Technology Business

Editor’s note: With incremental service improvements announced at its annual user conference, Oracle has cemented itself as a worthy opponent at multiple points in the cloud stack, says Technology Business Research. Plus: Video of chair Larry Ellison’s keynote. This is the second of a two-part report fro Oracle World. Part one is available online. HAMPTON, N.H. – The times they are a-changin’ (sort of) at Oracle During the Oracle World conference, attendees were bounced between the traditional keynote speakers that emphasized Oracle’s technical superiority over the competitor du jour (this was AWS’ second year of such a distinction), and...

IBM isn’t alone in trying to disrupt global banking with blockchain technology, its latest effort being announced Monday. Here’s an overview of other efforts underway around the globe from Technology Business Research: Bank of England The Bank of England is evaluating blockchain for digital settlement services for example, and Ripple has built a system now used for digital exchanges between banks in Thailand and Japan. The EU The European Union (EU) initiative called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has far reaching implications as well. Adopted in April 2016 and replacing a data protection direction from 1995, GDPR is...

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a review examining IBM’s new z14 mainframe. Bringing apps and data to the mainframe for intelligence and insight  z14 customers will be able to leverage an increasing degree of analytics and insight than on prior models. The  ability to leverage the analytics capabilities of Watson on IBM’s Z portfolio, not just z14, makes this entire product  portfolio uniquely valuable to its users. At IBM’s Z analyst preview, the vendor demonstrated the power of  analytics in use cases such as credit card churn, showing how the capabilities of Watson on z14 can provide its  users with instant insights so a bot can provide real‐time, targeted offers to potentially unhappy customers to  increase customer retention and satisfaction.  Machine learning can not only increase the efficiency of a company’s products and solutions for its customers but  also improve the automation of data center infrastructure and reduce the time spent by professionals to manage  the functionalities of environments, freeing up time for IT professionals to focus on more pertinent items such as  development. Although these capabilities are available on older versions of IBM’s Z, TBR believes these  functionalities have been enhanced for the z14.  Multi‐cloud operational analytics from the mainframe control point  Mainframes anchor most large enterprise IT environments. Operational analytics provide the insights necessary to  manage, monitor and maintain the environments in real time. While more of the compute and transactional  activity takes place via clouds and with multiple devices, there still needs to be a central repository for this  operational information, which IBM believes is best served by being hosted on the mainframe. Toward that end,  IBM has developed a suite of technologies to facilitate the burgeoning need for a consolidated control point for the  digital activity. Specifically, IBM offers the following:   EZSource, an acquisition made by IBM in June 2016, provides a dashboard to mainframe users to simplify  application modernization. EZSource was renamed IBM Application Discovery following its acquisition by  IBM.   zOS Connect enables its users to simplify management of mobile installments and existing zOS installments  within an enterprise. One key advantage of using zOS Connect on z14 is that customers can write  applications in their code of choice and zOS will, in a sense, translate it into the proper code language  wherever necessary to enable the application.    Blockchain, IBM’s hyperledger technology, provides an irrefutable ledger, which is highly valuable to  customers in industries such as banking, manufacturing and healthcare.  With IBM’s Z, customers can both connect and extend by leveraging APIs. This concept is not new to IBM, but z14  increases the performance of its cloud functionalities. For example, z14 provides a secure and central processor  through which APIs can be securely exposed at scale. This enhances z14 and IBM’s own cloud service for  Blockchain and also streamlines developers’ ability to understand existing programs and connect external services  with internal environments and vice versa. Rather than rebuild monolithic applications and retire technical debt,  customers can easily extend the life of these proven backbone application layers through simple refactoring, in the  language they choose, to refinance the technical debt and cost‐effectively modernize these critical application tent  poles. With z14, customers can cut the time it takes to build services by up to 90% leveraging IBM’s APIs and IBM  Z. IBM z14 also improves the connectivity of public and private clouds.  Another differentiator for z14 is its ability to leverage microservices to improve the efficiencies of a data center  environment. Through z14, application developers are able to leverage the code language they are most familiar  with to write microservices or augment traditional applications. Leveraging the company’s related capabilities,  such as Application Discovery, zOS Connect and Blockchain, IBM demonstrated how two developers, using  different coding languages, are able to write and integrate programs together that will address their key business  needs while improving audit trails.  Through its open operational analytics approach (IBM Common Data Provider and OMEGAMON for Application  Performance Management), IBM also enables its mainframe reporting and dashboards to integrate with the  customer’s entire enterprise IT platform to manage, monitor and maintain by ingesting the transaction data into  IBM’s Z operational analytics dashboards. This enables customers to develop a central middle‐office command and  control center, monitoring overall application‐level performance and evaluating threats. More importantly for  modern IT operations, customers can assign the operating costs back to the specific line‐of‐business (LOB)  stakeholders as compute increasingly becomes viewed as an LOB opex line rather than a corporate capex line  billed out as interdepartmental cross charges.  Part three: Market implications (C)...

Editor’s note: A team of analysts from Technology Business Research take a detailed look at IBM’s new z14 mainframe, which was announced Monday, generating headlines worldwide. What’s beyond the hype? If the world is a global open‐airair market, then IBM’s Z products are the tent poles — the foundation upon which we  integrate global markets — and hold up the tents of security, analytics and insight over our digital economy.  Throughout its 100‐plus years of operation, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has again and again been the provider of cutting‐edge  technology that changes the way business commerce occurs. IBM Z remains the backbone within this tradition.  As the digital economy evolves rapidly, data stores increase exponentially, resulting in two fundamental issues  arising. The first being the integration of data from multiple sources and the second being how to protect and  secure that data. IBM’s newest addition, the z14, addresses that security problem through pervasive encryption of  all data on the mainframe, which is a large shift in security management. In fact, IBM stated that of the data  breaches that have occurred since 2013, only 4% of the data was encrypted. This is especially true for industries  including government, financial services and healthcare, where data in need of high security flows abundantly. As a  result, customers increasingly demand hardware vendors provide them with answers on how to adequately  address these rising concerns and the rapidly increasing masses of unstructured data they have the responsibility  to protect.  IBM’s response: the z14.  IBM unveils a mainframe to address the workload demands of the future: z14  IBM designed z14 to address the concerns of the future, where securing data forms the new perimeter in IBM’s  view. IBM Z provides customers with cognitive analytics to not only increase the value of the data stored on z14  but also provide an increased volume of insights at a faster pace across unstructured data originating elsewhere.  IBM Z continues to facilitate reuse of the legacy application through full life‐cycle support of APIs, enabling  activities such as refactoring the front end to extend the useful life of the back‐office transactions and reporting  requirements that remain universal no matter how the consumer interacts with the front office.  However, the mainframe is plagued by a challenge not addressable by these modernized capabilities of the  platform with z14. The platform is perceived, especially by millennials, as outdated and unable to handle the  workloads of the future. It is perceived as the Cadillac of the IT industry — highly regarded by older generations  but not as cutting edge as the Teslas of today. But the IBM z14 is not the Cadillac of generations past. It has been  redesigned and is being reintroduced as a platform ripe with opportunity for application development that will suit  millennials’ workloads of the future — including 2.5x performance of JavaScript compared to x86, according to  IBM. The inherently higher performance of the mainframe over its x86 counterparts makes it well designed for  workloads in need of heightened security and performance, whether it be on premises or in the cloud.  IBM’s Z analyst preview focused on the three main pillars of its new z14 product launch — with trust as a key  theme of the launch. IBM’s Z product family has historically been perceived as having a higher degree of trust  among consumers than its x86 counterparts due to IBM’s long‐standing focus on developing the technological tent  poles to hold up and secure mission‐critical workloads with industry‐leading security capabilities. Another one of  the main themes at the analyst preview involved the ability of z14 to be leveraged in modern environments, such  as the cloud, to address the demands of the future, such as analytics and connecting a customer’s cloud‐based  environments with on‐premises counterparts.  Data encryption on the fly for digital business  One of the key focal points of the IBM z14 product launch was the mainframe’s high degree of encryption  capabilities. The z14 can encrypt 100% of the data stored on the z14 “on the fly.” IBM Chief Information Security  Officer Shamla Naidoo outlined the necessity of encrypting data as well as the unnecessary waste of manual  resources often used to determine which data requires encryption. With the z14, IBM has stated that 100% of the  data can be encrypted with only a minor impact on performance. Naidoo reinforced that while encrypting 100% of  the data will slow performance, the performance decrease will be minimal and there will be an overall savings due  to reduced labor costs.   IBM’s z14 leverages the company’s security portfolio, including QRadar, which simplifies the compliance mandate,  and Guardium, which provides more granular protection, to enable customers to encrypt sensitive rows or  columns of data. While TBR does not believe leveraging IBM’s related security portfolio is necessarily an advantage  for the company, as vendors including Dell Technologies (NYSE: DVMT)...

Editor’s note: Stephanie Long is a research analyst in TBR’s Data Center Practice, contributing to TBR’s quarterly syndicated reports researching vendors including Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM and NetApp across the spectrum of data center technologies. Stephanie also provides assessment and analysis on vendors’ financial and market strategies for TBR’s benchmark reports. What do you see as major trends in the area you cover? It’s an exciting time in the data center market. Over the past year, we have seen substantial changes to the vendor market landscape with vendors such as HPE undergoing massive portfolio...

Editor’s note: As the Internet of Things world continues to expand, analysts at Technology Business Research take an inside look at the latest IoT efforts at Google, Cisco and SAP. Google upgrades its core value by filling in a gap In May 2017 Google announced its new Google Cloud IoT Core service. The new pay-as-you-go managed service, situated between devices and the company’s Cloud Pub/Sub service, allows Google Cloud Platform users to connect, manage and generate insight from devices with elevated ease. TBR believes that many customers, prior to Google’s Cloud IoT Core, relied on Google partner solutions to...

Editor’s note: A visit to the Millennial 20/20 Summit in New York by two Technology Business Research analysts leads them to the conclusion than even the dierati are struggling to reach millennials. Making the trip were Bozhidar Hristov  and Stuart Williams. HAMPTON, N.H. – Amid the ongoing digital reinvention of advertising and marketing, enterprises face yet another challenge: reaching a new population demographic born after 1980 — the millennials. At the Millennial 20/20 event held in Manhattan on March 1 and 2, agencies, tech startups and industry giants such as Accenture, one of the event sponsors, demonstrated how they are...