Category: News

F5 Networks announced the availability of its 2019 State of Application Services report. This year’s survey showed that organizations regard application services as vital for cloud adoption and, ultimately, for success in today’s app-driven digital economy. Emerging application services like ingress control and IoT gateways are on the rise, and together with established services such as firewalls and global server load balancing, are enabling companies to adapt to the requirements of today’s multi-cloud world.

"Applications are now the most valuable asset in the modern enterprise, defining a new era of Application Capital," said Kara Sprague, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Application Services Business Unit at F5. "This year’s report explores the approaches companies are taking on their digital transformation journeys and how they are optimizing the people, processes, and systems used to develop, deploy, and deliver applications for competitive advantage and business impact."

The report reflects input from nearly 2,000 respondents globally across a range of industries, company sizes, and roles. Participants were asked about the challenges and opportunities presented by the ongoing process of digital transformation, resulting in a comprehensive analysis of how IT organizations are transforming to meet the ever-changing demands of the digital economy.

"We’re expanding our focus on Chinese and Japanese markets, where IT leaders also are seeing the ROI of deploying scale-out NVMe storage architectures – and we are already on track to make 2019 just as successful."

As data centers transition from legacy infrastructure to vastly more efficient software-defined solutions, Excelero’s 2018 business results demonstrate the enormity of the next-generation storage opportunity, the wisdom of a 100% channels-driven selling approach, and the appeal of Excelero’s NVMesh solution.

"Bsquare has a long track record of success developing solutions running on AWS that help industrial businesses reach their IoT goals," said Acting Bsquare CEO, Kevin Walsh. "We also share the same commitment to constant innovation that is necessary to drive digital transformation across a variety of enterprise and industrial markets. As a result, we are pleased to be able to collaborate with AWS as we work together to develop more advanced solutions for our customers."

Nutanix, Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced the retail findings of its Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring retailers’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. The report revealed enterprise workloads are quickly moving off traditional data center infrastructure, dropping from 41% today to just 18% in two years time, as cloud usage accelerates. The retail industry has the second largest penetration of hybrid cloud deployments at 21%; with 93% identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, outpacing the global average for other industries.

Today’s consumer expects a seamless omnichannel shopping experience in store, online and through new avenues such as mobile, in-app or even smart TV purchases. At the same time, retailers need to gather, analyze and keep data secure. This pressure to keep ahead of customer expectations is driving retailers to deploy innovative IT practices faster than ever.

It may not be a surprise that retailers are also embracing public clouds more quickly than their counterparts in other industries, yet their control of public cloud spend is better than peers in other industries. With the seasonality of the retail industry and traffic bursts impacting workload needs throughout the year, retailers have experience in flexing workloads to the public cloud as demand requires. Today, there is 15% public cloud usage in the retail industry compared to a 12% global average; and usage is set to grow to 22% in the next two years, outpacing the global cross-industry average by an even wider margin of 7 percent. Yet the higher than average percentage of retailers who say that hybrid cloud is the ideal IT deployment model (93%) also indicates that public cloud is not a panacea for the retail industry.

WekaIO, an innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data intensive applications, today announced that Untold Studios, an independent creative studio community based in the UK, is using the WekaIO Matrix file system on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to manage its visual effects (VFX) workflow. The company chose Matrix because it is cloud-native, built on AWS, and doesn’t require a big CapEx investment to spin up. A simplified implementation, the elimination of management overhead, and the ability to scale with its business demands, were additional considerations for the studio.

Untold Studios has a rich history in VFX, a workflow that typically has intense resource requirements, including a render farm and huge storage cluster. Most visual effects studios build their IT infrastructure on-premises, but Untold Studios is unique in that 100% of its workflow is managed on AWS. The decision to be 100% cloud-based has freed the company from the business constraints that limit the potential of other VFX studios. Instead, it enjoys the freedom and ability of multiple workgroups and VFX artists to access the content they need from any location, thus allowing it to employ the best creative VFX talent from anywhere in the world.

Quali announced CloudShell Colony – a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management platform for DevOps. CloudShell Colony automates DevOps environments all the way from development to production, while allowing IT and project managers to govern the use of cloud resources from a single pane of glass.  

This announcement follows the recent news highlighting Quali’s $22.5 million Series-C funding round in December 2018. CloudShell Colony initially being released as controlled availability (CA) software equips DevOps teams, developers and testers with reusable application environments on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure with support for Kubernetes deployments. Quali is providing varying levels of the solution based on company size.

"Setting up environments is error prone, time consuming and difficult to automate and troubleshoot. It’s even more challenging to do it in a scalable way that would serve more than one team, including team members who know nothing about infrastructure, and still work seamlessly with the CI/CD pipeline," said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali. "CloudShell Colony is designed to deliver IT environments more efficiently, eliminate configuration inconsistencies, and empower all stakeholders in the DevOps value chain by improving pipeline stability with less code and better error handling."

Commvault, a recognized global leader in backup, recovery, the cloud and data management across any hybrid environment, today announced that its IntelliSnap snapshot technology has been tested and validated to work with Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged systems to protect application workloads, file systems and virtual machines (VMs) without the need for third-party tools, providing customers with control, simplification and flexible architecture options that will meet their business needs now and in the future.

ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS expands many of the capabilities of the Cisco HyperFlex platform with backup and recovery. With the broadest ecosystem of integrated public cloud providers, ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS plus Cisco HyperFlex is a true multi-cloud platform. Delivering proven support for enterprise applications like SAP HANA – for which Commvault is certified – ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS allows customers to run mission-critical applications on Cisco HyperFlex with the confidence their data and applications are backed up and available. Pairing ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS with Cisco HyperFlex provides a hyper-converged, scale-out solution that delivers enterprise-class backup and recovery for end-to-end protection of the software-defined data center.

Rubrik, the Cloud Data Management Company, today announced a $261 million Series E investment at a $3.3 billion valuation with new investor Bain Capital Ventures, and with strong participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and IVP. This brings total equity raised to more than $553 million.

"Rubrik has won the trust and loyalty of large enterprise customers around the globe by offering a simple and reliable solution that solves the challenge of protecting and managing data in a hybrid cloud world," said Enrique Salem, former CEO at Symantec and Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. "When we met Bipul, we were instantly impressed with his vision as well as the skill and tenacity of his team. Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management."

"Our previous fundraising in 2017 was focused on global expansion and increasing our reach into the enterprise market. Now, with thousands of customers around the world, industry-leading customer satisfaction ratings, and numerous analyst and industry awards, we have customers asking us to solve new challenges," said Bipul Sinha, Co-founder and CEO at Rubrik. "This new capital will speed the introduction of exciting new products in 2019 that will solve those customer challenges and significantly expand our strategic footprint in the enterprise."

Zix Corporation (Zix), a leader in email security, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire AppRiver, a leading provider of cloud-based cybersecurity solutions for $275 million in cash.

AppRiver is a channel-first provider of cloud-based cybersecurity and productivity services, serving more than 60,000 companies worldwide and supported by a 4,500-strong Managed Service Provider (MSP) reseller community. AppRiver launched its flagship spam and virus service in 2002, and has since bolstered its suite of cloud-based security offerings with web protection, email encryption, secure archiving, and email continuity solutions. AppRiver also provides Microsoft Office 365 and Secure Hosted Exchange services, which serve as an effective lead generation tool for the company’s security solutions. For more than 15 years, AppRiver has helped drive industry-leading customer value through its award-winning 24/7 customer service and a single centralized platform to manage all cloud-based security solutions.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining standards, certifications and best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, today released the findings from the first research survey on "Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Applications and Cloud Adoption." The study offers greater insight into cloud preparation and migration, the features and benefits gained, and the security and privacy challenges for ERP systems in a cloud environment.

According to the survey, 69 percent of organizations are migrating data for popular ERP applications to the cloud, moving to major cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers, with the overwhelming majority, almost 90 percent, stating that these applications are business-critical.

In line with the top three migration concerns – moving sensitive data followed by security and compliance – the research finds that attackers are evolving, too. Over half of the survey respondents stated that they expect security incidents in the cloud to increase in the next year.