NComputing Releases Enhanced N-Series Thin Client For Desktop Virtualization In Partnership With Citrix

Posted on May 22, 2013 by

NComputing today announced the latest release of its thin client N-series featuring an array of enhancements that consolidates its position as a leader in the client virtualization space. The release builds upon NComputing’s relationship with Citrix to deliver a high performance, cost effective thin client solution that leverages Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp virtualization technology. NComputing claims that N-series firmware delivers competitive performance and quality at approximately one third the cost of comparable PCs and thin clients.

Key features of the latest release of the N-series thin client include the following:

•Certified integration of Imprivata’s OneSign single sign on (SSO) technology to streamline authentication amongst multiple devices in ways that are ideal for healthcare professionals that move from one room to another. The partnership with Imprivata also enables professionals to leverage RFID badges to seamlessly gain access to an ecosystem of machines without having to perform a single click.
•Additional USB options to support industry use cases such as specialized scanners, imagers, teller workstations in banking and other specialized peripheral devices.
•Integration with the Citrix receiver for Linux to optimize the user’s High Definition Experience (HDX) and utilization of multimedia audio and video streams.
•The latest version of vSpace Management Center in order to deliver management via a web-based management console including the capacity to perform and schedule critical updates to N-series firmware technology.

Raj Dhingra, CEO of NComputing, remarked on the value proposition of the latest release of the N-series as follows:

Together, NComputing and Citrix are transforming the economics of desktop virtualization. Since launching the N-series at last year’s Citrix Synergy show we’ve added more than 100 customers worldwide. The latest release is in direct response to the continued demand we’re seeing in every single market we serve, and keeps us well ahead of the competition. We will continue winning every time with our unique combination of simplicity, performance and value.

Dhingra’s remarks summarize NComputing’s strategy in the context of delivering simplified, high performing thin client solutions at a competitive price. NComputing’s customer base has expanded rapidly over the past year and now includes customers in healthcare, finance, education, manufacturing and government. Customers from all verticals leverage the benefits of the low power consumption specific to the N-series, whose System on Chip (SoC) technology consumes an average of 5 watts of power in contrast to the 150 watts of power typically consumed by a PC or laptop. The reduced power consumption specific to N-series firmware allows for less frequent recharging of thin clients in settings such as hospitals and manufacturing where the devices are typically moved from one space to another frequently, often in conditions where power outlets are not within immediate proximity.

Overall, the market outlook for thin clients remains positive with IDC projecting market growth of 6.2% in 2013 overall with higher growth rates expected for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) as noted by Oleg Sidorkin, senior research analyst at IDC:

Although commercial desktop PC shipments are shrinking, the thin client market remains buoyant. Vendors now offer attractive thin client solutions that meet the needs of different vertical markets, such as healthcare, banking, education, or retail. Increased security concerns, easier administration, lower maintenance costs, and lower power consumption are among the main reasons why companies may choose thin clients over traditional PCs.

Growth potential on the thin client market is still high in the EMEA region. We expect total thin client shipments in 2013 to grow fastest in France, Germany, and Russia – at more than 10%. This growth is driven by demand from healthcare entities, financial institutions, and public-sector customers, which are looking for a centralized desktop environment with high level of security and reliability. As the lifecycle of the current PC installed base among many companies is coming to an end, more organizations will consider thin clients as a viable alternative to desktop PCs in the coming years.

NComputing stands poised to increase market share in relation to competitors such as HP and Dell as its product line matures and traction in the enterprise space across multiple verticals deepens. According to IDC, NComputing currently has a market share of 16.1% in comparison to Dell’s (Wyse) 25.4% and HP’s 26.2% in the enterprise client device space. Given that thin clients typically do not perform well with HDX technology, NComputing’s latest N-series release could well disrupt the thin client market given its high performance with Citrix’s HDX technology and competitive cost and user experience simplicity.

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Concurrent Releases Pattern To Facilitate Predictive Analytics On Hadoop

Posted on May 21, 2013 by

Today, Concurrent Inc. announces the release of Pattern, an open source tool designed to enable developers to build machine-learning applications on Hadoop by leveraging the Predictive Model Markup Lanaguage (PMML), the standard export format for popular predictive modeling tools such as R, MicroStrategy and SAS. Data scientists can use Pattern to export applications to Hadoop clusters and thereby run them against massive data sets. Pattern simplifies the process of building predictive models that operate on Hadoop clusters and lowers the barrier to the adoption of Apache Hadoop for advanced data mining and modeling use cases.

An example of a use case for Pattern includes evaluating the efficacy of models for a “predictive marketing intelligence solution” as illustrated below by Antony Arokiasamy, Senior Software Architect at AgilOne:

Pattern facilitates AgilOne to deploy a variety of advanced machine-learning algorithms for our cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence solution. As a self-service SaaS offering, Pattern allows us to evaluate multiple models and push the clients’ best models into our high performance scoring system. The PMML interface allows our advanced clients to deploy custom models.

Here, Arokiasamy remarks on the way in which Pattern facilitates scoring of predictive models that enables the selection of one model amongst others. AgilOne uses Pattern to run multiple predictive models in parallel against large data sets and additionally illustrates the efficacy of Pattern’s operation on a Hadoop cluster deployed in a cloud-based environment.

Pattern runs on the popular Cascading framework for simplifying the deployment and management of Hadoop clusters that is used by the likes of Twitter, eBay, Etsy and Razorfish. A free, open source application, Pattern constitutes yet another pillar in Concurrent’s array of applications for streamlining the use of Apache Hadoop alongside Cascading and Lingual, the ANSI-standard interface that enables developers to leverage SQL to query Hadoop clusters without having to learn MapReduce. The release of Pattern consolidates the positioning of Concurrent as a pioneer in the Big Data management space given its thought leadership in designing applications that facilitate enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Enterprises can now use Concurrent’s Cascading framework to operate on Hadoop clusters using JAVA APIs, SQL and predictive models written in PMML compatible analytics applications.

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Sauce Labs Extends Cloud Based Mobile Testing Platform To Android

Posted on May 20, 2013 by

Sauce Labs recently announced the expansion of its cloud-based testing solutions for mobile and web applications to include Android in addition to iOS. The Sauce Labs web-based testing application allows customers to leverage a laboratory of virtual machines that empower customers to run parallel tests on multiple browser and OS combinations. By extending the capabilities of its testing environment to Android mobile apps in addition to iOS, Sauce Labs consolidates its position as one of the key players in the mobile testing space as enterprises increasingly turn to mobile apps to drive customer retention and to facilitate operational management of employees. Adam Christian, Vice President of Development at Sauce Labs, remarked on the positioning of Sauce Labs in the context of the larger market for mobile app testing as follows:

Appium on Sauce solves a big problem at a critical time. Companies are relying more and more on their mobile channels where they have just seconds to prove their worth with a positive user experience and a lot of mobile apps aren’t thoroughly tested, if they’re tested at all. Automated testing in a virtual environment represents the future, and we’re providing it for the mobile ecosystem.

Based on the open source testing framework Appium, the Sauce Labs cloud-based platform for testing enables mobile developers to focus on definition and development of mobile apps while leveraging the Sauce Labs testing environment to facilitate and streamline testing. As the mobile app market expands, the ability of Sauce Labs to support testing of Android testing is especially crucial given that the market for Android apps is one of the few mobile app verticals experiencing rapid expansion.

According to the market analyst firm Canalys, Apple’s App Store, Google Play, the Windows Phone Store, and BlackBerry World—the top four app stores—reported 13.4 downloads globally in Q1 of 2013, an 11% increase as compared to the entirety of 2012. In revenue terms, the top four app stores reported $2.2 billion in revenue from app downloads alone, or an increase of 9% over 2012. Whereas Apple’s App Store claimed 74% of revenue, Google Play claimed 51% of downloads with the Apple App Store coming in a close second.

Canalys senior analyst Tim Shepherd summarized the market landscape for the four main app stores in the mobile app market landscape as follows:

Apple’s App Store and Google Play remain the heavyweights in the app store world. In comparison, BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain distant challengers today, though they still should not be ignored. Each of these four stores represents a different market proposition for developers, and remains the primary outlet to reach users on the platforms they serve.

By supporting Apple’s App Store and Google Play, the Sauce Labs testing platform supports the overwhelming majority of market share in the mobile app space in terms of both revenue and downloads. The company’s SaaS platform for mobile and desktop application testing currently runs approximately 5 million tests per month and supports testing on over 150 browser/OS combinations. Customers should expect Sauce Labs to additionally support testing for mobile apps via BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store as and assuming both markets mature.

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CloudShare Labs Extends Application Testing And Agile Development To Cloud

Posted on May 20, 2013 by

CloudShare recently announced the release of a self-service lab that enables customers to create customized environments for development and testing in ways designed to radically accelerate the time to market for new applications and accelerate cycles for bug enhancements and new releases. The announcement means that developers can now provision IT resources and infrastructures to meet their testing and QA needs on demand. With CloudShare’s self-service lab, developers can conduct testing that allows teams to freeze bugs and take snapshots of applications and databases in addition to running multiple tests in parallel on replicated infrastructures.

CloudShare CEO Zvi Guterman commented on the value proposition of the CloudShare labs by remarking on how they facilitate access to IT resources for testing as follows:

Limited and slow access to infrastructure causes delays in release cycles and puts testing at risk of being incomplete, resulting in bugs in production. Lack of access to IT infrastructure and the limitation of existing solutions remain huge barriers to rapid innovation. With CloudShare Labs, application development and testing organizations work faster and companies will find a competitive advantage by gaining access to IT resources at the speed of development.

Guterman underscores the importance of developer access to dedicated IT resources that support development and testing. But the real innovation of CloudShare Labs consists in its ability to deliver advanced QA functionality that allows developers to more expeditiously fix bugs by way of the following functionality:

•Multi-VM disks can be leveraged to freeze bugs, fix them and reinsert the corrected the version into the original application
•The ability to replicate master environments to isolate and rectify defects caused by incorrect configuration
•Cross-functional team collaboration by way of a web browser console
•Libraries and templates of applications for subsequent testing and reference

The larger point, here, is that CloudShare expands the options for application development and testing to the cloud and delivers an environment with targeted testing functionality that is compatible with the Jenkins continuous integration server and the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Enterprises can leverage their VPN platforms to share testing results with geographically dispersed teams and stakeholders. In addition to testing, customers can use the CloudShare platform fundamentally for development purposes as well by spinning up infrastructures designed for agile development and testing by uploading their own VMs or using CloudShare’s library of templates for virtual machines.

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EMC and Juniper Enhance SDN Platforms And Support OpenStack

Posted on May 8, 2013 by

EMC and Juniper recently revealed details of updates to their Software Defined Networking (SDN) platforms and strategies.

Juniper launched a suite of products branded JunosV Contrail featuring the following components:

•The JunosV controller decouples management of the network from the hardware that undergirds the network, enabling vendors to quickly deploy network services and more effectively manage the overall network infrastructure.
•JunosV Contrail virtualizes the entire network, thereby enabling vendors to leverage a more flexible network topology in conjunction with increased network scalability.
•The platform supports both OpenStack and CloudStack.

Meanwhile, EMC revealed details of the ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform as follows:

•The EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform allows customers to manage both a software-defined networking infrastructure and data stored within that infrastructure.
•Integration with OpenStack via Swift by means of The EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform.
•Integration with VMware’s software-defined data center environment in conjunction with APIs that interoperate with OpenStack and Microsoft.
•The EMC ViPR Controller allows customers to use their current storage platforms for existing data, while enabling the provisioning of ViPR Object Data Services for new storage platforms that have the option of leveraging Amazon S3 or HDFS APIs.

Compatibility with OpenStack marks the key point of comparison between the two SDN platforms. Other key players in the SDN space include VMware due to its acquisition of Nicira, Cisco, Midokura, Nexenta Systems and Big Switch Networks. Customers should expect the SDN space to continue to deliver wave upon wave of functionality enhancements as SDN technology matures and becomes increasingly compatible both with a range of cloud platforms from myriad vendors in addition to IT automation software and DevOps platforms.

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Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller Responds To Paul Maritz’s Vision Of The Current State Of Enterprise IT

Posted on April 30, 2013 by

CEO of PaaS provider Apprenda Sinclair Schuller recently responded to Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz’s elaboration of the vision of Pivotal and Pivotal One by noting that Apprenda already provides the data-centric infrastructure and agile application development environment that Pivotal proposes to deliver in 9-18 months. Schuller’s larger point here is that the future which Maritz envisions for the enterprise has arrived insofar as customers such as JPMorgan, Chase and AmerisourceBergen are already leveraging Apprenda’s PaaS platform to develop “data-centric cloud applications.” Schuller argues that Maritz positions Pivotal One around a “future vision that is not really the future, but is the current market reality” as follows:

At Apprenda, we’ve been focused on the fact that enterprises need a PaaS that helps them tackle modern architectures, data-centric workloads, and rapid development for years. Waiting for Pivotal’s vision to turn into products means that CIOs are leaving money on the table because Apprenda is already there, and we’ve been there. The world Maritz describes, as “the future” exists today, and our customers are reaping the benefits of working with a company that has been espousing and backing that vision for years.

Pivotal joining us in this vision validates the vision we’ve had all along, but watch over the next 18 months as we move on to the next phase of enterprise IT’s monumental shift to a services model.
Yesterday, Paul Maritz unveiled more details around the Pivotal Initiative and their platform for the enterprise. It’s interesting to hear Maritz position around a future vision that is not really the future, but is the current market reality that leads customers to choose Apprenda because we fulfilled this vision before anyone in the market. Let me explain.

Our customers have bought into this vision today, and are executing with an enterprise PaaS that is driving IT efficiency and equipping CIOs to deliver on helping the business build innovative applications. Companies like JPMorgan Chaseand Diebold leverage Apprenda exactly this way. Organizations like AmerisourceBergen have written data-centric cloud applications that are used to manage the intricacies of oncology practices and patient care, and have built those applications 33 percent faster with developers that are now twice as productive. This is how innovation is powered.

Schuller’s remarks beg the question regarding the current state of enterprise IT with respect to its ability to store massive amounts of data and develop applications and iteratively respond to that data in real-time. The reality is that while some enterprises have clearly embarked down the road of building scalable IT infrastructures that support agile application development and data analytics, a significant percentage of enterprises continues to wrestle with basic IT infrastructure issues such as building scalable infrastructures to support continued growth and the challenge of consolidating siloed data into a centralized enterprise data warehouse repository, let alone running advanced data analytics and building applications that respond to the specificities of real-time data feeds. Nevertheless, the Apprenda CEO does well to point out that the current state of enterprise IT is not nearly as monolithically archaic as portrayed by Maritz in his webcast launch of Pivotal last week.

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EMC’s Pivotal One Attempts To Bring IT Infrastructures Of Facebook, Google and Amazon Web Services To Enterprise

Posted on April 29, 2013 by

This week, EMC and its subsidiary VMware revealed details of the vision behind Pivotal, its spin-off company financed in part by $105 million in capital from GE. In a webcast announcing the launch of Pivotal on Wednesday, Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, formerly CEO of VMware from 2008 to 2012, remarked that Pivotal attempts to bring to enterprises the technology platforms that have allowed internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon Web Services to efficiently operate IT infrastructures on a massive scale while concurrently demonstrating cost and performance efficiencies in application development and data analytics.

Referring specifically to Facebook, Google and Amazon Web Services, Maritz elaborated on the strengths of their IT infrastructure as follows:

If you look at the way they do IT, it is significantly different than the way enterprises do IT. Specifically, they are good at storing large amounts of data and drawing information from it in a cost-effective manner. They can develop applications very quickly. And they are good at automating routines. They used these three capabilities together to introduce new experiences and business processes that have yielded — depended on how you want to count it — a trillion dollars in market value.

According to Maritz, the internet giants are a cut above everyone else with respect to data storage, data analytics, application development and automation. Enterprises, in contrast, leverage comparatively archaic IT infrastructures marked by on premise data centers and attempts to migrate to the cloud in conjunction with meager data analytics capability and poor or non-existent IT automation and orchestration processes. As a result, the enterprise market represents an opportunity to deploy technology platforms that allow for efficient storage, data integration across disparate data sources and interactive applications with real-time responses to incoming data as Maritz notes below:

It is clear that there is a widespread need emerging for new solutions that allow customers to drive new business value by cost-effectively reasoning over large datasets, ingesting information that is rapidly arriving from multiple sources, writing applications that allow real-time reactions, and doing all of this in a cloud-independent or portable manner. The need for these solutions can be found across a wide range of industries and it is our belief that these solutions will drive the need for new platforms. Pivotal aims to be a leading provider of such a platform. We are honored to work with GE, as they seek to drive new business value in the age of the Industrial Internet.

More specifically, Pivotal will provide a platform as a service infrastructure called Pivotal One that brings the capabilities currently enjoyed by the likes of Facebook and Google to enterprises in ways that allow them to continue their transition to cloud-based IT infrastructures while concurrently enjoying all of the benefits of advanced storage, analytics and agile application development. In other words, Pivotal One marks the confluence of Big Data, Cloud, Analytics and Application Development in a bold play to commoditize the IT capabilities held by a handful of internet giants and render them available to the enterprise through a PaaS platform.

Pivotal One’s key components include the following:

Pivotal Data Fabric
A platform for data storage and analytics based on Pivotal HD, which features an enterprise-grade distribution of Apache Hadoop in addition to Pivotal HD’s HAWQ analytics platform.

Pivotal Cloud and Application Platform
An application development framework for Java for the enterprise based on Cloud Foundry and Spring.

Pivotal Expert Services
Professional services for agile application development and data analytics.

Open Source Support
Active support of open source projects such as but not limited to Spring, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ™, Redis, OpenChorus™.

Pivotal currently claims Groupon, EMI, and Salesforce.com among its customer base. The company already has 1250 employees and, given GE’s financing and interests, is poised to take a leadership role in the industrial internet space whereby objects such as automobiles, washers, dryers and other appliances deliver real-time data to a circuit of analytic dashboards that iteratively provide feedback, automation and control. Pivotal One also represents a nascent trend within the Platform as a Service industry whereby PaaS is increasingly evolving into an “everything as a service” platform that sits atop various IaaS infrastructures. For example, CumuLogic recently announced news of a platform that allows customers to build Amazon Web Services-like infrastructures marked by suites of IaaS, Big Data, PaaS and application development infrastructures on top of private clouds behind their enterprise firewall. EMC’s Pivotal One is expected to be generally available by the end of 2013.

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Serena Software Releases Advanced Deployment And Change Management Functionality For Its IT Orchestration Platform

Posted on April 22, 2013 by

Today, Serena Software announces the release of additional DevOps functionality for its acclaimed Orchestrated IT platform. New features include a portal that empowers developers to provision application development and testing environments in addition to deployment functionality that automates code release to Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure and virtualization platforms constituted using the VMware ESX/ESXi hypervisor. Serena’s Orchestrated IT solution now notably includes load balancing and advanced failover capability as well. Moreover, today’s release features an interface for centralizing the capture of costs related to change management requests in order to facilitate more accurate project cost estimates and reporting on resource utilization.

Greg Hughes, CEO of Serena Software, remarked on the Serena platform’s change and release functionality enhancements as follows:

DevOps allows IT to become truly agile. Serena’s enhanced change and release management capabilities allow Dev to exploit more self-service functions and Ops to release at the rapid cadence required of today’s enterprise cash cows, Revenue Applications.

Here, Hughes identifies revenue applications as one of the principal beneficiaries of the advanced DevOps functionality of Serena’s applications. Applications used for revenue analysis and operations represent the most popular use case amongst Serena’s customer base to date because of their sensitivities to real-time transactional data and algorithms that often need to be tweaked in conjunction with the rapidly changing day to day payment landscape. Serena’s latest change management and release functionality dramatically enhances its positioning as a major player in the contemporary DevOps space by foregrounding its orchestration platform in the context of cloud-based application development on two of the most popular cloud platforms in the industry. Today’s release also continues to empower developers to work in tandem with operations by giving them the tools to spin up on premise application development environments in much the same way that they independently provision virtual machines and platforms for cloud-based application work in collaboration with third party cloud IaaS and PaaS providers.

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