Microsoft is entering an agreement with the UK’s Janet research and education network to deliver a speedier and more secure connection to services such as the Azure cloud computing platform for students and researchers. Education institutions will also get access to Office 365 under pre-agreed terms and conditions as part of the deal.

The agreement will see the establishment of a peering arrangement between the networks of the two organisations, Microsoft said. This means that traffic to Microsoft services from educational sites will not have to traverse the public internet, cutting latency and enabling a high bandwidth connection for students and researchers.

While the move will benefit students by providing faster access to resources, it will also benefit Microsoft by potentially making services such as Azure more attractive for infrastructure and websites, virtual learning environments and research projects.

Oxford University chief information officer, professor Anne Trefethen, said: “The capability afforded by Janet’s peering with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud with high-bandwidth secure connections creates new opportunities for researchers and the University community as a whole.”

As part of the agreement, any UK education institution can also gain access to Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 suite under standard terms and conditions negotiated by Janet. This eliminates the need for each site to negotiate individually with Microsoft for terms and conditions applicable for the education market, according to Janet.

The two parties did disclose whether the agreement also included a discount on Office 365 pricing for educational organisations.

Microsoft UK’s director of education Steve Beswick said: “We are delighted to be working with Janet to provide additional value-added products and services to the research and education community. We have a long-standing relationship with this sector and are looking forward to more collaborative working with Janet to grow our offering.”

Janet, formerly the Joint Academic Network, provides services for further and higher education organisations in the UK, including a dedicated network that connects them all.

Microsoft finally revealed the UK pricing and shipping date for its overdue Microsoft Surface Pro tablet last week, and V3 managed to get its hands on one ahead of the 23 May release date to give it a thorough test. We were impressed with the performance and ability to run core business apps, but at £719, minus keyboard and Office, this could be offputting for many looking at this for a bring your own device option.

Last week several technology firms came under the spotlight for their low tax payments. The latest V3 column explained why, despite government pressure, it’s unlikely companies like Google and Amazon will be landed with large bills anytime soon.

Dell also took a little time off from questions over its buyout future to unveil its additions to its Precision workstation family, which will ship in early June running Intel’s latest Haswell processor.

Free WiFi was also a hot topic last week, as Camden Council announced plans to offer residents and visitors to the borough 30 minutes of free WiFi access per day. V3 broke the news that two other London councils, Newham and Havering, had ditched their free WiFi plans, while Barnet, Hounslow and Islington all signed up.

Microsoft Surface Pro with Windows 8 review
A decent business tablet that can run everything you’d find on a PC, but high price tag compared to standard laptops, iPads and Android tablets 

Amazon, Google and Apple won’t need to pay tax, despite government threats
Governments won’t have the courage or power to get a fair deal from big tech companies, argues V3 editor Madeline Bennett

Dell reveals Precision workstation line-up running Intel Haswell
Precision T1700 mini workstation and R7610 2U rackmount added to the family

Bitcoins are being traded for hack tools
Criminals now accepting digital currency on cyber black market

IBM updates COBOL to extend System/z into the cloud
Mainframe platform looks to transition with z/OS update

Microsoft Surface Pro priced from £719 in UK, ships 23 May
Windows tablet aims to be full PC but lacks in-built Office

Google I/O: Google Glass, Nexus tablets and Google+ set to dominate
Commentators say show will focus on software for existing products, rather than new hardware releases

Google Android malware levels rocket as spam threats grow
F-Secure warns platform being hit with evolved targeted attacks

Ipsos Mori denies trying to sell 27 million EE customers’ data to Metropolitan Police
Ipsos Mori fights back as Bloomberg reporters caught out for snooping on data

London councils Newham and Havering exit free WiFi plans as Barnet and Islington sign up
Five London councils have pulled out of plans to provide London residents with free WiFi access

Virtualisation specialist Veeam is aiming to make backups of virtual machines more efficient with Veeam Backup & Replication v7, which adds support for tape storage, built-in WAN acceleration for remote backups and can use SAN snapshots as a backup source.

Due to be available in the third quarter of this year, Backup & Replication v7 adds a number of new features. Many of these are aimed at making it easier for administrators to move some virtual machine backups to less costly storage, freeing up space and enabling more efficient use of resources.

However, some of the high-end features of Backup & Replication v7 will only be available under a new Enterprise Plus licence, which Veeam is also introducing with this release.

Veeam’s EMEA evangelist Hans De Leenheer told V3 that Backup & Replication v7 includes features that rivals only offer as optional extras, and also makes backing up virtual infrastructure as simple as possible.

To this end, new capabilities include support for tape storage and built-in WAN acceleration to optimise copying of backups to off-site locations, effectively enabling tiered levels of backup where long-term data can be moved to cheaper storage.

“What we’re not doing is supporting backing up virtual machines to tape, what we are enabling is use of tape as a secondary location for long-term retention of backup files, allowing customers to move long-term data to a cheaper form of storage,” De Leenheer explained.

Likewise, the built-in WAN acceleration feature in Backup & Replication v7 is purely to optimise the movement of backup data to the cloud or to another off-site location, according to Veeam.

“We’re not getting into the generic WAN acceleration market. It is built-in acceleration for our backup process only. When you do a copy job to an offsite location, that’s where the WAN acceleration kicks in,” De Leenheer said.

The exact technology is being kept under wraps, but it works at the block level and the network level and involves some caching at either end of the connection, according to Veeam.

Another key feature is support for backup from SAN snapshots, but this currently supports only HP StoreVirtual and HP 3PAR StoreServ storage arrays, although Veeam is looking to extend this in future.

Backing up from the snapshot rather than the virtual machine itself allows Veeam to dramatically shorten the time taken to perform the backup, according to De Leenheer.

“If you can do a backup from a SAN snapshot you’re not doing it from the production data store, and it will take about two to three minutes maximum,” he said.

Veeam also now supports Hyper-V with its virtual labs capability, which allows customers to spin up a virtual machine in a test environment directly from a backup. Previously, this was only supported on VMware.

Veeam is also looking to add grandfather-father-son retention for backups in the future, according to De Leenheer. He said this will do away with the need to perform a regular full backup every month or quarter.

“You can then do incremental forever. You will only have to do a full backup once, and every other backup afterwards can be incremental,” he said.

Veeam Backup & Replication v7 will be available as an upgrade for customers with a maintenance subscription. But Veeam is introducing a new Enterprise Plus licence that sits above its current Enterprise level. The WAN acceleration and SAN snapshot capabilities will only be available to customers who licence Backup & Replication v7 at this level, according to Veeam.

Existing Entperise level customers will be able to move up to Enterprise Plus for no extra charge when they upgrade to Backup & Replication v7, according to De Leenheer, or they can stay on the current licence going forwards.

IBM has updated its COBOL server software platform in hopes of extending its mainframe platform into the cloud and web applications space.

The company said that its System/z COBOL software update would look to add Java 7 and XML server capabilities to the platform, allowing the mainframe line to host cloud computing applications and services.

The update is part of what IBM sees as an effort to extend the lifespan of COBOL into the cloud computing era. The company estimates that there are currently some 200 billion lines of code and 15 percent of enterprise applications.

“COBOL powers many of the critical systems people rely on everyday,” said IBM fellow and Rational chief technology officer Kevin Stoodley.

“With this new software, IBM is helping companies reduce operating costs and processing time associated with these applications while delivering new capabilities to take advantage of cloud, Web and mobile devices.”

In updating its COBOL software, the company hopes to modernise the platform without the need for dramatically re-writing applications. The company said that the mainframe platform will be able to power mobile and web applications for fields ranging from finance to insurance and retail applications.

Additionally, IBM said that its new software will speed up the performance of applications with a compiler which is said to increase the performance of code by some 10 to 20 percent.

SAN JOSE: The cloud software market is in a fighting mood at present, with NetSuite and SAP taking pot shots at one another across the US as they host their user conferences in the same week.

With SuiteWorld on the west coast, and Sapphire on the east in Orlando, SAP had a three-hour head start on its rivals, so it’s no wonder NetSuite chief Zach Nelson was keen to get his jabs in early, using his opening keynote to chide the German firm.

“SAP talks a lot about cloud and they’re having their user group conference at the same time as we are. And while we’ll spend a lot of time introducing a new product, NetSuite for manufacturing, SAP are talking about databases in the cloud,” he said.

“Talking with customers, not a single one asked us for databases in the cloud – they want new features and new app capabilities, but not databases. I think it’s a telling week to see what we’re delivering this week and what SAP are doing.”

Nelson has good reason to be upbeat about his firm’s offerings, as NetSuite basks in the glory of the first quarter to 2013, with revenue of $91.6m, a 32 percent increase on the same period in 2012.

Understandably, SAP hit back, with SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe claiming NetSuite is likely “intimidated” by the firm’s push to the cloud.

“There is a market for NetSuite in the public cloud suite for small companies, but there we have [Business] ByDesign. We haven’t talked about it today because it’s a special case for the small companies but ByDesign is doing quite well, winning over larger and larger companies and I can understand if NetSuite is feeling a little bit threatened,” he said.

Clearly, both firms are keen to make sure they pick up as many new customers from the push to the cloud as possible, and both rolled out headline customers to sing their praises.

NetSuite called on the likes of Qualcomm, extreme sports camera firm GoPro and Williams-Sonoma – the US equivalent of John Lewis, owning brands such as Pottery Barn. Meanwhile, SAP rolled out F1 racing team McLaren and German banking giant Deustche Bank.

Both firms are no doubt hoping their fighting talk will catch the eyes of other companies considering moving more of their IT estate to the cloud. With so many firms on this path, isn’t there enough cloud business to go around Is there the need for such hostility – can’t we all just get along

Garter analyst Chris Pang agreed, saying given the current state of the cloud market there is “more than enough to go around”.

“There’s more than enough opportunity for everybody to enjoy the riches. If you look at customer demographics out there, there is opportunity for replacement of large systems and mid-sized systems. Fundamentally there will be some vendor swapping but, if you net it all out, I’d say there’s room for everybody to grow in this market place,” he told V3.

He added: “Some will grow more than others, but it’s not a case of someone is going to drop out of the market because someone is going to eat all their lunch.”

As such, Pang said that NetSuite’s key challenge now is to execute on the products and strategy it has built out in recent years. “Two years ago it was all about getting systems integrators involved, people like Accenture, and last year it was all about SuiteCommerce. Now, it’s all about proving they are executing,” he said.

“They’re really trying to set themselves up to scale – this will take some time to accomplish but in terms of getting basic building blocks in place from product perspective, that’s coming together.”

One area where NetSuite is hoping to grow is the UK and Europe, as plans for a UK data centre and expansion into Germany – the home of SAP – demonstrate.

So, while there may be enough in the market to go around, it’s unlikely the barbs will die down any time soon.

SAN JOSE: NetSuite has become the latest firm to confirm its intention to open a data centre in the UK in order to expand its footprint for data storage, following on from similar announcements from Salesforce and Oracle.

The firm’s chief executive Zach Nelson said NetSuite intends to open the location within the next 12 months and the UK is the most likely location, although he admitted other areas such as Amsterdam were still in consideration.

The company is likely to partner with a data centre provider, possibly Savvis, for the offering, noting that the outlay should be about $3m to get up and running.

The announcement comes after rival Salesforce announced its intention to open a UK data centre to make it easier for the firm to meet the needs of customers in Europe that have so far been wary of the cloud because of US data protection regulations.

However, Nelson said NetSuite had not been so affected by this issue, and the move was more about improving site and applicatation responsiveness.

“It’s great to have the systems closer to end user customers. The biggest value will be that the systems are closer to them so the applications and their website will perform faster,” Nelson said.

NetSuite is also looking to expand its presence into the German market, in a notable challenge to rival SAP in its own backyard, and is hoping its newly announced cloud tool for manufacturing will prove of interest.

“It’s a manufacturing country so it should work well but it’s also a technology country and we work well with tech companies, so it’ll be interesting,” Nelson said.

Earlier at the event Nelson had taunted SAP with barbs about whether the firm’s cloud offerings were relevant for businesses. SAP is currently hosting its own customer event, Sapphire, with firms like McLaren on hand to talk up its platforms, such as data analytics platform HANA.

Google executives took to the stage on Wednesday to showcase the company’s latest offerings for developers. The keynote, which included the introduction of an unlocked, stock Android version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 as well as updates to the Google+ platform, and Google Music and Search, did not see the usual fanfare that accompanies the Google developer conference.

Sought-after platforms such as Google Glass were nowhere to be seen. But according to industry analysts, there were still plenty of announcements to get the IT community excited.

Gartner research vice president Carolina Milanesi said: “It would be very easy to look at the event today and call it a non-event – no hardware, no parachuting. But this year had much more about the ecosystem and how to make it successful than last year did.

“It was all about strengthening the ecosystem and making it more profitable for Google but also for their partners.”

Milanesi told V3 that among the most useful updates in the first day of the event were the Google+ additions. With the service increasingly becoming a component of all Google products, updates will become more essential.

“Whether we like it or not we will be using Google+ as it becomes the door into the ecosystem. I think the enhancements they made will make it much more appealing and the forced sign in will get people on it,” Milanesi explained.

For Greg Sterling, senior analyst and program director at Opus Research, the rollout of conversational search was of particular interest. The platform, designed as a component the Google Now platform, could make interacting with the personal assistant platform more natural and efficient.

“The mapping features and upgrades were also impressive,” Sterling told V3. “Maps is a ‘bread and butter’ product for Google and the new capabilities and redesign put more distance between the company and its major competitors: Apple, Microsoft and Nokia.”

Investors, meanwhile, got something to smile about near the end of the company’s keynote address, when Larry Page made an appearance. Gartner research vice president Van Baker said that the appearance – which comes in the wake of Page’s disclosure of a throat condition that affects his speech – reflected well on the Google boss.

“I was impressed by Larry Page and his willingness to take the stage after his revelation about his medical problems yesterday,” Baker told V3. “He is refreshing compared to some of the other CEOs in the tech industry.”

Cloud storage and sharing firm Box has announced that its service is now ISO 27001 compliant.

The company said that its enterprise service now meets the security standard for data protection and has earned approval for information security management standards. The certification verifies that the service is now able to provide a high standard of security for customers using Box.

The company hopes that the certification, along with its compliance with other standards, will help to build customer confidence and bring further enterprise business.

“This certification demonstrates our commitment not only to the security and control of our customers’ data, but also our commitment to our global customer base,” said Box enterprise group product marketing manager Grant Shirk.

“We started down this path last year and our compliance efforts are gaining steam – we received our SOC-1/SSAE16 Type II, SOC-2 Type II report and announced our support for HIPAA compliance in just the past quarter.”

The lack of confidence in security and compliance has long been seen as a major hurdle in the uptake of enterprise cloud storage platforms.

Box, however, believes that by adding ISO 27001 and other security compliance credentials it can restore user confidence as well as press its business into new international markets.

“While this is an important certification for Box, it’s just one more step along our long-term roadmap and commitment to providing the highest level of transparency and assurance to our customers about the quality and security of our platform, top to bottom,” Shirk explained.

“It’s also a critical component of our ability to serve our international customers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia – where we’ve seen our customer growth more than double in the past year.”

Oracle has announced a new UK data centre plan, which will be focused on the G-Cloud initiative.

The new data centre will be located in Thames Valley and will be designed to comply with standards for government cloud hosting. In addition to security considerations, the facilities will allow the government to ensure that the data is not being hosted on foreign soil.

Such a facility would then be able to provide cloud services for public sector departments under the UK’s G-Cloud guidelines. The framework, designed to cut IT spending and improve efficiency, pushes government departments to work with approved cloud service providers. Oracle is just one of the hundreds of IT suppliers now on the framework.

Oracle president Mark Hurd said, “We applaud the G-Cloud program and believe it represents a significant step in the provision of public sector IT services. We are delighted to bring our technology, applications and experience to the initiative and to make significant investments in the new data centre and infrastructure that will be dedicated to the UK government’s G-Cloud initiative.”

In total, the G-Cloud includes some 708 suppliers of cloud services, many of which are small and medium enterprises. Earlier this month, the framework was expanded with 368 additional providers.

In addition to serving as a means for cutting IT spending and improving efficiency, the G-Cloud initiative has been hailed as a possible boon for data security. By moving data into the cloud and off dated or obsolete hardware, government agencies can help to make sure private data is secured.

Despite its advantages, even G-Cloud’s biggest backers have admitted that the platform has had problems gaining traction with public agencies.

Software AG has launched Live, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) suite that will allow application developers to easily create and deploy agile and cloud-based software.

The platform’s core component, AgileApps Live, is available now and allows developers to build applications that can instantly be deployed on mobile devices and that come with pre-built integration across social networks.

AgileApps Live is the same technology the firm acquired from its purchase of online app platform LongJump in April. Darren Roos, Software AG chief operating officer, told V3 that the LongJump application had not been altered since the acquisition, but had just been rebranded as the AgileApps Live component.

“Developers these days need to easily be able to integrate business applications they create with any social network, whether it be Twitter or LinkedIn, or an internal social network. LongJump does all of those things natively. So an application developer could create an order application that would quickly respond to customers on Twitter about delays in their orders,” said Roos.

Roos said other applications that developers could create using Software AG Live include loan applications or HR onboarding applications. “The suite will be useful in any instance a business needs to quickly deploy an application. Developers can take data from existing business systems and create agile apps within days. There is no code writing involved, just configuration,” he added.

Another component of the Live suite is the Process Live collaboration platform, which will allow developers in different departments and locations to easily work together on business process modelling. This capability will be available in the coming months.

“For Process Live, we are using the technology we acquired with the IDS Scheer acquisition in 2009. ARIS was the company’s core product and allows developers to model processes when designing business processes applications. Now a developer in Sydney could easily work with a developer in London and discuss whether to add in particular stops to the model, such as whether to link to data in an SAP app,” said Roos.

Roos said while Software AG allows developers to easily automate business process models on-premise, this capability would not be offered in the Software AG Live release. “We’ll introduce this in the future but there are technology reasons why this automation capability is not available in the cloud yet,” said Roos.

Additionally an Integration Live component of Software AG Live will allow developers to integrate cloud-based software with other cloud software, or with private cloud or on-premise installations, such as SAP or Salesforce applications.

Finally, Roos said Software AG would be announcing Dynamic Cloud Scaling later this year, which will allow Software AG Live customers to easily scale applications they develop. “So when application usage peaks, we can offer them more cloud to take that extra load,” he said.