Displaying items by tag: cloud services

Huawei exec touts cloud services as growth area

Chinese telecom equipment provider and smartphone maker Huawei aims to take on Amazon and Alibaba as a global provider of public cloud services, the company said in April. Edward Zhou, Huawei’s VP of Global Public Affairs, reiterated this to Active Telecom recently, saying Huawei can provide more trustworthy cloud services based on its legacy telecom experience.

Huawei used to provide cloud infrastructure for its customers but now also provides cloud services. In April this year, the company said it would expand cloud computing with a dedicated division, with the purpose of strengthening its public cloud offering, which involves shared data infrastructure, as opposed to dedicated infrastructure built for single customers.

“We believe we can provide more trustworthy cloud services based on our telecom background,” Mr. Zhou told Active Telecom. “Telecom services are very different from traditional IT services, and we draw upon this experience to build better, more reliable cloud services.”

Tailor-made cloud services are fundamental to Huawei’s offerings, Zhou said. “We make customizations based on our global version,” he said. Providing more security in its cloud services is also very important for Huawei’s customers today, Zhou added, because cloud is still a relatively new technology and Huawei needs to ensure that its customers are protected.

“Cybersecurity is a very hot topic for all countries and companies,” Mr. Zhou said. “Inside Huawei we have a very strong team dedicated to cybersecurity for our solutions and products – security is imbedded in these offerings. We believe high quality includes high security.”

Consultancy firm Gartner predicts the market for public cloud services to reach $383 billion by 2020 from $247 billion this year. Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2018, an increase of 4.3 percent from 2017 estimated spending of $3.5 trillion. By expanding into cloud computing, Huawei hopes to diversify away from its hardware focus and develop software-based revenue.

The company’s strategic focus will be on its telecom partners’ cloud transformation, Eric Xu, deputy chairman of Huawei’s board and one of three rotating chief executive officers, recently told Reuters. Xu reflected Zhou’s view that Huawei’s global network of telecom clients gives the firm a distinct advantage.

“Huawei as a brand is strong because it is not only about consumer smartphones. We have three different business groups: carrier, enterprise and consumer,” Mr. Zhou said, discussing the company’s future aspirations. “I think our strategy to build the brand revolves around quality – it is Huawei’s highest priority. We aim to deliver higher quality than other players in this market.”

Huawei has established its services in more than 170 countries around the world, aiming to become a “global iconic tech brand”. The company does face challenges, however, said Mr. Zhou. For example, Huawei often faces data protection rules and other regulatory barriers in some countries that it operates in. The company’s strategy is to follow the local rules and cater to local needs.

“We try to provide governments with expertise and knowledge about technology to support government initiatives,” Mr. Zhou said. “Many countries are talking about digital transformation and we have the technology and expertise to offer them support. We are very happy to contribute some of our value to governments pushing for change.”

Huawei’s broader vision, Zhou said, is to facilitate the Internet of Things (IoT) era, where everything will be connected by sensors. He said Huawei is a top investor in R&D (research and development) and focuses on bringing together the world's best intellectual resources to strengthen its innovation capability.

“Thanks to the emergence of new technologies including 5G and NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT), it will be easy to connect everything and create more value,” said Zhou. He added that the company also aims to support the development of cloud computing technologies – adding intelligence to cloud services.

“Everything will be connected and intelligent,” said Zhou. “That’s our larger vision.”

British telecoms giant BT announced a contract with Bridgestone Europe for new network infrastructure and managed cloud services connecting more than 200 sites across 20 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Bridgestone Europe, with headquarters in Brussels and serving markets across EMEA, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tokyo-based Bridgestone Corporation, the world’s largest tyre and rubber company.

BT will securely connect 150 retail stores and more than 50 offices, manufacturing plants and testing facilities using both BT’s global IP Connect virtual private network and its high performance internet service. BT’s Connect Intelligence service will ensure high performance of Bridgestone’s business critical applications.

Leveraging the new network infrastructure, Bridgestone will deploy BT’s One Cloud Cisco portfolio of secure, cloud-based communications to enhance collaboration between employees as well as with customers and suppliers. Employees will also have access to powerful collaboration tools, such as Cisco WebEx, and enjoy high definition audio-conferencing services, all managed by BT.

Across Europe, call centre agents will benefit from using BT’s Cloud Contact Cisco. The omni-channel contact centre service will allow customers to interact with Bridgestone agents through a wide variety of channels, including voice, e-mail, SMS, web chat and social media.

Chet Patel, president Continental Europe at Global Services, BT, said: “I am proud that Bridgestone Europe has entrusted us with the strategic building blocks of their ICT operations. At BT, we see digital transformation as empowering people – customers, businesses and employees – to do amazing things. We call this making the Digital Possible.”

BT will also manage Bridgestone’s in-office - and in-store - fixed and wireless local area networks to enable employees to securely access the corporate network.

PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, is collaborating with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the leading OS for container, cloud, scale-out and hyperscale computing, and CPLANE NETWORKS, the leader in multi-site OpenStack cloud orchestration, to create new cloud services for its customers.

Implementation at PCCW Global’s two next generation data centers in Reston, VA, US and Hong Kong is currently underway, with plans to expand to other strategic cities around the world over time. Cloud services provided in these centers are designed to enable “self-service” provisioning to accelerate service deployment for customers as well as seamless integration with and easy consumption of existing PCCW Global integrated communications solutions.

Mr. Bret Rehart, Chief Network and Information Officer of PCCW Global, said: “As applications continue to move closer to the network edge, the demands for workload agility and mobility are becoming increasingly important for our customers. Customers have needs for new applications for NFV and Internet of Things (IoT) and want them faster, at the right location, and tailored to their specific needs.”

“Our aim is to provide dynamic network and cloud based services that not only automatically flex in response to our customers’ policies and service level commitments, but also self-adjust based on rapidly changing network conditions. The approach we have taken, working with Canonical and CPLANE NETWORKS, will enable us to deliver a level of performance, scalability and automation that would otherwise be unachievable with traditional service configuration solutions.”

The delivery of additional value-added services such as security, video or application suites can be easily added on-demand as well as integrated with connectivity to public clouds and other infrastructure to create enhanced, enterprise-level services, a truly hybrid private to public cloud offering.

Using Ubuntu OpenStack and CPLANE’s Multi-Site Manager, Canonical and CPLANE NETWORKS will deliver unmatched performance and scalability for a truly global OpenStack cloud. 

Canonical’s Juju Charms will also extend the Canonical / CPLANE OpenStack solution by providing an automated mechanism to deploy base OpenStack cloud services, and enables a full ecosystem of value-added services for enterprise and edge applications, NFV and IoT enablement.

Mr. Brandon Williams, Chief Executive Officer of CPLANE NETWORKS, said: “The two great market forces of today, the proliferation of mobile / IoT devices and the conquering wave of public clouds, are growing at a phenomenal rate. But they are growing apart; the first is becoming more distributed and fragmented while the latter is becoming cheaper and more centralized. Canonical and CPLANE NETWORKS have bridged this gap with a hyper-distributed cloud solution for service providers. PCCW Global will be the first to market with an edge-cloud offering for the applications that will power this new frontier.”

Mr. Anand Krishnan, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Cloud, Canonical, said: “Canonical in partnership with CPLANE NETWORKS is enabling PCCW Global to deliver new cloud services. These services will be supplied to the edge of the network, meeting customer’s growing need for services at scale and speed with the economic benefit of an automated OpenStack deployment. Using Ubuntu OpenStack, the most widely deployed OpenStack in production clouds today, and CPLANE NETWORKS’ Multi-Site Manager, Canonical and CPLANE NETWORKS are delivering unmatched performance and scalability for a truly global OpenStack cloud.”

Canada's largest communications company Bell and Microsoft Canada announced the availability of an expanded suite of Microsoft Azure cloud services, including Compute, and Backup and Disaster Recovery, on Canada's largest broadband network for business.

Bell and Microsoft previously announced a partnership in which Bell became the first Canadian communications provider to offer enterprise access to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute through Bell Cloud Connect, a dedicated broadband solution for business customers.

"Bell customers can directly access Microsoft's growing portfolio of Azure cloud services over Bell's unparalleled private broadband network, enabling them to migrate workloads to the cloud securely and cost-effectively," said Tom Little, President of Bell Business Markets. "Bell Cloud Connect and Microsoft Azure enable Canadian businesses to move confidently to the cloud."

"We are seeing more businesses migrate to the cloud and are thrilled to expand our partnership with Bell to provide business customers access to more Microsoft Azure cloud services," said Janet Kennedy, President of Microsoft Canada. "Bell's reach, coverage and experience working with enterprise scale customers, together with Microsoft's leading cloud solutions, will further Canadian business innovation and competitiveness."

Bell has the largest national data centre capacity, offering customers access to 28 highly secure, high capacity centers across the country. Bell's unique hybrid cloud solutions allow customers to optimize workloads and host their business critical data on either public or private cloud by leveraging co-location and virtualized services.

"Canadian organizations' adoption of cloud has shifted dramatically over the last several years," said David Senf, Vice President, Infrastructure Solutions, IDC. "The benefits of an expanded architecture that includes on-premises, hosted and cloud options helps organizations execute faster on new projects, which is critical in the new age of digital transformation. Additionally, network proximity and performance are becoming increasingly critical for hybrid cloud connectivity for strong but flexible security. A strong foundation for cloud performance and security starts at the network."

Bell's Business Cloud ecosystem continues to evolve through new partnerships and services, allowing customers to benefit from additional solutions, enterprise applications and business tools.

Driven by industry-leading innovation and supported by strong expertise, Bell Business Markets offers a comprehensive national portfolio of products and services for large and medium business and government customers, including data centre solutions, unified communications, security and professional services supporting business ICT needs.

With strong business communications expertise and networks that are unrivalled in the industry, Bell designs, builds and operates the critical infrastructures that power many of the largest networked organizations in Canada and around the globe.

Huawei announced that it has become an executive corporate member of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The CSA is committed to ensuring the security of cloud services. Today, with the addition of Huawei, the CSA has nine executive corporate members. Executive members receive special access to the leadership team and board of directors of the CSA via an advisory group, the Executive Membership Council.

Huawei joined the CSA in 2012. The company has participated in several working groups such as the virtualization working group and is the main contributor to CSA’s “Mitigating Risks in a Virtualized Environment White Paper”.

Huawei also helped to create an ISO/IEC JTC1 virtualization security standard on behalf of the CSA. Based on its contributions to the CSA and the industry, the CSA International Standardization Council (ISC) granted Huawei one of its 10 member seats in 2014. The ISC is responsible for coordinating all aspects of standardization efforts within the CSA.

As a leading provider of cloud computing solutions, Huawei's CSA Executive membership is part of the company's commitment to developing more open, cooperative and secure cloud ecosystems.

Huawei will work with the CSA and its members to advance their innovative efforts, such as the Cloud component specification working group and cloud security services management working group, to ensure that users of cloud services have confidence in the security of their information. Huawei is willing to utilize its expertise and advocate for more CSA members to work together to improve the security of cloud services.

"Through our partnership with global telecommunications operators and cloud service providers, such as China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefonica, Huawei has developed valuable, real life experience in security of information and control in the cloud,” said John Suffolk, Global Cyber Security & Privacy Protection Officer (GSPO) of Huawei. “We look forward to working with the Cloud Security Alliance as an executive member to share that expertise to the betterment of the cloud computing industry.”

"In 2012, we welcomed Huawei join the group of industry leaders that comprises the CSA," said Jim Reavis, Co-founder and CEO of the CSA. "As a trusted partner to most of the world's top network operators, we now welcome Huawei’s expertise and contributions to both our ongoing and new research initiatives that continue to improve the security of cloud computing."

Whether it is the use of smartphones, laptops or tablets, a recent survey by CommScope shows that mobile devices are playing a larger part as game changers in today’s businesses, as enterprise IT managers struggle to keep pace with mobility’s dramatic effects on workplace productivity and requirements.

Meanwhile, cloud-based IT services and applications also have grabbed the attention of those responsible for enterprise networks, according to the CommScope study. While nearly three-fourths of respondents confirmed they already are deploying some cloud-based applications, the shift to the cloud is far from slowing.

The seventh edition of the CommScope Global Enterprise Survey, released today, found that enterprise mobility and cloud services beat out infrastructure intelligence, 40/100GbE and green power initiatives as the top challenges facing company networks around the world. More than 1,100 IT professionals from 63 nations participated in the tri-annual research.

The survey found a noticeable gap between usage of mobile devices within enterprise facilities and the capability of those buildings to enable wireless traffic. According to the survey, an average of 43 percent of all phone calls originating within an enterprise facility involves a mobile phone, yet only 30 percent of these businesses say their carrier-provided in-building signal coverage and capacity are sufficient to handle the mobile traffic. This had more than three-quarters of respondents admitting that employees had to roam around the office, or even go outside, to get an adequate signal for a call.

“It’s clear from the survey that bring-your-own-device is a growing trend and places a heavy demand on organizational infrastructure, while weighing heavily on the minds of most network IT professionals,” said Kevin St. Cyr, senior vice president, Enterprise Solutions at CommScope. “The pace of mobility adoption by consumers—and thus the workforce and company visitors—has outrun the infrastructure and practices in place within enterprise facilities to support it. This also factors heavily into the uptick in a majority of survey respondents confirming deployment of cloud-based applications.”

Key findings from the CommScope Global Enterprise Survey include:

• Enterprise mobility: Forty-four percent of surveyed participants see the widespread use of mobile technology as a game-changer. About a third of respondents reported having a distributed antenna system (DAS) deployed on site to support the indoor wireless traffic, while another 36 percent reported no capability to provide adequate indoor mobile coverage or capacity.
• Cloud services: Forty-four percent of surveyed respondents also pointed to cloud services as a top game-changer and expect that importance to grow. While 21 percent currently rely on cloud technology to run more than half of their applications, 52 percent believe that by 2017 more than half of their applications will reside off-site in the cloud.
• 40GbE and 100GbE: Nearly a third of respondents indicated that 40GbE and 100GbE would have a significant impact on their future operations, with a majority citing the emergence of laser-optimized multimode. There was also consensus among the respondents as to their installation strategies for future data centers. Sixty-one percent of operators favored a pre-terminated data center solution as opposed to a field-terminated solution.
• Infrastructure intelligence: Nearly one in three of surveyed participants mentioned the need for intelligent infrastructure as an IT infrastructure game-changer. The key driver, cited in 61 percent of the surveys, is the increasing demand for greater productivity.
• Green, reliable power: Energy usage is still near the top of many respondents’ minds. One-fourth of respondents indicated that energy and green initiatives would be a game-changer over the next five years. On average, respondents are looking to reduce energy consumption by 18 percent; their strategies involve server virtualization, consolidations and cloud computing.

The survey is conducted every three years, made available in 10 different languages and is online to maximize the number of completions. The survey respondents represent a wide variety of industry sectors. Thirty-five percent are involved in a technology or IT-related business. IT professionals within the finance/banking, industrial/manufacturing, education and government sectors accounted for a combined 36 percent of responses.

“We are trying to capture what’s important to IT managers, and the impact of trends in network planning and connectivity on the jobs they do,” said St. Cyr. “This survey is part of our ongoing commitment to fully understand our customers’ needs while getting a better perspective on how they view and manage their evolving enterprise networks and data centers.”

GoDaddy, which claims to be the world's largest technology provider dedicated to small businesses, has expanded its hosting services to offer cloud servers and Bitnami-powered cloud applications in Asia. It says the new offerings are designed to help individual developers, tech entrepreneurs and IT professionals to quickly build, test and scale cloud solutions.

“The platform offers a “pay as you go” utility billing model and the flexibility to meet the needs of customers,” GoDaddy said. “They only pay for what they use on an hourly basis and up to a monthly limit if they choose.”

GoDaddy cloud servers are integrated with GoDaddy products such as Domains and DNS, which allows customers to manage and maintain new and existing domains and subdomains. Also, cloud server customers have full access to multiple, public facing APIs. The new cloud offering from GoDaddy is available in 26 languages and 53 markets.

GoDaddy’s cloud applications are powered by Bitnami, billed as “the leading library for open source server application deployments.” According to GoDaddy, the partnership provides one-click optimized installation for application solutions like CMS (eg WordPress and Drupal), CRM (eg Odoo and OpenERP) and eCommerce (eg OpenCart and Magento).

The new cloud servers offering is built on OpenStack and powered by purpose-built KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization. With SSDs (solid-state drives) across the board, cloud servers is claimed to offer excellent performance due to very fast input/output. The basic service starts at $HK40/month and includes 512MB memory, one core processor, 20GB SSD storage and 1TB data transfer.

GoDaddy claims to have more than 14 million customers worldwide and more than 62 million domain names under management.