SEE ALSO: Special Report: The Internet of Things and You

Mobile traffic growth will be driven by streaming video, as consumers now in their teens lead a shift away from traditional televisions. Smartphone TV and video viewing by teens has increased by 85 percent in the last 4 years. The shift will see streaming video, including embedded video in social media and on web pages, grow by 55 percent to well over 30 exabytes globally each month, or close to 70 percent of all mobile data traffic, over the next five years. Web browsing by contrast will grow at a compound annual rate of 15 percent.

LTE subscriptions increased by 150 million to 1.2 billion in Q1 2016. Smarphone subscriptions also rose, and Ericsson expects them to exceed basic phone subscriptions in the third quarter of this year.

The report also calls for “global spectrum harmonization to secure early 5G deployments.”

Cisco also predicts that video will make up more than half of all mobile data traffic by 2020, and Gartner identified mobile video as a huge opportunity for communication service providers (CSPs) last year. Data center interconnection is another market likely to benefit from mobile video growth.

Ericsson partnered with AWS in February to encourage telecoms and CSPs to build links to the cloud to improve the efficiency of mobile app delivery, in anticipation of increased data demands. The company also joined with Orange Telecom in November to test different networking approaches and hardware for IoT devices.

Source: TheWHIR

Demandware is based in Burlington, Massachusetts, and traded on the NYSE, with share prices just below $48 at Tuesday’s close. Salesforce estimates it will bring in an extra $100 to $120 million in the second half of fiscal 2017, but Demandware’s value to Salesforce will largely come through providing ecommerce to its existing customer base, and in bringing Demandware’s enterprise customers onto Salesforce’s core CRM products.

“Demandware is an amazing company—the global cloud leader in the multi-billion dollar digital commerce market,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “With Demandware, Salesforce will be well positioned to deliver the future of commerce as part of our Customer Success Platform and create yet another billion dollar cloud.”

SEE ALSO: Magento, WooCommerce Lead Ecommerce Platform Market Share: Report

Demandware’s customers include globally recognized brands like L’Oreal and Marks & Spencer, and the company enables them to deliver personalized experiences with software for web, mobile, social, and in-store shopping.

“Demandware and Salesforce share the same passionate focus on customer success,” said Demandware CEO Tom Ebling. “Becoming part of Salesforce will accelerate our vision to empower the world’s leading brands with the most innovative digital commerce solutions that enable them to connect 1:1 with customers across any channel.”

It appears from comments in a blog post by Ebling that Demandware employees will all join Salesforce.

A report released in March by aheadWorks shows the Demandware platform is used by 1.2 percent of the Alexa top 1 million sites. It trails far behind Magento and WooCommerce in that regard, but is still tied for 11th among all ecommerce providers, and adding even a small percentage of Salesforce’ customers would easily push it into the top ten.

Source: TheWHIR

“The FCC’s proposal is potentially damaging to the entire online advertising ecosystem,” said Dan Jaffe, Group Executive Vice President of Government Relations for ANA. “This attempted regulatory overreach by the FCC is not necessary. Existing privacy self-regulatory programs such as those carried out by the Digital Advertising Alliance are working well and already provide consumer transparency, notice and choice for interest-based advertising.”

The Digital Advertising Alliance provides a voluntary self-regulation program for companies using online behavioral advertising. The program includes group principles, implementation resources, and a registry through which consumers can opt out of data collection.

Jaffe calls digital advertising and interest-based advertising a “growth powerhouse that supports much of the freely available content online,” calls for the FCC to produce evidence that it harms consumers. He also says there is no distinction made in the proposal between sensitive and non-sensitive information. He also says that the First Amendment protects ISPs and marketers commercial speech rights against targeted restrictions like those proposed by the FCC, that the commission failed to consider an opt-out strategy, and suggested that the courts would side with the ANA if the proposal was challenged legally.

“The industry has designed strong privacy self-regulatory programs, buttressed with enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, are an effective framework that provides consumers with the ability to control how information about them is collected and used,” Jaffe said.

Reply comments on the proposal are due June 27.

Source: TheWHIR

CIRA surveyed 1,200 Canadian Internet users and 300 leaders at IT firms in the country to produce the report From Broadband Access to Smart Economies, which will inform discussions at the upcoming Canadian Internet Forum, June 1 in Ottawa, Canada’s capital. The forum will likely include some calls for increased government involvement in infrastructure, as only three percent of those who feel Canada is competing well in the global technology market cite government infrastructure investment as a factor.

Nearly half of IT leaders surveyed said “Canadian technology companies aren’t equipped to compete globally,” and three-quarters said their major technology challenges require “made-in-Canada” solutions. The report refers to a Conference Board of Canada report which ranked the country 9th of 16 OECD countries for innovation, and indicated it is falling behind in ICT investment and connectivity.

Connectivity is not just a business issue, but is seen as crucial by Internet users for learning new skills (75 percent) and supporting childhood education (68 percent). Six in ten Canadian Internet users say that students should learn “basic programming/coding” skills, and IT leaders agree, with 88 percent saying coding should be a part of the core secondary school curriculum.

The global shortage of cloud skills led to the launch of AWS Educate a year ago, and a report from Incapsula in September suggested DDoS mitigation skills are also lacking around the world.

The average download speed for Canadians is 18.64 Mbps, as measured by CIRA’s Internet Performance Test, and a major divide between rural and urban users means many Canadian’s have much slower Internet speeds.

Source: TheWHIR

Service providers and others in the cloud and hosting ecosystem can still reserve a booth by downloading a prospectus (PDF), filling out the form, and sending it back to Penton by email.

Source: TheWHIR

“We designed SafetyNet for the millions of businesses that understand the value of backing up data offsite but either want an extra layer of infrastructure protection or do not yet have the resources for a more robust disaster recovery tool,” said Jordan Jacobs, vice president of products at SingleHop. “As a partner to our customers, we never want to see downtime threaten their businesses’ survival. SafetyNet can not only help to mitigate those worst-case scenarios, it initiates conversations around next steps for bulletproofing business continuity plans across the board.”

SingleHop cites a Ponemon Institute statistic pegging the average cost per minute of downtime at $7,900 in 2013, and rising quickly. The company also points out the potential for natural or data center disaster to render backups unavailable.

READ MORE: Cloud and Disaster Recovery: Workload Management and Documentation

When a SingleHop Cloud Backup customer contacts SingleHop to initiate the SafetyNet restore, SingleHop provisions a virtual private cloud with 128 GB RAM and 32 cores, then restores data and operations for critical VMs, and allows the customer to configure networking and firewall rules using vCloud Director. As an emergency-only environment, the SafetyNet VPC cannot be pre-provisioned or pre-configured.

Source: TheWHIR

“It’s an experiment and we might take the learning from here and push it over to Shopify, and that’s kind of how we’re looking at it,” Shopify VP of Growth Bruno Roldan told BetaKit. “We want to expand into these markets really fast, learn, sit back and say ‘Hey should we expand on this platform, or should we further some of these learnings into the Shopify platform.”

“We’ve found in a lot of markets credit card penetrations aren’t what they are over here; the circumstances around ecommerce are very different. We are looking at this model where it’s not just about ecommerce, it’s about getting people set up online,” he said.

The GoSpaces blog offers up an infographic about the strength of international business environments for entrepreneurs.

Shopify became publicly traded on the NYSE last year, in the midst of a shifting ecommerce market that includes an online store platform launched by GoDaddy in 2014, but will soon not include Amazon ecommerce hosting.

UPDATE: This article mistakenly referred to the Shopify service as Spaces, not GoSpaces. Shopify is listed on the NYSE, not the NASDAQ. The WHIR apologizes for these errors.

Source: TheWHIR

Flare is mobile-only, at least for the time being. It is now available on iOS, and launches for Android devices next month.

EIG launched a mobile app providing social networking and business advice for SMBs in 2015 called Business on Tapp, which is up to 50,000 downloads.

GoDaddy’s broadening of SMB services continues, as it began extending its Professional Web Services internationally with a Canadian launch last week.

Source: TheWHIR

“Rackspace is an extremely valued and long standing member of the Dovecot open source community, working with us to constantly improve Dovecot’s IMAP server offering for the benefit of end-users across the globe,” said Timo Sirainen, chief architect and co-founder, Dovecot. “Large email providers are under constant pressure to reliably grow their storage capacity at an affordable price for both themselves and their end-users. By partnering with Dovecot, Rackspace, famous for its fanatical customer support, has tackled this challenge head on.”

Dovecot was merged into Open-Xchange in March 2015, and Rackspace has long been an active member of Dovecot’s open-source community. In addition to Dovecot’s email backend and fully stateless design, Rackspace will gain Dovecot Pro’s Object Storage Plugin, with its scalable storage from Scality. Dovecot also reduces the storage capacity needed for full text indexes by 50 percent over other open source full text indexes, the companies said.

This year’s Open Email Survey showed Dovecot has cornered over two-thirds (68.5 percent) of the IMAP server market.

Open-Xchange also expanded its infrastructure services by merging with PowerDNS on the heels of the Dovecot merger last year.

Rackspace has also struck several deals this year to boost its OpenStack cloud, including most recently with cloud optimization startup AppFormix.

Source: TheWHIR

“Despite efforts to improve, FedRAMP remains cracked at the foundation,” said MeriTalk founder Steve O’Keeffe. “We need a FedRAMP fix – the PMO must improve guidance, simplify the process, and increase transparency.”

The Authority to Operate (ATO) system, in which an agency completes a security assessment of a system, and authorizes its use, is supposed to allow services to be authorized once and used often. However, MeriTalk found 41 percent of Feds have not used another agency’s ATO, and 35 percent of those with an ATO have not allowed others to use it.

As a result, 17 percent said FedRAMP compliance is not a factor in their cloud decisions, and 59 percent would consider a non-FedRAMP cloud.

READ MORE: CenturyLink Launches New FedRAMP-Compliant IaaS Cloud for Government Agencies

Top suggestions for improvement are accelerating the Cloud Service Provider certification process to increase the number of secure cloud options (49 percent), and creating an ATO clearing house which forces sharing 47 percent. Additionally, 37 percent at civilian agencies, and 27 percent overall suggested a leadership change at the Program Management Office of the GSA.

The report recommends improved guidance and expanded training to reduce confusion, adopting the ATO clearinghouse idea to promote sharing and reduce duplication of efforts, and increased transparency.

Industry advocacy group FedRAMP Fast Forward called for improvement to the program in January.

Source: TheWHIR