Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making the case for its cloud platform as a driver of business innovation, saying that as the cost of using its infrastructure falls, so does any risk associated with a new venture.

The firm also argues that AWS is now a mature and robust enough platform for enterprise workloads, citing some customers using its infrastructure to operate even mission-critical applications.

At the AWS Summit in London, chief technology officer Werner Vogels said the cloud platform has had a fundamental impact on how IT has evolved since it launched in 2006. He stressed the firm’s commitment to openness and value as reasons for the success of AWS.

“We do not lock you in to any type of technology. You can choose any operating system and any application; you can run them all on AWS. There is no contract to force you to be our customer for say, five years, and this means we need to be on our toes – if you not satisfied, you can just walk away,” he said.

As Amazon continues to expand, this drives economy of scale and cuts costs, which the firm passes on to customers to keep them happy, with some customers seeing a 40 percent reduction in their bills at start of 2012. But this also helps to ensure customer success, according to Vogels.

“If we can get the cost of computing down low enough that you don’t need to worry about it, then the type of new applications we can help create will be enormous. Our aim is make infrastructure so cheap that it will drive innovation,” he said.

Vogels claimed that economics rather than technology is driving cloud uptake, with customers realising that they can gain access to IT resources quickly without any purchase cost, and only pay for what they use.

“You increase innovation when the cost of failure approaches zero, and so you can stop wasting money on IT, and spend it on the things that really matter for your business – building better products,” he said.

A recent study found that big data and cloud software lead the enterprise software market to $342bn in revenue last year.

According to the study from research firm IDC, the enterprise software market jumped over three percent year-over-year. The firm reports that software categories that include big data and cloud programmes made up a majority of the markets revenue.

“The global software market, comprised of a multi-layered collection of technologies and solutions, is growing more slowly in this period of economic uncertainty. Yet there is strong growth in selective areas,” said senior vice president for worldwide software, services and executive advisory research at IDC Henry D. Morris.

“The management and leveraging of information for competitive advantage is driving growth in markets associated with big data and analytics. Similarly, rapid growth in cloud deployments is fueling growth in application areas associated with social business and customer experience,”

IDc says application development and deployment (AD&D) software such as data analytics and data management tools made up a major part of the growth. The firm found that AD&D software made up 24 percent of total enterprise software revenues in 2012.

Year-over-year the sector grew over four percent in 2012. Oracle was reported to be the most profitable AD&D software firm. The firm owned over 21 percent of the market.

Overall, Microsoft was the biggest supplier of enterprise software overall. Redmond had an over 17 percent market share in 2012, according to IDC. Microsoft was followed by IBM, Oracle, and SAP in the sector.

IBM and Microsoft enterprise software revenues stayed pretty consistent in 2012 with about a one percent growth rate. However, Oracle and SAP saw their market shares grow slightly larger.

Oracle saw enterprise software revenues jump over three percent in 2012. While SAP saw its revenues grow over five percent.

SAP’s growth in the market may be attributable to major cloud software push in 2012. The firm reported that its cloud software was used by over 17 million users last November.

Oracle also made a widespread push into the cloud last year. During its OpenWorld event last October, Oracle launched a slew of cloud software options to the market.

The firm has been playing catch up in the cloud marketplace for the past few years. 2012 marked one of the firms larger pushes into the sector.

Shell is undertaking a huge bring your own device (BYOD) project at its organisation, which will soon see the firm supporting around 135,000 devices picked by users rather than dictated by the IT department.

At the CA World show in Las Vegas on Monday, Ken Mann, enterprise information security architect at the oil and gas firm, outlined Shell’s shift to become a cloud-first and BYOD outfit.

Shell had already undertaken a project to centralise all its IT, and has outsourced its infrastructure to three main suppliers – AT&T, EDS – since purchased by HP -and T-Systems. Two years ago, the firm adopted a cloud-first policy, which means that any new applications have to be in the cloud unless there is a business case for them to be on-premise.

The next project for Mann’s department was BYOD – which Mann’s boss defines as buy rather than bring your own device.

The BYOD scheme is a major undertaking. Shell has 90,000 permanent employees, and an additional 60,000 on a contract basis so the company is managing 150,000 clients, from desktops to portables to tablets.

Of those users, 10,000 are already on a BYOD scheme, but Mann said Shell expects that in a few years, less than 10 percent of its users will be using company-provided IT equipment. Or taken another way, Shell will soon have 135,000 BYOD users to support.

“We’re looking at true BYOD, not just for mobile, but bring in your own laptop,” he said.

“Windows, iOS and Android are key operating systems for us, but if Windows Phone 8 becomes popular, we’ll look into using that.”

Part of the decision for the BYOD drive is around recruitment and staffing.

“In about five to 10 years, 50 percent of our staff worldwide will retire,” Mann explained.

“We’re going to have a lot of people turning over, and we want to be able to attract and retain talented and young staff. They don’t want to come into a locked corporate environment.”

To support this major BYOD drive, Mann’s job was to secure the different devices accessing the corporate network. 

“We had two-factor authentication using smartcards and one time passwords (OTP) as default. But we started to look at how we could do two-factor authentication in the cloud. We wanted a solution for single sign-on from any device, whether in the cloud or an in-house app, and we wanted to support authentication standards like SAML and OAuth and translate between these,” he explained.

“We also wanted device authentication – is it from a Shell device or a kiosk in an airport”

Mann said that four IT companies were in the running to provide Shell with its desired cloud authentication system, and each was visited to carry out an on-site proof of concept, with CA being one of the four.

“We didn’t find one company that could do everything we wanted to do. CA showed us the guts and development code, but they didn’t have a solution ready at the time,” he noted.

“Based on the four firms, we ended up selecting CA CloudMinder – it didn’t have a name at the time – as it was highly focused on cloud apps, and we’re already using SiteMinder, which focuses on in-house authentication, so there was a good bridge to link cloud and on-premise apps.”

CA CloudMinder was released in February, and is designed to offer enterprises key security capabilities including advanced authentication, identity management, and federated single sign-on as cloud services.

CA also unveiled a partnership with SAP at the Las Vegas show, to license the latter’s Afaria software for mobile device management.

Apple said that it retains user mobile data from its Siri personal assistant for up to two years.

According to a report from Wired and the ACLU, the company said that it maintains information in an anonymised capacity and uses the data for development of the platform.

The report cited Apple spokespersons in explaining that while it retains the information, the company does not log user names or mobile numbers, opting instead to associate collected data with a random numerical token.

The company said that the information is kept on file in Apple datacentres for six months and is then disassociated with the identification number. The information is then housed for another 18 months for developer reference.

The storage and retention of user data has become a contentious issue, both in the public and private sectors. Social networking sites and web application providers in particular have found themselves facing criticism for the retention of user data.

The issue came to a head in 2010 when Google was found to be collecting data from public wi-fi networks with its Street View imaging vehicles. Earlier this week the company was slapped with a fine from German authorities over the practice.

Last year, the UK government triggered debate when it unveiled a controversial new set of data retention laws. Critics argued that the laws will allow government agencies to further pry into the personal lives of citizens.

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison once called cloud computing a fad. Well, that fad is now making Oracle money.

According to an IDC study, Oracle software revenues grew over three percent on the back of big data and cloud software. According to the study, Oracle owned a 21 percent share of the application development and deployment (AD&D) software market.

Ellison unveiled Oracle’s first IaaS offering last October at OpenWorld. Now, the firm is seeing growth in the software market. Oracle’s slow march to cloud software looks to be paying off this year.

However, Oracle still has a while to go before it can truly compete in the evolving world of enterprise software. The firm still lags behind IBM and Microsoft in overall enterprise sales.

Microsoft has been the top dog in the enterprise software world for a long time. Its grasp on the market doesn’t seem to be slowing anytime soon either with a 17 percent share of the sector.

However, Oracle can still look to get into the number two spot by leaping over IBM. Big Blue didn’t see much growth in enterprise software revenues for 2012. The firm only registered a little under a one percent growth mark year-over-year.

That in comparison to Oracle growth could mean big things for the firms future. If Oracle continues its trend towards growth, and IBM continues to stay consistent, it can take the number two spot.

To do that Oracle would need to continue to bring out cloud software offerings going forward. The world of enterprise is increasingly becoming cloud-centric. IDC reported that the cloud would be a major growth sector moving towards 2015 and that has proven to be coming true.

For Oracle to capitalise on that growth it would need to continue its push towards the ether. Oracle’s executives have been hesitant to embrace the cloud on the level of some of its competitors, but its getting their.

It will be interesting to see if Oracle will attempt to bring out ground-breaking cloud software offerings in the future or if it will stand content to just play catch up with its competitors.

The firm’s Q3 earnings were less than impressive. Commentators mentioned that a probably cause of the poor earnings was the firm’s failure to offer compelling cloud services.

The products the firm released over the second half of last year were a good start. However, to truly capitalise on the cloud market it will need to do more by stop playing catch up and start being an innovator.

23 Apr 2013

CA Technologies has acquired application programming interface (API) management and security provider Layer 7 Technologies, giving CA an inroad into an area of technology boosted by the growth of mobile and cloud.

APIs are designed to let applications talk to each other, so that an e-commerce site can process an online transaction calling on a user’s bank details or a smart meter can connect to a utility system and back to an energy monitoring company. Canadian firm Layer 7, founded in 2002, offers technology that manages these API integrations, to check they are working properly and securely.

According to CA, the acquisition will let customers deploy cloud, mobile and Internet of Things initiatives, accelerate service delivery and govern API activity to enforce SLAs. CA plans to combine the Layer 7 technology with its own identity management and Lisa application delivery suite.

Layer 7 pointed out that there were more than 8,000 public APIs available at the end of 2012, meaning “there is a vast library of proprietary components and data that need to be managed and secured from unauthorised access”.

Jacob Lamm, executive vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development at CA, said the firm is “really really excited” about the Layer 7 deal, which has only just been signed so still has to officially go through. He explained that the technology is a critical part of rounding out CA’s authorisation and authentication services.

“Think of the front door as the identity management, you knock on the door, we need to tell if you are who you say you are,” he told V3.

“The back door are the applications, the APIs. Now especially with the cloud, with mobility, any application can be connected to hundreds of other services. How do I know they are who they say they are. We need to manage the connections between all those applications. API governance and security, that’s what Layer 7 adds to our security perimeter.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Layer 7 acquisition follows hot on the heels of Intel’s purchase of Mashery last week.

Mashery also offers developers a way to manage application programming interfaces (APIs). Intel said that the team will report to its Services Division, founded in 2011 in a bid to have a potential revenue stream from devices that don’t use its chips.