companies stick other data in NoSQL-oriented software Hadoop, which can process the data more quickly by spreading it out across a vast number of servers.

Operating in its MapReduce mode, Hadoop can also shrink, then classify, that data.

Firms can then decide whether to put it in their SQL database or their NoSQL database, said Longbottom.

The future

Oracle is one SQL incumbent that has recognised the power of Hadoop, and last year responded to customer demand to use the NoSQL technology.

Its Oracle Big Data SQL product allows users to run SQL queries against Hadoop data stores, allowing customers to combine unstructured data on their Hadoop clusters with structured data in their SQL environments.

More SQL players may go down this route in future to appease customers wanting the best of both worlds, and Longbottom pointed out that both Actian and IBM also offer “SQLisation of Hadoop”.

The analyst sees this combination of NoSQL and SQL as the eventual ending point for vendors currently plugging the competing technologies.

He said: “Our long-term view is that the three-legged stool becomes a monopod: in the same way that in-memory databases are far more built-in to SQL databases than they previously were, we expect to see true big data storage tools emerge that can do MapReduce and deal with structured and less structured data in the same store.”

This is a couple of years away, he said, and so backs the three-pronged approach in the meantime for organisations with legacy apps looking to make more use of unstructured data.

This might sound familiar. You've come up with a great idea for a new app or service that will dramatically increase business value or boost end user satisfaction. Yet you lack the budget or authorisation to move things forward and prove the necessary business case. BlueMix changes this.

Instant is the watchword of this platform. All the runtime, infrastructure and more are there at your fingertips you no longer have to explain what the future will look like, you can build it.

IBM's BlueMix PaaS environment was launched as an open beta back in February this year and it has proved extremely popular. The basic premise is to enable DevOps, businesses and IT departments to build enterprise apps more quickly and effectively than ever before.

At the same time of unveiling BlueMix, IBM announced the acquisition of DBaaS firm Cloudant, which will become a core component of the cloud development offering.

"IBM is ushering in a bold new era of innovation by partnering with developers in an open environment to accelerate the emerging world of hybrid cloud computing," Robert LeBlanc, IBM's senior vice president of software and cloud Solutions, said at the time.

"We are combining the strength of our developer ecosystem with the depth of subject matter expertise in domains such as mobile, Big Data and DevOps, to build a scalable model that easily spans from a single developer to global teams. Today's announcement is another significant move in extending true cloud integration - not just to existing data and transaction services but to a new class of emerging applications."

IBM's own BlueMix website suggests using this platform will allow you to "create apps with the efficiency of a cold-blooded cyborg." And those words aren't used lightly. Indeed, the BlueMix environment has everything developers need from IBM built services to third-party offerings to conceive, create and develop from the ground up.

Pre-configured service sets, runtimes and sample code are all there ready for quick and instant deployment. It's like the LEGO of enterprise infrastructure except much more valuable. What's more, the fact BlueMix is based on open standards IBM is now a Cloud Foundry member makes for an even more attractive proposition. No-one likes to feel trapped or locked in and that's exactly why developers can feel comfortable developing using the BlueMix platform.

None of this though has come about as a matter of co-incidence. IBM has invested heavily ($1 billion and counting) and regularly in making cloud come to life for developers and end users alike.

The untapped development potential of the cloud is no laughing matter as it means businesses are missing out on ways to provide added value to customers and partners alike. Evans Data reckons that there are more than 18 million software developers globally, but less than a quarter of them are actively developing for the cloud. That, for those who understand the value of cloud, is more than a massive shame.

To that end, IBM is powering ahead by expanding what it offers to those wishing to develop on the BlueMix platform. Indeed, in April 2014, just a few months after announcing the beta, IBM revealed that more than 30 new cloud services were available on BlueMix.

To recap what BlueMix has to offer, it delivers the following:

• Cloud integration services that provide a secure connection between public applications used by organisations and their own private data;
• Fast and secure connections, via the cloud, between IoT and M2M devices to store, query and visualise data;
• Data and analytics-as-a-service enabling applications that take advantage of the power of big data to be quickly and easily designed and scaled;
• DevOps services to fully support the end-to-end developer lifecycle.

"The adoption rate of BlueMix has been nothing short of phenomenal since being announced only a few short weeks ago," said Steve Robinson, general manager of IBM Cloud Platform Services, at the time.

"Rapidly growing numbers of beta participants are embracing our model of extending their existing assets and services into a cloud-based, open-source development platform, allowing our clients to bridge between the tools they are planning for the future and the workloads and services they use today to get them to market faster."

A number of businesses are already enjoying the benefits BlueMix delivers, including Continental Automotive, EyeQ, GameStop and Pitney Bowes.

Indeed, by utilising the BlueMix environment, EyeQ has been able to reduce its monthly server maintenance times by 85 per cent, freeing up resources to spend time innovating for the greater good of the organisation.

Other customer successes include FIMC, which was also able to unleash the power of mobile thanks to BlueMix, resulting in an app that has increased renewal rates by 30 per cent. While BART created a mobile app pilot in a matter of weeks rather than months thanks to BlueMix.

Using BlueMix DevOps BART will be able to delve into the data related to some 44 stations and 104 miles of track as well as sensors, systems, trains and more, to track movements in real-time.

"BART has a huge volume of incredibly valuable information living in its infrastructure: from trains to tracks to maintenance reports," said Slavik Zorin, CEO of Synchrony Systems.

"We are looking to the DevOps model to give us the tools we need to rapidly tap all of this important data into a new, interactive mobile platform for BART to roll out to its mobile workforce improving maintenance response and providing better service."

Although developers largely work in isolation, sometimes there is power in numbers. To this end, IBM created the BlueMix Garage a series of collaborative locations that bring developers using BlueMix together under one roof.

The first such BlueMix Garage was located in a place that is home to more start-ups per square foot than anywhere else on the planet South of Market in San Francisco. More specifically, it is placed in the start-up hub Galvanize, which is touted to have more than 200 start-ups housed there by the end of the year.

"We're trying to shape the ingredients for a learning environment to create the next great tech leaders. That involves putting them in close proximity of one another. There is no manual for creating a great company," said Jim Deters, co-founder and CEO of Galvanize.

"We're incredibly excited to bring the capabilities, the mentorship, the technology, the ecosystem and global reach of the enterprise that comes from IBM and start to intersect that and layer it in where start-ups are. That is a hugely beneficial relationship."

As of June 2014, more than 50 BlueMix services were available as the platform moved out of beta and into general availability. Internally, IBM has trained more than 80,000 developers to take advantage of the platform, while the number of developers externally continues to grow.

"BlueMix represents the next step in the transformation of IBM's cloud offering. One of the most important factors is the breadth of technology IBM can offer when it comes to cloud, coupled with clear intention to ensure its different product groups work together more closely than ever before," said Gary Barrett, principal software analyst at Ovum.

"If IBM continues to enhance the platform and can bring on enough partners, BlueMix could transform the Platform-as-a-Service market."

The recent Apple/IBM partnership looks set to expand the reach of developers using BlueMix further still.

The partnership will result in IBM selling iOS devices to its customers pre-loaded with industry specific apps. Given the appetite for apps in the enterprise, this will likely fuel further growth and further demand.

"iPhone and iPad are the best mobile devices in the world and have transformed the way people work with over 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and over 92 per cent of the Global 500 using iOS devices in their business today," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO.

"For the first time ever we're putting IBM's renowned big data analytics at iOS users' fingertips, which opens up a large market opportunity for Apple. This is a radical step for enterprise and something that only Apple and IBM can deliver."

Ginni Rometty, IBM's chairman, president and CEO, added: "Mobility - combined with the phenomena of data and cloud - is transforming business and our industry in historic ways, allowing people to re-imagine work, industries and professions.

"This alliance with Apple will build on our momentum in bringing these innovations to our clients globally, and leverages IBM's leadership in analytics, cloud, software and services. We are delighted to be teaming with Apple, whose innovations have transformed our lives in ways we take for granted, but can't imagine living without. Our alliance will bring the same kind of transformation to the way people work, industries operate and companies perform."

Apple looks set to take the wraps off a host of products at its launch event in Cupertino later today, with the iPhone 6, iWatch and the next generation iPad Air all expected to put in an appearance.

The event is likely to be presided over by Apple CEO Tim Cook and Phil Schiller, the consumer electronics giant's vice president of worldwide market, if previous launches are anything to go by, and will kick-off at 6pm, UK time.

The IT Pro team will be covering all the news from the event as it happens, with comprehensive breakdowns and comparisons planned for all the kit Apple decides to debut during the keynote, so make sure you check the site often for updates.

Industry sources are suggesting tonight's event could be one of the most ambitious in Apple's history, with two new iPhones tipped to make their debut, along with news of the vendor's first foray into wearable tech in the form of the iWatch, as well as the next-generation iPad Air.

We're also likely to see a comprehensive walkthrough tonight of the various new features packed into Apple's soon-to-be-launched iOS 8 mobile operating system, and possibly how its HomeKit and HealthKit offerings will tie-up with the devices it unveils at the launch.

Below, we take a quick run through the devices that are hotly-tipped to be unveiled tonight, with links to articles we've written about them already, and place our bets on how likely they are to make an appearance.

iPhone 6

September has traditionally seen Apple announce details about a new iPhone it's bringing to market, and this year - as was the case in 2013 - the rumour mill seems to be suggesting that two models could be in the offing.

Last year, this resulted in the highly-praised iPhone 5s, which marked the introduction of the firm's TouchID biometric finger scanner, and the lower cost iPhone 5c.

Whereas cost and specs were the key differentiators between last year's two devices, in 2014 it seems it's all about size for Apple.

According to various reports, the firm is planning to bring a 4.7in smartphone and a 5.5in phablet-style device to market.

You can find out more about both devices, and what's rumoured to be bundled in with them here.

Likelihood of launch: 99.99999 per cent Apple always debuts new iPhones in September, and last year's crop are already falling behind the competition on the specs front, so a refresh is well overdue.

iWatch

With Asus, Sony, Samsung, LG already touting smartwatches of some description, Apple has been accused of being late to the wearable tech party.

However, given Apple's track record for popularising the use of, and improving on, technology that already exists, market watchers have been quick to bat away suggestions the firm's decision to bide its time will cause it harm.

Industry sources claim the device is likely to sport a 2.5in touch screen, which arcs around the wrist, and will have wireless charging capabilities. Furthermore, it's thought the device will also act as a fitness tracker by monitoring health metrics, such as heart rate, calories burnt and the number of steps taken.

Here's a link to our latest news about the iWatch.

Likelihood of launch: The momentum surrounding Apple's iWatch has markedly ramped up in recent months, with the announcement Apple had recruited a former Tag Heuer sales director to help with its development.

Early reports hinted at an October release date for the iWatch, so we'd say there's a75 per cent chance of a shiny wristwatch.

iPad Air 2 AKA New iPad Air

Apple officially did away with the numeric naming convention for its tablet family last October with the launch of the 9.7in iPad Air, which it declared the "lightest, full-size tablet in the world."

The device is due a refresh, with reputable KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggesting last weekthat tonight will be the night Apple announces the iPad Air's successor.

Little is know about the prospective, new device at the moment, although reports suggest it could feature 2GB of RAM and come equipped with Touch ID.

Here's a link to an article featuring further details on the iPad Air 2.

Likelihood of launch: 30 per cent.The iPad Air 2 was a late, prospective addition to the keynote line-up, and - given Apple usually debuts new additions to its tablet family in October, ahead of the holiday rush - we're a little dubious about claims it'll be launched tonight. We could be wrong, but Apple rarely tampers with its release cycles.

Be sure to check back here once the keynote ends to see if any of our predictions were true.

IBM has traded widely on the prowess of its cadre of supercomputers. Built for speed and sheer computing capacity, IBM Blue Gene has a petaflops pace almost unfathomable to the human brain; and then there is Watson, the natural language supercomputer with Artificial Intelligence named after IBM’s first CEO.

Watson has proved extremely good at consuming, analysing and making decisions based upon the unstructured content with which it is fed. So good in fact that the computer beat two human contestant ‘previous champions’ in a quiz shoot-out on the US game show Jeopardy.

But Watson was destined for more. IBM decided that the machine-learning technology behind this box of processors and chips could be put to greater use for humanity.

Watson’s “intelligence” has since been directed at worthy objectives in health, particularly in making prognoses - where it's thought to be able to out-think even the most knowledgeable medical minds. Other applications could see the legal trade being usurped by a new kind of lawyer, ie one with a computerised knowledge of all statute books and points of precedent, capable of deduction based upon incomprehensibly huge streams of historical (and, conceivably, real-time) data.

What next then? Well it’s going to be that word that all vendors just love to use to denote their technology’s breadth - and that term is “platform”.

Anything-as-a-Platform is the term sitting somewhere in between being a noun and a verb that describes the point at which a database vendor, cloud hosting supplier, technology services company etc. decides that software application developers should be able to “program to” their technology proposition.

Watson is becoming a platform rather than just a very impressive box, by dint of IBM readying itself to give external third party developers access to its power. The company is doing this by opening up an API set , building what it will eventually call a Watson app marketplace.

If successful, the Watson “app store” could be a route for software programmers to eventually monetise their own innovative “applications”, on the back of the AI backbone that they tap into.

Will it be successful? Well, let’s be honest, yes it will. IBM doesn’t fail at this kind of thing and the firm is using a RESTful API set and familiar programming tools to maximise the chances of user take-up and adoption. It fits the global IBM model nicely too as the firm could subsequently put itself in a position to sell integration services on top (remember IBM Global Services?) and even international translation perhaps.

If Google is selling routes and channels and formats to access its data, IBM is selling access to its data processing and analysis, so what’s wrong with that?

If there is a criticism to be levied here it comes back to the term platform again. Where we see developers urged to “program to” Watson, the more purist of mind will still regard a platform as something to “program on” or even “with” at the very least.

In other words, a platform is something with an accompanying language, plus a set of tools, components and a runtime: think .NET or think Java. OK so fair enough, this is not the only way to think of a platform now and the definition is widening, but it is being widened by commercial labelling rather than from technology functionality in the first instance.

Let’s also remember that this is a cloud computing practitioner’s website and highlight the fact that Watson (as a platform) will now also be offered as a service.

As a piece of terminology, computational artificial intelligence & knowledge engine platform -as-a-Service (or CAIKEP-aaS) isn’t going to stick. So you will hear IBM talk about Watson as a service in the same way that Google and perhaps also Wolfram Research will position Wolfram Alpha.

So is there one problem that IBM Watson can’t solve? One could suggest that it needs to shrug off as much of the ‘old traditional IBM’ feel if it is to be perceived as cutting edge and worth programmers’ attentions. But perhaps this heritage for big machines is exactly the kind of image that it should present? At least Watson can still occasionally get some things wrong and doesn’t know where Chicago is. There is hope for us humans yes, just.

The Sanderson Group has bought cloud-based eCommerce company One Iota for around £5.43m.

One Iota provides mobile commerce technology to retailers via the cloud.

The company has developed a proprietary cloud-based modular technology platform, MESH, that enables the delivery of enterprise-grade retail SaaS offerings, which span mobile commerce, ecommerce, social media and a range of in-store technology.

The 20-strong firm is based in Rossendale, Lancashire, and count Footasylum, Republic, Mamas & Papas, Universal, Jaeger and SuperDry among its customers. For the seven months of this year until the end of August, One iota reported revenues of about £610,000 and a pretax profit of £210,000.

Sanderson will initially pay £2.38million cash and £750,000 in shares. The remainder depends on One Iota achieving certain performance targets over the next three years.

Software and IT services business Sanderson employs 30 people at its base in Sheffield. It plans to raise £3.5 million, before expenses, by a placing more than six million new shares.

Sanderson chairman Christopher Winn said the firm was “delighted” to welcome the One Iota team, led by Damian Hanson and David Hague, into the Sanderson group.

“Following the acquisition of Catan Marketing in August 
2013, the One Iota acquisition further strengthens the company’s position in the rapidly expanding mobile enabled e-commerce and online sales markets,” he said.

Hague and Hanson founded One Iota in 2010. The firm’s founders told the Manchester Evening News earlier this year it would break the £1 million sales barrier by the end of the year, thanks to its cloud-based retail platform.

Cloud computing has had a disruptive effect upon information technology in many ways. There's been a revolution in the way we think of supply, consumption and the interplay of partners and customers, thanks to cloud. New delivery models have been formed, forged and (in many cases) also fragmented. Okay, so no big surprise, you knew that part.

What cloud computing has also done is blur the lines between vendors and customers. We normally think of cloud computing with relatively identifiable perimeters in terms of who hosts, who connects, who stores and who computes from infrastructure, to platform, to service or application. But the reality is different: inside the cloud vortex, the customer is the customer - and possibly the supplier as well.

Examples of this have been seen in the case of IBM and Netflix. As a supplier of datacentre storage and other compute power to Netflix, IBM’s vendor-supplier relationship was initially straightforward. However, when developers at Netflix produced the Chaos Monkey web application resiliency tool, IBM performance architects couldn’t resist making it a two-way relationship. Chaos Monkey itself is a tool designed to cause deliberate failure in Amazon Web Services (AWS) applications and IBM has used it as part of its project Icap developerWorks prototypes.

For the record, IBM is so huge that it obviously has lots of two-way and even ‘three-way love triangle’ relationships with partners and customers, but that’s not the point - the point is that this is a direct example of a supplier picking items from a customer’s toolset (in this case at no cost with the open sourced Chaos Monkey) and re-implementing them upon its own coalface, albeit an experimental one.

This new slightly incestuous trend goes further. OpenStack vendors are working with their own customers on software development as they fully engage in the ‘collaborative community model of contribution’ in the true sense of open source. So does this mean we need to think differently about the way cloud implementations are developed in some way? Does this changing relationship mean a different approach for CIOs?

“Cloud has been a catalyst for this kind of ‘crossover’ behaviour from the start. This is because, fundamentally, the total cloud proposition is really quite complex. The scale of the technology problems we are trying to circumvent with cloud are bigger than any one company, even an engineering giant like IBM,” says Nigel Beighton, international VP of technology at Rackspace.

“If you look at the difference between what makes a partner and what makes a supplier, a good partner will always have ‘skin in the game’ and have bought into a wider technical object target. For my money, I believe we need to encourage and propagate mutually united goals and I will always trust somebody who has a defined shared objective, even if that objective itself is exploratory and subject to change,” adds Beighton.

So where did this all start? “I am not sure that cloud started this blurring of the lines between vendor and customer, but I think that it has accelerated the blurring,” says Peter Matthews, research staff member, CA Labs at CA Technologies. CA Technologies conducted a survey recently that reviewed how the role of the CIO would change in a cloud world. One of the most interesting results was the realisation that many organisations are seeing an increase in “shadower rogue IT” in use.

“This is the ultimate expression of cloud potential. For example marketing departments using cloud storage or applications without reference to the procurement or IT departments and developing their own market analysis tools that they could then offer to other marketing departments,” adds CA’s Matthews.

The whole dynamic now shifts

Bryan House is VP of product marketing at commercial Drupal services company Acquia. He suggests that the ways and means by which firms work with customers is constantly evolving, specifically with regards to large-scale PaaS/cloud applications - and yes, this has implications for the ‘whole dynamic’ of the business-technology framework.

“Let me put this into context,” said House. “Historically, the datacentre team has taken ownership of managing every element of performance tuning. But now, by shifting to PaaS platforms, the customer willingly sacrifices some control to reduce complexity and lower costs, while taking advantage of the PaaS platform’s scope, power and elasticity. So the cloud introduces a new continuum in terms of ‘value vs. control’ and this drives a much closer partnership between vendor and customer. The days of transactional - here's a box with your server in it, you're on your own - are over."

The customer-partner relationship of old is being reshaped in no uncertain terms. Open source distributed database company Basho is working with Angry Birds developer Rovio. EMEA director at Basho Stuart McCaul explains that as a Basho customer, Rovio has invited a number of permanent Basho staff to work from Rovio's offices to take part in R&D on advanced technologies like conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs).

Think cloud, think big data, think conflict-free replicated data types to be used by all the stakeholders responsible for their development. In addition to this, third parties too ie the CRDTs will be part of Basho’s Riak and, therefore, the technology will be available to everyone.

Gary Calcott, technical marketing manager at Progress Software asserts that these trends point to longer term changes that will come about in terms of the way CIOs need to approach cloud infrastructures. Calcott reminds us that customers have a choice of which platform they use, so perhaps for them, a little blurring of the lines when it comes to helping them make this decision can be a powerful thing.

“Application development platforms in the cloud will increasingly need to be IaaS agnostic otherwise they run the risk of limiting choice, potentially impacting on cost and also inhibiting reach (for ISVs in particular).

What we're seeing, as a direct result, is that for the customer at least, the blurring of lines between vendors and customers is actually a desirable outcome. After all, by remaining cloud agnostic, and preventing lock-in, IaaS platform suppliers will be stronger and more present in certain regions (and absent in others). Regional IaaS suppliers may also be better positioned to satisfy regulatory issues than others in certain markets."

Was the advent of the cloud IT delivery model concept always going to create such a fluid situation? It didn’t appear to be the case five or years ago, as much as the evidence presented here might suggest.

If this is cloud’s seven-year itch where it starts sleeping around with other vendors, then it may be no bad thing as long as appropriate levels of protection are employed. No one-night stands though please, let’s do this with love OK?

There were a lot of news announcements coming out of Oracle’s Open World conference. Some of it was substantial, while a good deal was PR spin and some received little attention, but could end up having a significant effect on the way that programming in the cloud is handled in the future.

Java always seems a bit of the poor relation of Oracle. Acquired as part of the deal that brought Sun to the Ellison empire, it never seems to be regarded as main part of the family – in a wedding photo, it would be the one sandwiched in the back row, half-hidden by the bride’s exceptionally tall uncle.

You can tell Java’s status by the fact that its events aren’t part of the main conference but are held in meeting rooms down long hotel corridors. Despite this, there was plenty to talk about, with plenty of optimism for the future - notwithstanding some unspeakable zero-day vulnerability flaws that surfaced earlier in 2013

Oracle Java Central (or whatever they call the mothership) still claims to have seen a 10 percent increase in Java user groups during the year and that’s before we talk about the major new release of Java EE 7 to get excited about too.

So the future is bright for Java then?

VP of Java product management Peter Utzschneider is very upbeat: “The combination of mobility and social have created an incredible amount of new data, of people interacting, sharing and producing things with new services and new applications, all being driven by massive infrastructure, mostly running on Java.”

So, will Java find its movement to cloud-based Internet-fuelled virtualised-only platforms without much trouble too then? Not really; despite Java’s “born on the web” (or pretty damn close to it) pedigree, the true transition to “programming in the cloud” hasn’t really been talked about half as much as it should have been.

From Oracle’s perspective it’s a case of “we have loads of SaaS apps running, so let’s make Java fully service-based too” - which is the informal way of saying Oracle has just made Java-as-a-Service available. This will help “support a wider variety of workloads” says Oracle, and allow full control of dedicated Oracle WebLogic server clusters, support any Java application and gives users greater flexibility and choice over their services.

What Oracle appears to mean by Java-as-a-Service, is Java the platform, not the language in the first instance. The Java application server can reside in the cloud, but the programming element should still reside here on Earth. The notion of an “online language” is still something of an oxymoron, but this will surely not always be so.

So are Oracle’s moves intelligent and enriched with much needed technological foresights, or are they merely corporate and self-serving?

The emergence of Java-as-a-Service comes under the umbrella of the Oracle Database-as-a-Service offering. This provides dedicated database instance(s) running on the firm’s own VM virtualisation, based on tested configurations with support for any database application, language or connection method. Perhaps then it should have been called Java-as-a-Service-Inside-a-Database-App or some such variant.

This is Oracle saying to developers “build your Java app and it’ll sit nicely on Oracle”, this is not Oracle saying “we have a bunch of on-demand Java services for you to help build, augment, test and debug your app” as such.

Although that being said, this does offer a route to an elastic compute service, which is compatible with OpenStack Nova and provides virtual CPUs to which Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder assemblies and Oracle VM templates may be deployed.

The “how do we actually program for the cloud” question may not be quite taboo, but it has been uncomfortably glossed over for many people’s money.

Utzschneider notes that his team now has to “rethink security” and work out how services can move from being container-based to a more service-based model. The Java team wants to be able to move its applications from physical infrastructure to the cloud, but also be able to port it to a different cloud if we wish. It’s still all about post-development migration to cloud though.

Al Hilwa, programme director for software development research at IDC, asks what do we mean by a language in the cloud anyway? “Java EE code generally runs on the server and thus in the cloud, but if you are wondering about the IDE, or authoring the language in the cloud, then you are right, that is still being done by client-side IDEs like Eclipse, JDeveloper or NetBeans,” he says.

IDC’s Hilwa goes on to say that Oracle’s new Java-as-a-Service offering is essentially WebLogic-as-a-Service. “It is oriented towards enterprises who have existing applications built on WebLogic and want to take advantage of cloud economics to run them. These may be burst workloads that extend on-premises applications during peak loads, or they may be testing workloads etc. This is a sound approach for Oracle to take its customers to the cloud, but it is not to be confused with what is being offered by other PaaS providers today.”

Where perhaps this differs from what many PaaS vendors are doing (let’s include Cloud Foundry, Heroku and EngineYard) is that the Oracle model remains virtual machine (VM)-bound in terms of scaling. "In Cloud Foundry, the application is the unit of scale, not the application server and virtual machine, said Andy Piper, developer advocate for Cloud Foundry, speaking at a recent conference.

So, a lightweight container technology is used to enable many application instances to be packed into a single VM instance - and this is said to “drastically” improve cloud economics.

This approach is also argued to enable greater focus for developers, who can work on their code and application without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure. In this way, applications can be scaled independently and pretty fast. In summary, the route to a “real cloud application” is a cobbled street right now with more than one path open to the intrepid hiker.

Cloud applications are one thing, cloud programming is another thing, but cloud languages and virtual application development is yet another - but not for too long perhaps?

The European Space Agency (ESA) is using a virtual datacentre in the cloud to process satellite data that could help boost its understanding of the underlying causes of geohazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes.

The ESA has developed a SuperSites Exploitation Platform (SSEP) on the Interoute Virtual Data Centre offering.

The SSEP was created in collaboration with Interoute and allows on-demand processing of satellite data.

Providing initial access to 13TB of data, encompassing 50,000 radar scenes from ESA, users of SSEP can choose from a number of algorithms to process the data.

The platform also features a cloud-based toolbox, which offers virtual desktop resources configured with appropriate software and licenses to analyse and process the data.

ESA used the cloud to transform the way its satellite data is used, processed and distributed.

It said the platform would encourage collaboration via the cloud as it enabled the scientific community to gain instant access to data and remote instruments, and the setup of virtual research communities.

This development required the capability to procure, provision and deploy a secure cloud-based infrastructure, making on-demand, scalable processing and storage of large data volumes faster for users who are distributed around the world.

“This platform will provide authorised users with simple access tools to view and retrieve data from multiple archives, to place their tasking requests, to fetch data, and to report results back to data providers; which will make a larger pool of data available to scientific data users,” said Jordi Farres, service manger at ESA.

“The SSEP model complements the legacy model where data was shipped out and processed at a user's premises. Collaboration with Interoute and other industrial partners has made this significant step forward possible.”

Matthew Finnie, chief technology officer at Interoute, added: “Combining Interoute Virtual Data Centre with the European Space Agency’s e-Infrastructure brings all the advantages of cloud, huge scalability and unparalleled connectivity, to the innovative ESA SuperSites Exploitation Platform. With this collaboration and through the cloud Interoute is helping ESA track tomorrow."

Google's first Nexus 7 blew open the budget tablet market by showing affordable slates could be great, and now it's released an updated edition that's raised the bar further. Targeted primarily at a consumer audience - and likely no match for the desktop/laptop - we explore its potential as a companion device for the on-the-move business user.

Dazzling 7in display

The undoubted star of the show is the screen. The 7in IPS panel provides the sharpest display that's available on any tablet. The 1,920 x 1,200 resolution pack 323 pixels-per-inch, which easily outstrips the 163ppi iPad Mini and even the 264ppi iPad 4. It's also an improvement on its predecessor, the Nexus 7 which had pixel count of 216ppi.

This makes it practically impossible to spot pixels, and the world-beating sharpness makes an impact across the whole device: text is clear, pictures/photography look crisp and games are sharper than on any other tablet. The high resolution only works against the Nexus 7 when web browsing it's here where low-resolution images stand out.

The high contrast and colour accuracy together with the stunning clarity makes this great for reading e-books and multimedia consumption.

The numbers back this up. We measured a retina searing brightness level of 540cd/m2, which bests the iPad Mini's 389cd/m2, and the black level of 0.51cd/m2 is good. Combine those measurements and you get a contrast ratio of 1,058:1 better than the iPad's 720:1 result. It's the best set of results we've seen from a tablet, and it means colours are vivid throughout, from distinguishable deep shades of black to delicate white tones.

Colour accuracy is great throughout, the IPS technology underneath means viewing angles are excellent, and it's made from hard-wearing Gorilla Glass so it should be able to withstand a drop. It's one of the best screens available on any tablet or smartphone at any price.

Pocket friendly companion

The screen is the most dramatic change in this year's Nexus 7, but the Asus-made device is also sleeker than the original. The weight has dropped from 340g to 290g, and it's 2mm thinner and 6mm narrower than the original 10.5mm, 120mm frame.

For the travelling worker, the Nexus 7 shapes up to be the ultimate companion. The pocket friendly dimensions and weight means you can slip it into a jacket comfortably and pull it out at a meeting to review notes, showcase videos or browse the web.

Asus has stepped up the design too. The silver band around the edge has been axed, and instead the tablet is entirely clad in black plastic, with a discreet Nexus logo across the back panel. The soft-touch material is comfortable, and the build quality concerns that plagued the first Nexus 7 have disappeared there's not a hint of creak or flex around this thin, light tablet's frame.

There's a micro-USB port at the bottom and a headphone jack at the top but, sadly, Google has omitted a microSD card slot so there's no chance to add your own storage. The power button and volume rocker are both situated at the top of the right-hand edge, and we've two minor complaints: they're close to each other, and they're flush with the tablet's body.

Processing power

The internals get the inevitable upgrade too. Last year's Tegra 3 processor is replaced by a Qualcomm 1.5GHz, quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chip with an Adreno 320 graphics core. RAM is doubled to 2GB and this allows the 2013 edition to fly through benchmarks.

The Nexus 7's SunSpider score of 1,133ms is quicker than the iPad Mini's 1,535ms result. In Peacekeeper's HTML 5 browser benchmark the Nexus 7's score of 568 beat the smaller iPad's 508. The Nexus also triumphed in Geekbench: its score of 1,687 trounced the iPad Mini's 759.

These benchmarks translate to smooth real-world use. There was no slowdown when navigating Android's menus or browsed web pages the flawless performance is helped by the absence of manufacturer-added software and skins and the ability to process smooth graphics. Despite the huge number of pixels pushed across that marvellous screen, Real Racing 3, Modern Combat 4 and Rayman: Jungle Run all ran without a hitch.

Battery life

The slim line dimensions means the battery is reduced from 4,325mAh to 3,950mAh. With successive generations we usually see the battery get bigger, but there doesn't seem to be a downside to this. The Nexus lasted just under 12 hours in our video-looping benchmark better than last year's Nexus 7, which ran out of juice after nine hours, and an improvement on the iPad Mini's 11 hours 26mins longevity.

There's one area that tablets haven't had nailed, and it's audio. The new Nexus 7 has stereo speakers, and they're loud but not quite up to standard found on the HTC One smartphone.

The rest of the specification covers most of the bases: there's dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and NFC. The device comes with either 16GB or 32GB of storage space, and we'd opt for the latter of the two tablets so you can have more space to use the Nexus as a hard drive and high-end movies and games are around 2GB in size, which means memory can be used up quickly.

Google has upgraded the original tablet's 1.2-megapixel camera to a 5-megapixel shooter. It's a big improvement, but it's still not going to trouble the best smartphones. Daylight snaps are decent but it struggles in low-light conditions images are too dark and noisy for our tastes.

Conclusion

The Nexus 7 lays down the gauntlet yet again. It boasts the industry's sharpest screen and oodles of power. The hard-wearing, good-looking chassis and price make it a better choice than the iPad Mini.

Google offeres the 16GB version for 199, and the 32GB model is 239. That compares well to the iPad, which costs between 269 and 429. It's also better value than rivals such as the Asus Fonepad and Barnes & Noble Nook HD while both of these are cheaper, they are not quite up there when it comes to performance.

Whilst the new Nexus is not the cheapest 7in device it's the best in the business in virtually every department. If you need a compact tablet, versatile tablet, this is the one to buy.

Verdict

The Nexus 7’s screen bests every rival for pixel count and sheer quality. The components outstrip virtually everything out there – so performance is slick. The chassis is slimmer, lighter and more comfortable than before, and the 16GB and 32GB models cost less than £239. It'll also be first in line to get the Android 4.4 KitKat update.

OS: Android 4.3 Processor: 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro GPU: Adreno 320 Memory: 2GB RAM Storage: 16GB/32GB Screen: 7in 1,920 x 1,200 IPS Connectivity: Dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC Other: Micro-USB slot, 3.5mm headphone jack Camera: 5mp, 1080p 30fps video Battery: 3,950mAh Size: 114 x 200 x 8.7mm Weight: 290g

Cloud services broker Cloud Sherpas has acquired London-based IT consultancy Stoneburn Software Services.

The company expects the acquisition to strengthen its UK presence and anticipates it will lead to a doubling of the company’s UK workforce, which currently stands at 70 full-time personnel.

Like Cloud Sherpas, Stoneburn, which was founded in 2008, focuses on migrating clients to Google Apps and Amazon Web Services, among other services.

However, the fact the company was the first UK Google Enterprise Partner may have influenced Cloud Sherpas’ decision to acquire the company, as it is a Google-focused operation and expects its Google business unit to grow by more than 70 per cent this year.

Cloud Sherpas has twice been named Google Enterprise Partner of the Year for Google Apps and claims to be one of the world’s largest independent cloud services brokers.

David Northington, CEO at Cloud Sherpas, said: “The UK and Western European cloud and Google Enterprise markets have very quickly transitioned from early adopter phase to established businesses.

“The timing is right for Cloud Sherpas to expand its presence in the region. Stoneburn has proven its ability to secure large enterprise clients, and we were very impressed with the team’s management and technical capabilities around Google Enterprise and cloud software in general.”

Ciaran Cosgrave, co-founder of Stoneburn and now vice president of Cloud Sherpas’ UK Google business unit, said: “The increased size and scale of Cloud Sherpas, along with its best practices and implementation expertise, will translate to a stronger cloud strategy and better service for our clients.

“We can now provide more services, especially around Google’s cloud platform, as well as 24x7 world-class support and cloud management. This is a terrific day for Stoneburn customers in the UK and elsewhere,” Cosgrave added.

Windows Azure, Microsoft’s Platform-as-a-Service offering, is being used to connect software and services firm Blackbaud’s on-premise donor management software to non-profit organisations and its mobile app.

Raiser’s Edge, Blackbaud’s flagship product, is a donor management database software range for non-profit organisations and charities that is deployed on-premise.

The new app, also called Raiser’s Edge, uses Azure to allow non-profit professionals to access their organisation’s database from mobile devices. This, the company claims, makes it easier and more efficient for non-profit professionals to go about their work.

The app already has 15,000 users and Blackbaud claims it is “quickly emerging as an important tool for non-profit professionals to manage critical information on the go”.

Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Microsoft’s Windows Azure director of marketing, said: “Mobile device users need access to on-premises data and assets.

“By taking advantage of Windows Azure Service Bus, Blackbaud enables large and small organisations to cost effectively access The Raiser’s Edge through the cloud.”

Mary Beth Westmoreland, Blackbaud’s vice president of engineering, said: “We are delivering seamless integration between disparate systems – some in the cloud and some not. Even five years ago, this would have been too costly and complicated for many of our clients.

“Cloud services like Windows Azure help support non-profits in spending less time managing technology and more time on their missions.”

Another non-profit organisation, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), also recently turned to Azure, as well as several of Amazon Web Services’ cloud (AWS) offerings to help it deal with the massive amount of traffic it receives during the clearing period.

London-based Movellas is a community website where people share short stories and poems they have written. Readers of the stories offer feedback and can interact with the authors through the Movellas site.

Set up almost four years ago, the Movellas platform (applications and website) was originally hosted with a local Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider in Copenhagen. The Movellas development team was responsible for building the systems and on-going maintenance of the infrastructure. The systems are based on Linux and Unix.

Over the last 3-4 years, Movellas has grown – today it has about 1.5 million web and app users and over 70,000 stories accessible on the site. Originally hosting the Movellas platform with an IaaS hoster saved it from having to invest time, money and resources in building out their own IT infrastructure. However, with IaaS, the Movellas team still had many of the maintenance activities – loading up software, middleware, etc. Movellas wanted to focus development time on improving/extending the applications: not on maintaining IT infrastructure.

Magnus Kvalheim, chief technology officer at Movellas, learned about Platform-as-a-Service offerings and thought a PaaS service could help. The company has no hardware – intentionally. They wanted to save the time and investment that would have been required to build out their own infrastructure.

However, Kvalheim felt he and his team were spending too much time on IT maintenance activities. He wanted to empower his developers to develop and deploy the Movellas applications. He didn’t want them to spend time constantly maintaining the computing infrastructure and began to explore PaaS options. He thought that PaaS might provide the ability to quickly and cost-effectively build and deploy new applications.

“We see a lot of value in cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services (AWS),” says Kvalheim. “It’s reliable and easy accessible. Easy to setup, configure and provision. Once you have data and services running in the cloud – it’s only natural to also look for ways to run apps close to that data and services.”

Making the right PaaS

Movellas looked at a variety of PaaS services before choosing CloudBees including OpenShift, Elastic Beanstalk, RightScale and Jelastic. In each case, there seemed to be a drawback for Movellas’ needs. Some of the PaaS providers required fairly extensive changes be made to the Movellas applications in order for them to run on the platform. Some were in beta and not production-worthy. Others were difficult to configure and required a lot of maintenance.

Movellas then evaluated CloudBees and found that it provided the right functionality for the company’s requirements. The Movellas applications are written in Java, and with CloudBees focused on support for JVM-based languages, the CloudBees Platform was a natural fit. Movellas found the service to be flexible, easy to use and easy to configure.

No application changes were required to be made in order to run existing applications on CloudBees. Additionally, the Movellas team found deployment with CloudBees to be a fast, simple process. The development team is striving to deploy frequent, small sprints – constantly enhancing and improving the user experience. For example, one such enhancement was adding the ability for a user of the site to export a story to pdf. Whenever Movellas developers complete incremental functionality, the enhancements can be deployed to production on the CloudBees Platform in a click.

According to Kvalheim, “What is really cool is that we can make modifications in an afternoon, deploy them on CloudBees and have them instantly running in production.”

Movellas was also a long-time Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) user. Jenkins, the open source platform, supports agile development and is used around the globe. Movellas wanted to continue to use Jenkins. Again, CloudBees had a good fit for their needs. On the CloudBees Platform, the development services provided in DEV@cloud are Jenkins services

Movellas could continue to develop the way they always had, now using Jenkins in the Cloud on the CloudBees Platform.

The service

Movellas operates a Java-based set of seven applications, using a Tomcat container on which to run. The systems are Linux- and Unix-based. The firm is using both CloudBees development services (DEV@cloud) and deployment services (RUN@cloud).

“Because the Movellas applications are developed in Java, deploying the application to CloudBees was painless,” says Kvalheim. “We use DEV@cloud (jenkins) and successful builds can be automatically deployed and provisioned to run services.”

The first application to migrate to the CloudBees Platform was the image service. This is the database of images (user profile images, book covers, etc.) used on the Movellas site. Images are stored on S3 (Amazon’s storage service) served from CloudFront - with CloudBees as origin server. They are processed and served up in real-time. It took Movellas staff one morning to migrate this application to the CloudBees Platform.

Realising value

Movellas wanted ease of use for developers. The team didn’t want to have to spend time constantly maintaining IT infrastructure.

"CloudBees removed a lot of the barriers to developers so they could focus on development – therefore, unleashing a lot of creativity in them,” says Kvalheim.

He says that his team doesn’t have to spend three to five hours configuring a new instance. “A developer can have an idea, build a prototype or even a fully functional piece of functionality,” he says. “He can make full use of AWS and CloudBees integrated services without breaking a sweat. Fire up an instance when needed, then shut it down when no longer necessary. This is the value provided from the instant on/instant off elasticity of the cloud.”

Movellas also found the service to be very cost efficient. The low cost of the CloudBees Platform, coupled with a huge developer productivity boost, translates to big savings for Movellas.

Kvalheim also says that deployment was fast and easy with no arduous, time-consuming process to think about. "CloudBees provisions instances very easily. For the developers, on a daily basis there are a lot of things they no longer have to even worry about – upgradability, scalability (can instantly add nodes to their cluster) and deployment to additional machines. It is so easy to add incremental functionality and deploy it,” says Kvalheim.

Ecosystem services provide instant developer access to more services. In just a click or two, Movellas is able to tap additional services from CloudBees Partners, such as MongoHQ (database), Papertrail (log management) and New Relic (performance monitoring). An example of the value of the ecosystem: Log management is important for understanding what is going on within the Movellas application, particularly when errors occur. Yet the logs generated are voluminous and hard to correlate. When Movellas ran into issues with its image application, the company needed more details in order to resolve. Using Papertrail to help them analyse logs, they were able to trace the issue and resolve it.

Next moves

Kvalheim says that Movellas will continue to improve and innovate to give customers the best possible experience on Movellas. Also, the company wants to empower developers by having a frictionless infrastructure. Many of these services will be running in the cloud on CloudBees.

“It’s an on-going process where the Movellas applications are enhanced and extended on a continuing basis,” says Kvalheim. “Having a complete infrastructure running on AWS is appealing – and CloudBees is the preferred partner in order to make that happen.”

“We think CloudBees is a great way to build, deploy and run apps on top of AWS. Two of seven applications are in production on CloudBees. We consider CloudBees for all new applications – and existing services/applications that may be better suited in a cloud (AWS) environment.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made available MapR M7 to users of its Elastic MapReduce (EMR) service.

MapR Technologies, the firm behind the M7 Big Data platform for NoSQL and Hadoop, has long-been been a big supporter of Apache Hadoop. In addition to M7, all other MapR versions (M3, M5 and now M7) are now available on EMR.

MapR M7 is designed to provide ease of use, dependability and greater performance for NoSQL and Hadoop, its maker claims. Amazon EMR is used to deploy and operate elastic Hadoop clusters on AWS.

MapR said that users could launch a dynamically scalable M7 cluster on Amazon EMR to store or process vast amounts of data with “just a few mouse clicks or a single line of code.“

M7 is supported on multiple AWS instance types, including the latest high-performance SSD-backed High I/O instances. It can scale horizontally to thousands of nodes per cluster.

Standard YCSB benchmark tests on AWS High Storage instances have shown M7 delivering consistent performance of more than 100,000 operations per second per node, demonstrating how M7 users can derive greater use from their cloud infrastructure.

"MapR's latest technology accomplishment with the availability of the MapR M7 Distribution is providing ground breaking capabilities for Apache HBase applications to enhance Big Data operations," said John Schroeder, chief executive and co-founder, MapR Technologies.

"Customers that want added flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness in the cloud can gain further benefits from MapR's technology via AWS."

In a blog post, Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, said that MapR is the “only distribution that enables Linux applications and commands to access data directly in the cluster via the NFS interface that is available with all MapR editions."

He added: "MapR M7 was optimised for cloud deployments including high performing instances such as High Storage and High I/O."

Barr also said users who don't need the full feature set offered by M7 can now run MapR M5 and makes savings of up to 45 per cent, depending on instance size.

General Electric (GE) claims to have created the first big data and analytics platform robust enough to manage the data produced by large-scale, industrial machines in the cloud.

The product, named GE Predictivity, is built for the industrial internet – a trend which brings together a number of new and emerging technology fields, such at big data, the internet of things and machine-to-machine (m2m) communication – the company explained.

The platform is supported by another new product, Proficy Historian HD, which is reportedly the first Hadoop-based historian data management software in existence.

GE said Predictivity will benefit global industries like aviation, healthcare, energy production, transportation and manufacturing.

The company further asserts that this is the first time industrial companies will have a common architecture, which combines intelligent machines, sensors and advanced analytics.

Bill Ruh, vice president of the global software center at GE, said: “GE’s industrial strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing.

“The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement – but it is only in the ability to quickly analyse, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data.”

As well as launching Predictivity, the company has also implemented three partnerships to help support the platform.

The first is a global strategic alliance with consultancy firm Accenture to develop technology and analytics applications for the new offering.

The second is an extension of its technology partnership with Pivotal, which was spun out of VMware and EMC earlier this year, to leverage its Cloud Foundry in-memory and Hadoop-based technology to jointly develop and deploy the service.

The final partnership is with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will be the first Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) player to host the platform.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, said: “Decades of GE-led innovation have helped shape history, and we are excited to work with the GE team to help shape the future of industrial Big Data.”

Pivotal’s CEO Paul Maritz added: “Our respective strengths in big and fast data analytics and agile software development will provide our mutual customers with the solutions they need to leverage the industrial internet.”

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Heroku has introduced a new aspect to its status monitoring service, which allows users to review the cloud platform’s performance over the past year.

Previously, the Heroku Status dashboard had focused on the present health of the platform.

The uptime review page covers both the US and Europe regions and was the top-requested feature at the launch of the Europe region in April, the company claimed.

At the end of each month, the uptime of the platform is displayed as a percentage. The company claims that, as the Heroku platform is spread across many datacentres, it is rare for all applications running on it to be affected at the same time.

Therefore, the percentage represents an average of the number of applications affected.

In a blog post, the company said: “The new uptime page provides a longer-term perspective of Heroku uptime and incidents - perspective that is critical for transparency and continued trust in the Heroku platform.

“To provide a view of historical incidents as well as historical uptime, [the page] ... visualises the occurrence and duration of major and minor incidents by day ... [and] is designed to provide a clear ... view into uptime and incident occurrence over time.”

Earlier this year, the PaaS provider was dogged with complaints over routing performance, with customers claiming a change in its system had degraded throughput on the platform.

The company pledged to remediate the latency problems, blaming the situation on its routing and load balancing mechanism.

EMC and VMware spin-off Pivotal has officially begun trading as a standalone entity and fleshed out details about its new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

Pivotal was initially formed through a collaboration between tech giants VMware and EMC, but has now established itself as an independent company.

VMware and EMC are still listed as investors in the firm, along with power company General Electric (GE).

The company boasts around 1,250 staff and is headed up by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

The firm took the wraps off its Pivotal One PaaS platform yesterday, which will allow developers to create cloud-independent applications using big data tools, new programming frameworks and cloud architectures.

In a statement, Maritz said Pivotal's aim is to tap into customer demands for new products that will provide real-time insights into their data.

"There is a widespread need emerging for new solutions that allow customers to drive new business value by cost-effectively reasoning over large datasets, ingesting information that is rapidly arriving from multiple sources, writing applications that allow real-time reactions, and doing all of this in a cloud-independent or portable manner," he said.

"The need for these solutions can be found across a wide range of industries and it is our belief that these solutions will drive the need for new platforms. Pivotal aims to be a leading provider of such a platform."

In a research note, market watcher Gartner said the type of applications Pivotal is targeting include those offered by the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com.

"Pivotal's declared mission is to democractise these innovations and make them available to enterprise IT architects and innovative ISVs," wrote Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

However, Natis claimed the company was missing a couple of "notable components" that are essential for the creation of a "comprehensive" cloud computing platform.

"There is no integration technology...integration of data, applications, cloud and web services, partners and event streams is an essential element of such an environment," said Natis.

"Considerable functionality will have to be developed, acquired and integrated into the platform before it can claim victory," he added.