FCC: 4% of cell sites down in coastal Texas

As of August 27, 2017 at 11:00 a.m. EDT,  4.1% of the cell sites were down in the coastal counties of Texas and Louisina impacted by Hurricane Harvey.

Of the 55 counties in the hurricane impact zone, three were hit by outages in greater than 50% of cell sites: Aransas, Calhoun, Refugio, and San Patricio counties. Within these counties, there were 7,804 active cell sites prior to the hurricane, and of the time of the report, there were 320 cell sites down.

The FCC found there were at least 148,565 cable and wireline subscribers out of service in the affected area on Sunday morning.

There were 19 ongoing outagages or re-routing incidents involving Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs).

In addition, there were 9 radio stations off the air. No TV broadcaster outages were reported.

https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-346369A1.pdf

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AWS Cognito provides mobile app authentication

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced new capabilities to make it easier for mobile app developers to authenticate users and gain access to resources on the AWS cloud.

The new service features are part of AWS Cognito User Pools – App Integration and Federation, which is now in general availability release.

Amazon Cognito is a managed cloud service that provides authentication, authorization, and user management for web, mobile and even IoT applications. Some highlights:

• Amazon Cognito User Pools: create and maintain a user directory in order to add sign-up and sign-in to your mobile app or web application. You can also sign in users to a user pool through social identity providers as well as, SAML-based providers
• Amazon Cognito Federated Identities: enables the creation of unique identities for users and the ability to authenticate them with federated identity providers, such as Google or Facebook, for temporary, limited-privilege access to app resources
• Amazon Cognito Sync: allows you to synchronize user profile data across mobile devices and the web without the need to build a backend. It supports offline access, cross-device synchronizing, and local data caching of application-related user data so the user app experience remains consistent regardless of the device.

AWS also noted that the mobile client login can now provide a sign-up and sign-in for social identity providers including Facebook, Google, Login with Amazon, as well as through SAML with corporate identity providers such as Microsoft Active Directory.

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

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IBM Offers Data Protection Software

IBM announced a new data protection software with hybrid cloud capabilities that can rapidly move data from on-premises back-end storage to public or private clouds.

IBM said the software is designed to be used by virtual machines (VM) and application administrators. It also provides data clone functionality to support and automate DevOps workflows.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is offered for two different deployment options, either as a stand-alone software installed into virtualized environments or as an integrated function with IBM’s Spectrum Protect software, which can be used by large enterprise clients with diverse data protection and availability requirements.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus also has data protection and monitoring based upon automated Service Level Agreements to provide backup status and support retention compliance.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus provides data availability using snapshot technology for rapid backup, recovery and data management.

https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53024.wss

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IBM and SAP team on real-time retail data

IBM and SAP have teamed up to provide a co-innovated solution for the retail and consumer packaged goods industries that uses near real-time data to markedly improve planning and execution in the physical store.

The solution leverages unique data sources, such as IBM’s Metro Pulse, which flow through SAP Cloud Platform.

"SAP S/4HANA, coupled with access to rich, hyperlocal data understood and reasoned by IBM’s cognitive services, can provide consumer product and retail business users across the C-suite with the specific insights to gain a competitive advantage in major markets,” said Laurence Haziot, IBM Global Managing Director and General Manager Consumer Industries.
“Through this exciting collaboration between SAP and IBM, retailers and consumer products companies today can respond with speed, precision and confidence to locally relevant events. SAP S/4HANA includes capabilities to enable users to execute end-to-end business processes in ways that other systems cannot,” said Lori Mitchell-Keller, global general manager, Consumer Industries at SAP.  

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/consulting/

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Splunk's sales continue to rise - up 32% yoy

Splunk reported solid sales growth for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2017, with total revenues rising to $280.0 million, up 32% year-over-year. Total billings were $303.4 million, up 32% year-over-year. There was a GAAP operating loss of $82.1 million; GAAP operating margin was negative 29.3%.

Some highlights:

• Signed over 500 new customers.
• Announced Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring
• Introduced Splunk Insights for Ransomware, a new offering that delivers organizations an analytics solution to manage ransomware threats.
• Released new versions of Splunk Enterprise 6.6 and Splunk Cloud to make it easier than ever for a wide range of users to leverage datasets, build dashboards, gain answers and share insights.
• Released the latest version of Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) 4.7 to improve investigation efficiency and incident response, as well as provide insight from common SaaS applications.
• Splunk and Booz Allen Hamilton announced a private beta of Booz Allen Cyber4Sight for Splunk, a new solution designed to empower security analysts and threat hunters with actionable  intelligence.
• Released new version of the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Cloud Services in Splunkbase, which gives Splunk administrators the ability to collect events from various Microsoft Cloud Services APIs.

“I am pleased with the solid sales execution in Q2, particularly our results in EMEA,” said Doug Merritt, President and CEO, Splunk.

http://www.splunk.com

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VMware cites momentum as sales rise 12% yoy

Ahead of this week's VMworld show in Las Vegas, VMware reported Q2 revenue of $1.90 billion, an increase of 12.2% from the second quarter of 2016. License revenue for the second quarter was $732 million, an increase of 13.7% from the second quarter of 2016. GAAP net income for the second quarter was $334 million, or $0.81 per diluted share, up 30% per diluted share compared to $265 million, or $0.62 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2016.

"We are very pleased with our Q2 results, which were driven by broad-based strength across the product portfolio in all three geographies," said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. "As we continue our multi-year journey from a compute virtualization company to offer a broad portfolio of products driving efficiency and digital transformation, customers are increasingly turning to VMware to help them run, manage, secure and connect their applications across all clouds and all devices. VMware had a strong quarter and is well positioned for the future," said Zane Rowe, executive vice president and chief financial officer, VMware. "We increased our fiscal year guidance, completed our successful debut debt offering and received authorization for an additional $1.0 billion of stock repurchases."

Some highlights:

• NSX included in all top 10 deals this quarter
• VMware Cloud Services, including VMware Cloud on AWS service, continues to experience strong customer interest and remains on-track
• During the quarter, VMware signed its largest ever telco deal with Vodafone, reprsenting "a huge step forward" for its NFV initiative
• VMware now has 20,916 employees
• In June, VMware introduced major updates across its VMware vRealize Cloud Management Platform which enable customers to manage and provision at scale -- including compute, network, storage, and application services across multi-cloud environments.

http://www.vmware.com

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ZTE posts 1H17 sales of RMB 54 billion, up 13% yoy

Citing strength in mobile networking and its smartphone business, ZTE reported that its first-half revenue increased 13.1% to RMB 54.01 billion (US$8.12 billion). Net profit attributable to holders of ordinary shares of the listed company jumped to RMB 2.29 billion.

Some highlights:

• R&D spending increased to RMB 6.68 billion in the first half, or 12.4% of revenue. 
• In March 2017, the company was ranked No. 1 in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)'s latest annual list for patent applications, reflecting the company's increased focus on research and development of next-generation technologies.
• The Carrier Networks division accounted for 59.9% of revenue.
• ZTE has deployed over 60 Pre5G networks as well as 240 SDN and NFV networks globally.  
• ZTE cited a year-on-year growth of 41.7 percent in self-developed chip shipments in the first half of 2017. 
• In its Consumer division, ZTE reported growth in both operating revenue and gross profit, saying it now ranks fourth in the US smartphone market and ranks among the top five in countries including Australia, Germany, Canada and Spain. ZTE’s terminal STB shipment gained a year-on-year increase of 15% in first-half, exceeding the annual shipments in 2016.

http://www.zte.com.cn

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