Salesforce’s 2012 Sustainability Report is been heralded by environmental groups as a “high water mark” for the cloud storage industry.

According to the report, Salesforce has been able to increase its workflow while reducing emissions. The cloud storage provider says that it has lowered its emissions through a mixture of improved technology and green alternatives.

Salesforce reports that it was able to reduce its carbon emissions per cloud transaction by 20 percent in 2012. The company says it was able to do this while increasing overall transactions by 63 percent.

Among the cuts the firm made to go green included a switch to bio-diesel employee buses and an increase in video conferencing. In its report, Salesforce says that it has invested in video conferencing technology in an effort to circumvent excessive employee business travel.

While the company has made strides to go green it still expects to do more in the coming year. Salesforce’s goals for 2013 include encouraging energy suppliers to invest in renewable energy and researching future green technologies for the datacentre.

“I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, but we have much more to do. As always, we believe in the power of sharing the model,” said Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.

“It is my hope that this report goes beyond detailing what we are doing at Salesforce, and inspires others to work toward a sustainable world.”

Greenpeace has heralded Salesforce’s green outlook as a wake up call to the cloud storage industry. According to the group’s senior IT analyst Gary Cook, the early commitment by Salesforce to get greener should result in a net positive for the industry as a whole.

“Salesforce’s commitment sends an important signal to the rest of the sector that energy efficiency is important, but not enough. Salesforce and other leading IT companies recognize that they must shift their explosive growth in electricity demand to renewable sources of electricity,” said Cook.

“The transformation of Salesforce’s cloud to renewable electricity will not happen overnight, but the commitment and initial steps in its announcement show that the company intends to play a leading role in shaping a truly green cloud.”

This is not the first time Greenpeace has spoke up on the issue of energy consumption in the datacentre. Last year, Greenpeace slammed Microsoft and Apple for building datacentres in regions which rely heavily on coal power.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) management vendor Aerohive has unveiled a trio of products designed to expand its WAN and on-premise networking lines.

The company said that the SR series switches would offer improved connectivity speeds and options for both headquarter and branch office locations, while the HiveManager and HiveOS 6.0 releases would give administrators improved tools for monitoring and managing traffic on their wireless network infrastructure.

“Managing the surge in enterprise mobility has become the primary concern for organisations evaluating how their users connect to the corporate network,” said Aerohive chief executive David Flynn.

“Our new SR series switches along with our APs, branch routers and cloud management allow our customers to build an access layer solution that is optimised for the mobile centric enterprises.”

The SR switches, which are set to arrive in March, will offer both 3G and 4G wireless networking capability along with eight, 24 and 48 port LAN connectivity. The switches will include tools to manage both VoIP and data traffic over networks.

Meanwhile, the HiveOS and Hive Manager will be updated to improve network visibility and management. The company said the HiveOS update would add traffic management and security components to scale up to 1,000 network applications on both LAN and wireless networks.

The company believes its ability to manage and monitor traffic over wireless networking will help to set both products apart in a changing IT sector.

With consumerisation bringing an increased reliance on wireless devices, Aerohive sees its products playing a vital role in helping companies manage large-scale networks and WAN deployments, the firm said.

IBM said that it would be transitioning all of its enterprise cloud computing software and service lines to open platforms.

The company said that it would be offering a full range of cloud platforms which would be based on the OpenStack model and would better enable companies to customise and build their own cloud computing deployments.

The rollout will be lead with the release of the SmartCloud Orchestrator tool. The management platform will allow businesses and developers to synch components from multiple cloud services into a single offering.

IBM hopes that the tool will speed up the time needed to construct new cloud platforms by providing developers with a simplified method for constructing the interfaces for cloud computing services

The release is the first in what IBM promises will be a larger line of cloud computing products and services which will be based on open source technology platforms. Big Blue hopes that its efforts will mimic the success of other open platforms in the enterprise space.

“Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing. IBM has been at the forefront of championing standards and open source for years, and we are doing it again for cloud computing,” said IBM senior vice president of software Robert LeBlanc.

“The winner here will be customers, who will not find themselves locked into any one vendor, but be free to choose the best platform based on the best set of capabilities that meet their needs.”

The release also marks a new episode in IBM’s cloud computing efforts. The company in recent weeks unveiled a promising new 100Gbit/s interconnect platform which could expand the potential market for high-performance cloud computing platforms.

Dropbox chief executive Drew Houston has called out the iCloud’s walled garden as bad for business.

According to Houston, its poor form to have a cloud storage solution that only works for one type of hardware maker. He specifically questions why an end user would want to use a cloud platform that’s proprietary.

“There will never be an engineer in the Apple cafeteria who’s like, hey I made the Android version of iCloud,” Houston said, according to MacWorld.

Houston goes on to say that it might not be in a hardware maker’s best interest to operate a cloud storage offering. He believes that the work involved in protecting and managing a cloud storage operation might be too much for some firms.

A possible solution for the issue, according to Houston, may be partnering up with cloud operators to bring storage apps baked into devices. He specifically points to a recent deal Dropbox signed with Samsung to have Dropbox’s app pre-installed on all Samsung devices.

On one hand, Houston has a point. Being unable to access files stored in the iCloud on a Surface Tablet could be problematic. However, with so many companies, and people, living an i-only life it’s probably safe to assume the issue is a moot point in a variety of cases.

More importantly, if you’re Apple, you’re just better off having a consumer using only your devices and services. If a consumer has already bought into your whole ecosystem than you really don’t have to worry about them moving somewhere else.

05 Mar 2013

Cloud storage provider Box pushes back on roughly 90 percent of the governmental requests for data it receives, according to Box general council Peter McGoff.

McGoff says the firm works with law enforcement officials and scans through court orders for loopholes in an attempt to protect user data. He says that data stored in the cloud stands up to the same rules that dictate protocol in the on-site storage sector.

“In my time at Box we have pushed back on roughly 90 percent of court orders,” said McGoff during a recent panel on Cloud data regulations.

McGoff says that Box feels constant pressure to fight on the behalf of its user’s privacy. He reported during his presentation that putting the customer first and keeping government snoops away from consumer data is a constant battle.

“You’ve got customer who entrust their most sensitive data to Box. You got an agreement with the company to not share that information with anybody. But on the other side of that you have governments wanting to see that data,” continued McGoff.

“We have constant pressure between living up to consumer expectations and dealing with government access.”

According to McGoff, the ability to keep sensitive data outside of the hands of government officials is no different in the cloud or on-site. He believes that the biggest myths about what rights a consumer who stores data in the cloud have are mostly perpetuated by on-site storage firms.

“The US on premise hardware and software providers help perpetuate this myth of what the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) can do,” continued McGoff.

Fellow panelist Francoise Gilbert tended to agree with McGoff’s assessment. The managing attorney at the IT Law Group said during the presentation that the Patriot Act shouldn’t be considered a threat to big businesses.

“Don’t blame the Patriot Act, it has very little to do with all of this it. It’s just one of the many laws that deals with this matter.” said fellow panelist Gilbert.

Gilbert stated that even with the Patriot Act, requests for the public’s data must go through the courts. She says that the time and expensive involved with obtaining that data is, in many cases, too much for the government to handle.

“The concept that the government knocks on the door and just asks for things is not true,”

Box’s panel comes following a busy month for corporate transparency. Both Google and Twitter released transparency reports on governmental requests for data earlier this year.

Microsoft has launched new versions of its cloud-based software as a service (Saas) Office 365 suite for businesses, bringing an updated licensing model, greater focus on worker mobility via the cloud, and expanded integration with its enterprise social networking tool Yammer.

Unveiled today, the new Office 365 for businesses adds two further offerings, Office 365 Midsize Business and Office 365 Small Business Premium, to address some of the needs customers have been asking for, Microsoft said. The existing Office 365 Enterprise release has also been updated.

“There are three main areas we’ve invested in with the new Office. Firstly, we’ve looked at how Office is used across PC, tablet and phone, and making sure users have the right experience for how they want to be productive on those devices. The second area is around cloud, and the third is social, building on our acquisition of Yammer,” Lara Kingwell, Microsoft UK Office launch lead manager, told V3.

Like the consumer-focused Office 365 Home Premium that shipped last month, the business versions are licensed on a per-user subscription basis, allowing each user access from up to five devices, including Windows tablets, PCs or Macs.

Users also get the rights to stream the desktop Office apps onto any internet-connected PC they might be sitting at via Microsoft’s Click-to-Run feature, a move designed to make it easy for users to get the tools they need to do their job wherever they might be.

Served up this way, the desktop Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote are known as Office 365 ProPlus, and use Microsoft’s app virtualisation (App-V) technology for deployment rather than a conventional installation.

Office 365 ProPlus is available as a standalone offering for £10.10 per user per month.

Meanwhile, Office 365 Small Business Premium targets small firms with one to 10 users and has a simple setup process that requires no IT skills, according to Microsoft.

It provides email, communication and collaboration capabilities via cloud-hosted versions of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint and is priced at £10.10 per user per month.

Rackspace has acquired database firm ObjectRocket to add its NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform to its ever-growing portfolio of cloud computing offerings.

The move will help customers to implement a big data strategy, according to Rackspace, as well as helping to differentiate its offerings from other cloud providers.

With the acquisition expected to close Wednesday, Rackspace said it intends to move quickly to integrate ObjectRocket’s technology with its OpenStack-based open cloud platform in order to make the service available to its customers.

It is set to be up and running from Rackspace’s Chicago datacentre in March, and will roll out to the firm’s other global datacentres throughout the rest of the year.

European datacentre support is expected “sooner rather than later,” Rackspace vice president of technology Nigel Beighton told V3.

ObjectRocket’s platform is based on the MongoDB open-source database, which does not rely on traditional relational database techniques to store and retrieve information, making it a “NoSQL” class of tool.

“Companies are starting to realise that they shouldn’t throw any data away, and instead of worrying about the cost of very expensive proprietary systems, they are now looking at NoSQL and open-source technologies as a very cost-effective way of handling all the data they will ever have,” said Beighton, explaining Rackspace’s reasons for the acquisition.

ObjectRocket built its service from the outset to be able to partition – or “shard” – the database across multiple servers, enabling it to scale easily, while also adding greater resilience and recovery capabilities.

For this reason, it is expected to attract existing MongoDB users who are looking for a way to scale up, or those taking their first steps in the NoSQL world and don’t want to have to build it all themselves.

“If I was creating an e-commerce solution now, I’d really think about using NoSQL for driving the catalogue, for giving a really fast user experience when searching for products, while a relational database would be best for recording purchase transactions,” Beighton said.

Rackspace said that the ObjectRocket service will store data entirely on Solid State Drives (SSDs), with redundancy built-in, and that in tests it delivered a latency of just 2ms, making it 10 times faster than rival database services.

The new platform will also be backed by Rackspace’s Fanatical Support services.

Rackspace has yet to disclose pricing, but Beighton said it would likely be in line with ObjectRocket’s existing licensing structure, which starts at $29 per month for a 1GB shard.

No financial details on the deal were disclosed.

Salesforce has launched a mobile edition of its Service Cloud application with features including chat, co-browsing, communities and touch interfaces for both iOS and Android devices, including the Kindle.

Service Cloud Mobile will help businesses improve the mobile services they offer customers, by giving businesses the ability to interact with their customers in real time, giving answers to customer queries instantly.

“We are doubling down on mobile this year,” Salesforce innovation director Charlie Richey told V3. “This announcement is the launch pad [for] a number of mobile announcements that will follow.

“This isn’t just saying Service Cloud is mobile as we have had mobile capabilities on the Service Cloud before. This is about customer satisfaction and improving customer experiences.”

“Everyone looks first to receive customer service on the mobile devices they carry around with them. We believe they should not have to be on hold, and should not have to look for answers on social networks.”

The co-browsing technology available with Service Cloud Mobile will allow customer service agents to deliver guided assistance to customers on mobile devices via any web browser. Customers may need such assistance when performing complex transactions or trying to set up accounts or resolve issues.

Meanwhile, Service Cloud mobile chat will allow customers to instantly interact with live service agents to quickly resolve issues as they happen, said Salesforce.

A communities feature will allow businesses to provide a single destination for customers needing answers to questions via peers or company experts.

Additionally Salesforce said Service Cloud Touch will allow service agents to easily manage and resolve customer cases on the go with an Amazon Kindle, Android device, iPad or iPhone.

The cloud giant said the release builds on the success of Salesforce Touch, which brings Salesforce Sales Cloud to mobile devices, and the Salesforce Touch Platform, which allows developers to write custom mobile applications once and then deploy them to any device.

One customer that has used Service Cloud Mobile in beta is New Jersey’s public transportation organisation NJ Transit. It said it is now able to give travellers real-time information about their journeys.

However, Richey told V3 that Salesforce had no UK customers using the Mobile Service Cloud in beta that he could reference.

Samsung has unveiled a new service called Knox to let enterprises create and manage a secure container for corporate applications and data on their Android smartphones.

The handset maker last year introduced Samsung for Enterprise (Safe) on its Galaxy S3 smartphone, adding capabilities such as encryption and VPN support in a bid to make its devices more appealing to the corporate market.

Now, Samsung is extending this with the Knox technology in a move to meet the growing bring your own device trend by creating separate container environments for personal and professional use of devices.

The firm said this should remove many of the headaches facing firms dealing with issues of security and data protection. The Knox service will be available on select devices later this year.

Security management vendor Centrify has partnered with Samsung to provide administrator control for the feature via a company’s existing Active Directory infrastructure.

The capability is said to be comparable to the Balance feature on BlackBerry’s new Z10 and Q10 smartphones, potentially making Samsung a rival for BlackBerry in the corporate market.

“It involves making their devices more secure and enterprise-ready, providing cleaner separation between work and play, and Samsung definitely sees an opportunity to go after the enterprise mantle that BlackBerry has historically had,” Centrify chief executive Tom Kemp told V3.

The technology revolves around creating an isolated container on the device, according to Kemp, which can be managed by the IT department, while the user is free to use the handset outside the container for whatever they wish.

“One of the issues with bring your own device (BYOD) in the enterprise is that there’s a big concern about data leakage occurring, and making sure the enterprise stuff stays in the sandbox and doesn’t leak out,” Kemp said.

“If the employee leaves the organisation, IT want to ensure the information is wiped, but the user doesn’t want their personal photos and music deleted as well.”

Google has unveiled a new Chromebook device called the Pixel that is designed to compete with Apple and Microsoft at the top end of the laptop market with a cool £1,049 UK price tag.

The device was unveiled late on Thursday and V3 was one of a handful of UK sites to get its hands on the device. Below are a series of images showing the key dimensions and specifications of the devices.

The device boasts a 3:2 display which Google said is designed to better display pages on the web which are generally designed vertically, rather than adhering to movie formats of 16×9 that are more horizontally framed.

Google said it did away with the markings usually found for ports for design reasons and because most users never actually consult what they are, instead just working out the shapes of what will fit into which holes. This makes sense in a way; most people don’t need these symbols and many other devices don’t include them either.

Google made big boasts about the screen, claiming it was better than anything on the market with a pixel density of 229 pixels per inch (PPI). Here you can see it snapped against a large-screen Macbook Pro, and certainly there’s not much difference between the two, as you can see below (although admittedly, this is far from ideal testing conditions, and we’ll compare it more properly in due course).

When compared to other Windows devices on the market such as a Lenovo X220, you can see the device is not that much larger in general, but far more of its real estate is given to the screen or keyboard units, which is a nice touch as these are far more important than the casing around it.

Speaking of the keyboard, it’s certainly very nice, with deft, responsive keys that are well spaced out and easy to adapt too.

Overall, based on early first impressions, while the price is fairly eye-watering, the Pixel is a lovely piece of design and the touchscreen is very nice to use too. Those unsold by Apple or Microsoft and looking for something at the high-end and confident they’ll always have Wi-Fi access may well be tempted, but the price may well be off-putting for many.

Check back in the coming days for a more thorough review.

21 Feb 2013