Google has rolled out a number of updates to its Cloud Print product, most notably bringing the service to Windows machines.

Previously only available on Google’s laptop operating system Chrome, Cloud Print allows users to print from any device to any cloud printer to which they have access. The service’s Windows offering is twofold, with tools for consumers and IT managers. The consumer software installs a virtual printer on a user’s machine, which then allows them to print from any Google Cloud printer.

The second is Google Cloud Print Service, which enables system administrators to connect existing printers to Cloud Print. Running in the background on machines using Windows XP, Vista or 7, the software is still in beta as Google continues to develop the service.

Google has also brought the offering to Android, with an app in the Google Play Store giving mobile devices access to Cloud printers.

In addition users with a unique URL can now share printers, and administrators using this function can set how many pages a particular user is allowed to print.

Cloud Print was first introduced in 2011 with a simple browser plug-in for Chrome, but it now works with cloud-ready printers, which connect directly to the internet without needing a PC to be connected and switched on. 

Elsewhere, Google has seen its staple advertising business take a slight hit, as the amount it receives from advertisers for its services per click has dropped by six percent. Google’s share prices fell as a result despite the search giant making a profit of $3.23bn.

IBM has unveiled a wide-ranging update to its System z mainframe line, including a new zEnterprise business class BC12 system designed to appeal to firms of all sizes, a beefed-up Enterprise Linux Server, and integration with OpenStack clouds.

Announced today, the updates to System z represent a move by IBM to keep its mainframe platform relevant in the modern world, with performance enhancements and new capabilities targeting specific customer segments such as government, banking and healthcare.

In addition to the zEnterprise BC12 (zBC12), which is intended to bring capabilities found in the high-end zEnterprise EC12 available to a broader market, IBM is releasing new versions of the z/OS operating system and z/VM virtualisation platforms across System z, along with numerous other enhancements.

In fact, IBM tries to discourage use of the word mainframe, System z director Kelly Ryan told V3, because of the image it conjures up of the massive room-filling systems of the past. In contrast, the zEnterprise BC12 unveiled today fits in a single cabinet, but is powerful enough to replace a whole rack full of standard servers, with much greater availability and reliability.

The zBC12 is effectively the follow-on from the zEnterprise 114, which launched in 2011, Ryan said. It enables customers to start small and scale up as required, with an upgrade path all the way up to zEC12. Pricing for the zBC12 starts at about £40,000.

This means that many customers will use the zBC12 as their entry point to using System z, while others are likely to use it as a regional server or as a failover system for the most critical workloads running on a larger zEnterprise box.

“It’s a bigger business class with up to 13 total cores compared with 10 before, so you can run a lot more Linux workloads or z/OS workloads, but it’s a single frame that’s completely air cooled,” she said.

Compared with the z114, the new box boasts a 36 percent performance improvement per core thanks to faster 4.2GHz processor chips, with memory capacity doubled to a maximum 512GB.

With the new z/OS 2.1 release, IBM has added scale and data-serving enhancements, plus an improved z/OS Management Facility designed to make it easier for new clients to adopt the platform.

Meanwhile, the z/VM 6.3 release adds a significant new capability in the form of integration with the OpenStack cloud computing framework. This will allow customers with OpenStack-based infrastructure to provision resources on a System z through the cloud orchestration and management layer for the first time, according to IBM.

IBM is publishing the APIs to enable this, Ryan said, allowing a zBC12 or zEC12 to integrate into an overall cloud architecture.

“Whatever cloud computing layer the client is running, whatever tools are pushing down on OpenStack, they can now push down on to z/VM and do the provisioning through it. You can envision a picture where you have your System z pieces, your PowerVM pieces, some VMware pieces, anything that ties up to OpenStack, available in a consistent manner,” she explained.

The z/VM 6.3 update also adds enhancements for performance and scale, increasing real memory support up to 1TB, for example.

IBM’s updated Enterprise Linux Server (ELS) enables customers to run up to 40 virtual servers per core, equating to a maximum 520 in a single footprint on the zBC12 or thousands on the zEC12. This enables customers to consolidate hundreds of workloads onto a single system.

A dedicated analytics solution based on ELS is also new, providing a dedicated Linux environment for analytics that is competitively priced, according to IBM.

IBM is also previewing new versions of its Information Management System (IMS) and DB2 applications, with IMS 13 set to ship to customers participating in the Quality Partnership Programme (QPP), while DB2 has already shipped to a select group of clients in a closed Early Support Programme (ESP).

New zEnteprise solutions for specific industries comprise the IBM Signature Solution, aimed at fraud detection for government agencies; IBM Smarter Analytics for Banking; and an updated IBM Cúram Solution for care management in healthcare.

While many have predicted the decline of the mainframe, System z is actually one of IBM’s growth areas, showing a revenue increase of 10 percent in IBM’s most recent financial figures.

“We’ve really seen a turning where clients are now coming in and asking us what new workload can be run on System z. Clients are starting to understand and see the benefits of the economies of scale in running an integrated platform,” said Ryan.

SAP co-chief executive Jim Hagemann Snabe has announced his intention to step down from the role, leaving partner Bill McDermott to lead the company forward.

Since 2010 the firm has been led by Hagemann Snabe and McDermott, but Hagemann Snabe said he wanted to spend more time with his family, and so has taken a less hands-on role on the company’s board.

“After more than 20 years with SAP, I have decided that it is time for me to begin the next phase of my career, closer to my family,” said Hagemann Snabe.

McDermott said he was pleased to retain the advice of his partner, but ready to take on the challenge of leading the company forward on his own.

“As co-chief executives, we have a proven track record of making bold decisions that set SAP and our customers up for value and growth,” said McDermott.

“The proposed setup, with Jim joining the Supervisory Board, builds on the strength of our partnership and personal friendship, and will make SAP an even stronger company as we accelerate the transformation of the industry.”

SAP’s setup of having two chief executives is a rare example in the business world, made even rarer by the fact it proved such a successful partnership, given the failings at BlackBerry during their co-chief executive era.

Their work at the company has seen a huge push towards cloud computing and business intelligence tools, such as the Hana platform, although rivals have claimed the firm was slow to embrace the cloud and is losing customers as a result.

SAP’s customers said they would be sad to see Hagemann Snabe go, but were glad he would remain involved in the company, as Philip Adams, chairman of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group, explained.

“Although it’s a shame to see Jim will be leaving the role of co-CEO, we are pleased he’ll be moving onto the Supervisory Board as he’s been a great customer advocate and has had huge passion for making sure SAP delivers the best possible products to us,” said Adam.

“McDermott and Hagemann Snabe have done a good job and initiated an era of better communication with customers.”

The OpenStack cloud computing framework is marking its third anniversary with plans to become the data centre operating system of the future, as it celebrates the huge progress already made so far.

It is just three years since hosting firm Rackspace and Nasa launched the joint open-source cloud project which went on to become OpenStack. Since then, the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference has grown from just 75 attendees at the first event, to over 3,000 earlier this year.

In the same period, the OpenStack code has seen at least seven releases, and picked up major IT industry players such as Cisco, Red Hat, IBM and HP as backers. Developers from over 200 different companies across more than 120 countries contributed code to the last release, making OpenStack a truly global project.

Rackspace vice president of technology Nigel Beighton told V3 that OpenStack’s success can be attributed to their decision to completely open up the platform to anyone wishing to participate, as well as a keen focus on meeting the requirements of end users.

“When we first started OpenStack, there were 75 of us in the room at the first summit, and it was a bit of a geek fest. What’s been a subtle but important change is that the last summit was primarily a user conference, and what we do a lot more now is explain just how to use the technology,” he said.

However, another factor in its favour is that there are not many other options available for organisations or service providers wanting to implement infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Beighton admits.

One of OpenStack’s big early challenges was credibility, as cloud is a complex issue and a major infrastructure investment for organisations to make. Getting the backing of firms like IBM was key, according to Beighton.

“One of the best things the OpenStack community did was to really get on board many of the big long-term traditional IT providers like IBM, HP, Cisco and Juniper. We managed to do this by setting up OpenStack properly: we handed over all the intellectual property relating to it, we set up a proper board and made it a full open-source project and retained nothing,” he said.

This is in contrast to some other open source projects where the intellectual property is retained by one company who then use it to develop a private paid-for version, Beighton added.

Indeed, fears that Rackspace would have too much influence over OpenStack led to the creation of the OpenStack Foundation, which took over the management of the platform last year.

Going forward, the challenges for the OpenStack community are to build and maintain interoperability across every cloud that uses the platform, as the code continues to develop.

“The user community cares a great deal about open standards. People don’t want to be locked in. If they can’t move their applications between Rackspace, HP, IBM or Piston, then it suddenly weakens the whole proposition for all of us,” Beighton said.

Going forward, Rackspace sees hybrid cloud as the future, and is positioning OpenStack as the “operating system of the data centre”, with a key focus on the links between the private and public cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace and OpenStack are looking to address these with three key developments, according to Beighton. The first is software-defined networking, which is being implemented in an update of the platform’s networking component, due with the next OpenStack release codenamed Havana later this year.

The second development is Rackspace’s partnership with Cern, which is expected to deliver standards for federating and connecting clouds together, while the third is a bare-metal provisioning technology called Ironic, which is set to enable OpenStack to manage workloads that may not be suitable for virtualised infrastructure.

“The data centre operating system of the future needs to integrate any of the resources in that data centre, because there are lot of technologies that don’t like virtualisation, and it’s about controlling all of them, not just the cloud part,” Beighton said.

Cloud provider Zynstra has come out of stealth mode with a platform that enables service providers to deliver a complete managed IT infrastructure for small to medium enterprises (SMEs), for a modest monthly fee comparable to the cost of a mobile phone contract.

Available now through Zynstra partners such as Easynet and voxclever, the platform offers customers one or more HP ProLiant servers preconfigured with services such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, file storage and more, all of which are managed remotely for them by the service provider.

Zynstra chief executive Nick East told V3 that the company has focused on a different approach for delivering IT to SMEs, which often lack an IT department or the expertise to build and operate their own infrastructure.

“We’ve taken a hybrid cloud approach and made it relevant and affordable for SMEs. The thinking behind it is to make sure they can get data and applications with the security, performance and control that they want. They can run it on their own premises behind the firewall and combine it with any IT services they might want to use from the public cloud as well,” he said.

Instead of simply offering a scaled-down version of big enterprise infrastructure, Zynstra has tried to adopt a standardised approach using preconfigured and tested builds of applications and services.

The platform is essentially a “mini private cloud”, according to East. It uses the Xen hypervisor to operate each application and service the customer requires inside its own separate virtual machine.

Depending on requirements, this can include a Windows server acting as Domain Controller for Active Directory services, file storage virtual appliances, Exchange email server, SharePoint instances for collaboration, and applications such as Sage accounting software. Linux and open-source software can also be supported.

“The service provider should be able to recommend whether you are better running something on premise, or whether it would be more cost effective to link to the public cloud for something like Office 365 email, and they will be able to provide that integration as well,” East said.

Meanwhile, common to all deployments are security tools including firewall and anti-malware functions, plus automatic backup of all customer data.

Zynstra said it has developed its own management tools that allow service providers to manage and update the customer infrastructure non-intrusively and without causing any interruption of service.

“All updates are pre-tested before being deployed, and the service provider can spin up a new virtual machine then switch it with the live instance once it is up and running,” East said.

Pricing for the Zynstra service will depend on the configuration, and also whether the provider packages extras around it such as an IT helpdesk service, according to East. However, it is likely to cost in the region of “tens of pounds per user per month”, he added.

Cloud collaboration firm Egnyte has updated its platform with Google Drive integration, allowing its enterprise customers to see and access shared documents stored on Google accounts alongside shared files stored on Egnyte, and enabling better collaboration.

Egnyte’s platform is styled as an “enterprise Dropbox”, but actually combines on-premise storage with cloud-hosted storage to enable sharing across remote sites or access by mobile users, all under control of policies set by the IT department.

Rajesh Ram, vice president of products at Egnyte, told V3 that the firm has considerable traction in industries such as CAD and engineering, where there is a need to store very large files locally, but share them across multiple sites by synchronising via the cloud.

However, at the same time, customers are using multiple collaboration platforms for different purposes, and Google seems to be emerging as the leader for document sharing.

“As the cloud is becoming more mainstream, businesses are using different solutions to meet different needs. When you have to work on a project and you have to create a spreadsheet or a list that you collaboratively edit with a group of colleagues, Google Docs has pretty much become the standard for that,” Ram said.

“What we’ve tried to do is bring these worlds together and integrate all of it under one roof, so the end user can have Google Docs, CAD drawings, media files, all residing side by side and they can access them anywhere,” he added.

The integration comes at the back end, using Google application programming interfaces (APIs) to link Egnyte’s cloud to Google Drive. Customers will typically link their Egnyte account with a corporate Google Docs account, after which they can access both with a single sign-on.

Egnyte unveiled the Hybrid Cloud version of its platform last year. The current update is available at no extra cost to existing customers, the firm said.

IP telephony firm 3CX is extending its portfolio with a mobile device management tool aimed at small to medium firms needing to address the growing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend of workers using their own mobile device for work purposes.

Available now, 3CX Mobile Device Manager (3CX MDM) is a cloud-hosted service that provides smaller companies with many of the standard management functions you would expect to see in an enterprise-grade platform, but for a relatively modest annual subscription starting at €150 (£130) for up to 10 devices.

These include the ability to remotely lock and wipe a missing device, enforcement of passwords, the ability to push out WiFi and email configuration settings, and even application blacklist and whitelist tools to offer some control over what apps users can run.

3CX marketing manager Jaymes Marsh told V3 that the platform has been developed in response to demand from its channel partners, who in turn said they have been getting requests from SME customers worried about the amount of company data getting on to employee smartphones and tablets.

“One of the most important things is securing devices. What happens if it gets lost or falls into the wrong hands” he said. Another key concern is ease of use, which is why 3CX opted for a cloud-hosted service that customers can access through a browser, although an on-premise version is on the roadmap for customers that want this.

3CX MDM currently supports Android and Apple iOS devices, in addition to Windows 7 and 8 systems. Windows Phone support is coming in the near future.

On the security side, 3CX allows an admin to lock a device reported missing, and if necessary reset it to factory settings and wipe its flash card. This can be triggered by SMS message for devices with a cellular connection, even if they are not connected to the internet.

Meanwhile, the admin can change user passwords by individual group or device, if required. WiFi passwords can automatically be pushed out to users, allowing the firm to change this without having to recall devices or get end users to manually update. Access can also be rescinded by deleting the password if an employee leaves.

For Android devices, 3CX MDM includes a copy of the widely used AquaMail client app, because “configuring the built-in Android email client can be problematic,” according to March. Admins can push this out to users instead, and then push out configuration settings, he added.

Some remote support features are also included, allowing a technician to remotely see device and application usage logs, remotely manage files on a device, and perform a restart if required.

Application management capability enables an admin to see applications installed on all devices, and optionally set a blacklist of banned apps or a whitelist of approved apps.

On the roadmap for the future are features including the ability to monitor data usage for each device, and trigger an alert if a user starts using data roaming abroad or “roots” their handset.

3CX MDM is available free for up to five devices, to allow for pilot deployments but also because the firm sees it being used by families to secure their own mobile devices as well, Marsh said.

Often referred to as the ‘queen of startups’, Bindi Karia has supported events and initiatives for new firms across Europe, and led Microsoft’s entrepreneurial support branch BizSpark in the UK.

After leaving her role at Microsoft, Karia joined the UK branch of Silicon Valley Bank in January, taking on the role of vice president of Accelerator solutions, a branch of the bank that focuses on startup companies. Silicon Valley Bank has financed many burgeoning San Francisco firms, such as Twitter and Pinterest, and as part of its expansion into the UK it has backed companies including Mimecast and Cambridge Broadband Networks.

Karia’s Hot Seat follows other tech high-flyers, including EMC vice president for UK and Ireland James Petter and F-Secure chief executive Christian Fredrikson, as part of V3’s weekly insight into the professional and personal preferences of some of the biggest names in the IT industry.

V3: What’s your favourite part of your current job

Karia: Working with and being inspired by innovators and entrepreneurs. Their enthusiasm and passion for their product is infectious, and I carry it into the work that I do.
 
Which mobile phone and tablet do you currently use

I’m a bit of a tech junkie given my Microsoft heritage and the number of startups I’ve worked with. It’s made me curious about all the platforms for sure. Having recently left Microsoft and joined Silicon Valley Bank, I’m actually enjoying learning and playing with all the technologies out there.  I currently use a Nokia Windows Phone 7.5, a Surface Pro, an iPad Mini, a Symbian device (Nokia 808 PureView, the 41MP camera is absolutely amazing), and I’ve just purchased an iPhone 5.
 
Which person do you most admire in the IT industry

It would have to be Bill Gates. Not only did he change the world from a technology perspective, he is now changing it from a humanitarian perspective.  
 
Which technology has had the biggest impact on your working life

Tablets and cloud surrounded by productivity technologies. It means that I can work anytime, anywhere with WiFi, get real-time access to my data, and essentially be portable anywhere in the world. This means I can spend time on the ground with my customers at their offices, or out in the community and see what is really happening. I no longer have to be bound to my desk. 
 
What’s been the highlight of your career so far

Genuinely, it’s been meeting all the startup CEOs and rulebreakers. They completely inspire me.

What was your first job

My first job in my teens was as a retail assistant in a clothing store. My first graduate role was as a business analyst at Datamonitor.
 
What’s your favourite thing about working in the IT industry

The level of innovation and the incredibly rapid pace of change. Nothing is ever the same, which means you are forced to keep on learning and changing with the times. I love being kept on my toes to keep up with the incredible pace of change. Why do you think I have so many devices 
 
What will be the next big innovation of the coming years

Ultra-smart, uber-connected devices. Hyper local, and hyper knowledgeable of all aspects of the individual, from health to shopping to general day to day. We’ve not even begun with this generation of current devices yet.  

What do you do enjoy doing when you finish work

I enjoy keeping fit, so will always end up at some class in the gym, or going for a run if I am training for a marathon. I also enjoy meeting up with my friends, and finding new interesting restaurants in this great city we call London. There’s always something new and innovative popping up, every week it seems!   

What keeps you awake at night

Worrying that I will not get everything done that I need to the next day!  
 
What was the last book you read and was it any good

I’m currently in the middle of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It’s a chunky read, so thank goodness for my Kindle app. So far, I’m really enjoying it.
 
Where’s your favourite holiday destination, or favourite place for escape

I am absolutely in love with and at home in the mountains, given that I grew up outside Calgary, Canada. Lake Louise, Canada, and Chamonix, France, are my favourite places bar none; they are my spiritual homes. For summer getaways, I love Mombasa, as my entire family is from Kenya, so I have been going there since I was a child.

E-readers or real books

Both. I download everything onto my Kindle for convenience, especially when I travel or commute. And for the more epic books, or the books I love, I buy a copy for my exceptionally crowded bookshelf at home. 

The Beatles or The Rolling Stones

Rolling Stones.

Favourite film

Amélie.

Windows or Mac OS

Windows.

On-premise or cloud

Cloud.

What’s holding women back from entering the IT profession

We need to start encouraging girls to take an interest in technology from a young age, and we need to continue to highlight current amazing female role models in technology. That’s why I rate initiatives like Microsoft’s DigiGirlz.

How can we get more school children interested in IT careers

I think initiatives like Code Club, CoderDojo or Codecademy are going a long way in terms of encouraging school children. Putting technology at the centre of the school curriculum would also make a lot of sense.

Did you always grow up wanting to work in IT

Actually, no. I fell into it as a result of the work I did, and the people I knew via work. In the beginning, I wanted to be in the Foreign Service given my international upbringing – how things change!

What websites do you have bookmarked at work

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Outlook.com, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Forbes, BBC, FT.com, SVB.com/UK.

Just one third of UK businesses are either running or considering implementing cloud computing services, with the UK continuing to lag behind France and Germany in the uptake of cloud computing, according to data released by Forrester today.

Instead UK businesses are spending proportionally more on hardware and software than most other countries in Europe and are continuing to invest in on-premise equipment, according to the study, which examined the IT spending of hundreds of businesses across Europe.

Andrew Bartels, an analyst at Forrester, told V3 that much of the UK’s businesses – notably those in the banking and financial services sector – have no reason to move into the cloud. He said this was down to the priority given to data security and high-power data centres for which cloud services cannot currently provide a cost-effective solution.

UK businesses spend a higher proportion of their IT budget on hardware and software than France and Germany, with 31 percent of IT spend going on in-house services and businesses seeing a 10 percent spending increase on software.

The utilities and telecommunications sector is leading the charge towards the cloud, however, with more than half of businesses in this sector adopting offsite services.

Elsewhere, the UK is seeing a higher adoption of mobile-based services, including both consumer and employee-facing mobile applications.

Bartels says that this is in part due to the UK’s big retailers such as Tesco pushing the market forward. “UK retailers have been leaders on a global basis in terms of adopting technologies, and this has put pressure on other retailers to do this. In France and Germany business is not as retail oriented and retailers are fairly conservative,” he said.

Sixty percent of the retail sector is now pushing for mobile-based technologies, according to Forrester’s study. The news comes as retailers such as M&S begin to see sales from mobile applications rise significantly.

The future of cloud computing is hybrid, according to Rackspace. However, the hosting firm also warned businesses to choose the right deployment model to suit their applications, and extolled the virtues of open standards in helping to build the best solution.

At a Rackspace “Unlocked” event in London, part of the firm’s Rackspace Academy programme, chief technology officer Nigel Beighton told an audience of engineers how to take best advantage of cloud computing, and hybrid cloud in particular.

“The next cloud is the hybrid cloud, it is the right fit for the enterprise,” Beighton said, echoing the industry consensus that, for the near future at least, firms are unlikely to ditch on-premise infrastructure for cloud services, but will instead use cloud to supplement and extend what they already have.

Beighton warned against rushing to the public cloud, and said that organisations need to consider which location will be the best place for applications and services to be delivered from on a case-by-case basis.

“People always talk up the pay-as-you-go aspect of public cloud services, but here’s an analogy. You can rent a car if you need one to use one, but if you rented a car every day you would find it more expensive than owning one in the long run,” he said.

Security is also “much harder” when running services on public cloud infrastructure, according to Beighton. “It isn’t necessarily less secure, it’s just more difficult to do,” he warned.

The real benefits of using cloud are that you can separate IT infrastructure from where it actually runs to give you greater flexibility, and that cloud frees developers in particular by allowing them access to extra resources when they need them, instead of going through a lengthy traditional procurement process.

“Cloud allows developers to grab more resources quickly, and this is leading to real fundamental change in the way development works, leading to firms being able to deliver apps faster. No longer is infrastructure the blocker. If you want to get new functions out there, you can change your app on the fly,” Beighton said.

Rackspace cloud architect Wayne Walls also highlighted one customer case study as a cautionary tale about choosing the right cloud approach.

HubSpot is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm offering marketing tools, but it found that as it increased its customer base, an increasing fraction of its server instances running on public cloud infrastructure were failing.

“The problem with public cloud is that while you might be saving money, you’re not getting rock-solid infrastructure like you can if you build it yourself, so you’re going to have to work around that and build resiliency into your software,” Walls said.

However, HubSpot found itself constrained by the API set offered by its cloud provider, and instead turned to OpenStack, the platform co-founded by Rackspace.

Because OpenStack has an open API and is an open source project in the hands of a developer community, Hubspot was able to request the features it needed and see them implemented, according to Walls.

Walls also warned that many firms looking to use public cloud infrastructure are often tempted purely by the potential capital expenditure savings on hardware and technical support, and do not see the pitfalls.

“Moving to cloud is not just a forklift job where you take an application and drop it into the cloud and suddenly you get all the advantages. Cloud is a new platform that you must design for,” he said.

“However, many cloud users have done exactly this. They looked at public cloud pricing and said, ‘Wow, I don’t need to pay the VMware tax anymore,’ then got bitten. Running clouds is not easy – people still want that escalation point, where you need to call someone to fix things, which is why support will always matter, even with cloud,” he added.