SEE ALSO: Microsoft Dominates Cloud Infrastructure Software Market: Synergy

In a letter to Microsoft employees on Monday, Nadella outlined the vision for the LinkedIn acquisition.

“Along with the new growth in our Office 365 commercial and Dynamics businesses this deal is key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes. Think about it: How people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done and ultimately find success requires a connected professional world,” he said. “It requires a vibrant network that brings together a professional’s information in LinkedIn’s public network with the information in Office 365 and Dynamics. This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you’re trying to complete.”

Of course there is a much larger strategy at play. According to a report by WindowsITPro, “this purchase is all about the data and what larger insights Microsoft can bring to the members of LinkedIn and to Microsoft’s continued embrace of big data.”

Nadella said that as Weiner remains LinkedIn CEO, he’ll report to Nadella and join its senior leadership team.

“In essence, what I’ve asked Jeff to do is manage LinkedIn with key performance metrics that accrue to our overall success,” Nadella said. “He’ll decide from there what makes sense to integrate and what does not. We know that near term there will be no changes in who reports to whom so no reporting relationships at Microsoft will change in that regard. This approach is designed to keep the LinkedIn team focused on driving results while simultaneously partnering on product integration plans with the Office 365 and Dynamics teams.”

In premarket trading on Monday, LinkedIn shares surged 49 percent to $194.63 while Microsoft fell 3.7 percent to $49.50, Bloomberg reported.

Original article appeared here: Microsoft to Acquire LinkedIn: What You Need to Know

Source: TheWHIR

Last week, Heroku announced a new feature, called Heroku Teams, which lets groups of software developers manage different projects, permissions, and people with centralized administration and billing. The new feature is available for free for up to five users.

Earlier this year, Heroku Private Spaces became generally available after being in beta since September as part of the Salesforce App Cloud launch. According to Heroku, Private Spaces is “a new Heroku runtime designed from the ground up to meet the trust and control requirements of the most demanding applications.”

Source: TheWHIR

Apple has been striving to power 100 percent of its operations, including several large-scale data centers, with renewable energy. Its data centers started consuming more energy than any other part of the company’s operations in 2013.

See also: Cleaning Up Data Center Power is Dirty Work

With the exception of colocation facilities it uses in addition to the data centers it owns, Apple has been able to claim that its data center infrastructure is powered entirely by renewable energy, using a combination of its own generation capacity and renewable energy purchases.

The application doesn’t mean Apple may eventually sell energy directly to consumers. The company is asking the commission to grant its new subsidiary market-based rate authority, which is a license to sell energy on the wholesale market at market rates, as opposed to rates established by energy regulators.

The authority is a mechanism to enable energy companies that aren’t vertically integrated in a given market – meaning they don’t own enough generation and transmission infrastructure to be essential to ensuring the region has enough power – to compete with the ones that do, while the ones that do have to sell energy at rates set by regulators because they hold too much power in the market.

There’s also no indication that Apple is looking for a way to sell excess energy its renewable-energy generation projects produce. The commission’s approval would simply give it more flexibility to sell the energy it generates to make it more economical.

Google has had a subsidiary registered as an energy company for years for this reason. If a company invests in a utility-scale photovoltaic installation or a wind farm, it usually cannot plug its data center into the generation source directly. The energy has to go to the same utility grid all other electricity users in the area are on.

Google sells the clean energy it pays for on the wholesale energy market, recouping its costs and applying renewable energy credits to the regular grid power it buys for its data centers, making it “carbon-neutral” as a result. The company has said this scheme makes using renewable energy at least as economical as simply buying grid energy if not more economical in some cases. As the cost of renewable energy goes down over time, Google expects to actually make a profit from the energy it sells.

See also: Google Makes its Biggest Renewable Energy Purchase Yet

Apple owns four data center sites in the US, which together consumed 455 million kilowatt-hours of energy in 2015, according to the company’s latest sustainability report:

• Newark, California: 137 million kWh in 2015
• Reno, Nevada: 46 million kWh in 2015
• Prineville, Oregon: 54 million kWh in 2015
• Maiden, North Carolina: 218 million kWh in 2015

The company has data center projects underway in Mesa, Arizona, Athenry, Ireland, and Viborg, Denmark.

It also uses shared colocation data centers in the US and elsewhere around the world, but says the vast majority of its online services are supported by its own facilities.

The company has built three solar arrays and a fuel-cell plant in North Carolina, a solar array in Nevada, and two micro-hydro systems in Oregon, which use the power of water flowing through local irrigation canals.

Original article appeared here: Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy it Generates

Source: TheWHIR

“We believe we have huge assets and opportunities to go through that but we like everybody else have to navigate our business, business model, customer relationships, to the other side of this tectonic shift in the industry.”

VMware Bets on NSX

One of these assets is the VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform for the software defined data center (SDDC) – a technology that he says is his number one priority.

“I compare NSX, our networking and security platform, to ESX of 2004. It is that big. It will be even more important than compute virtualization is. I see this as huge for us. We’re going after billions of dollars of potential markets,” he said.

READ MORE: New Partnership will Help Hybrid Clouds Span VMware SDDC and the IBM Cloud

One of the areas that will be less of a priority – at least for now – is containers. Gelsinger says that “containers are early in the hype cycle” and played down recent comments from HPE CEO Meg Whitman that suggested containers could make VMware irrelevant.

“We’ve announced a complete new product family, Photon, which is optimized for container environments. Sort of the thesis behind Meg’s [Whitman] comments were some of the things behind virtualization that have moved from the infrastructure to the application layer and as that moves you don’t need some of that in the infrastructure. We would agree.”

VMware Channel Partners

VMware and other vendors aren’t the only ones navigating these changes; in many ways partners are facing the biggest hurdle on the frontlines as they figure out what all of these changes mean to them.

“We talk about the disruptive cycle and what’s happening; they are absorbing that into their businesses. One of the big shifts that is happening is that business model shift from perpetual to subscription it affects the entire financials of their organization and how they look at their business,” Donna Wittmann, Executive Director, Channels, Alliances and Commercial Sales for VMware Canada said.

“They’re looking at compensation models for their teams and how do they drive the transition and get the right balance.”

“How did channel partners make money in the past? They’d deliver boxes, and then they supported the box and the integration of it and services. That was sort of the standard channel business model,” Gelsinger said. “Now it’s a cloud-delivered service. There’s no box. There are no services to install the box. All of the sudden, how do they work in that environment? It’s a very dramatic shift for a lot of those partners. “

“Some will make it through the transition and some won’t. Some will need to migrate in other different directions for their business models in the future,” he added.

Industry Predictions

As for the industry as a whole, Gelsinger said that the Dell-EMC deal is on the “front end” of a lot of industry consolidation.

“Obviously in this space there will be enormous scale, supply-chain efficiencies that will result,” he said. “Customers will be big winners in all of that.”

While Gelsinger acknowledges the important role that mega cloud providers play in enterprise cloud environments (he referenced a VMware customer, one of the top three car manufacterers in Germany that uses AWS, Microsoft Azure, and VMware) he said that there is “enormous diversity that will occur in this environment” that doesn’t often get addressed.

“I’m not trying to dismiss how big and exciting the mega-clouds are, but to say ‘there’s going to be four global cloud providers’ is dead wrong,” Gelsinger said.

Looking to the Future

The theme of navigation comes up a lot talking to Gelsinger: partners navigating through business model changes, enterprises navigating from on-premise to multi-cloud environments, and of course, VMware’s navigation through the impending Dell-EMC merger.

“When people talk about VMware in the case of these enormous, tectonic shifts that are occurring in the industry [my hope is] that we will have created enough evidence, the growth of those products and our strategy that everybody will say, oh, they’re clearly part of our strategic future,” he said.

Source: TheWHIR

SolidFire’s Mark Conley Opens Up About the NetApp Acquisition and What It Says About the Channel

NetApp’s December 2015 acquisition of SolidFire is still fresh, and the two companies are still figuring out how to best leverage each other’s assets and resources. The VAR Guy breaks the deal down.

And from HPE Discover 2016:

HPE Strengthens Its IoT Play with New Hardware and Software

According to our colleagues at Windows IT Pro, who were at HPE Discover 2016 this week, “the Edgeline EL1000 and Edgeline EL4000 are designed to integrate data capture, control, compute, and storage to deliver analytics processing for near real-time machine learning.”

HPE CEO Meg Whitman Teases “The Machine”

During the day 2 keynote for HPE Discovery 2016, Meg Whitman found a way to excite the crowd about something that will alter the computing landscape but doesn’t quite exist yet.

Source: TheWHIR

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50 percent per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30 percent, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “But on the enterprise data center side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”

In a soft quarter typical for the beginning of the year, infrastructure sales grew by 13 percent annualized in Q1, and 20 percent over the past year.

Synergy calculated total public cloud revenues at $20 billion per quarter as of September.

READ MORE: HPE Bets on Core Data Center Hardware Sales to Drive Profits

Source: TheWHIR

“There was a disruption in power to the facility,” Gee said. “It was partially affecting certain areas of the facility.”

As of Thursday evening, the root cause of the outage or the reason the facility’s backup power systems did not pick up the load had not been determined, she said.

“Everything has been restored. Our customer are back online.”

As with any major data center outage, some of Peer1’s customers took to Twitter to vent their frustration:

Just got this from @CogecoPeer1 .. omg, seriously? #peer1 #outage pic.twitter.com/c9yLKZNui8

— Heather Morris (@ladyinMT) June 9, 2016

@ladyinMT @tallensr @CogecoPeer1 Is anyone back up? This seems a little excessive. — Ben Halverson (@HalversonBen) June 9, 2016

@ladyinMT @HalversonBen @CogecoPeer1 @digideth At least someone is – we are still down hard. Trying to manage 4K+ angry subscribers on FB.

— Troy L. Allen, Sr. (@tallensr) June 9, 2016

Another common occurrence is a competitor trying to lure angry customers from the provider experiencing the outage:

@tallensr I would love to help get you and your subscribers back online. Please let me know if we can lend a helping hand.

— Brad Gilpin (@whoabrad) June 9, 2016

Original article appeared here: Cogeco Peer1 Recovers from Atlanta Data Center Outage

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Launches Azure Container Service

The discussion of container misconceptions below is a condensed version of commentary delivered by Herrmann to The VAR Guy.

Original article appeared here: Container and Microservices Myths: The Red Hat Perspective

Source: TheWHIR

“We wanted to take this thing that was complex and hard and make it obtainable and put it in the reach of those for whom making a website is mind-blowing,” said Nir Zohar, president and chief operating officer of 10-year-old Wix.

Empowered Designers

The web design service market, which companies like Wix are disrupting, was worth about $24 billion in September 2015 and is expected to grow to $29 billion by 2020, according to IBISWorld. Companies offering online website development applications for the computer-challenged could slow growth for professional designers, as an increasing number of small businesses develop and maintain their own websites, the report said.

Wix’s new artificial intelligence tool will “empower” designers rather than displace them, by allowing them to focus on more innovative or complex tasks, Chief Executive Officer Avishai Abrahami told reporters and employees at Wix’s New York offices Tuesday.

Wix ADI, the acronym standing for artificial design intelligence, is the newest technology leap by the Tel Aviv-based company, whose free tools have helped 86 million people create websites. It’s a product that could help lift Wix ahead of competitors like Squarespace, Weebly, WordPress.org and Shopify Inc. if demand for automation goes the way the company anticipates.

Removes Friction

Wix ADI not only trawls the web to find personalized information, it also mines its database of 86 million users to produce content for its automatically-generated website templates.

“This should help accelerate growth to the extent it removes friction from the transaction,” Kerry Rice, an analyst with Needham & Co. in San Francisco, said by phone. “Continuing to make it easy, make it more accessible, and obviously they’ve got a lot of insight from their 80 million plus registered users — that’s something that no one else has.”

Wix anticipates Wix ADI will supplant Booking.com as the go-to system for small hotels and family bed and breakfasts, eliminating the fee payable to the Priceline Group’s service in the same way Wix Restaurants, released in March, seeks to remove the reliance of cafes and eateries on commission-based marketplaces.

The ultimate goal is to boost the ranks of the current 2 million subscribers who pay monthly between $4 for a basic domain to $16 for e-commerce.

Wix reported a first quarter revenue jump of about 40 percent last month and increased its financial outlook for the year, prompting Oppenheimer & Co.’s senior analyst Jason Helfstein to raise his price target to $32 from $25. In his note, Helfstein named Wix as saying “the clear leader” in web presence and services for small and midsize businesses, attributing its success to the focus on software development and new products.

Wix shares rose 1.7 percent to $27.50 in New York. They have rallied 67 percent since the company went public in November 2013.

Source: TheWHIR

“We’re seeing significant growth in interest in our deep dive, peer-based training at both our conferences and our eLearning classes,” Trent added. “That’s why we are creating a professional development ecosystem that capitalizes on learning-focused content at our conferences, on our web sites and forums, and at new on-site learning events we’ll soon be rolling out across the country.”

To celebrate the debut of the new platform, by Thought Industries, Penton Technology is discounting all on-demand classes by 20% through July 15. The expanded course offerings compliment Penton Technology’s onsite conference training.

This year IT/Dev Connections, which runs Oct. 10-13 at the ARIA Resort in Las Vegas, will present new on-site classes on various cloud services and Windows 10, and introduce on-site Microsoft certifications for the first time, including some that will not be available at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in September. There’s also an extensive array of new professional development workshops being offered at our upcoming Data Center World and HostingCon conferences.

We’d love to get your feedback on the new platform. Send it to Rod.Trent@penton.com.

Source: TheWHIR