Telefónica Business and Huawei Reach Global Agreement on Cloud

Telefónica Business Solutions, which offers a wide range of integrated communication solutions for the B2B market, announced a global collaboration agreement with Huawei to promote the migration of traditional IT services to the cloud.

The agreement is aimed at helping enterprises to migrate their servers to the cloud, allowing them to use computing, storage and backup services in Telefónica’s data centers with no infrastructure investment required and on a pay per use basis.

Huawei will deploy the Telefónica’s Open Cloud service based on OpenStack in eight Telefónica data centers. Telefónica will use Huawei’s knowledge and experience on its public cloud service in the Chinese market. The first countries where the service will be deployed are Brazil, Mexico and Chile during the first quarter of 2016 and in five additional locations later on also next year.

Telefónica said the deal provides it with access to the latest technology levering on the economies of scale enabled by a global provider such as Huawei, which together with competitive pricing will enhance Telefónica’s value proposition in the cloud services market while making easier for enterprise customers to securely move their data to the cloud. The services offered include virtual servers, storage and physical servers, also known as "baremetal".

"With this agreement Telefónica will be better positioned to serve the needs of thousands of enterprises that require an easily scalable platform in the cloud at a competitive cost and with full reliability and security. This is all possible thanks to Telefónica’s capabilities providing end-to-end service management including the network and data center. The smart combination and scale of Telefónica’s and Huawei’s capabilities reinforce both companies and furthermore represents the best guarantee for our customers" said Juan Carlos López-Vives, CEO Telefónica Business Solutions.

“This global collaboration agreement represents a unique milestone in our long successful partnership with Telefónica, and will certainly have a big impact in promoting the migration of enterprises to the cloud and the digital world in all Telefónica footprint. Joint innovation capabilities, customer focus, global scale will allow us to sustainably bring cutting-edge solutions and differentiated offers to our enterprise clients” said Ryan Ding, Huawei’s Executive Director of the Board and President of Products & Solutions.
http://saladeprensa.telefonica.com/

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Telefónica’s Strategic Plan: Onlife Telco by 2020

Telefónica presented its new strategic plan for coming years under the slogan “We choose it all”.

In a corporate event in Madrid, César Alierta, Executive Chairman of Telefónica, said his goal is to transform the company into an “Onlife Telco”, which he defines as "a company that promotes connections in life for people to choose a world of infinite possibilities." The event was streamed to the Group's 125,000 employees in 20 countries.

The new strategic plan is founded upon six key elements, three for value proposition –outstanding connectivity, integrated offering, and differential experience- and three facilitators, which will be Big Data and Innovation, end-to-end digitalisation, and capital allocation and simplification.<br /> <br />

 “We are experiencing an true revolution... This is not just another revolution. It is already being shown to be the revolution that will have the greatest impact of all of human history in terms of generation of wealth. The social development it brings will be more than exponential. And we are lucky enough to be at the centre of this revolution. The future will be a better one because we find ahead of us an era of exponential change and growth. A whole new world of opportunities is open to everyone, in any location, to create a better world”, stated Alierta.

http://saladeprensa.telefonica.com/

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Microsoft Adds Office 365 Enterprise Communications

Microsoft rolled out new capabilities in Office 365 that modernize the enterprise across meetings and voice, intelligence, and security and privacy. Some highlights:

• Meeting and voice capabilities in Office 365 -- adds Skype Meeting Broadcast, Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) Conferencing, PSTN Calling and Cloud Private Branch Exchange -- making Office 365 one platform for calling, conferencing, video and sharing integrated with Office applications
• Analytics and data visualization -- Delve Analytics provides interactive dashboards that surface insights into how users spend their time and who they spend it with, so they can focus on the tasks and people that matter most.

• Advanced security and compliance -- Customer Lockbox offers customers control over access to their data in Office 365 by giving them ultimate approval rights in the rare instances when a Microsoft engineer must request access to the service. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery brings machine learning and text analytics that reduce the costs and risks inherent in managing large quantities of data for e-discovery.

• Dynamics CRM 2016 is now generally available for online and on-premises deployments. Dynamics CRM 2016 includes advancements in intelligence, mobility and service, with significant productivity enhancements to help businesses and customer-facing employees achieve more.

http://blogs.office.com/2015/11/30/office-365-brings-significant-new-value-to-business-customers-worldwide

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AppDynamics Builds Ecosystem, Raises $158 Million

AppDynamics, a start-up based in San Francisco, announced co-engineering, co-marketing, and co-sales agreements with Accenture, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Pivotal, Rackspace, and Red Hat.

AppDynamics offers an Application Intelligence Platform that helps businesses proactively monitor, manage, analyze and optimize complex software environments, providing real-time, actionable IT operational and business insights into application performance, user experience, and business outcomes — all in real time. AppDynamics and its partner ecosystem help ensure maximum application and business performance, greatly improved DevOps collaboration for faster delivery, and enhanced analytical insight leading to better decision-making.

At a company event in Las Vegas, AppDynamics also confirmed a $158 million funding round led by General Atlantic and Altimeter Capital. The company's other investors include Adage Capital, Cross Creek Advisors, Industry Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

http://www.appdynamics.com/

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Orange Romania Updates Microwave Transport Network with ALU

Alcatel-Lucent is upgrading Orange Romania’s existing long-haul microwave transport network, allowing Orange to enhance its 4G network capacity and performance. Orange Romania’s 4G network covers 70 percent of the population and 96 percent of those in urban locations, with higher speeds of up to 300 Mbps now available in six major cities as well as throughout Bucharest’s metro rail network.

Under the project, which will be completed in 2016, Alcatel-Lucent will migrate its own microwave links to the 9500 Microwave Packet Radio technology across Romania, replacing existing Alcatel-Lucent microwave transport links. Network management will be provided by the 5620 Service Aware Manager. The 9500 MPR offers superior capacity for legacy TDM and new Ethernet traffic.

https://www.alcatel-lucent.com/

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Iguaz.io Raises $15 Million for Big Data Storage

Iguaz.io, a start-up based in Israel, announced $15 million in Series A funding for its data management and storage solutions for Big Data, IoT and cloud applications.

The funding round was led by Magma Venture Partners, the funding includes additional investments from JVP and large strategic investors.

The iguaz.io founding team is comprised of a group of former executives from successful technology companies in the fields of storage, cloud computing, high-speed networking, analytics and cyber-security. These companies include XtremIO (acquired by EMC), XIV (acquired by IBM), Mellanox, Voltaire and Radvision (acquired by Avaya).

"Enterprise customers have been sharing their pain points and challenges with us as they try to adopt Big Data and predictive analytics in their business," said Asaf Somekh, co-founder and CEO of iguaz.io. "We designed our solution from the ground up to address these challenges and allow our customers to focus on their applications and business."

"The IT industry is undergoing major shifts with the spread of cloud technologies on the one hand and new data consumption requirements on the other," said Yaron Haviv, co-founder and CTO of iguaz.io. "We're leveraging state-of-the-art hardware with our novel software architecture enabling customers to take a leap forward in their data-driven businesses."

http://www.iguaz.io

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Orange and ENGIE to Collaborate on Rural Electricity Grid in Africa

Orange and ENGIE announced a partnership to use their technological knowledge to achieve sustainable progress and economic and social development in Africa. The goal is to expand the electricity grid in Africa and encourage responsible power consumption. These solutions could, for instance, include individual solar kits and small-scale, local electricity networks. The service could then be billed via mobile using Orange Money. Both companies are participating in the COP21 conference in Paris.

Orange is present in 19 countries in Africa and the Middle East. ENGIE, which is an international player in the the energy sector, currently supplies 760 MW of power in Africa and aims to become one of the major energy leaders on the continent by 2025 with several major projects planned.

http://www.orange.com

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Zain Hosts Telecom Technology Conference in Bahrain

Zain Group, a leading mobile telecom innovator in eight markets across the Middle East and Africa, is hosting its fifth annual Zain Technology Conference (ZTC) this week in Manama, Bahrain.

The theme of this year’s Conference is ‘Transforming Our World’, reflecting Zain’s strategic aspirations of delivering on a compelling digital lifestyle to its customers. Zain is hosting some 60 technology vendors, showcasing their latest technologies.  Topics includes Road to 5G; Core Virtualization Evolution; Business Enablement Solutions; Big Data Analytics & Cloud Services; Customer Quality of Experience; Services Innovation; Energy Efficiency, and Site Optimization.

http://www.zain.com

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LGE Licenses Rambus CryptoManager Security Platform

LG Electronics (LGE) has licensed Rambus' CryptoManager security platform for its next-gen mobile devices. The Rambus CryptoManager platform provides chip and device companies with end-to-end security throughout the design and manufacturing process.  It includes a hardware root-of-trust for provisioning of keys to manage sensitive data on mobile devices. Specific terms of the agreement are confidential.

"At LGE, we are committed to ensuring that security is a key component of our industry-leading mobile devices," said Sang-won Song, vice president and head of LGE Mobile SoC Development Department. "With Rambus Cryptography Research team's advanced security expertise, the CryptoManager platform will help us secure mobile devices and applications throughout their lifecycle, providing critical trust among our customer base."

http://investor.rambus.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=944758

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