NTT Comm Inaugurates 5th Data Center in Osaka

NTT Communications inaugurated its fifth data center in central Japan's Kansai Region.

The new Osaka 5 Data Center, which has a dedicated building comprising 11 floors, is the newest addition to NTT Com's Nexcenter data center service, which combines extensive disaster countermeasures and ideal network environments to enable NTT Com's customers to accelerate their business development with confidence and efficiency. The facility offers approximately 3,500 m2 of server room, equivalent to 1,600 racks.

NTT Communications said the new data center is designed to minimize the impact of any envisioned disaster in Osaka, including earthquake, tsunami or flood in the event of a major tremor in the Nankai Trough. In the unlikely event that water were to reach the data center, equipment would continue to operate safely because the electric power equipment, communication facilities, server rooms and other important facilities are located on the second floor or above, over seven meters above ground level. The building's seismic-isolation device, which lessens the impact of strong shaking by the earthquake, is installed on the post beneath the second floor to ensure that it would work properly if water were to enter the building's first floor. In addition seismic damper, which suppresses the vertical shaking by the epicentral earthquake, is also installed.

http://www.ntt.com/aboutus_e/news/data/20160118.html

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SoftBank Picks Brocade VDX Switches for Data Center

SoftBank Corp deploying Brocade VDX switches to provide Ethernet fabrics as part of the company's group-wide common service infrastructure network. More than 70 switches have already been installed.

The Brocade VDX 6740 and 6740-T switches, deployed in three key SoftBank data centers, create an elastic, self-forming, and self-healing Ethernet fabric with Brocade VCS Logical Chassis functionality enabling the entire fabric to be managed as a single switch. The fabric-based architecture simplifies and automates virtual machine mobility and management within the data centers.

"Increased data center agility is critical to realizing the company's strategy of delivering new OTT services to drive growth," said Takenobu Yamane, manager of system infrastructure and service platform, SoftBank Corp. "Deployment of Brocade VDX switches as part of the new common service infrastructure network gives our data centers a more flexible and automated foundation, supporting a much more streamlined and cost-effective operational model that is capable of responding rapidly to new demands."

http://www.brocade.com

• The BROCADE VDX 6740 SWITCHES support up to 64 wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, with the units being deployed with an initial 24 active ports and the option to activate more in eight-port increments under Brocade's pay-as-you grow Ports on Demand (PoD) licensing model. 

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BloomReach Raises $56 Million for Cloud Personalization Plat

BloomReach, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, raised $56 million in Series D funding for its cloud personalization platform.

BloomReach provides a single Personalization Platform that includes applications for organic search, personalized site-search and navigation in addition to marketing and merchandising analytics. The products now are broken into two families, including:

• BloomReach Commerce, encompassing BloomReach's Organic Search and SNAP applications, that drives 10-40 percent lift by algorithmically optimizing site experience.
• BloomReach Compass, role-specific analytics providing machine-intelligence insights, KPI management and action-tracking for marketers and merchandisers, that leads to an average $8,000 in monthly revenue for each action taken. With customers like SendGrid, development of BloomReach Compass also has paved the way for BloomReach's further expansion outside of e-commerce.

The company said it now captures data from approximately 20.5 percent of all U.S. e-commerce and currently has more than 175 customers, including 57 from the Internet Retailer Top 500. BloomReach also is experiencing 70 percent in new average contract value (ACV) growth.

Investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Salesforce Ventures. Also demonstrating BloomReach's growing presence, joining its Board of Directors is the CEO and co-founder of Guidewire Software, Inc., Marcus Ryu.

"There's a $10-billion opportunity in marketing tech, and BloomReach has the core data-expertise to understand, learn and apply big data to make every experience personal for all digital businesses," said BloomReach co-founder and CEO Raj De Datta. "When the leading investors in our space show their confidence with this level of investment, it tells the entire landscape that BloomReach has the staying power to take the market. And, our growing, unmatched portfolio of customers proves it."

http://www.bloomreach.com

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Savari Secures $8 Million for Vehicle Situational Awareness Tech

Savari, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, raised $8 million in Series A funding for tis V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) safety communication technology.

Complementary to LiDAR, Radar and Camera-sensor technologies, Savari's DSRC technology works in any V2X environment including non-line-of-sight environments. Savari's solutions provide 360-degree situational awareness for the car and the road and include an upgrade path to support LTE technology.

The company said its technology is already deployed in the largest V2X safety pilot study conducted by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). The company is continuing to collaborate with major automotive manufacturers in engineering and field trials along with additional industry groups around the world, including ITS America, OmniAir Consortium and Car 2 Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC).

The company plans to launch an after-market product later this year that will provide full situational awareness to drivers while exchanging real-time information between connected cars.

Delta Electronics Capital Company, a subsidiary of Delta Electronics Inc., SAIC Capital, the corporate venture of Shanghai Motors, and an undisclosed strategic investor participated in the round.

http://www.savari.net

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Appcito Enhances Enterprise Application Delivery Capabilities

Appcito, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, announced the latest release of its Appcito Application Delivery System (ADS), formerly known as Appcito Cloud Application Front-End (CAFÉ). The new capabilities allow enterprise IT and network infrastructure teams to act as providers and enable application owners and DevOps teams to rollout new applications with a self-service model, while still being 100% compliant to existing security policies and governance models.

New capabilities include:

• Provider-Tenant Portal – allows enterprise infrastructure teams to define policies and arm application teams with a self-service portal to spin-up new services – traffic management, application security and analytics
• Service Adapters for F5 Big-IP LTM and HAProxy Deployments – service adapters can be non-disruptively inserted into existing data center or cloud deployments complementing existing ADC and open source tools to provide per-application health, visibility and analytics. For F5 Big-IP deployments Appcito ADS service adapters provide application-centric monitoring with real-time monitoring and threat detection leveraging Big-IP high speed logging (HSL). For HAProxy based deployments Appcito provides ongoing and meaningful monitoring with a dedicated system that stores, visualizes and co-relates HAProxy metrics. It provides alerting based on HAProxy metrics and an application-specific dashboard providing real-time and per-application views of health and performance of applications served by HAProxy.

“We are seeing ever-increasing adoption across cloud-native, microservice-based applications, as well as with enterprises looking to accelerate their cloud adoption by de-risking application migration,” said Kamal Anand, CEO, Appcito. “The new capabilities create an excellent opportunity for enterprise IT and infrastructure teams to empower agile application teams and facilitate DevOps-friendly deployments. It is time to embrace and empower shadow IT, not fear it.”

http://www.appcito.com

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Sony to Acquire Altair Semiconductor for $212 Million

Sony Corporation has agreed to acquire Altair Semiconductor for US$212 million.

Altair, which is based in Israel, supplies modem chip technology and related software for LTE.

Sony said it aims to not only expand Altair's existing business, but also to move forward with research on and development of new sensing technologies. By combining Sony's sensing technologies - such as GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) and image sensors - with Altair's high-performance, low power consumption and cost-competitive modem chip technology, and by further evolving both, Sony will strive to develop a new breed of cellular-connected, sensing component devices.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201601/16-008E/

LTE IoT Chipset Targets 10 years of Battery Life

Wednesday, October 28, 2015  #IoT, Altair, LTE, Silicon  1 comment

Ericsson, in partnership with AT&T and Altair Semiconductor, plan to demonstrate ultralow power consumption for IoT devices with a target battery operational life of ten years.

The demonstration of LTE Power Saving Mode on a commercial LTE Internet of Things (IoT) chipset is showcased at this week's GSMA Mobile 360 Series - North America event in Atlanta, Georgia.

The IoT device Altair's FourGee-1160 Cat 1 chipset featuring ultra-low power consumption. Power Saving Mode is an Ericsson Evolved Packet Core feature based on 3GPP (Release 12) for both GSM and LTE networks. The feature is able to dramatically extend IoT device battery life up to ten years or more for common use cases and traffic profiles.

Cameron Coursey, Vice President, Product Development, AT&T's IoT Organization, says: "IoT connectivity is essential to helping businesses stay tethered to their assets around the world. Whether a trucking company hauls expensive cargo across the country or a restaurant transports fresh food overseas, a long battery life on their connected devices can help them provide continuous service.  Businesses can save money and become more efficient with battery replacements every few years rather than very few months.

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Bell Canada Deploys Nokia 7950 XRS Core Router

Bell Canada is deploying Nokia's 7950 XRS core router to support its wireless, residential and business customers. Specifically, Nokia is providing Bell Canada with the 7950 XRS - to be managed by Nokia's 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM) - to create a single, end-to-end managed IP platform streamlining day-to-day network operations and enhancing operational efficiency, including a reduced energy footprint. The 7950 XRS scales from 6.4 to 32 terabits per second in a single system. 

The deal was won by Alcatel-Lucent, a subsidiary of Nokia.

http://nokia.com

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Pankaj Patel to Step Down as Cisco's Chief Development Officer

Pankaj Patel will step down from his position as Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer, Global Engineering of Cisco Systems during the second half of calendar year 2016.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/858877/000119312516441933/d116386d8k.htm

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Nigel Stagg to Step Down as CEO of BT’s Wholesale business

Nigel Stagg will step down as CEO of BT’s Wholesale business.

Stagg has spent 36 years with the company in a variety of roles and is now planning to explore other options. His most recent role has been CEO of BT Wholesale, a position he has held since 2011. BT Wholesale provides services to more than 1,400 communications providers who prefer to rely on BT’s expertise than to build out their own networks. It generated £2.2 billion of revenue in 2014/15 and EBITDA of £561 million.

http://www.btplc.com/News/index.cfm#/pressreleases/nigel-stagg-to-leave-bt-1304090

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