Coming only five months after its acquisition by Oracle, NetSuites SuiteWorld 2017 event was always going to be a different affair from previous years. For one thing, Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd was in attendance for the first time, joining NetSuite EVP and former president Jim McGeever. The event, running from April 24-27, also shifted locales from its usual San Jose location to Las Vegas.

But both Oracle and NetSuite took pains to underscore continuity following the merger, rather than highlight any changes. McGeever emphasized that all sales, services, customer support, and development will be maintained within the NetSuite business unit, meaning that customers should expect to see minimal changes.

Double the Data Centers

On the other hand, NetSuite and Oracle leadership talked about the benefits customers will see as a result of the sale, such as greater investment in international expansion and less pressure from public shareholders.

Hurd (pictured above) also addressed the question of whether Oracle had plans to sell off any parts of the newly acquired business. To the contrary, the company announced plans for a major global expansion that will include more data centers, field offices, development centers, international product functionality, and a broader partner network.

"Leveraging Oracle's global scale, we are able to massively accelerate NetSuite's vision of bringing a single unified suite to companies all over the world," McGeever said in a statement. "Oracle's technology infrastructure and global reach enables us to help ensure customer success no matter where they are located in the world."

Under Oracle, NetSuite plans to more than double the number of data centers it operates globally, from five to eleven. The new data centers will be located in Chicago, Frankfurt, Australia, Singapore, Japan, and China. The company said the addition of the new data centers will provide customers with greater security, redundancy, performance, and scalability.

New Products

The business unit will also be expanding its field offices from 10 countries to 23, with plans to increase headcount by 50 percent to better address rising global demand for cloud enterprise resource planning services.

One new cloud service NetSuite will be offering is a core human resources service called SuitePeople, which the company is adding to its cloud suite. SuitePeople will offer core HR capabilities, HR analytics, compliance, and security services, according to the NetSuite.

The company is also reconfiguring the way it delivers its cloud solutions. NetSuite is calling the new platform SuiteSuccess, and marketing it as a unified industry cloud solution to address the unique needs of a number of sectors, including advertising, media and publishing, financial technology, manufacturing, retail, software and Internet, and wholesale distribution businesses.

Meanwhile, NetSuite also took advantage of this weeks event to launch of several new artificial intelligence apps for the customer experience. The new services, known collectively as Adaptive Intelligence Apps, analyze large data sets, such as customer behavior, in real time.

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CLOUD COMPUTING Oracle Hits Suiteworld with Cloud Plans and NetSuite Initiatives - CIO Today

Opinion Imagine a business where the product keeps getting better and better, like storage space and video quality, but the prices keep falling steadily as the product continues to improve. Its happening in cloud computing and this race to zero has people in the industry deeply worried.

The current leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS), slashed their prices an astounding 44 times in the past six years. Amazons strategy, it seems, is more of a low cost, high volume model. This strategy seems to be working according to research company Gartner, who reported that AWS stores twice as much customer data as the next seven leading public cloud companies. AWS profits in 2016 grew over 120% and sales grew over 60%, extinguishing any assumptions that AWS was a loss leader product for Amazon as a whole.

Amazon is betting at such a low cost, enterprise businesses will treat cloud services like you treat products at Walmart. With such low prices on products, youll keep adding more to your cart. The other leading cloud providers, like Microsoft and Google, are willing to keep up and match Amazons prices, with Gartner analyst Raj Bala describing it as aggressive, even punitive.

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, has predicted that storage will be free and unlimited in the future. If the current race to lower prices continues, it looks as if Levies prediction will soon come to pass. This means, however, that cloud companies have to build in other functionality besides storage alone. From security improvements to converged storage where data storage is combined with data computing, cloud companies are looking for related and integrated services they can charge for.

In the race to differentiate, Microsoft rolled out a hybrid cloud which integrates into its subscription based Office 365 program in April 2016. Satya Nadella, Microsofts CEO, explained how this integration works. If a certain calculation needs massive resources, the transaction can be handed off to its cloud products to provide a sort of turbo charge, he said. This strategy might be very successful, since many people already use Office at work and the ease of integration might be the incentive for companies to choose Azure over AWS.

Googles Cloud Platform has strengths with its big data analytics capability, but also has some restraints as it is unable to integrate with existing data platforms, making it more difficult for late adopters to convert to the service. As Kurt Marko explains, it can be a poor choice for cloud laggards and organisations looking for a place to offload legacy virtual infrastructure and applications.

In March this year, IBM announced it was rolling out more cloud offerings in an effort to compete with AWS and to make the point that storage is not the aspect of the cloud which enterprises really need. One study predicts 85% of enterprise businesses will move to multi-cloud architectures by 2018. IBMs new products utilise Watson to help clients manage and leverage data stored between multiple clouds.

One analyst, Rodney Nelson at Morningstar Inc., questioned how effective IBMs rollout would be, noting the major cloud vendors are flooding the market with new features on a consistent basisall have moderate to major leads on IBM in that regard. IBMs most competitive idea may be moving focus away from offering cloud services and moving towards offering services that will integrate with all cloud providers.

The intensely competitive cloud computing environment is volatile, with new companies throwing their proverbial hat in the ring, such as the Chinese company Alibaba. Its also pushing out current competitors, with telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T losing market share due to lack of expensive yet impactful infrastructure investment and innovations.

There are so many facets which will affect the final outcome of the cloud computing industry. From the businesses who are quickly trying to implement and then harness the clouds potential, there are CIOs who are actually choosing the cloud provider, business people who are learning how to use big data and cloud computing for business intelligence, to companies who are fighting for the biggest piece of the pie and are investing millions to stay competitive. Its impossible to predict what the final outcome will be.

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How the cloud wars are beginning to enter a new phase - Cloud Tech

Banks looking to take their cloud plans to the next level are likely to have returned to the drawing board following the latest Amazon Web Services outage, which disrupted the online activities of major organizations from Apple to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. One estimate suggests US financial services companies alone lost $160 million in just four hours. Its been a timely reminder that any downtime is too much in an always-on digital economy, certainly for financial services.

The sobering point is that AWS was still delivering within the terms of its service-level agreement (SLA). This promises 99.99% service and data availability (otherwise known as four nines availability). This may be good enough for a lot of things, but it wont do for banking.

Over a year that 0.01% scope for unavailability equates to almost nine hours of unplanned outage and thats on top of any planned downtime for maintenance or updates. Combine the two and youre looking at more than a days worth of service loss across a 12-month period. Its hardly a recommendation for banks to move critical, live data into the cloud however compelling the business drivers.

Banks need five nines (99.999%) service and data availability the levels aimed for on their own premises. Thats a downtime tolerance of between 0.32 and three seconds per year. And public cloud services are not set up to match that. It would be uneconomical.

Moving real-time transactions into the cloud is the final frontier for traditional regulated financial institutions. And theres no question that they need, and want, to do this. Its vastly more cost-efficient, and its the only way they can hope to compete with nimble financial upstarts, whose agility owes everything to being able to crunch huge numbers at high-speed using someone elses top-of-the-range server farms.

Financial authorities such as the UKs Financial Conduct Authority have already accepted the cloud, which on the face of it gives banks the green light to be more ambitious. But not really, because the issued guidance doesnt bridge the reality gap traditional banks need to get across in other words, the inadequate service level for scenarios other than data archiving or disaster recovery.

In data archiving and backup applications, the clouds appeal hinges on its cost-efficiency, scalability and durability. But durability should not be confused with availability. Even if data is tightly safeguarded, and can be brought back online efficiently after a system crash or other crisis, this adds no value in a live-data scenario. If there is any chance that at some point access may be interrupted, the other merits of cloud dont matter in this context.

And thats why banks havent made the final leap to using cloud in a production environment because these otherwise very viable on-demand data centres cant offer them the very high availability assurances they need.

So banks are stuck. The inability to move core systems and live data into the cloud is costing them competitively in lost market opportunity.

If they could make the leap, it would pave the way foradvanced customer analytics, intelligent service automation, complex stock correlations, and predictive fraud detection: data-intensive applications that demand massive computer power at a scale that their proprietary data centres simply cant deliver.

But AWS and other mainstream cloud infrastructure providers have designed their services and service level agreements to meet the needs of the majority: where the risk of interrupting a mornings business, social feeds or even hedge fund activity, though costly, is at least partly offset by huge infrastructure savings.

Banks absolutely need to be more ambitious and creative in their use of the cloud. Their future differentiation depends on having access to the same computer power, speed and flexible resource as their more nimble, less risk-averse competitors. But they are not going to make the transition until the service levels they rely on for core systems can be delivered.

Inadequate service levels are a significant stumbling block, but lessons will be learnt each time a high-profile cloud service is compromised. In the meantime, barriers to what banks need to do can be overcome. Solving the data availability issue comes down to the way data is synchronized between sites (e.g. primary servers and secondary data centres), so that live data is always available in more than one place at the same time. It sounds impossible, but it isnt.

Achieve this (and at WANdisco we have) and the nines will take care of themselves.

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Four nines and failure rates: Will the cloud ever cut it for transactional banking? - Cloud Tech

The cost of cloud computing is, to be sure, very much of a pay you go model. You pay per use and you pay for everything. Cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google have spent billions to build out massive data centers the size of football stadiums and they arent giving that away on the cheap.

Its remarkable how many people forget this, or dont think about the cost. Surveys have found many companies leave the cloud after getting a massive bill because they failed to accurately predict usage fees.

The major providers are all offering "pay as you go" access to virtual machines running on Linux and Windows, so the basic features arent that different from one provider to the next. And their fees are comparable. Its the other intangibles that can make your decision for you.

As companies make greater use of the cloud, they face pressure to optimize the costs.

Main Cloud Costs

For the purposes of this article, we will approach this from the perspective of purchasing Infrastructure-as-a-Service level services, since that is the starting point for a complete package of services. Anything below that and you are either at SaaS, where you are using an application, or a basic service like DropBox for simple storage.

For most customers, running IaaS involves taking on-premises apps and moving them to the cloud for any of a variety of reasons, be it scale, flexibility, or to reduce costs. Because of this, the main costs for an IaaS subscription are compute and bandwidth. Compute costs will consume 60% or more of your total subscription. The next largest portion, bandwidth, can be as high as 20% depending on how much data you are moving between your on-premises systems and your cloud provider.

In both cases, there will eventually come a point where its no longer economical to operate in the cloud because the monthly costs exceed what you would pay to run it on-premises. In fact, Gartner says cost reduction should not be your motivation.

We never advise customers to move to the cloud to save costs, said Sid Nag, research vice president in the technology and service providers division of Gartner. You dont flip a switch and move to the cloud. You have to maintain old app on premises and are always running in a bimodal mode. Maybe four or five years later you start to see cost savings. In the first six months, absolutely not.

Then theres a hidden cost most firms dont realize before moving to the cloud. Often, you cant take an on-premises app and move it to AWS and expect it to run unchanged. At best, it wont operate the same. Or, your app simply doesnt take advantage of the characteristics of the cloud.

Rewriting apps is a cost people overlook, said Nag. If you really want to take advantage of true cloud characteristics, you will end up writing an app that looks nothing like the app on-prem. It does the same thing but looks completely different. That costs.

After compute and bandwidth, support can add up quickly, as can storage. Cloud providers allow customers to choose between flash and traditional disk storage, and the flash storage costs twice as much. Another cost that can spiral out of control is memory. Memory tends to be priced at a rate of 1:1, meaning if you double the amount of memory you allocate for your VMs, you will pay twice as much.

There are also a number of costs unrelated to the actual cost of using the service. They are:

• Over-provisioning: You allocate too much compute, memory and storage and pay for something you dont use..
• Under-provisioning: The opposite problem, where you dont have enough resources and either have to buy more or spend more to get the work done..
• Fire and forget: Spinning up a bunch of virtual machines and then forgetting to shut them down when you are done. If they keep running, the meter keeps ticking..
• Bad storage choices: You might get too much or too little or use the wrong kind of storage, since there are many to choose from..
• Non-cloud services: virtual hardware, like load balancers and VPNs, are often pushed on customers who think they need them and add up quickly.

• Exit fees: Say you pick a provider and decide you dont like them and decide to move to another provider. You might get hit with a big fee to retrieve your data. Check for this in the fine print before signing on with a host..
• Support costs: Tracking down support issues can be complicated and your provider is going to charge you a hefty fee for it.

As companies make greater use of the cloud, they face pressure to optimize the costs.

For the purposes of this article, we will approach this from the perspective of purchasing Infrastructure-as-a-Service level services, since that is the starting point for a complete package of services. Anything below that and you are either at SaaS, where you are using an application, or a basic service like DropBox for simple storage.

For most customers, running IaaS involves taking on-premises apps and moving them to the cloud for any of a variety of reasons, be it scale, flexibility, or to reduce costs. Because of this, the main costs for an IaaS subscription are compute and bandwidth. Compute costs will consume 60% or more of your total subscription. The next largest portion, bandwidth, can be as high as 20% depending on how much data you are moving between your on-premises systems and your cloud provider.

In both cases, there will eventually come a point where its no longer economical to operate in the cloud because the monthly costs exceed what you would pay to run it on-premises. In fact, Gartner says cost reduction should not be your motivation.

We never advise customers to move to the cloud to save costs, said Sid Nag, research vice president in the technology and service providers division of Gartner. You dont flip a switch and move to the cloud. You have to maintain old app on premises and are always running in a bimodal mode. Maybe four or five years later you start to see cost savings. In the first six months, absolutely not.

Then theres a hidden cost most firms dont realize before moving to the cloud. Often, you cant take an on-premises app and move it to AWS and expect it to run unchanged. At best, it wont operate the same. Or, your app simply doesnt take advantage of the characteristics of the cloud.

Rewriting apps is a cost people overlook, said Nag. If you really want to take advantage of true cloud characteristics, you will end up writing an app that looks nothing like the app on-prem. It does the same thing but looks completely different. That costs.

After compute and bandwidth, support can add up quickly, as can storage. Cloud providers allow customers to choose between flash and traditional disk storage, and the flash storage costs twice as much. Another cost that can spiral out of control is memory. Memory tends to be priced at a rate of 1:1, meaning if you double the amount of memory you allocate for your VMs, you will pay twice as much.

There are also a number of costs unrelated to the actual cost of using the service. They are:

In this early era of cloud computing, many costs are higher than they need to be.

There are almost two dozen enterprise cloud services providers of note, so time does not permit going into a complete comparison of everyone. What we did was compare the top four Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM along with two small players that may not necessarily on the radar of most companies but are extremely price competitive.

To start, we looked at the size of a Linux-based virtual machine in cores and memory. They range in size from small to double extra large and break down this way:

The price difference between the small players and big players, however, is astounding.

Hourly Cost

Is Internap the first cloud services provider that comes to mind? Or the second? But its clearly the leader in price. The provider 1&1, which primarily sells hosting and domains, is also extremely price competitive if your needs fit their system. Thats why it pays to shop around.

Next we look at Block Storage, a common form of cloud data storage. The prices vary widely, but also so do the services. Some providers offer much greater guarantee of performance, but it comes at a cost.

There are many other price metrics, some easier to compare than others because the providers either do or do not providing pricing information on their Web sites. Data transfer rates, for instance, can be difficult to find for all the different providers because some providers dont list them.

What these charts show is pricing can vary greatly, and the biggest providers arent necessarily the cheapest. So when researching cloud costs, it really pays to shop around and cast a wide net.

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Cloud Computing Costs Datamation - Datamation - Datamation

An academic study, published last week, tracked what happen when local authorities shift their in-house IT services to internet-based providers.

Researchers at Brunel University London focused on three councils, including Warwickshire County Council and the London Borough of Hillingdon, which were among the first to make the move.

While the move to cloud brought with it several advantages for councils, such as making it easier for staff to work from home and better information management, drawbacks were also identified.

Researchers noted that the move tended to be made too rapidly, and there was a loss of control and governance, with a lack of clarity over who was responsible when things went wrong.

One of the councils studied found itself immediately hit by hackers.

Council workers also told the researchers they felt the move had been rushed because of a need to meet a political agenda.

Uthayasankar Sivarajah, lecturer in operations and information systems management and part of the research team at Brunel, said the teams findings contained messages for both local and central government.

There are huge black holes between what the councils are trying to do and what they are achieving, Sivarajah said.

In particular, councils needed to ensure the right person is driving and leading the implementation and ensuring staff buy in.

At operational level they could all see real benefits in cost savings, he added.

But it is still early days and we dont know what the long-term impact will be. That may take 10 years to find out. It might reduce the headcount in IT departments, but I cant see it cutting out the need for them altogether.

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Councils 'must be prepared' to make switch to cloud computing - Public Finance