AWS Accelerates its Growth Trajectory

Amazon Web Services continues to ramp up in services, availability regions, data centers, applications, customers and revenue.

At its AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Andy Jassy, SVP of Amazon Web Services said the business is now on a $7 billion annual run rate, up 81% YoY. AWS now has over 1 million active customers that have used the platform in the last 30 days.  Amazon EC2 compute instance hour usage is up 95% YoY. Amazon S3 object storage data transfers have grown 120% YoY. AWS databases services are growing at 127% YoY.

Some highlights:

• AWS re:Invent has a total of 19,000 attendees in person and 38,000 of the livestream.
• The AWS Marketplace has over 2,300 listings offered by over 800 independent software vendors. These have generated over 143 million EC2 compute hours of usage so far.
• Snowball - a faster/cheaper alternative to high speed Internet connections for transferring terabytes or petabytes of data from an existing data center to the AWS cloud. Snowball provides 50TB of encrypted transfer capability per unit. It is entirely self-contained in a weather-resistant shipping container with a 10 GB network connection on the back and an E Ink display/control panel on the front.
• Amazon QuickSight - a new AWS data visualization engine for business intelligence. QuickSight is designed to handle many types of data-intensive workloads including ad targeting, customer segmentation, forecasting & planning, marketing & sales analytics, inventory & shipment tracking, IoT device stream management, and clickstream analysis.  QuickSight is built around SPICE (the Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine). Amazon claims it can deliver the solution at 1/10th the cost of on-premise solutions from "the old guard"
• Amazon Kinesis Firehose - loads streaming data such as from IoT sensors into hosted databases. Users simply create a delivery stream, route it to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket and/or a Amazon Redshift table, and write records (up to 1000 KB each) to the stream. Firehose will take care of all of the monitoring, scaling, and data management.
• Amazon Inspector - a new service that analyzes the behavior of your applications in AWS and helps identify potential security issues.
• MariaDB - Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now offers support for the popular MariaDB database, beginning with version 10.0.17. This engine was forked from MySQL in 2009, and has developed at a rapid clip ever since, adding support for two storage engines (XtraDB and Aria) and other leading-edge features. 

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/

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Teradata Expands to AWS

Teradata, which offers a portfolio of big data analytic solutions, will offer its data warehousing as a service on AWS.

The initial version of Teradata Database on AWS will be offered on a variety of individual multi-terabyte virtual servers--known as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances--in supported AWS regions via a listing in the AWS Marketplace.

"Today, Teradata is adding more innovation by coupling data warehousing capabilities with public cloud convenience," said Tony Cosentino, Vice President and Research Director at Ventana Research, a leading benchmark research and advisory services firm. "No longer is cutting-edge technology the sole domain of the upper echelon of the corporate community; soon virtually any organization on the planet can tap into – and trust – the power of Teradata."

http://www.teradata.com

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Equinix Streamlines AWS Migrations

Equinix and its professional services arm, Nimbo , announced two solutions to help enterprises migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The AWS Direct Connect Converged Infrastructure bundles feature deployment tools from Nimbo; NetApp's NPS capability and Cisco technologies; along with secure, direct connection inside Equinix's data centers.  These bundles enable enterprises to use the same storage and network management tools used in their on-premises deployments as they migrate to public or hybrid cloud architectures.

Equinix and Nimbo will also provide Equinix Cloud Exchange configuration and foundation enablement services, either as part of the Equinix Cloud Exchange Starter-Kit or as individual, stand-alone offerings.

http://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/?prId=123406

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Sungard Launches AWS Recovery Solution

Sungard Availability Services will offer its disaster recovery solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The new Sungard AS AWS Recovery Solution allows Sungard AS to expand its offerings to provide backup, vaulting and recovery services into the AWS U.S. East and West Regions. Customers can be assured their data is replicated quickly and fully so that they will always have continuous access to applications to perform critical functions.

"Sungard AS delivers a range of recovery services that, when used in conjunction with cloud services, provide a resilient and scalable architecture," said Jack Dziak, Executive Vice President, Global Products, Sungard AS. "Now, specifically for AWS, customers can experience the full capabilities of Sungard AS – including operating system recovery, storage replication, off-site storage and automated recovery of protected workloads – as a fully managed, utility-priced service on AWS."

http://www.sungardas.com/

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IBM Launches "Cognitive" Consulting Practice

Leveraging its Watson artificial intelligence cloud, IBM is launching a consulting organization dedicated to helping clients realize the transformative value of "cognitive business."

"Our work with clients across many industries shows that cognitive computing is the path to the next great set of possibilities for business," said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services. "Clients know they are collecting and analyzing more data than ever before, but 80 percent of all the available data -- images, voice, literature, chemical formulas, social expressions -- remains out of reach for traditional computing systems. We're scaling expertise to close that gap and help our clients become cognitive banks, retailers, automakers, insurers or healthcare providers.”

"Before long, we will look back and wonder how we made important decisions or discovered new opportunities without systematically learning from all available data," said Stephen Pratt, global leader, IBM Cognitive Business Solutions. "Over the next decade, this transformation will be very personal for professionals as we embrace learning algorithms to enhance our capacity. For clients, cognitive systems will provide organizations that adopt these powerful tools outperform their peers.”

IBM noted that over the past year, it has forged strategic partnerships with Apple, Twitter, The Weather Channel and Facebook, all aimed at unlocking new data sources to the advantage of clients worldwide.

http://www.ibm.com

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Pure Storage Fizzles in IPO

Pure Storage, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, completed its initial public offering (IPO) of 25,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock at a price to the public of $17.00 per share.  Trading of NYSE:PSTG closed at $16.01. The company offers all-flash storage arrays.

https://www.purestorage.com

• In April 2014, Pure Storage closed a $225 million Series F funding round, at a pre-money valuation of over $3 billion, to support its all-flash enterprise storage array strategy.  The round included contributions from previous public market investors including T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global and new investor, Wellington Management Company. The round also included participation from prior venture capital investors Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. The new funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $470 million to date.

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Digicel Withdraws Plans for Upcoming IPO

Digicel Group, which provides communications services in 31 markets in the Caribbean and South Pacific, withdrew its plans for an upcoming initial public offering.  The company cited inopportune conditions particularly in emerging markets.

Commenting, Denis O’Brien, Chairman, Digicel said: “Given our growth outlook, an IPO for Digicel was optional and predicated on achieving fair value for the company. Recent volatility in equity markets has seen a number of IPOs listing at a discount to their signalled price range and this was a less attractive route for us.”

“Digicel is now at a key juncture in our growth story following a $1.5 billion investment programme over the past three years; we generate strong and growing free cash flow and we have no material debt maturities until 2021. Our growth plans remain unchanged and we remain in a strong position to exploit areas of interest in: Data, Business Solutions, Cable TV and Broadband.”

http://www.digicelgroup.com/en.html

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TeliaSonera Deploys Metaswitch’s Network Interconnect Solution

TeliaSonera has deployed Metaswitch’s Network Interconnect Solution to better serve its customers in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

The installation, which includes Metaswitch’s Perimeta session border controller (SBC), secures real-time communications and delivers visibility into the network. In addition, Metaswitch’s Service Assurance Server (SAS) feature set offers network technicians tools for smarter, faster troubleshooting.

“Metaswitch is pleased to provide TeliaSonera with the solutions that better equip it to offer subscribers a superior level of service across multiple technologies, services and devices,” said Dave Reekie, SVP of Metaswitch Interconnect Solutions. “Metaswitch’s Network Interconnect Solution, powered by the Perimeta SBC, will consistently enable a full interworking of services while providing TeliaSonera with a flexible, modular architecture that’s ready for the future.”

http://www.metaswitch.com

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NTT Com Develops Cloud-based Video Analytics

NTT Communications is developing an artificial-intelligence (AI) technology called Time-series Deep Learning  that analyzes time-series video data to identify specific human motions with high precision.

The goal is to analyze video images taken with network cameras to distinguish between specific motions, such as people crouching, acting restlessly or moving things.

NTT Com said its system can attain more than 80% accuracy, paving the way for network-based detection applications for preventing crimes or accidents, understanding purchasing behavior, analyzing sports performance, etc.

NTT Com is planning to launch this Video Analysis Platform as a service.

http://www.ntt.com/aboutus_e/news/data/20151007_3.html

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O3b Hits First Year Milestones for its Satellite Network

O3b Networks marked first year of commercial operation, saying its high-throughput, low-latency satellite network has become the fastest growing in satellite history. The company operates a Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellation, which at 8000 km, is much closer to the earth than traditional geostationary (GEO) satellites.

O3b’s first year anniversary achievements include:

• 12 satellites in orbit
• Initial constellation capacity of 192 Gbps
• 40 customers in service
• 31 countries with live customers
• Already, the capacity that O3b has sold is equivalent to nearly 10% of the contracted capacity of the three largest Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) operators combined.

“Our first year of commercial service has been phenomenal. We couldn’t be happier to see the impact that O3b has had on our customers and their businesses. The breadth of industries and geographies that our customers span reflects the broad based demand for high performance connectivity and we are excited to help our customers take their network capabilities to another level,” stated Steve Collar, CEO, O3b Networks.

http://www.o3bnetworks.com

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