Salesforce Brings Big Data Analytics to IoT Cloud

Salesforce unveiled its IoT Cloud aimed at connecting billions of events with its leading enterprise platform as a service.  Salesforce IoT Cloud features a massively scalable, real-time event processing engine for unlocking insights from the connected things, customer interactions, sensors, and digital streams.

IoT Cloud's capabilities include:

• Listen to the World at IoT Scale: IoT Cloud connects everything to Salesforce. In addition to the Internet of Things, connecting to phones, wearables, windmills and industrial turbines and other devices, IoT Cloud connects data from websites, social interactions and more to Salesforce. By connecting the billions of real-time events and digital content with Salesforce, the IoT Cloud brings customer context to transactional data.
• Trigger Actions with Real-time Rules: With IoT Cloud, business users can use intuitive, point- and-click tools to define, modify and set rules and logic for events that can trigger actions across Salesforce. A global fleet management company, for example, can enforce passenger safety standards by setting filters for "hard brakes" or "hard accelerations" and defining rules that trigger in-car sensors to log service cases reporting possible instances of erratic driving. Or, a national retailer holding a holiday sale can set rules based on loyalty program status, inventory or sales performance, triggering retail beacons to send discount offers to in-store shoppers in real-time.
• 1:1 Proactive Engagement through Salesforce: IoT Cloud seamlessly works across the Salesforce Customer Success Platform to surface insights and trigger real-time 1:1, personalized actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process. For example, a thermostat provider can parse through billions of events gathered from weather forecasts, sensors and temperature settings to proactively alert customers on how to manage their HVAC usage within their predefined budget. Or, a vehicle assistance service partnering with an auto brand can send personalized offers on behalf of local dealers based on sensor data that tracks fluid levels and mileage.

IoT Cloud launch partners include ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln.  The service will be in pilot the first half of 2016 with generally availability later in the year.

"Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers," said Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive officer, Salesforce."The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success."

http://www.salesforce.com/iot-cloud

Read More

Brocade Releases New OpenDaylight-based SDN Controller

Brocade introduced its SDN Controller 2.0, a commercial distribution of the OpenDaylight (ODL) controller based on the Lithium ODL release.

Some highlights:

• Enhancements to the Open vSwitch Database (OVSDB) interface and the OpenStack Modular Layer 2 plug-in (certified in Red Hat's Juno distribution) enabling cloud providers to completely use an open software stack to manage their data center infrastructure
• OpenDaylight clustering for improved scalability and stability
• A new user interface for applications to provide a consistent and intuitive view of the network under control

Brocade said its SDN Controller is continuously built from OpenDaylight code, free of proprietary extensions. The company provides multi-vendor compatibility testing and single-source support for Brocade SDN Controller environments.

The company also announced two SDN applications:

• Brocade Topology Manager: a free SDN application that displays discovered network topology, allowing administrators to create a list of nodes and conduct simple searches for nodes. 
• Brocade Flow Manager: extends the capabilities of the Brocade Topology Manager by enabling users to view and interact with the network topology using near-real-time information to perform traffic engineering and network segmentation based on end-to-end flow views. 

"Brocade's strategy is driven by the very close collaboration we have with our leading service provider and enterprise customers to deliver unique networking products and solutions that speed their transition to the New IP, and software is increasingly central to that pursuit," said Kelly Herrell, senior vice president and general manager, Software Networking, Brocade. "Delivering open solutions like the Brocade SDN Controller 2.0 and related applications, packaged with a full complement of education and services, will facilitate the smooth journey to SDN for customers worldwide."

http://www.brocade.com/

Read More

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Targets $50 Billion Annual Revenue, Faster Growth, Smaller Workforce

Hewlett Packard hosted an all-day Securities Analyst Meeting ahead of its pending split into two independent company.  Here are some highlights of the executive presentations for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The new Hewlett Packard Enterprise will have more than $50 billion in annual revenue and will trade under the ticker symbol "HPE".

Hewlett Packard Enterprise expects 25,000 to 30,000 people to leave the company, primarily associated with the ES transformation.  This will result in a GAAP-only charge of approximately $2.7 billion, beginning in the fourth quarter fiscal 2015. The cash impact will be approximately $2.6 billion over the next three years, beginning in fiscal 2016.

"Hewlett Packard Enterprise will be smaller and more focused than HP is today, and we will have a broad and deep portfolio of businesses that will help enterprises transition to the new style of business," said Meg Whitman. "As a separate company, we are better positioned than ever to meet the evolving needs of our customers around the world."

Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it is uniquely positioned to guide customers on a journey to a Hybrid Infrastructure, whether that includes public cloud (HP Helion, AWS, Azure or others), Virtual Private Cloud, Managed Private Cloud or Traditional Data Center. While it sees opportunities in cloud, the company believes traditional IT and private cloud will continue to dominate the market. Nearly 90% of IT spend over the next three years will be in traditional IT and private cloud.

Cloud revenue is expected to be about $3 billion in FY15 and monetized across the entire portfolio. The company expects cloud revenue in fiscal 2015 to be approximately $3 billion, growing over 20% annually for the next several years. This estimate includes revenue from the enterprise group, software and enterprise services segments which support customers' cloud build and consume.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Inc. will consist of four main groups:

Enterprise Group - includes networking, all-flash storage, HP Apollo servers, converged systems, Aruba and TS Consulting

Annual Revenue of $27.8 billion, operating profit of $4.0 billion, operating margin of 14.
Approximately 50% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's revenue will come from EG, spread across servers, storage, networking, and technology services.

Enterprise Services - includes cloud services
Annual Revenue of $20.3 billion, operating profit of $1.0 billion, operating margin of 4.9%
The Enterprise Services group is undertaking further cost reduction measures, office consolidations, data center consolidations and headcount reduction.

Software - includes ADM, Big Data and Security
Annual Revenue of $3.8 billion, operating profit of $0.8 billion, operating margin of 22.3

Financial Services - includes pre-provisioning, asset recovery and cloud migration
Annual revenue of $3.3 billion, operating profit of $0.4 billion, operating margin of 11.2%

Archived webcast materials are online.
http://h30261.www3.hp.com/news-and-events/hp-investor-events/upcoming-events/09-15-2015.aspx

Read More

Deutsche Telekom Extends Cloud Service to China with Huawei

Deutsche Telekom is extending its public cloud offering to the Chinese market in partnership with Huawei.  Huawei provides the hardware for the Deutsche Telekom cloud services while Deutsche Telekom ensures reliable operation in a German data center.

“Customers will receive both cost-effective resources as well as quality and reliability from German data centers with our product,” says Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, Managing Director of T-Systems and responsible for the IT Division. “We're unveiling this here in Shanghai in order to help Chinese businesses expand their operations into Europe. In a second step we are also planning to do the reverse with European businesses moving into China. Thus we will be one of the first companies in Germany to integrate actively into the ‘Digital Silk Road’.” Both companies have also joined forces to work on research and development for new cloud solutions. Experts forecast 30 percent annual growth of the cloud market in China through 2018.

http://www.telekom.com/media/company/287814

Read More

Hibernia Express Transatlantic Subsea Cable Ready for Service

The Hibernia Express transatlantic cable is now ready for service.

The new 4,600km ultra low latency submarine cable connects Halifax, Nova Scotia to Slough, England and Cork, Ireland. It carries optical transport services up to 100Gbps speeds and is capable of 200Gbps service on select segments. The 6-fiber-pair cable is optimized for lowest latency performance, offering an unmatched roundtrip delay of sub-60 milliseconds on the New York to London route. It is engineered to potentially scale up to 400Gbps per circuit and up.

“The Hibernia Networks team has demonstrated an unwavering commitment towards completing the first transatlantic subsea cable in over a decade and we are thrilled to announce its official launch,” states Bjarni Thorvardarson, CEO of Hibernia Networks. “We are proud to have accomplished this transformational milestone, and more importantly, we are proud to deliver the lowest latency, highest performance capacity required to facilitate real-time access to information and content by the ever growing global communications community.”

http://www.hibernianetworks.com/hibernia_express

• Hibernia Express utilizes a 6-fiber-pair submarine cable, with a portion of the fibers optimized for lowest latency and a portion optimized for 100X100 Gpbs design capacity. The total cross-sectional design capacity of the cable will be over 53 Tbps. Hibernia Express will initially launch with 100 Gbps transmission capacity using TE SubCom’s C100 SLTE platform.

Read More

Qualcomm Acquires Capsule Technologie for Telehealth

Qualcomm announced its acquisition of Capsule Technologie, a leading global provider of medical device integration and clinical data management solutions with more than 1,930 hospital clients in 38 countries.

Capsule's medical device integration and clinical data management platform enables data collection, EMR and health IT system integration and monitoring in one of the largest ecosystems of connected devices inside the hospital. The acquisition extends Qualcomm Life's connected health offerings into the hospital, ultimately creating a more seamless care continuum from hospital to home and all points in between.

Capsule will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Life.

"Qualcomm is focused on strengthening its position in specific Internet of Everything verticals, like healthcare," said Derek Aberle, president, Qualcomm Incorporated. "The acquisition of Capsule expands the breadth of our healthcare platform, enabling us to provide connectivity solutions for the entire care continuum and create one of the world's largest connected health ecosystems. This will be an important step in advancing the Internet of Medical Things."

http://www.capsuletech.com/
http://www.qualcomm.com

Read More

FireEye Calls Out SYNful Knock - A Cisco router implant

FireEye published a technical overview of SYNful Knock, a stealthy modification of a Cisco router's firmware image that can be used to maintain persistence within a victim's network. The backdoor malware reportedly has been confirmed in a number of router implants spread across four different countries:  Ukraine, Philippines, Mexico, and India.

FireEye warned that this attack vector is potentially severe.

https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/09/synful_knock_-_acis.html

Read More

Plexxi Raises $35 Million for SDN

Plexxi, a start-up pioneering next-generation converged networking solutions, raised a $35 million round of financing .

Plexxi’s products – Plexxi Control and the Plexxi Switch – and market solutions create an optimized network that dynamically helps applications perform better.

The round was led by a new investor with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. This brings Plexxi’s total funding to $83 million.

“We are experiencing a generational shift to a new era of IT in which applications and data are rapidly increasing demand for a new agile and scale-out networking architecture,” said Rich Napolitano, CEO of Plexxi. “Plexxi represents a transformative converged networking and application-centric approach to traditional legacy networking. 2015 has been a record-breaking year for Plexxi as we gain a foothold in federal, financial services, education and service providers markets here in the United States and around the world.”

http://www.plexxi.com/

• Plexxi is based in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Read More

Broadcom Adds Wi-Fi/Bluetooth to Automotive Silicon Portfolio

Broadcom introduced two new connectivity chips in its automotive portfolio for providing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for in-car infotainment and telematics systems.

The new solutions include a 5G WiFi/Bluetooth Smart 2X2 MIMO combo chip with Real Simultaneous Dual Band (RSDB) support as well as a stand-alone tri-mode Bluetooth Smart (version 4.2) system-on-a-chip (SoC).

"Broadcom's new automotive-grade chips enable car makers and tier one suppliers to keep pace with the rapidly evolving mobile and IoT ecosystem by providing immediate access to the latest in wireless connectivity technologies," said Richard Barrett, Broadcom Director of Automotive Wireless Connectivity. "By tailoring our products to meet the stringent quality and environmental demands of the automotive industry, we can significantly expand our footprint and stay ahead of the competition in this fast-growing market."

http://www.broadcom.com

Read More