SAN JOSE: NetSuite has updated its manufacturing offering to offer a set of features for companies producing goods that want embrace the benefits of operating in the cloud.

The update to the NetSuite for Manufacturing Edition includes a number of key features designed primarily for manufacturers in a evolution from its existing products that were designed for firms working with manufactureres.

NetSuite chief executive Zach Nelson claimed that “manufacturing is the final industry to come to the cloud” and that the functionalities on offer, such as standard costs, work-in-process tracking and routings, will all help make it easier for firms to operate online.

In particular, he said new manufacturing processes set to revolutionise the industry will ramp up the demand for cloud-hosted tools.

“We’ve had this product in development in stealth mode for about two years and there’s a sea change coming in manufacturing. Not everything will be outsourced anymore. You’ll see people coming back onshore driven by new capabilities like 3D printing,” said Nelson.

“Every company is becoming a cloud company and the cloud is going to transform how manufacturers operate. We are getting to the market place at the right time with the right product.”

As part of this announcement NetSuite also announced an integration with CAD manufacturing firm Autodesk, between Netsuite’s ERP services and Autodesk’s Product Life Management (PLM) service PLM 360, as design services also move to the cloud.

This is designed to help customers run their design, manufacturing and sales channels through a single portal as well as integrating customer feedback and internal social tools, such as Netsuite’s own SuiteSocial.

“It’s a pure web base environment – this is something dramatically different from anything done before in the PLM world,” added Autodesk’s senior vice president of manufacturing Buzz Kross, speaking at the event.

SAN JOSE: NetsSuite chief executive Zach Nelson wasted no time in laying into rival SAP during his SuiteWorld keynote on Tuesday, mocking the German firm for its approach to the cloud, and taking a potshot at Microsoft too.

Kicking off his presentation, Nelson said the fact both NetSuite and SAP, with its Sapphire conference in Orlando, are having their user conferences at the same time is a chance for the industry to assess the state of each firm’s offerings.

“SAP talks a lot about cloud but they’re having their user group conference at same time 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 also touched on research from analyst house Gartner that pegged SAP’s growth in the ERP market at minus three percent as further proof the firm is failing to meet business’s needs.

This same data was also used these to slight Microsoft’s own ERP offering, Dynamics.

“I was talking ‘to a partner and they said they shouldn’t call it Dynamics, they should call it Static, and that’s pretty darn accurate. There’s nothing going on in the Microsoft cloud, particularly in the ERP space.”

Despite Nelson’s withering criticism, SAP looks to be a strong player in the cloud space. The company recently unveiled its HANA Enterprise Cloud service, a move which analysts believe could bring big dividends for SAP.

SAN JOSE: Cloud computing is now such a central part of the IT enterprise landscape that firms cannot ignore its benefits any longer, according to the chief information officer of mobile chip giant Qualcomm.

Speaking at NetSuite’s Suiteworld event on Tuesday Norm Fjeldheim (pictured left) said that the firm has been a keen adopter of the cloud, including products from NetSuite, and that IT teams are now accepting that the cloud is a key part of the future of enterprise IT.

“We were an early adopter of SaaS applications – we liked it as a solution for our business and I see this trend continuing,” he said, explaining that the firm had used NetSuite for the launch of a new division in Mexico due to the speed of getting services live in the cloud.

“Even security guys are now saying, ‘alright, the cloud is here to stay and I’m going to have to deal with this’.”

Fjeldheim also believes firms that have been slow to embrace the cloud, and remain sceptical of its benefits, risk being left behind. “Cloud is a positive force and I think it’s a big change for the industry – if I were Oracle or SAP I’d be really worried.”

The comments on cloud from NetSuite and Qualcomm come in the same month V3 launched the May edition of the V3 tablet app focused on cloud computing, which is available now for download from the iTunes store.

It can be downloaded free by registering on the V3 website and then using the same credentials when prompted to get the app for free. It costs only £1.99 if you do not want to register.

Google is now offering 15GB of free storage on its Drive cloud storage platform, in a move to entice more customers to its services by merging the data storage offered between Gmail and Drive.

Google users were previously offered 5GB of free storage for Drive and another 10GB for Gmail, but now users will get 15GB of storage across both services.

Google’s director of product management Clay Bavor wrote: “With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where.

“Maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.”

Google is also giving Google App users a larger amount of storage. Companies that pay to use the firm’s apps will now be granted a total of 30GB storage.

Storage of files created with Google Apps will not count against the cap. Instead, only emails and attachments filed in the cloud will be included as part of the 30GB limit.

Google has been ramping up its cloud storage offering since introducing it early last year. Drive launched in April 2012, allowing Google users to store files and data in a public cloud controlled by the firm.

Drive has seen much convergence with Google’s other software in recent months. Last November, Drive became integrated with Google+ to offer file sharing and Google launched its preview tool earlier this year.

The announcement comes just ahead of the Google I/O developer conference, where the firm may reveal more numbers on users of its Drive and Gmail products.

Microsoft has lined up a series of customers to dismiss the enterprise credentials of Google’s Apps as the battle for businesses between the two heavyweights rumbles on.

Both firms have been taking pot shots at one another for a while, with Microsoft’s infamous ‘Scroogled’ campaign warning firms of the limitations of Google’s software. However, Google was able to bask in the glow of the city of Boston’s decision to ditch Microsoft’s software for its Apps services.

In a blog post on the eve of the Google I/O conference, Microsoft presented a series of customers that have been unhappy with Google to let them voice their frustrations.

Arysta Lifescience, an agrochemical company with 3,400 employees in 125 countries, had been a Google Apps customer, but staff were unhappy with its services and so it switched to Redmond.

Dustin Collins, global head of IT infrastructure at Arysta LifeScience, said: “Google Apps was difficult to use and lacked the capabilities our employees had grown accustomed to in Office. With Office 365 we’re able to interact and engage with each other more, allowing us to efficiently and quickly respond to new opportunities. As a result, we’re a more agile, competitive organisation.”

Microsoft also highlighted Office 365’s compliance with security standards like ISO 27001 as another reason customers are ditching Google for its offerings. One such customer it cited is human development organisation FHI 360, which has 4,000 staff.

Douglas Wilkins, director of IT infrastructure at FHI 360, said: “As a non-profit organisation, we work on educational and public health issues and must comply with privacy regulations related to the U.S. federal government. Not only did Office 365 have privacy features in line with our requirements, but we know where our data is stored – it’s essential for us to have control and set parameters on who views it. That was not possible with Google.”

In a bid to make it enterprise offering more attractive to customers, Google has this week increased the amount of Apps storage on offer to 30GB.

SAP has jumped into the mobile security space with the launch of Mobile Secure software, designed to secure customers accessing their business applications from mobile devices.

Mobile Secure will also be offered as a software as a service (SaaS) edition, which will be integrated with the firm’s mobile device management cloud software Afaria to help businesses manage multiple mobile devices. The most recent cloud edition of Afaria is bundled with analytic dashboards from SAP’s business intelligence Business Objects portfolio to give customers insight into device compliance usage.

SAP said Mobile Secure will work on today’s most popular devices including iOS, Windows and Android operating systems.

SAP president of technology solutions and the mobile division Sanjay Poonen said the increasing number of mobile operating systems and the influx of bring-your-own device (BYOD) programmes for employees has meant enterprise-level security is a priority for many companies.

“With SAP Mobile Secure, we want to make it easy for CIOs to bring comprehensive mobile security to all layers of their mobile infrastructure at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) possible,” he said. “The SAP Mobile Secure solution portfolio is integrated with the SAP Mobile Platform, allowing developers to build in security at the right time. SAP Mobile Secure is designed to scale to millions of devices.”

The Mobile Secure software will allow customers to quickly add security and usage policies to iOS and Android apps without having to write any code. Such capabilities are due to a partnership SAP has secured with mobile security firm Mocana, which will see the firm resell Mocana’s Mobile App Protection software as part of the SAP Mobile Secure offering.

SAP has had recent success with its mobile offering, inking a deal with CA Technologies for the software management firm to licence Afaria for mobile device management.

SAP is this week holding its annual Sapphire US event in Orlando, which V3 will be attending.

Last week SAP made a bold move in both its big data and strategy, announcing that its HANA database platform would be offered as an enterprise cloud service. The HANA Enterprise Cloud will allow users to analyse data from SAP Business Suite applications in the cloud. SAP said that the HANA as a cloud service will reduce the cost for customers wanting to perform big data analytics, as well as offering them increased flexibility.

HP has updated several of its automation lines in a bid to improve IT and service management for customers.

The company said that it would be adding new capabilities and features to its Server Automation, Operations Orchestrator, Database and Middleware Automation, and Cloud Service Automation lines. The updates will include new components for managing virtualised servers as well as improved components for the distribution of patching. Additionally, the company will release tools for automating database and middleware.

A fourth platform, Cloud Service Automation, will allow administrators to automate day-to-day tasks associated with running cloud services.

Manoj Raisinghani, senior director of worldwide product marketing for HP cloud automation software and software as a service (SaaS), told V3 that the aim of the platform was to give administrators a single management system for running automation practices and policies.

“IT has started to become a broker of services. There needs to be consistency in the way IT is driving tools to the market,” he said.

Likewise, the update of the Server Automation platform is designed to help companies cope with the heightened demand for server virtualisation and provisioning as well as server lifecycle management. By helping to streamline many of the day-to-day processes associated with server management, HP aims to help administrators better handle growing demand.

“They are taking a 30 to 40 percent virtualisation and going to 80 to 90,” Raisinghani explained. “And the amount of time they are giving themselves is six months to one year.”

Microsoft has added integration for Google’s Chat platform into Outlook.com, in a rare co-operative effort between two firms vying for search and web application dominance.

Redmond said on Tuesday that it would be allowing users to access Google Chat directly from their Outlook.com and SkyDrive pages. The platform will use the OAuth syncing protocol to connect with Google Chat and pull contact information to the Microsoft communications platform.

Once synced, users will be able to connect with and message friends on Google Chat through their Outlook.com homepages.

The move marks a rarely-seen gesture of co-operation between what has become one of the web’s most heated corporate rivalries. With Microsoft’s move into the search market with Bing and cloud application space with Office 365, the two firms find themselves directly competing on platforms ranging from communications apps to productivity suites.

That competition has been heated in the past, and Microsoft’s ‘Scroogled’ campaign essentially accused Google of selling off user data wholesale to third-party advertisers.

According to Microsoft, however, the Google Chat integration was less about outreach to Google than an effort to accommodate new users who have fled Gmail for Outlook.com. In a company blog post, Microsoft’s group program manager for connected services Douglas Pearce said that the company has similar integration components with other social networking platforms.

“You see this in the People experience, where you connect to your contact lists from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more,” he explained. “And you can already chat with your Facebook and Skype friends. But we heard that some of you who switched over from Gmail still want to chat with friends stuck on Gmail.”

The city of Boston has announced that it will ditch Microsoft’s communication software by moving its school and government workers to Google Apps.

Boston’s chief operating officer Bill Oates says the move will allow the city to modernise and reduce total overhead. However, Microsoft representatives say the switch will leave Boston with a poorly secured infrastructure.

“This decision represents an important step forward for the City,” said Oates.

“We want to equip all city employees with easy-to-use tools that allow them be more productive and innovative in their jobs, as well as a system that can scale to keep up with the city’s demands.”

The switch to Google will see Boston city workers start to use Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, and Docs. Workers will be migrated from previous on-site solutions such as Microsoft Exchange and Symantec Vault.

City officials predict that the move to Google’s cloud will reduce annual expenses by over 30 percent. The city’s current Microsoft services cost Boston an average of $8.25 per user each month.

However, Microsoft said the decision to go with Google could lead to future security and privacy concerns.

“We believe the citizens of Boston deserve cloud productivity tools that protect the security and privacy of their data,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement sent into V3.

“Google’s investments in these areas are inadequate and they lack the proper protections most organizations require.”

Microsoft’s harsh words continue its lengthy PR battle with the search giant. Last Month, Redmond went after Google Apps. During one of its ‘Scroogled’ ad campaigns, the firm accused its competitor of sharing user’s personal information with developers.

Earlier this year, Microsoft also shot barbs at Gmail. Last February, Microsoft accused Google of skimming through its users email in a bid to offer up improved targeted ads.

V3 contacted Google for a statement on the news. However, the search giant had no comment at the time of publication.

While businesses are increasingly taking to the public cloud in an effort to lower costs, Transport for London (TfL) has said it has no plans to follow suit.

In an interview with V3, TfL chief information officer Steve Townsend said moving IT services or infrastructure to the public cloud was strictly off the IT agenda for the foreseeable future.

“The public cloud is not something we’re considering,” said Townsend. “When you want the public cloud to have certain limitations, then the service becomes less flexible and there is more cost associated with it.”

Townsend suggested that complying with data regulations would mean that opting for a cloud service would not cut costs for TfL.

“When I have conversations with public cloud providers, I find that I need to know, for instance, where congestion charging data is being stored, how it is backed up and who has access to it. Often then the cost becomes prohibitive as you are essentially turning what is a public cloud back into a prohibitive private cloud,” he said.

However Townsend said TfL is making increasing use of the private cloud within its IT infrastructure. “There is definitely room for cloud-based services in the organisation. We are already using the Microsoft Azure platform for predictive services,” he noted.

“We provision train data so [outside] developers can take it and create apps that tell people when the next train is. We provision that data through the cloud so developers can easily reuse it.”

Townsend also spoke to V3 about TfL’s increasing use of big data analytics to improve transport services for Londoners. “TfL has always held the view that data is valuable but it has not always been called big data. Since the Olympic Games, we have been using big data more than ever before to look at how we can further improve business processes,” he said.

For example Townsend said analysing past data on escalator upgrades in tube and train stations may mean TfL can carry out similar projects in the future more efficiently, without the need for closing whole stations for long periods of time.

Townsend also said TfL is using big data analytics in order to run more trains per hour. “Train lines used to run 25 trains per hour as standard but now some lines, like the Jubilee and Victoria, are running 30 trains per hour,” he explained.

“Increasing the number of trains is a complex process and we have to analyse a wide range of data from dispatches information, to the number of drivers we have available on one day, to the maintenance work there is planned. Also too many trains per hour can mean the trains cannot move as fast, so this correlation also has to be analysed.

“We know we have to move more people around London on a daily basis. As we continue to upgrade, we will further use big data techniques to increase the trains per hour.”