The availability of IBM Blockchain services on IBM Bluemix in China complements IBM’s recent announcement of the availability of signed blockchain code image, which will allow Chinese companies to download, easily install and run a Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain network on Docker-enabled environments.

Ernie Hu, General Manager, Cloud, IBM China stated, “Today’s launch of blockchain and our IoT platform through the IBM Cloud is a tremendous boon for Chinese companies. Providing the infrastructure of Bluemix, combined with these latest technologies from both IBM and a growing roster of partners and Chinese service providers, will equip our country’s developers with the set of tools they need to fuel more intelligent and advanced innovations across China’s fastest-growing industries, including manufacturing and financial services.”

The same set of blockchain services will be accessible and offered on IBM Bluemix via cloud. As a result, blockchain will be available to a large number of developers and it will assist them to drive greater blockchain technical and business innovations in China for a number of industries that comprises of financial services, supply chains, IoT, risk management, digital rights management and healthcare.

IBM and Cisco’s move

IBM and Cisco that partnered earlier this year in June are aiming to expand their global team up by tapping the power of Bluemix and IBM’s IoT technologies, combined with Cisco’s specialized analytics for data at the edge of a network. With this, the Chinese companies can monitor their remote equipment in real-time, helping to increase productivity and reduce maintenance costs.

Steve Zhang, CEO, 21Vianet said, “Today, IBM Bluemix operated by 21Vianet is able to help Chinese companies transform and extend their cloud services to developers, helping to support entrepreneurship. We also plan to continue working with IBM to build a robust and comprehensive cloud ecosystem in China, combining our 20 years of experience in data center operations with IBM’s advanced cloud services and deep technical expertise. This will give Chinese businesses the right mix of tools to innovate and succeed.”

IBM claims that its cloud platform one of the largest open public cloud deployments in the world and it features over 150 tools and services. With its entry into Chinese marketspace, it will make sure that Chinese cloud apps remain interoperable, giving the country’s tech economy a solid foundation to springboard future innovation.

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Scott Chasin, CEO and Co-Founder, ProtectWise said, “When looking for integration partners, we want to work with a broad range of strategic technical champions with a strong set of APIs who share the same approach to cybersecurity.”

“We need to come together as an industry, democratize access to data and insights and provide added value and protection to our customers. Carbon Black will help us to do just that.”

ProtectWise claims that Grid provides its customers with an intuitive, actionable experience, changing the way it look at data and revolutionizing the way the enterprise currently deals with threats. Carbon Black’s Endpoint Security Platform helps organizations of all sizes replace ineffective antivirus, lock down endpoints and critical systems, and arm incident response teams with the most advanced tools to hunt down threats. Thus, with the integration of platforms will provide the customers will provide a better scale of enterprise security and better protection to customers.

ProtectWise also claims to have the ability to create an unlimited retention window with full-fidelity forensics, automated retrospection and advanced visualization with -savings of an on-demand deployment model. With the Cb Response integration, customers will get more information about devices and users, creating universal visibility from endpoint to network. Together, the products give users workflows to not only view the process that ran on the endpoint and executed the connection on the network, but actually see the data sent on the network.

Ramon Peypoch, Chief Product Officer, ProtectWise stated, “As we move forward as an organization, we are pursuing an aggressive list of integration partners. We want to pull in threat detection from other security devices to feed into our event generation system and leverage additional integrations to act as an enforcement point on the network. By focusing on collaborating as an industry, we hope to shift the paradigm away from the current approach to enterprise security and provide better protection to our customers.”

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Microsoft and SAP are partners from last 20 years now and with Azure as an add on, SAP has a global cloud data platform to help it drive companies’ human resources transformation, and the potential to improve business outcomes. Earlier in June this year, both the companies announced joint plans to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform deployed on Microsoft Azure, simplify work through new integrations between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP, and provide enhanced management and security for custom SAP Fiori apps. With this expansion, SAP will have a crucial added capacity to run operational workloads of SAP SuccessFactors solutions on Azure, beginning with demo environments, to support its continuing client user growth.

Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business at Microsoft stated, “Microsoft and SAP share a commitment to empowering digital transformation across every aspect of business. The combination of SAP’s market-leading, innovative human capital management solutions with Microsoft’s intelligent cloud will equip companies around the world to help maximize the potential and skills of their most valuable asset, their people.”

According to a report in ZDNet, SAP seem to plan to maintain its own hosted version of SuccessFactors, making Azure an option, not an exclusive. The addition of Azure as an option will happen over the next five years. According to both the companies the alliance has always helped organizations use the cloud to drive innovation, agility and enable new ways to work. By aligning and integrating solutions, the alliance empowers businesses to reason over vast quantities of data and create systems of intelligence that they can use to dramatically improve their customer engagement, employee productivity, business operations and product development to give the end user unprecedented insight, convenience and agility.

SAP SuccessFactor HCM suite entails:

• Employee central– Deliver real business impact with a core HR system that puts the ‘self’ back in ‘self-service’.
• Recruiting– Transform recruiting into a continuous, strategic part of your talent strategy with the only end-to-end recruiting solution that helps attract, engage and select better candidates and then measure the results.
• Onboarding– SAP SuccessFactors makes onboarding a strategic process that improves job satisfaction, time to productivity and first year retention.
• Performance and goals– Communicate strategy, create meaningful individual goals across the organization, and focus employees on what matters, while enabling executives to monitor goal progress in real-time.
• Workforce analytics and reporting– Deliver actionable, quantitative insights to your business leaders with a powerful combination of talent and business data that produces easy to understand and consume information.

Mike Ettling, President, SAP SuccessFactors said, “SAP SuccessFactors is the fastest growing core HR solution, and offers an unmatched depth and breadth across the entire HCM suite, of any vendor in the industry. We’ve seen exponential growth in the past two years, with 42 million users now benefiting from our market-leading solutions. In selecting Azure, we will be able to expand our reach even further, with the reliability that is required of these mission-critical applications, and continue to innovate and enhance services to meet client needs across additional environments.”

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Bengaluru-based Chaitmity was founded by Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy, former employees of Google and they started this social chat application with an aim of helping people discover others based on locality and interests and it raised to over 3 million users across various platforms. Chatimity claims that to achieve this, it built a lot of chat tech and employed ML and AI solutions like a social reputation system for automated community moderation and spam detection. It also built a chatbot, named MITI, that in addition to making casual chat, conducted games, and kept users hooked.

Economic Times quoted Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and Chief Executive, Freshdesk, “Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge. With their focus on artificial intelligence and chatbots, the Chatimity team, now part of Freshdesk, has already started to create a scalable customer engagement chat platform that is future ready.”

In the month of June this year, Freshdesk launched a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution called, Freshsales which the company claims that the new CRM works best for “high-velocity” environment as it can accomplish multiple jobs such as lead, deal and account management; email and phone integration; user behavior tracking; lead scoring; a visual sales pipeline; and reporting.

Freshdesk claims to already have a chat platform named as Freshchat which in beta right now and it claims this platform as intelligent live chat product that helps find interested visitors on website and convert them into customers. With this acquisition, Freshdesk will be able to make enhancements in its existing chat platform by adding AI and machine learning technology to it.

According to ZDNet, today many companies in CRM space are investing big bucks chatbot platforms and technologies. Salesforce introduced LiveMessage, a platform where representatives can interact with customers with multiple messaging apps. Oracle also launched a bot platform and similarly LinkedIn also has its own bot assistant.

Tarkeshwar Thakur, Co-founder and CEO, Chatimity stated, “Our team was able to get a glimpse of what Freshdesk was already working on and we immediately knew that our team and technology would complement and accelerate product development at Freshdesk with a strong focus on AI and chat tech. Delivering a top-notch customer experience over chat continues to be a challenge for many companies, a problem we intend to solve with some of the next-gen chat products we are building at Freshdesk.”

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Yoh claims that the entry of Starpoint will bring in its expertise and resources and at the same time will also expand Yoh’s geographic reach, reaffirming its position as a national and international leader in workforce solutions. Yoh aims to gain a strong reputations of both companies in the IT, interactive, media, and health care fields as well as enhancing its ability to service fast growing industries that includes financial services, creative, retail and insurance.

Anthony Bosco, President of Yoh stated, “Strictly transactional staffing relationships are no longer the only answer in today’s evolving business landscape. This acquisition is a reinforcement of our commitment to predicting client needs and providing them with unmatched project-based solutions and talent all under one roof. Starpoint Solutions is a perfect fit for us from a cultural and business standpoint. This addition will allow us to deliver even higher levels of value and confidence to our customers.”

New York-based Starpoint Solution was founded in 1982, it claims to have an expertise in professional staffing, Application Development projects, leveraging predictive data analytics and constantly evolving their Enterprise Resource Planning and Enterprise Cloud solutions.

Yoh’s solutions comprises of recruitment process outsourcing, managed services, payroll and staffing services and the acquisition will help the company to escalate and expand its solutions and services. According to Jeffrey Najarian, President of Starpoint Solutions, this deal will help Starpoint transform the staffing industry by providing more holistic staffing solutions to customers.

“As a leader in the market, we see this acquisition as a chance to join a world class company with great talent reach and a tight grasp of changing workforce dynamics. Our 30 years of solutions design and execution tactics are a perfect fit for advancing Yoh’s offerings,” added Najarian.

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According to Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist, AWS, there is a difference between Regions and Availability Zones. Each Region is a physical location where there are more Availability Zones or AZs. Each Availability Zone, in turn, consists of one or more data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, all housed in separate facilities. With more AZ’s in each Region gives user the ability to run application that are more highly available, error free and durable as compared to a single AZ.

Therefore, AWS has two Regions, US East (Ohio) and US East (Northern Virginia) as both are close enough to serve the same user base. The users can make optimum utilization of AWS features that includes S3 Cross-Region Replication, Cross-Region Read Replicas for Amazon Aurora, Cross-Region Read Replicas for MySQL, and Cross-Region Read Replicas for PostgreSQL. Data transfer between the two Regions is priced at the Inter-AZ price ($0.01 per GB), making cross-region use cases economical.

Peter DeSantis, Vice President, Infrastructure, AWS stated, “Our customers tell us that by running their applications in the AWS Cloud, they are able to move faster, operate more securely, and save substantial costs–all while leveraging the scale and performance of AWS.”

“Now with five highly scalable regions across the United States, AWS customers have multiple options for providing US-based end users low-latency access to cloud applications, as well as the opportunity to architect a variety of inter-region backup and disaster recovery operations for even greater availability.”

The company claims that the new Ohio Region supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, NAT Gateway, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.

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The wireless solution delivers wireless intrusion prevention system (WIPS) technology, when both are deployed together. WatchGuard Wi-Fi Cloud connects and protects SMBs and distributed enterprises with fully automated wireless threat prevention and enterprise-grade interactive engagement and analytics features.

With this solution, the Wi-Fi hotspots turns into consumer research, analytics, and push marketing tools. It allows businesses to engage with hotspot users in different ways that are tailored to the modern methods people use to communicate in their daily lives. For instance, an interactive splash page can be presented with various options for logging into the Wi-Fi hotspot using Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, and other popular social media networks, as well as SMS text and self-registration via guestbook. Each method captures different hotspot user information, which is valuable to marketing teams for follow up engagement and promotion.

Ryan Orsi, Director, Product Management, WatchGuard stated, “Information like where and how long customers tend to linger in a particular location can offer key business insights into metrics like storefront conversion: how many people walked past outside versus coming into the store. This can be extremely valuable to businesses looking to optimize their advertising, loyalty programs, floor layouts, and more.”

“Typically, businesses are forced to piecemeal separate engagement, analytics, and SMS push marketing tools together from different vendors, which leads to management complexity and higher costs. WatchGuard’s Wi-Fi Cloud wraps research, analytics, and SMS push marketing tools into one license and one easy to use cloud-based portal.”

Ensured Security

Unlike traditional wireless network management solutions that fail to stop rogue devices from connecting to their networks or block threats like wireless denial of service attacks, WatchGuard Wi-Fi Cloud allows IT professionals to deliver high-quality wireless performance, while ensuring consistent security policies across all connected devices, even at remote locations.

WatchGuard claims to offers a broad portfolio of network security products aimed at protecting businesses from cyber threats. When paired with WatchGuard’s Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances, the Wi-Fi Cloud passes all traffic generated by Wi-Fi clients through the UTM appliance for additional security protection against today’s latest malware, viruses, Trojans, ransomware, known malicious websites, and more. Additionally, when paired with a UTM appliance, the Wi-Fi traffic generated by the Wi-Fi Cloud’s access points are displayed inside Dimension, WatchGuard’s centralized visibility platform aimed at providing IT administrators with a consolidated view of all network activity in a single pane of glass.

WatchGuard’s WIPS also provides customers with:

• Secure Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Policy Enforcement – automatically identifies on-network smart devices and blocks unapproved connections.
• Accurate Location Tracking – pinpoints the location of connected wireless devices or sources of interference, enabling administrators to quickly take action.
• Flexible Deployment – deployable in configurations to meet any security need. It can be installed as an overlay on top of existing WLAN infrastructure or as a standalone enforcement system for Wi-Fi prohibited zones.

Wi-Fi Analytics

Data is collected via passive scans, active scans and user connections in and around Wi-Fi networks. It is then analyzed and conceptualized to provide insight into traffic patterns, behavior, and demographics of Wi-Fi users, in addition to generate a visual map of foot traffic patterns on a floor plan. Any Wi-Fi device with an 802.11 radio enabled broadcasts automatic probe requests that are captured and stored, along with the triangulated physical location of the client. Associated user demographics are captured when users choose to connect to a Wi-Fi Cloud-powered SSID and select an authentication method such as login with Facebook, twitter, or LinkedIn.

“We refer to ‘Wi-Fi analytics’ as the power of our back-end system to sift through this ocean of data and present key insights that are valuable to businesses. These insights allow businesses capitalize on data about the age, gender, and brand loyalty of hotspot users within their different locations,” added Orsi.

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Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage Network solutions enhance on-premise storage options for clients and service providers with low-cost, large scale active archives and unstructured data content stores and it complements IBM’s software portfolio for data protection and backup, tape archive, as well as a high performance file and object solution which is focused on response time.

The storage service will increase the flexibility and security of IT systems. In a price comparison of identical object storage capacity running on a competitive cloud, the new IBM Cloud Object Storage demonstrated more than 25% lower costs for the capacity, environment and locations. The platform is built on SecureSlice and is specifically designed to make storing and managing that data on the IBM Cloud reliable and available across regions round the clock.

SecureSlice combines encryption and erasure coding for greater security and information dispersal which enhances data availability. These fundamental technologies can help clients satisfy their data compliance security requirements and maintain access to critical data even in the face of a regional outage.

Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud stated, “As clients continue to move massive workloads to hybrid clouds there is a need for an easier, more secure and economical way to store and manage mounting volumes of digital information. With today’s announcement, IBM becomes the leading cloud vendor to provide clients the flexibility and availability of object data storage across on-premises and public clouds.”

How does it work?

It transforms the content by encrypting, expanding, slicing and dispersing data and those slices are distributed to separate disks and commodity hardware across geographic locations. Real-time, bit-perfect data is highly available and can be retrieved with a subset of slices—even with individual servers or entire sites down. IBM claims that the service is easy to operate as it is:

• Flexible: User can move workloads across these environments to scale with the changing needs of business. In addition, a common software infrastructure can be used with complete license and interface flexibility.
• Scalable: The web-scale storage platform enables performance and capacity to scale independently reaching exabyte levels.
• Simple: Huge volume of data can be managed and streamlined with the simplified storage system and monitored accordingly.

According to the company, IBM Cloud Object Storage is being offered in two public, multi-tenant services: Cross Region Service, which sends the sliced data to at least three geographically dispersed regions across IBM Cloud data centers; and Regional Service, which holds the data in multiple data centers in a given region. IBM claims that for the first time IT organizations with on-premises storage will be able to move data to and from the cloud. IBM Cloud Object Storage is available now for enterprise clients across IBM Cloud data centers in the US and Europe and will be available in the Asia Pacific region in December.

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It will be delivered, sold and supported by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service and customers will be able to leverage the global footprint and breadth of services from AWS. According to a report in ZDNet, VMware Cloud on AWS is currently in a beta phase and the two are projecting to commence the service in early 2017. Customers will be able to make use of the tools that include storage, databases and analytics.

Both the companies claim that the service will combine the capabilities of compute, storage and network virtualization products (vSphere, Virtual SAN and NSX) along with vCenter management, and optimize it to run on next-generation elastic, bare metal, AWS infrastructure. This will allow customers to deploy secure and enterprise-grade AWS cloud-based resources that are operationally consistent with vSphere-based clouds. This new service represents a significant investment in engineering, operations, support, and sales resources from both companies. It will run on next-generation, elastic, bare metal AWS infrastructure.

Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware said, “VMware Cloud on AWS offers our customers the best of both worlds. This new service will make it easier for customers to preserve their investment in existing applications and processes while taking advantage of the global footprint, advanced capabilities, and scale of the AWS public cloud.”

What customers will get out of this joint architected solution?

• Hybrid Cloud Capabilities: Enterprise application performance, reliability, availability and security with the VMware technologies, all optimized to run on AWS, the public cloud provider.
• Consistent with vSphere: With VMware Cloud on AWS, users’ private data center integrated with the AWS public cloud can be operated using the same vCenter UIs, APIs and CLIs. With vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode, user will have a single pane of glass for managing on-premises and VMware Cloud resources on AWS.
• Operated and supported by VMware: The service will be operated, sold and supported by VMware.
• Workload portability: Full VM compatibility and total workload portability between the datacenter and the AWS cloud. No complex and time consuming application re-platforming is required.
• Subscription-based consumption: Customers will be able to purchase dedicated clusters that combine VMware software and AWS infrastructure, either on-demand or as a subscription service.

Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS stated, “Our customers continue to ask us to make it easier for them to run their existing data center investments alongside AWS. Most enterprises are already virtualized using VMware, and now with VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time, it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS, and without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operating model.”

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Alibaba also recently partnered with cloud services provider Datapipe to help global organizations entering China and Chinese organizations venturing abroad to rely on Datapipe for designing, building, and managing Alibaba Cloud environments. Therefore, undoubtedly this partnership will act as a beneficiary for both the companies.

As the Docker Hub will be on Alibaba Cloud, the users will be able to create distributed applications by leveraging the content from thousands of ‘Dockerized’ services available in the Docker Hub hosted repository. According to the company the users in China will experience faster downloads and UI response rates because Docker Hub will be hosted locally in China. This will also enable them to transfer applications more often than before.

With this agreement, Alibaba Cloud states that it will offer enterprise support options for CS Docker Engine and Docker Datacenter. Both the companies claim that with this platform, enterprises all over China will be able to innovate faster, accelerating time to value when building, shipping and running circulated applications.

Nick Stinemates, Vice President, Business Development & Technical Alliances at Docker stated, “As we deepen our roots into the Asian market, our partnership with the leading cloud provider in the region will enable us to better serve the unique needs of the global enterprises in China.”

“We are excited to bring Docker containers, the CS Docker Engine, and Docker Datacenter to the second largest economy in the world as this is a critical step to enable our vision of ‘write-once, run-anywhere’ apps that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.”

“Through our partnership, we make it easier for organizations of all sizes to containerize legacy applications, accelerate their digital transformations and build new microservices using Docker and Alibaba Cloud,” Stinemates added.

The company also claims that organizations can have a makeover as Alibaba Cloud will resell Docker Datacenter, an integrated platform for developers and IT to collaborate, bringing improved security, policy and controls to the application lifecycle without sacrificing agility or application portability. Docker recently launched a new tiered partner program to address the growing enterprise demand for Container as a Service (CaaS) offerings through its commercially-available Docker Datacenter solution. With this expansion, Docker will provide its global partners with a well-defined path for selling Docker services and solutions while enabling them to build on their expertise in Software Defined data centers, converged infrastructure and cloud technologies.

Stinemates also stated that with this partnership enterprises of all sizes will be able to containerize legacy applications, accelerate their digital transformations and build new microservices using Docker and Alibaba Cloud.

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