So with the deadline looming, cloud services providers may consider applying to sell services through Digital Marketplace. But at least one G-Cloud provider is cautioning would-be participants about some of the frustrations of providing cloud services to government agencies through the G-Cloud framework.

Memset co-founder and managing director Kate Craig-Wood wrote a blog post recently sharing her experience with the program, and the WHIR caught up with her over email to learn more about her thoughts on G-Cloud.

Kate Craig-Wood, co-founder and managing director, Memset

The WHIR: You’ve been involved with G-Cloud since 2009, and been a vocal supporter of the initiative. What was the last straw so to speak that led to you to write this blog post suggesting that the “dream is dying”?

Kate Craig-Wood: The deadline for GCloud 8 is looming and preparing the entries and also forecasting pricing for the next 8-9 months together with speccing up products that we think the government might like to buy (due to the way the reiteration process works) involves a lot of resource. This prompted me to review where we are at in terms of the amount of ROI, and as I said in the blog post, I had been pondering for some time why we weren’t doing so well in government.

WHIR: How realistic is it that the UK, or other governments for that matter, will ever truly abide by a cloud-first mandate?

Craig-Wood: If they were enforced and monitored then government departments would need to truly abide by the mandates.

Look at the open standards mandate, first published back in 2012. It underlined the government’s commitment to the wider use of open standards across government, yet here we are four years later and most G-Cloud sales have gone through just 30 suppliers, and the majority of infrastructure spend has been on proprietary systems, despite the ‘open standard’ mandate.

AWS is already overwhelmingly dominant in private sector IaaS and within just two years being on GCloud they have secured over £800K in revenue. If we want to avoid a situation where government is having to do all this (G-Cloud) again in 10 years time to break away from a new oligopoly (potentially AWS), suppliers and the public sector, actually need to get together as a community. We need to start truly collaborating around open standards and open source technology.

Its also worth noting while OpenStack’s adoption and maturity grows by the day, it will become increasingly hard for government to justify defying the mandate.

WHIR: What impact does the slow growth of G-Cloud have on service providers like Memset? In the blog you mention that the ROI has been disappointing to say the least.

Craig-Wood: We have made massive investments in pursuit of government business via the G-Cloud Framework:

• £2m on a high-security data center, originally specced out to IL4 in preparation for “data aggregation” – a subsequently abandoned requirement.
• £300k + £200k/year enhancing and upgrading our security and compliance stance for IL3, again a requirement subsequently relaxed.
• £250k + £120k/year on a PSN-Protected connection, which has only just started working and nobody seems to actually use.

These investments, while affordable, have stolen investment from other areas of our business. Our growth over the last few years has slowed as a result. Our faith in the G-Cloud dream has caused us to innovate less and create fewer jobs.

WHIR: Recent research has suggested that cost isn’t as much a factor when choosing a cloud provider as it once was. Do you think the same is true when we talk about the public sector?

Craig-Wood: To an extent, yes. Consider AWS. They are actually very expensive compared to their competition, especially when you factor in having to pay for storage, bandwidth and even disk IOps with some solutions. That has not stopped them securing a dominant position.

For most government buyers the potential saving offered by an IaaS provider is likely huge whichever they choose, because of being so over-charged for IT in the past, so price is probably a smaller factor. However, the G-Cloud buyer’s guide clearly states that price should be a major factor in the decision making. Just because the difference between choosing a “you won’t get fired for buying” supplier like AWS or a SME is an 80 percent saving or an 85 percent saving doesn’t mean you should squander the extra 5 percent of taxpayer’s money.

WHIR: You mention Memset’s sales approach as a possible factor that may have contributed to some of the issues. Can you elaborate on that?

Craig-Wood: We come from a web hosting background, addressing a mass-market. Everything from our highly-automated systems to our pricing to our sales approach has been driven by that pedigree. We spend money on marketing (raising awareness) and our sales team mostly just do education, lead conversion and account management. We don’t do “little black book” type selling.

Although we were aware that government selling used to be all about who you knew our expectation was that G-Cloud would change it to make it more appropriate for mass-market suppliers. That was the stated desire by the Cabinet Office; that they wanted buyers to be able to procure IT services at the sorts of prices available in the private sector.

Instead we have found that we are at a huge disadvantage in G-Cloud because we don’t have a “proactive”/network-based sales approach. We don’t have a small army of Rolex-toting salesmen to schmooze government buyers, and nor can we afford one. We price on a strict cost-plus model which does not allow for such overheads, which is exactly what we were told we should keep doing – ie. that government didn’t want to be funding the aforementioned Rolexes anymore.

WHIR: It seems that part of the issue is that the buyers on the government-side may not have the proper training or education and may be relying on the old-way of IT procurement into the new way (you suggest some buyers already know who they’re going to buy from before they even get to the App Store). Do you have some suggestions for improving this model?

Craig-Wood: In the buyer’s guide there was a requirement to give feedback to suppliers that were shortlisted but didn’t win business. [GDS] never actually did that, but it’s really important for us as a supplier to find out why we’ve lost out.

There is also a lack of transparency about G-Cloud call off contracts – suppliers do not know when opportunities arise, or when contracts have been let (figures published are for suppliers and customers, not individual contracts).

By contrast, information about individual OJEU contracts is published on the Contracts Finder website – G-Cloud call-off contracts should also be published on Contracts Finder.

Read Craig-Wood’s blog post.

Source: TheWHIR

The integration with Apple News is available to all customers, and Squarespace said customers can create their own branded Apple News channel that is discoverable in-app.

As hosting becomes an increasingly competitive landscape, features like this integration which help customers’ websites get found can be a selling point for an individual or small or medium-sized business user.

Squarespace said this is the first of more Apple News integrations to come. Initially, users can publish images and galleries, videos, audio, text, Twitter and Instagram embedded content and a link back to their Squarespace site.

In April, Squarespace launched Squarespace Domains as a way for it to offer 200 top-level domains to users, competing with other SMB-focused hosting providers.

Source: TheWHIR

System Containers vs. App Containers

Lovell said that Virtuozzo system containers “allows you to have a fully configurable operating system and run your applications” as opposed to app containers which provide a way to run a single application.

“We have a lot of work to do in kind of educating the market that there is a difference between the two,” he said. “Obviously all these businesses are looking at the app container wave that’s happening at the moment. There’s still a big need for system containers that could offer a lot more flexibility than Docker.”

RELATED: Do Containers Render Virtualization Obsolete For Web Hosting?

“What we have as a challenge is to reinsert ourselves into the conversation again around containers and show that there are multiple ways of running an application,” he said.

Revamped Partner Program

In addition to the education and marketing component, Lovell said part of his role as Virtuozzo CEO is to reengage partners with a completely refreshed partner program.

Traditionally, Lovell said Virtuozzo focused on partnering based on pricing and volume. “What we’re doing now is a much more practical approach to work with partners much closer,” he said, helping partners with marketing campaigns and go-to market strategies “rather than just shipping them software and expecting them to make it work as well as we think it can.”

While becoming more engaged with existing partners is part of the strategy, Lovell said that Virtuozzo is also looking for new partners.

“The hosting market is so large. From your kind of shared smaller hosting companies, managed hosting, enterprise hosting. There are plenty of different companies which can use this technology to attract different customers. It’s about us looking at different deployment models,” he said.

As an independent business, Virtuozzo now has its own R&D, support, sales and marketing engines, Lovell said. With this independence, Virtuozzo will be able to be a lot more agile and act on partner feedback a lot more quickly.

“Within the Parallels group originally people where designated to certain products. The split of resources was somewhat easier than it sounds. Obviously we had to rebuild the support team from scratch. We had to hire in development as well because there was obviously shared development in some areas.”

“So we’re bringing some fresh blood into the corporation as well and a fresh look at things. Because the problem with any business if it’s been in existence for some time, it tends to get a little stale.”

“My role on one hand is to lead the business, enable it to be independent,” Lovell said. “The second is to give it the energy to bring in a team to change the way Virtuozzo perceives, to make it relevant now and hopefully to make it successful.”

Refreshed Roadmap

At the end of June, Virtuozzo will be launching Virtuozzo 7. Following that launch, Virtuozzo will be releasing a DevOps orchestration tool which will give customers lifecycle management of their development environment, Lovell said. Towards the end of the summer Virtuozzo will release a standalone version of its software-defined storage.

“So even if you’re not using any of the Virtuozzo products themselves, you can still use the storage product,” he said.

Lovell said Virtuozzo is focused on tailoring the products to the “use cases of today and what service providers are looking at.”

“It’s really about action rather than talk. We’ve separated the business; we’ve done that. We’ve brought in a team; we’ve done that. We’re building a new partner program. We’re doing these things piece by piece,” he said. “We want to win back the trust and now inject some energy into not only putting ourselves in a position here [where we’re] attracting customers to service providers but we’re also helping those service providers build and grow.”

Source: TheWHIR

Google said that the TPP requirement of the 12 participating countries that allows cross-border transfers of information and prohibits them from requiring local storage of data will make it more difficult for TPP countries to block internet sites.

Critics call the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and say the agreement could force sites to remove content that allegedly infringes on copyright without a court order, punish internet users who share copyrighted material, and put restrictive limits on “Fair Use”.

“So, the ‘don’t be evil’ era at Google is officially over? I am extremely disappointed that Google would take this stance,” said an anonymous user in the top comment on Google’s blog post outlining its stance, referencing a slogan that Google used to include in its Code of Conduct.

Here are other organizations and tech companies that support the TPP:

• Internet Association
• Information Technology Industry Council
• Business Software Alliance
• Semiconductor Industry Association
• Silicon Valley Leadership Group
• TechNet
• Tech CEO Council
• Telecommunications Industry Association
• Software & Information Industry Association

And hundreds of technology companies that oppose it, including GlowHost, Golden Frog and Minerva Hosting.

It will be interesting to see if Google responds to critics and backtracks its decision. For now it seems to be holding steady.

Source: TheWHIR

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

“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

If you’ll be in Chicago or surrounding areas on June 23, 2016, be sure to RSVP. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Source: TheWHIR

The investment closely follows the launch of Microsoft Ventures, a new team that is focused on investing in early stage companies developing products around cloud computing.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Azure Offers Support Upgrades for Select Enterprise Cloud Users

Based in San Francisco, Helpshift was launched in 2012. Its customers include Zynga, Virgin Media, Microsoft, WordPress, and other brands, startups and developers. Helpshift currently serves more than 300 million mobile customers monthly.

“Our continued growth is a direct reflection of a capital-intensive support industry that’s ready for change. Consumers are tired of waiting for support agents to get back to them, and companies are tired of staffing expensive support teams to answer common, or even predictable, problems in the first place. People want immediate help, wherever they are, especially when using mobile applications,” Abinash Tripathy, CEO and co-founder of Helpshift said in a statement. “This is the year we champion a new model of support, one that’s better for both consumers, as well as the companies serving them.”

Tripathy said that Helpshift’s financing “will help fuel its continued expansion across teams in R&D, sales and marketing.”

“Helpshift has been a great partner for Microsoft and our investment today represents our confidence in their messaging-based approach to customer service, as we hold a shared value of providing the seamless experience customers want,” said Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president, Microsoft Ventures.

Original article appeared here: Mobile Customer Support Platform Helpshift Raises $23M from Microsoft Ventures, Others

Source: TheWHIR