Saturday, August 19, 2017

Vertical Systems: Mid-Year 2017 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD

AT&T tops Vertical Systems Group's U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD results for Mid-Year 2017.

The following eight companies achieved LEADERBOARD status (rank order based on retail port share): AT&T, Level 3, Verizon (includes XO), Spectrum Enterprise, CenturyLink, Comcast, Windstream and Cox.

To qualify for the LEADERBOARD, providers must have four percent (4%) or more of the U.S. Ethernet services market. Shares are measured by the number of customer ports in service as tracked by Vertical Systems Group, with input from surveys of Ethernet providers.

"While the pace of growth has slowed from the market ramp years, demand for Carrier Ethernet services remains very strong in 2017," said Rick Malone, principal at Vertical Systems Group. "The revenue and profitability outlooks for many providers are improving as fiber buildouts are completed and pricing begins to stabilize."

Key results of the Mid-Year 2017 U.S. Carrier Ethernet share analysis:

  • Verizon advances to third from fourth position on the LEADERBOARD with the addition of Ethernet ports from its acquisition of XO, which was completed in February 2017. (XO was ranked seventh overall at the end of 2016.)
  • As a result, Spectrum Enterprise moves to fourth from third position on the LEADERBOARD.
  • Frontier advances to the Challenge Tier, up from the Market Player tier.
  • Level 3 is the only remaining Competitive Provider on the LEADERBOARD, which also includes four Incumbent Carriers (AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Windstream) and three Cable MSOs (Spectrum Enterprise, Comcast, Cox).
  • All Ethernet providers ranked on the Mid-Year 2017 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD are also represented on Vertical Systems Group's 2016 U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings LEADERBOARD.

Other providers selling Ethernet services in the U.S. are segmented into two tiers as measured by port share. The first or Challenge Tier includes providers with between 1% and 4% share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market. For Mid-Year 2017, the following companies attained a position in the Challenge Tier (in alphabetical order): Altice USA, Cogent, Sprint, Frontier and Zayo.

The second or Market Player tier includes all providers with port share below 1%. Companies in the Market Player tier include the following providers (in alphabetical order): Alaska Communications, Alpheus Communications, American Telesis, Birch Communications, BT Global Services, Cincinnati Bell, Consolidated Communications, DQE Communications, Expedient, FairPoint, FiberLight, FirstLight, Global Cloud Xchange, Great Plains Communications, GTT, Hawaiian Telecom, Lightower, Logix, LS Networks, Lumos Networks, Masergy, Midco, NTT America, Orange Business, RCN Business, Tata, TDS Telecom, Telstra, TPx Communications, Unite Private Networks, US Signal, WOW!Business and other companies selling retail Ethernet services in the U.S. market.

https://www.verticalsystems.com/vsglb/mid-year-2017-u-s-carrier-ethernet-leaderboard/

Latest Docker release covers Windows, Linux and Mainframe apps

Docker released a new version of its Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform featuring the ability to manage and secure Windows, Linux and mainframe applications across any infrastructure, both on premises and in the cloud.

The company said its latest release enables organizations to modernize traditional applications and microservices built on Windows, Linux or mainframe and manage these all in the same cluster. By using one orchestration system for all application types, organizations can centralize access controls, security policies, etc. across teams and business units without requiring changes in code, processes or procedures. With the additional support for IBM Z, enterprises can use Docker EE to deliver a consistent operational experience from application composition to networking to security across Linux, Windows and mainframe applications while managing all three in a mixed cluster.

“Customers come to Docker with a common challenge- how can they accelerate business growth when 80 percent of their annual budget is spent simply on maintaining their current infrastructure,” said Banjot Chanana, Head of Product Management for Docker. “With Docker EE, organizations can shift more investment into innovation by reducing the costs of maintaining their existing applications, while increasing flexibility and security. Docker EE enables organizations to unite traditional applications and microservices built on Windows, Linux or mainframe onto a single, secure software supply chain, accelerating application delivery by 13x while reducing IT spend more than 50 percent.”

https://www.docker.com



Alibaba's Q2 cloud revenue rises 96% to US$359 million

Alibaba Group reported that Q2 2017 revenue from cloud computing reach RMB2,431 million (US$359 million), up 96% year-over-year.

Alibaba said the number of paying customers of its cloud computing business grew to 1,011,000 from 874,000 in the previous quarter. Operating loss from cloud computing was RMB532 million (US$78 million) and adjusted EBITA loss was RMB103 million (US$15 million).

Alibaba Cloud is seeing improved revenue mix of higher valued-added services, as reflected by ongoing ARPU expansion.

The company says market expansion is its top priority. Some highlights for Q2:

  • Alibaba Cloud launched several new products that lower the barrier of migrating large-scale data to cloud services for traditional companies. For example, Cloud Storage Gateway allows customers to seamlessly connect their on-premise storage with Alibaba Cloud storage. Lightning Cube, a petabyte-scale data transport solution, helps enterprises to transfer large amounts of data at high speed between their data centers and Alibaba Cloud through portable storage appliances. 
  • Alibaba Cloud is expanding its Elastic Computing Service product portfolio. As of mid-August 2017, Alibaba Cloud is providing 19 types of Elastic Computing Service products that can be applied to 173 application scenarios, such as artificial intelligence, healthcare, video streaming, finance, e-commerce, and IoT.
  • Selected enterprise customers in China include: CITIC Group, a major state-owned multinational diversified company in China; China Huaneng Group, a fortune 500 company; PICC Finance, a subsidiary of PICC, one of the largest insurance companies in Asia.
  • Alibaba Cloud announced plans to build two new data centers in Malaysia and Indonesia, adding to its presence in over 14 countries and regions.


http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/ir/earnings

Expereo opens SD-WAN POP at CoreSite Miami

Expereo, a leading managed SD-WAN, Internet connectivity services and cloud acceleration solutions provider, has deployed a new network Point of Presence (PoP) at CoreSite's Miami data center.

Expereo’s Miami POP provides 10GB connectivity to Latin America for its Cloud Acceleration service, called Accelerated Cloud Access (XCA). The company said this service overcomes the limitations of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing to deliver improved user productivity experiences for cloud applications, through speed and reliability optimized Internet routing.

“CoreSite is a high-performance partner that we know is highly reliable and provides an excellent customer experience,” said Sander Barens, Vice President of Commercial Development at Expereo. “As we worked to establish our Miami POP, it was clear to us that CoreSite was best positioned to provide the required international connectivity options that we need to support our Latin America services and ensure our customers have the performance and connectivity they expect from Expereo.”

http://www.coresite.com

Box integrates Google Cloud Vision for image recognition

Box is integrating Google Cloud Vision into is cloud storage service to provide its enterprise customers with advanced image recognition.

The capability, which is currently in private beta, leverages machine learning to help enterprises improve workflows and drive efficiencies through more accurate discovery and deeper insights into unstructured content stored in Box.

“Organizations today have no way to extract insights from the massive amounts of unstructured data that are essential to their business, missing a huge opportunity to drive innovation, efficiency, and cost savings,” said Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO, Box. “By combining the machine learning capabilities of Google Cloud with the critical data businesses manage and secure in Box, we are enabling our customers – for the first time – to unlock tremendous new value from their content, digitize manual workflows, and accelerate business processes.”

“Box’s application of Google Cloud’s machine learning APIs brings to life the potential of AI in the enterprise,” said Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist, Google Cloud AI and Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University. “Understanding images remains a challenge for businesses and Box’s application of the Vision API demonstrates how the accessibility of machine learning models can unlock potential within a business’s own data. Ultimately it will democratize AI for more people and businesses.”

http://www.box.com

Dell'Oro: WLAN market bolstered by cloud subscriptions

Migration to higher-end and Cloud-managed products will bolster the Wireless LAN market between now and 2021, according to a newly released market forecast report by Dell’Oro Group, which predicts that average prices will rise with user adoption of new technologies and Cloud subscription licenses

“The trend is clear—users are willing to pay a premium for higher-performance WiFi experience,” said Trent Dell’Oro, Business Analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “Over the past several quarters average prices have been rising on like-for-like class of products. For example, upgrades to 802.11ac Wave 2, and NBASE-T have been contributing to rising average prices. We predict the trend will continue in 2018 and beyond as 802.11ax products become widely available. What we found most interesting is the impact Cloud-managed subscription license will have on average prices over the long run. By the fourth year of the forecast, the compounded income from licenses will be a significant contribution,” added Dell’Oro.

The Wireless LAN 5-Year Forecast Report highlights other key trends, including:

  • A discussion on the role 5G may play in Enterprise Campus networking.
  • An analysis of Enterprise Campus networking trends for wired Ethernet and Wireless LAN.
  • Cloud-managed Wireless LAN forecast by access points versus subscription licenses.
  • An in-depth analysis on the adoption of 802.11ax, at different price thresholds.


http://www.delloro.com/news/higher-end-cloud-managed-product-migration-bolster-wireless-lan-market-according-delloro-group

NVIDIA adds virtualization software for GPU-accelerated servers

NVIDIA introduced new virtualization software capabilities for NVIDIA Tesla GPU-accelerated servers.

The company said its new Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation Software (Quadro vDWS) enables enterprises to run both virtualized graphics and compute workloads on any virtual workstation or laptop from NVIDIA Tesla-accelerated data centers. This provides high-end performance to multiple enterprise users from the same GPU for lower cost of ownership.

When powered by NVIDIA Pascal architecture-based Tesla GPU accelerators, Quadro vDWS provides:

  • The ability to create complex 3D and photoreal designs - Up to 24GB of GPU memory for working with large, immersive models.
  • Increased productivity - Up to double the graphics performance of the previous NVIDIA GPU architecture lets users make better, faster decisions.
  • Unified graphics and compute workloads - Supports accelerated graphics and compute (CUDA and OpenCL) workflows to streamline design and computer-aided engineering simulation.
  • Better performance for Linux users - NVIDIA NVENC delivers better performance and user density by off-loading H.264 video encoding, a compute-intensive task, from the CPU for Linux virtual workstation users.

"The enterprise is transforming. Workflows are evolving to incorporate AI, photorealism, VR, and greater collaboration among employees. The Quadro visualization platform is evolving with the enterprise to provide the performance required," said Bob Pette, Vice President of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. "With Quadro vDWS on Tesla-powered servers, businesses can tackle larger datasets, power the most demanding applications and meet the need for greater mobility."

htttp://www.nvidia.com