The Home Office’s chief technology officer Denise McDonagh has received a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list for her services to the IT world, such as leading the G-Cloud framework, despite numerous issues plaguing the system since its inception.

McDonagh has worked in the civil service for over 25 years, with IT projects ranging from DEFRA to the Home Office, and taking charge of IT renovation projects with budgets in excess of £100 million. Her 2009 Home Office “extend and blend” programme reportedly removed £100 million of unnecessary costs over the duration of multiple IT contracts.

However, the G-Cloud project has come under fire in recent months, most recently with the government admitting that the service was still ‘underused’ despite having been available for more than a year and spending on the project only reaching £22m, a tiny amount in government spending terms. She stepped down from the role last month, but remains the chief technology officer for the Home Office.

The scheme, which is designed to streamline the process of procuring IT services to public sector bodies through an online shop known as CloudStore, suffered at the hands of excessive red tape and lack of clarity among government departments.

Despite these roadblocks, McDonagh said in February that a change it attitude was required before G-Cloud can truly take off: “The move to purchasing IT services as a commodity requires a culture shift for the public sector that won’t happen overnight,” she insisted.

McDonagh will deliver a keynote entitled ‘It’s Only Just Begun’ at tomorrow’s ‘Think G-Cloud’ event in London. V3 contacted McDonagh and the Home Office for comment on the appointment but had received no reply at the time of publication.

Microsoft has added much-needed multi-factor authentication to its Windows Azure cloud computing platform, enabling organisations to secure access to any Azure services used by workers, partners and customers.

Available now, Active Authentication enables multi-factor authentication for Windows Azure Active Directory identities, the cloud-based service that provides identity and access capabilities for applications and other resources on Windows Azure itself.

Active Authentication requires users to authenticate themselves at sign in using an app on their mobile device or via an automated phone call or text message. This extra step helps prevent unauthorised access to data and applications in the cloud, Microsoft said.

The service is based on technology Microsoft gained from last year’s acquisition of PhoneFactor, a firm specialising in phone-based authentication.

Active Authentication can be used to secure access to Office 365, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, Dynamics CRM Online. There is also an Active Authentication SDK that customers can use to build multi-factor authentication into custom applications, Microsoft said.

Microsoft said that Azure customers can simply add the service to their Windows Azure AD tenant to enable it, after which users can enroll their own phone numbers and set authentication preferences during the standard sign in process.

Customers can choose to license Active Authentication based on a payment for each authentication, or on a per-user per-month basis.

The service is currently available as a preview, with pricing set at $1 per user per month, or $1 for every 10 authentications. Microsoft said it anticipated that pricing on general availability will be about double this amount. The firm declined to give a date for when it is expected to hit general availability.

LAS VEGAS: The chief information officer of 20th Century Fox, John Herbert, has touted HP’s converged cloud services as a key tool powering the movie-making machine.

Herbert said the hybrid cloud approach has helped the entertainment company overcome traditional core complexities in the movie making industry’s business model, during a talk at HP Discover in Las Vegas.

“[In the past] we, like many IT organisations, worked from a traditional point of view when supporting the business’s professional endeavours, so when running purchasing processes or ordering equipment it would be four to five weeks before we’d actually started offering any value proposition for the business,” he said.

“For us first and foremost it’s all about speed to market, we have to be able to run as fast as the business. Because of this we’re literally looking at shifting from a five-week window down to 15 minutes.”

Herbert highlighted the removal of physical obstacles, like tape movie distribution processes, as a key example of how cloud computing had helped streamline Fox’s business operations. “If you look at something like international TV distribution, it hasn’t been that many years since we were really focused on a physical business that was pushing our products out via tapes,” he said.

“Since then, in a short window we completely transformed that aspect of the business. We moved from tape distribution to a completely digital content model around the world.”

Despite the positive benefits of the cloud, Herbert said security concerns regarding Fox’s intellectual property makes a wholly open approach unworkable. “One of the things we really have to balance is the fact that content is our business, so it’s absolutely critical we have the right security in place to protect our assets while still driving efficiency throughout the business,” he said.

Herbert said Fox’s need to reap the power benefits of the open cloud for certain business processes combined with its need to protect its IP is a key reason it chose HP’s hybrid approach. “At 20th Century we’ve used public cloud for the last three years and have really seen the benefit of it, but now the approach we’re taking with our converged cloud strategy is all about choice,” he said. “It allows us to expand when appropriate to leverage the public cloud whenever there’s a specific case we’re trying to solve.”

The Fox chief added that the approach has also helped the IT department radically reduce its operation costs. “The foundation cost is around the data centre. There’s power and space, it’s all about the data centre and one of the things we’re really excited about is the choice that we have with this converged cloud solution to reduce our data centre footprint and reap tremendous cost reductions and help the bottom line across all our businesses,” he said.

Herbert’s comments mirror those of HP chief executive officer Meg Whitman, who listed the cost of running traditional data centres as a key challenge facing modern enterprise during her Discover keynote address.

A startup company is borrowing the best minds of Cisco and Tandberg to create a revolutionary videoconferecing platform capable of branching across multiple devices and platforms.

Based in Oslo with offices in London and New York, Pexip is looking to develop a software-based platform that can run on both commodity hardware and virtual instances to solve scalability problems, which have plagued videoconferencing platforms in the past.

Simen Teigre, chif executive and co-founder of the firm, told V3 that the Pexip platform will rely on a software system to scale hardware for traffic levels and distribute traffic through regional offices. In doing so, the company believes it can overcome the traffic problems that have affected large-scale videocasting and conferencing systems.

“The nature of bringing people together on video requires a lot of processing and typically you have done that on hardware,” Teigre explained. “The problem is you can’t really scale that, if you deploy video to hundreds of users you will have massive bandwidth challenges.”

To meet those challenges, Pexip is proposing a system that can dynamically scale hardware resources to meet the needs of each locale, employing branch office hardware as satellite broadcasting systems. Additionally, the system’s policy of transferring licences between systems will allow multiple offices to share a single subscription, effectively moving coverage around the globe as time zones and work hours shift.

The firm, which traces its roots back to the pre-acquisition days of Tandberg, is making healthy use of local talent in London. Teigre said that the company specifically chose the city for its branch office due to a pocket of world-class engineering talent in the telecommunications field. Dating back to the days of its Ridgeway Systems, the company has fostered a strong presence in London.

“These were some of the most capable engineers that we could find in videoconferencing software,” said Teigre. “It grew into a solid team and community of engineers that were based out there.”

Red Hat is extending its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform into the cloud space with the release of an OpenStack-based cloud computing service.

The service will combine the OpenStack cloud platform with the RHEL environment, allowing for OpenStack and Red Hat’s Linux build to operate together. In doing so, Red Hat is aiming to give developers and administrators a single platform for hybrid cloud deployments.

Red Hat believes that the combination of RHEL and OpenStack will provide a single server platform that can run on anything from on-premise datacentres to private cloud deployments and a public cloud service, simplifying the process of migrating deployments and porting applications between cloud and on-premise environments.

“The key element of this is from physical systems to purely virtualised machine and now the cloud,” said Red Hat president of products and technologies Paul Cormier.

“It is the ability to have that application consistency across those footprints.”

To help further advance the open cloud platform, Red Hat is launching a service known as Cloud Infrastructure. Designed to help firms move from on-premise datacentres to hybrid and public cloud deployments, the service will combine RHEL Server and OpenStack with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and CloudForms management platforms, creating a single service for managing and transitioning datacentres.

“Our goal with is to span the datacentre with these prods and platforms so we can support the same applications with the same consistencey across bare metal to a hybrid cloud and a public cloud,” said Cormier.

Red Hat said that both the cloud services would be reaching general availability to customers and service providers by July.

Additionally, the company unveiled an update for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation platform. In addition to performance and management enhancements, the update will see the introduction of a third party plug-in platform and the addition of live storage migrations which will allow administrators to move servers without disrupting availability.

LAS VEGAS: Enterprises need new super-powered IT solutions to deal with the evolved cloud, mobility, big data and security challenges facing them, according to HP chief executive officer Meg Whitman.

During her keynote at HP Discover in Las Vegas, Whitman cited the increased cost of running traditional data centres as proof that traditional IT solutions are no longer sufficiently powerful for enterprise-level businesses.

“Thinking about the data centre, everyone knows the path that we are on is simply not sustainable – not in terms of space, in terms of energy or in terms of cost. For example, large cloud and web-based services will conservatively have an install base of eight to 10 million servers over the next three years,” she said.

“The space that these servers will occupy will be the equivalent of 200 football fields and these data centres will span the length of Manhattan and to build them will cost anywhere between $10bn and $20bn. That’s not including the cost of operating in a world that is facing asymmetrical and relentless security threats. Since 2006 threats against US government systems alone rose 680 percent. Today security is a board-level agenda.”

Whitman said the need for a change in the way businesses run data centres is indicative of a wider shift in the IT industry. “IT is no longer just about keeping the computers running, it’s now a critical strategic factor determining whether an organisation is a winner or a loser in the marketplace. Driving this huge shift is the rise in cloud, mobility, big data and security,” she said.

“Think about it: on any given day the world posts one billion pieces of content to Facebook, generates over 200 million Tweets and creates information using cameras, sensors, GPS-enabled devices and transaction systems. For example did you know that Walmart alone processes over one million transactions every hour and this translates to over 2.5 exabytes of new data every single day,” she said.

Whitman said despite the evolving nature of the new challenges, HP is already working to create new super-powered services to help face the problem. “In many cases these issues are new and they’re evolving all the time, we get that. We understand you [IT workers] may go to work feeling like Clark Kent, but when you arrive on the scene people expect Superman,” she explained.

“We get what you’re going through and part of our job at HP is to get you wearing a red cape. We’re here to help you be the hero, by delivering the services and perspective you need to stay afloat and stay ahead and stay on top. We do this every day for customers around the world.”

Whitman highlighted HP’s recently unveiled Moonshot servers as proof of her bold claim. “HP’s strategy is to provide solutions for the new style of IT. We are the only company with the breadth and depth of innovative products and services to help businesses succeed in this new reality,” she said.

“Look at our new Moonshot server system, this is revolutionary innovation. With Moonshot you can reduce power consumption by 89 percent and the footprint of those servers by 80 percent and best of all they cost 77 percent less than traditional servers.”

Moonshot servers are one of several new innovative products launched by HP to deal with the new IT challenges facing business. Other key innovations include the launch of HP’s new Haven cloud platform. Haven was unveiled on Tuesday and is designed to offer businesses unprecedented big data analytics powers.

Red Hat has announced commercial availability of its OpenShift Online platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud computing offering, enabling customers to develop and operate cloud-based applications with full commercial support from Red Hat and additional resources.

OpenShift Online, which has been available as a developer preview since 2011, is an enterprise-class PaaS public cloud for development and hosting applications and services.

The platform is built upon Red Hat’s OpenShift Origin open-source project and is being delivered from Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure. However, Red Hat is at pains to point out that it is not competing against Amazon; its closest rival is in fact Microsoft’s Windows Azure service.

Like Azure, OpenShift Online is designed to automate the provisioning, management and scaling of application resources so developers can focus on producing the code to run their project. It supports multiple languages including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js and Perl, according to Red Hat.

With commercial availability, Red Hat is introducing a new support tier, the Silver Plan. This will run alongside the existing Free Plan tier already available to customers who have been part of the OpenShift Online preview.

The Silver Plan adds customer service, technical support, higher scaling, additional storage, and more, according to Red Hat. It is available in North America immediately, with pricing starting at just $20 (£13) per month. European customers will get access from next week, with payment options in Euros, Red Hat said.

That $20 per month gives users 3 small ‘Gears’ included (application containers providing CPU, memory and storage), scalable up to 16 Gears; a choice of Small (512MB RAM) or Medium (1GB RAM) Gears; up to 6GB of file system storage per Gear; and Red Hat Technical Support.

Ashesh Badani, Red Hat general manager for Cloud and OpenShift, said: “As PaaS matures, enterprise developers want world class support so they can focus less on system administration and more on coding.”

The move follows Red Hat’s announcement last year of OpenShift Enterprise, a version of the platform designed for deployment by a customer in a private or public cloud.

Salesforce.com has ratcheted up its rivalry with Oracle by appointing the database giant’s former head of sales, Keith Block, who had left the firm under a cloud after conversations containing a scathing attack on its management came to light.

The two firms have increasingly come to blows, with former Oracle exec and now Salesforce chairman and chief executive, Marc Benioff, once blacklisted from the Oracle OpenWorld trade show.

“We are thrilled to welcome Keith to Salesforce.com,” said Benioff. “His exceptional track record leading sales, consulting and engineering teams makes him a powerful addition to our world-class distribution and leadership team.”

Block spent 26 years at Oracle, rising to head of US sales. But perhaps his most notable contribution there came as a result of a lawsuit between Oracle and HP, in a spat over support for Itanium.

HP published emails obtained as part of the e-discovery process in which Block dismissed Oracle’s president Mark Hurd [pdf] as making “lot’s [sic] of noise, not much results”. Block also described the hardware that Oracle had acquired as part of its $7.4bn Sun deal, as a “dog”.

Block left Oracle shortly after the comments came to light. At Salesforce, Block will lead the company’s global sales, customer support and consulting services organisations. He has also gained a seat on the company’s board of directors.

Last year, Oracle boss Larry Ellison claimed Benioff only got the idea to set up Salesforce.com after listening in on a meeting with Evan Goldberg about setting up an enterprise resource planning business on the internet. That firm went on to become NetSuite.

For his part, Benioff has often taunted his former boss for the glacial pace at which the firm has adopted cloud technology.

Microsoft has been bitten by the cloud computing bug in a major way. You only have to look at its latest announcements from the TechEd conference in New Orleans this week to see that the firm is pushing cloud as the way forward for delivering enterprise IT services.

Of course, the tech giant isn’t the only vendor to see the advantages of cloud and to start positioning itself to be the provider of choice. Amazon has been delivering its public infrastructure as a service (Iaas) to anyone willing to pay for the best part of a decade, while VMware has evolved its server virtualisation software into a private cloud platform used in many enterprise data centres.

But the big target for the corporate market is the hybrid cloud, the nexus between both the private and public cloud spheres. Using a hybrid cloud approach, organisations should be able to extend their infrastructure out to that of a service provider and move workloads from their own private domain to the public one as required.

The idea behind the hybrid cloud is that organisations can quickly expand their compute resources using pay-per-use cloud services if necessary, in order to meet a spike in demand. Alternatively, they may take the decision to save money by using the public cloud to implement any new infrastructure instead of building and owning it themselves.

However, it has eventually dawned on many of the cloud computing players that this scenario will be much easier and simpler if the same technology is in use in both the private cloud and the public cloud. This has sparked a kind of race to deliver the necessary tools and services to make a successful hybrid cloud strategy, but also to draw as many partners and customers as possible.

On the face of it, Microsoft would seem to have a huge advantage here. Its server platform is found in almost every enterprise that exists, and its System Center management suite had evolved with its last iteration into a platform capable of corralling those servers into a private cloud.

At the same time, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, running atop its own Windows Server 2012 platform, has gained Iaas capabilities. The software giant has made it possible for customers to link any public cloud infrastructure to their corporate domain, enabling it to be managed as if it were in their own data centre.

In the year and a bit since the G-Cloud was launched the government has made great overtures about the fact it would open up the exciting world of government IT procurement to small and medium-sized firms.

This is a lofty ideal and an important one, as for too long the big firms have had a complete monopoly on those making the buying decisions in the public sector, possibly because everyone is so scared of making a screw up they stick with the tried and trusted suppliers.

Nothing wrong with that per se, but when you’re trying to overhaul government IT for the modern age while driving down costs, the ability to turn to small, nimble and cheap, companies is important, and helps to energise digital services within government.

However, while the G-Cloud was meant to address this issue and give IT buyers the chance to purchase services with confidence, it appears there is a long way to go to change the mindset of the public sector.

Data from the Cabinet Office unearthed by V3 shows that of the £4m spend on the G-Cloud in April, one third went to the most iconic of giant IT companies, IBM, which secured deals totaling £1.3m.

The Home Office was the one signing off the deals, and it must pain Cabinet Officer minister Francis Maude – who admits the service is ‘underused’ – that his colleagues down the road are ignoring the pleas to embrace SMEs and are instead sticking with the old monopoly suppliers like Big Blue.

It’s not IBM’s fault, and it may well be that its services were best suited to the government’s needs, but it doesn’t paint a very welcoming picture for small firms trying to boost their balance sheets when they see US giants hoovering up major contracts yet again.

05 Jun 2013