Wednesday, June 6, 2018

FWD: Huawei's Global Connectivity Index 2018

Cisco regularly publishes its Visual Networking Index and Ericsson does likewise with its Mobility Report -- both are well-regarded across the industry for their primary data and forecasts. Huawei is doing the same with its Global Connectivity Index, which is now in its fifth annual edition.

Huawei's Global Connectivity Index provides a big picture look at digital transformation and presents its data on a country-by-country basis.

This year, the GCI report provides a quantitative assessment of the digital health of 79 nations, ranking them by considering their progress in 5 technology enablers: broadband, data centers, cloud, Big Data, and IoT. There are four pillars: supply, demand, experience and potential. The study relies on expertise from inside of Huawei as well as outside the company, including in-depth interviews with top think tanks around the world, including digital strategy advisors, digital economy academics, and policymakers from the World Bank, MIT, Stanford University, and Singapore Infocomm Development Authority. Huawei argues that the long-term return on investment (ROI) for digital technologies is 6.7 times that of non-digital investments.

The biggest takeaway from the study is that the global digital economy could nearly double in size to $23 trillion by 2025 from $12.9 trillion in 2017, when it accounted for 17.1% of global GDP.

One outside observation is that a country's connectivity ranking is related to its GDP but not bound by it. Another is that Huawei's own remarkable performance in certain developing countries must certainly have helped to list their ranking but often not enough to push them into front-runner or even adopter status -- and for the U.S. market, which holds the No.1 spot on Huawei's Global Connectivity Index, the company is essentially locked out. 

Some highlights:
  • The U.S. continued to lead in ICT Infrastructure investment and held onto its top position in the rankings.
  • Singapore and Sweden trailed close behind the US, and over the past year closed the gap in rank with the US by two GCI points each. 
  • Qatar, China and Malaysia improved their GCI scores in part due to roll-outs of national ICT initiatives. 
  • The study identifies several countries seeing a drop in GCI rankings, mostly these nations are not yet investing, adopting and capturing the potential of advanced technologies including Cloud, Big Data and IoT.
  • The study finds growing inequality, an ICT version of the “Matthew Effect” – the sociology theory that states: “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”


Huawei's Global Connectivity Index can be accessed here:
http://www.huawei.com/minisite/gci/en/


Facebook pioneers StatePoint Liquid Cooling for data centers

Facebook is pioneering a StatePoint Liquid Cooling (SPLC) system, developed in partnership with Nortek Air Solutions, that promises to increase the power efficiency of its data centers.

The latest Facebook data centers in certain dry climates currently use a direct evaporative cooling system based on outdoor air rather than water.

Facebook estimates that the new SPLC technique can reduce water usage by more than 20 percent for data centers in hot and humid climates and by almost 90 percent in cooler climates.

The SPLC system is described as an advanced evaporative cooling technology, patented by Nortek, that uses a liquid-to-air energy exchanger, in which water is cooled as it evaporates through a membrane separation layer.

Further details are provided on Facebook's engineering blog.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1221779261291831/statepoint-liquid-cooling-system-a-new-more-efficient-way-to-cool-a-data-center/

T-Mobile extends its 600 MHz LTE rollout

T-Mobile has now lit up 600 MHz LTE coverage in more than 900 cities and towns across 32 states.

T-Mobile is now referring to its 600 MHz deployment as "Extended Range LTE", noting that 600 MHz signals travel twice as far from the tower and are four times better in buildings than mid-band LTE.

The carrier also announced plans to bring 600 MHz Extended Range LTE to Puerto Rico this fall.

“After the devastating hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico last year, we saw an opportunity to rebuild the network better than new -- to rebuild with 5G-ready gear. We’re laying the foundation for the island to become a technology and innovation hub in the future while adding coverage and capacity with 600 MHz LTE this year,” said Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer for T-Mobile.

T-Mobile now has six smartphone models on sale with 600 MHz support.

https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/extended-range-lte-puerto-rico.htm

Fortinet acquires Bradford Network for endpoint visibility

Fortinet has acquired Bradford Networks for an undisclosed sum.

Bradford, which was founded in 2000 and is based in Boston, provides a Network Sentry solution that continuously assesses the risk of every user and endpoint, and automatically contains compromised devices that act as backdoors for cyber criminals.  The platform integrates with leading endpoint security, firewall and threat detection solutions to enhance the fidelity of security events with contextual awareness.

Fortinet said the acquisition enhances its own Security Fabric by converging access control and IoT security solutions to provide large enterprise with broader visibility and security for their complex networks including:

  • Complete, continuous, agentless visibility of endpoints, users, trusted and untrusted devices and applications accessing the network including IoT and headless devices.
  • Enhanced IoT security through device micro-segmentation, dynamic classification of headless devices by type, profile, as well as automatic policy assignment to enable granular isolation of unsecure devices, all using a simple web user interface.
  • Accurate event triage and threat containment in seconds through automated workflow integrations that prevent lateral movement.
  • Easy, cost-effective deployment due to highly scalable architecture that eliminates deployment at every location of a multi-site installation.


“We are excited to join with Fortinet, the leader in network security to deliver exceptional visibility and security at scale to large enterprise organizations. Bradford Networks’ technology is already integrated with Fortinet’s Security Fabric including FortiGate, FortiSIEM, FortiSwitch and FortiAP products to minimize the risk and impact of cyber threats in even the toughest security environments such as critical infrastructure - power, oil and gas and manufacturing,” stated Rob Scott, chief executive officer, Bradford Networks.

Paul Jacobs sets up a new company to pursue next-gen mobile

Paul Jacobs, the former CEO and executive chairman of Qualcomm, has founded a new company called XCOM to focus on next-generation mobile technologies.

Jacobs is joined in the effort by Derek Aberle, previously president of Qualcomm from March 2014 to January 2018, and Matt Grob, previously CTO of Qualcomm from 2011 to 2017.

https://xcom-tech.com

Riverbed refines its Application Performance Management

Riverbed introduced a unified application performance management (APM) and end-user experience monitoring solution to help enterprises eliminate digital experience blind spots.

The latest release of Riverbed SteelCentral leverages ML-based business analytics to derive performance insights from every transaction and every application experienced by the end customer.

Riverbed SteelCentral blends device-based end user experience, infrastructure, application, and network monitoring to enable customers to holistically manage the users’ digital experience. The new SteelCentral release introduces a new management clustered architecture for application scalability and data compression mechanisms that enable a single analysis server to support tens of thousands of agents.

In addition to the AI-driven insights, this SteelCentral release provides integration with Riverbed Xirrus Wi-Fi access points.

Riverbed said its unique approach enables organizations to monitor the digital experience for all applications, and capture every application transaction at a level of depth and quality that is essential for today’s digital business.

“Companies in virtually every industry are pursuing digital business initiatives to deliver a better end user experience – these are highly strategic investments designed to drive significant improvements in employee productivity, customer loyalty, and financial performance. But as organizations roll these digital initiatives out, they’re discovering that they’re blind – their highly fragmented traditional APM tools are unable to help them accurately measure the end user experience and identify the underlying drivers of that experience,” said Mike Sargent, Senior Vice President, General Manager for SteelCentral at Riverbed.

Avi pulls in $60 million including an investment from Cisco

Avi Networks, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, announced $60 million in new funding including investments from Cisco Investments along with DAG Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures.

Cisco resells the Avi Vantage Platform in markets around the world, and Avi closely integrates with Cisco ACI, Cisco’s intent-based networking and automation solution for the data center.

Avi Networks offers an application delivery controller (ADC) with a Software Load Balancer, an Intelligent Web Application Firewall, and an Elastic Service Mesh for container-based applications. The company says that as businesses shift their operations to clouds such as Azure and AWS, its intent-based software offers easier management, faster performance, greater elasticity, deeper analytics, and more powerful automation than legacy ADC vendors.

Avi also reports that it has tripled its bookings over the past year, with significant adoption by the Global 2000 and 20% of the Fortune 50.

This latest round brings Avi’s total funding to $115 million.

“Modern applications are driving a new urgency with which enterprises are automating their networks and application delivery systems,” said Amit Pandey, CEO of Avi Networks. “Cisco software and infrastructure are a cornerstone in this transformation. I am thrilled about this strategic investment from Cisco and our continued joint efforts to deliver the elasticity, intelligence, and multi-cloud capabilities that enterprises need.”


  • Avi Networks is headed by Amit Pandey, who joined the company as CEO in 2015. Previously, Pandey spent nearly a decade at NetApp in a wide range of executive positions, and followed that with two successful stints at startups - first as CEO of TerraCotta that was acquired by the European software giant, Software AG and next as CEO of Zenprise that was acquired by Citrix.
  • Avi Networks was co-founded in November 2012 by Umesh Mahajan, who previously was VP/GM of Data Center Switching at Cisco; Murali Basavaiah, who previously was VP Engineering at Cisco for NX-OS Software and Nexus 7000/MDS product; and Ranga Rajagopalan, who previously was Sr. Director of Engineering at Cisco and responsible for NX-OS systems/platform software for the Cisco Nexus 7000.

Cloudera posts Q1 revenue of $103 million, up 29% yoy

Cloudera, which specializes in enterprise analytic data solutions powered by Apache Hadoop, reported total revenue of $102.7 million for its first quarter fiscal 2019, ended April 30, 2018, an increase of 29% from the first quarter of fiscal 2018. GAAP loss from operations for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 was $50.4 million, compared to a GAAP loss from operations of $222.3 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2018. Non-GAAP loss from operations for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 was $24.4 million, compared to a non-GAAP loss from operations of $30.3 million in the year-ago period. GAAP net loss per share for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 was $0.35 per share. Non-GAAP net loss per share for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 was $0.17 per share.

"The rapidly connecting world is driving every enterprise in every industry to go through a digital transformation in order to remain competitive in this modern era. Data is the foundation of digital transformation. A completely new architecture and set of technologies is required for enterprises to leverage and gain meaningful insight from data," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer. "To better-position Cloudera for the next evolution of the market -- machine learning, analytics and cloud -- we are focusing our innovation and go-to-market initiatives on these high growth areas and the line of business executives responsible for digital transformation."

Some highlights

  • Subscription revenue was up 33% year-over-year to $85.9 million
  • Subscription revenue represented 84% of total revenue, up from 81% in the first quarter of fiscal 2018
  • Non-GAAP subscription gross margin for the quarter was 85%, up from 84% in the first quarter of fiscal 2018
  • Dollar-based net expansion rate was 132% for the quarter





EE to launch 5G trial in London in October

EE, which operates the UK's biggest mobile network, plans to launch a live 5G trial network in East London in October.

The EE 5G trial will encompass 10 sites around East London in areas including City Road, Old Street, Hoxton Square, St Paul’s and Chiswell Street. EE will be using social media channels to sign-up the first 5 small business and 5 residences to test the service.

EE said it aims to be the first UK operator to launch 5G, but did not commit to a rollout date.

Marc Allera, CEO of BT’s Consumer business, said: “This live trial is a big step forward in making the benefits of 5G a reality for our customers, and in making sure that the UK is at the front of the pack for 5G technology. We’re focusing our resource and experience across EE and BT to ensure that we continue to lead the UK market with a mobile network that keeps giving our customers the best speeds and the best coverage. 5G is a fundamental part of our work to build a converged, smart network that keeps our customers connected to the things that matter most.”

Commvault adds tie-in to Alibaba Cloud

Commvault, which specializes in enterprise backup, recovery, archive and the cloud, announced a strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud to deliver scalable hybrid cloud data management solutions. The strategic partnership includes the joint delivery of:

  • Integrated features on a single unified platform
  • Advanced centralized support
  • Innovative, personalized offerings

Dajiang Han, Head of Global Alliance, Alibaba Cloud Global said, "We are excited to enter this strategic partnership with Commvault and concertedly empower our customers through advanced cloud computing and data management capabilities. Digital transformation is the new benchmark for companies amidst an increasingly competitive landscape, and data is at the core of this journey. As cloud continues to serve as the backbone of today's digital economy, Alibaba Cloud and Commvault are committed to deliver innovative technologies to address the ever-growing challenges in data storage, processing, management and protection."

"The strategic combination of Commvault's leadership in backup & recovery and moving data to, from and between clouds and Alibaba Cloud's strengths will provide customers with scalable and secure cloud data solutions, while supporting the acceleration of digital transformations across the globe," said Owen Taraniuk, Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships and Market Development, Commvault.


  • Commvault has existing cloud partnership with multiple players, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.