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Europe warms to OpenStack

David Meyer — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:08:22 +0000

OpenStack is finally taking off in Europe, it seems. As with most cloud infrastructure, uptake has been somewhat behind the curve here, but it looks like things are changing.

OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier (L) and Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (R)

According to OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (pictured at the first OpenStack DACH Day in Berlin on Friday), the last 6 months have seen adoption pick up all over the world. However, it’s a relatively new phenomenon in Europe and Asia, he added:

“There’s more tolerance for early adoption around this technology in the U.S. We’ve seen that not just in Europe, but in Asia as well. In the last few months we’ve definitely seen people picking it up in other countries, and in some cases it means they’re getting the benefit of all those early adopters.”

How about numbers? Well, that’s tricky – because OpenStack is open-source, there’s no way of nailing down precisely how many organizations and providers are using it. However, some big hitters are certainly getting publicly behind it.

Marquee adopters

CERN, the European nuclear research organization that runs the Large Hadron Collider, is one of them. Although it’s also involved with sort-of-OpenStack-rival (although less so these days) OpenNebula, CERN has been toying with OpenStack for a while and is now in the process of rolling out a 150,000-virtual machine private cloud using the platform.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom has been involved with OpenStack for over a year now and has been using it to deliver a security service (along with fellow OpenStacker ClearPath) since March this year. This summer it will move more applications onto its OpenStack-based cloud, Kurt Garloff, head of cloud services engineering at the telco, said at Friday’s event.

And then we have the grand French clouds, Cloudwatt and Numergy, both of which are based on OpenStack.

Why now?

According to OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier, the technological requirements of European users are the same as those of U.S. users, but the drivers for adoption are often different, “particularly around data sovereignty.”

“For example, in France there are a lot of companies and policies that create an incentive to have local clouds where the data resides,” he told me, pointing out that the open-source nature of the technology and its resulting widespread take-up by variously-sized outfits meant there were “hundreds of cities where you can get OpenStack.”

Florian Haas is the co-founder of Hastexo, a professional services company that isn’t aligned with any vendor, but has found itself working a lot with OpenStack (it’s a heavy contributor on the high availability front). He reckons Europe has been a slow cloud adopter due to a combination of legal and privacy concerns and a general “degree of conservatism” but, now that cloud adoption is happening, it’s happening on OpenStack:

“Of the big four [stacks] we’re not seeing any OpenNebula, although interestingly there are a few German companies here [at LinuxTag] pushing it hard. We’re not seeing any Eucalyptus. We’re seeing a bit of CloudStack and a massive amount of OpenStack.

“Europe is late to the cloud party, but that creates an interesting situation, which is that much of Europe didn’t go through the AWS uptake cycle. Strangely enough, OpenStack is filling a void, rather than displacing something else.

“A lot of the people we talk to are actually using OpenStack to essentially reorganize their data center. They might have old-style iron-and-wires data centers, or they might be running on proprietary virtual solutions. They’re now considering public and private cloud, and OpenStack is the default.”

With this pace of change — everyone keeps talking about the last 6 months — it will be interesting to see how much further things have gone by our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September, where we will of course be discussing issues such as stack choice.

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Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:55:09 +0000

Roughly half a dozen new mobile operating systems will come to market over the next 6 to 12 months. Many of these look to be more sophisticated than the older ones controlled by Apple and Google. This report will examine the most noteworthy of these new operating systems, Blackberry 10, Firefox, Tizen, and others. It will also document their competitive advantages and disadvantages and gauge what their chances of success — or even true disruption — might be.

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Mobile first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:55:19 +0000

The mobile platform wars escalated once again in the first quarter of 2012 as BlackBerry finally took the wraps off its much-anticipated new operating system. Meanwhile Android continued to build on its dominance both worldwide and in the U.S., cementing a two-horse race with Apple.

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Microsoft hopes to sell its Mediaroom IPTV platform to Ericsson

David Meyer — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:59:49 +0000

It was a rumor, but now it’s reality: Microsoft is to sell its Mediaroom IPTV business to Ericsson. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The deal should go through in the second half of the year, the companies said in a statement on Monday. According to a separate blog post by Yusuf Mehdi, strategy head at Microsoft’s interactive entertainment division, the sale will allow Microsoft to “commit 100 percent of its focus on consumer TV strategy with Xbox” – bear in mind that the next-generation Xbox is expected to be unveiled in the coming months.

Mediaroom is a telco-oriented, customizable IPTV platform that should be a good fit for Ericsson, a company that already sells networking equipment and services – including IPTV equipment and services – to telcos. There are more than 40 existing Mediaroom customers, including AT&T (who brands it as U-verse) and Deutsche Telekom (Entertain). According to the statement, Ericsson will have a market share of over 25 percent if the deal goes through.

As is customary for such sales, the deal will be subject to regulatory approval in various countries. Microsoft’s Mediaroom division employs 400 people, who are based in Mountain View, California.

According to Ericsson SVP Per Borgklint, “future video distribution will have a similar impact on consumer behavior and consumption as mobile voice has had”, and the transferring staff that coming with the platform will give Ericsson “senior competence and some of the most talented people within the field of IPTV distribution”.

Here’s an excerpt from Mehdi’s post:

“We are proud of the world-class engineering and business achievements within Mediaroom. They have a rich history of driving innovation in IPTV. As early pioneers, they built the infrastructure to stream video on limited bandwidth, and today they enable multiscreen entertainment experiences for pay TV subscribers. Mediaroom has contributed to the evolution of TV and powers 22 million set-top boxes today in 11 million subscriber households.

“With the sale of Mediaroom, Microsoft is dedicating all TV resources to Xbox in a continued mission to make it the premium entertainment service that delivers all the games and entertainment consumers want – whether on a console, phone, PC or tablet.”

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Evernote adds document search functionality to mark Deutsche Telekom partnership

David Meyer — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:39:02 +0000

Evernote has struck a strategic partnership with Deutsche Telekom, which will see Telekom customers get one-year Evernote Premium subscriptions. And, to mark the occasion, Evernote has added a new Premium feature: document search.

Evernote Premium’s existing features include higher upload limits, offline note availability, added note-sharing options and better note search. But now Premium subscribers can also search documents, spreadsheets and presentations that are attached to notes, as long as the documents in question were created in Microsoft Office, Apple iWork or OpenOffice.

At the same time, Evernote also unveiled a major new version of its Android app, bringing a refined user interface and shortcuts that sync across devices, and also the Page Camera feature that iOS users got six months ago.

The initial result of the Telekom tie-in is not in itself unique by any means – many Orange and Taiwan Mobile customers, for example, also got a year’s free Premium access last year. However, the use of the term “strategic partnership,” along with the companies’ insistence that this Premium deal is only “the first part” of that arrangement, suggest more to come.

For Evernote, such deals mean more reach and entrenchment, which comes at an opportune time given Google’s entry into the same market with Keep and the rise of other rivals such as Wunderlist.

For Deutsche Telekom, the partnership is a continuation of the telco’s strategy of bundling the premium versions of popular web brands as a way of making its own services more attractive: it does much the same with Spotify for one of its youth-oriented tariffs.

“At Deutsche Telekom, we count on partnerships to pave the way for innovations,” Telekom business development SVP Heikki Makijarvi said in a statement. “Our goal is to offer highly innovative and unique services with the easiest access possible. The cooperation with Evernote is an excellent example of two companies combining their strengths for the benefit of our customers.”

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T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger: Now all that’s left is shareholder approval

David Meyer — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:58:23 +0000

The MetroPCS-T-Mobile USA merger has cleared its final regulatory hurdle, leaving just MetroPCS shareholder approval standing in the way of completion.

That final piece of regulatory approval came from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which, according to a statement, told the two operators on Wednesday that “there are no unresolved national security concerns with respect to the transaction and that [the committee] has therefore concluded its review”.

The merger has already sailed through other regulatory pitstops, first the Justice Department then the FCC (without the commission even seeing the need to hold a vote). Some institutional MetroPCS shareholders oppose the deal, however, so it’s still not a sure thing – we will see the final outcome after a MetroPCS board meeting on April 12.

If the merger goes ahead, Deutsche Telekom will hold a 74 percent stake in the combined company. It is therefore unsurprising that incoming Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges would become chairman of the board, as MetroPCS revealed on Tuesday.

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Scoop: Deutsche Telekom dives into multi-cloud management with NetOptimize

David Meyer — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:27:13 +0000

Deutsche Telekom (DT) hasn’t announced this one yet, but the German communications giant is getting into the cloud multi-sourcing business. The website for two new services is already live: they’re called NetAnalyze and NetOptimize, and the focus seems to be on content delivery.

While public cloud services, including content delivery networks (CDNs), are usually very reliable, no one is perfect. Outages happen, and as a result some companies find themselves looking into multi-cloud strategies to ensure redundancy (and to optimize performance and cost). The issue is that cloud costs and resource allocation are complex — hence the emergence of a new breed of cloud mediation services such as Rightscale and Cedexis.

DT is preparing two complementary services in this space. The first is NetAnalyze, which draws on the billion network measurements that DT’s “community” takes every day, spanning 32,000 networks in 230 countries. Webmasters can put the NetAnalyze tag on their site and visiting customers will then automatically generate anonymized measurement for metrics like throughput and response time.

Then NetOptimize kicks in. When a customer requests the website from wherever they are located, NetOptimize will use the NetAnalyze metrics to determine which provider will deliver the content most quickly, and automatically route the content accordingly. Pricing for this load-balancing service is pay-per-use. The result, in theory, is better performance and lower risk of outages, and also better price-to-performance ratios, given the ability to hop between different providers according to needs.

DT’s website also touts the fact that such multi-sourcing approaches make it easier to avoid vendor lock-in. The company says NetAnalyze and NetOptimize make it possible to “form a unified strategy across multiple platforms (cloud, data center or CDN)”.

A glance at the NetOptimize portal (which appears to default to Japanese, at least from my end) shows that the service covers numerous clouds and CDNs. On the cloud side, we have locations for Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, InstaCompute, Internap AgileCLOUD, Joyent, PhoenixNAP, Profitbricks, Rackspace Cloud, Softlayer and Windows Azure. For CDN, there’s Akamai, Azure, BitGravity, CacheFly, CDN77, CDNetworks, CDNVideo, ChinaCache, ChinaNetCenter, CloudFlare, Cloudfront, Edgecast, Fastly, Fastweb, Highwinds, Internap AgileCAST, Internode, Level3, Limelight, NetDNA, Ngenix, OnApp, Pacnet, UPX CloudCache and Yacast.

I’ve asked DT for further details of the service, such as when they intend to officially take the wraps off it, and will add their response when I get it.

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Deutsche Telekom activates Joyn for richer communications

David Meyer — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:44:23 +0000

Deutsche Telekom has adopted Joyn with immediate effect, allowing its mobile customers in Germany to use the platform to message, share files and videos and even play basic multiplayer games while talking to each other.

Joyn (technically known as Rich Communications Services or RCS) is an industry-wide initiative designed to counter third-party applications such as WhatsApp by augmenting the traditional voice-and-text functionality offered by the carrier. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense unless your contact’s carrier also supports it – and so far, only users in Spain and South Korea can be sure that theirs does.

Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are the two biggest carriers in Germany, though, and both now support Joyn. That means quite a lot of people in the country will be able to use the service, the features of which are free. As in other deployments, initial usage will have to be through a special app – the Android version is available now, and iOS will follow soon – while upcoming handsets from manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia will have Joyn baked in.

It’s too early to tell how successful Joyn will be at this early stage. It will certainly have a tough time in the U.S., where so far only MetroPCS has set it live. In South Korea, though, operator SK Telecom said in February that it had garnered a million Joyn users in just a couple of months since launch.

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Fon scores a big one: crowdsourced Wi-Fi community signs DT for millions of hotspots

David Meyer — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 09:59:20 +0000

It may not be the investment that was rumored earlier this year, but Deutsche Telekom has struck a deal with the crowdsourced Wi-Fi outfit Fon to provide coverage across Germany. This comes a month after Fon signed with a DT subsidiary in Croatia – a country, as we pointed out at the time, that DT sometimes uses as a testbed for new services that it intends to roll out more widely.

Fon is a community of people who submit their Wi-Fi hotspots for inclusion in a global pool. By doing so they become “Foneros” who let others use their Wi-Fi connections for free, and in exchange they get to do the same around the world. Due to ISPs’ terms and conditions, which generally forbid letting strangers onto customers’ connections, this idea works best in concert with the ISPs themselves – BT in the UK was a trailblazer here, and DT is certainly one of the biggest ISPs that Fon has landed.

The DT offering is called WLAN TO GO, and through it DT’s customers who offer up their own connection, will gain access to around 8 million hotspots worldwide. As DT itself has 12 million broadband lines and around 12,000 Wi-Fi hotspots, there’s clearly scope for major expansion of Fon’s reach too – this deal doesn’t just cover Germany, but also DT’s local subsidiaries in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary.

For DT, there’s an extra motivation too: if its customers start using more hotspots, they will theoretically use less mobile data – a boon for networks feeling the strain of bandwidth hogs such as mobile video. Here’s how DT CEO Rene Obermann put it in a statement this morning:

“The partnership with FON fits perfectly with Telekom’s network expansion strategy. The astonishing increase in data traffic calls for network optimization and expansion, as well as the implementation of new high-speed networks.

“By the year 2016, we want to set up more than 2.5 million additional hotspots in Germany with the WLAN TO GO offering. With our technology mix of mobile communication, fixed lines and Wi-Fi, we can gradually introduce our customers to the benefits of internet access anywhere and anytime.”

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BSkyB buys Telefónica UK’s fixed-line business for $300M

David Meyer — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:02:38 +0000

British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB) will buy Telefónica’s UK fixed-line broadband and telephony business for up to £200 million ($303 million), the companies announced early on Friday.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory clearance, should close in April. If that goes ahead, the customers will be moved off the O2 and BE Broadband brands and become Sky customers. Sky (40 percent of which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp) would then become the UK’s second-largest ISP, behind BT and ahead of Virgin Media.

Telefónica will get £180 million for its broadband business, plus an extra amount — up to £20 million — upon the “successful delivery and completion of the customer migration process”.

Here’s what Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch had to say:

“Sky has been the UK’s fastest-growing broadband and telephony provider since we entered the market six years ago. From a standing start in 2006, we have added more than 4.2 million broadband customers. The acquisition of Telefónica UK’s consumer broadband and fixed-line telephony business will help us accelerate this growth.

“We believe that the O2 and BE consumer broadband and telephony business is a great fit, with customers used to high-quality products and strong levels of customer service. We look forward to welcoming these new customers to Sky and giving them access to our wide range of high-quality products, great value and industry-leading customer service.”

This deal is not hugely surprising, in that O2/BE has a shrinking customer base (as ISP Review notes, that base peaked at 671,000 customers and currently sits at around 560,000). However, it may prove to represent more than consolidation in the UK’s fixed-line market.

European mobile carriers are itching to carry out more mergers, particularly in highly competitive markets. The UK is about as competitive as it gets. With Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom having already merged their UK operations (formerly T-Mobile and Orange) into EE, I would now frankly be surprised if we didn’t see the newly mobile-only O2 UK merge with one of the others. Based on the complementary nature of their recent 4G spectrum wins, Vodafone would be a good fit.

This is shaping up to be a very exciting year in the UK communications market.

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