Alibaba Cloud Looks for Growth Outside of China, and Indonesia Is a Good Target

S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

• Alibaba Cloud is gaining a stronger foothold in Indonesia with its second data centre, a growing partnership ecosystem and an initiative to support start-ups to develop their business through a cloud-native approach.
• Alibaba needs to grow its international presence, and it is establishing an early presence in markets such as Indonesia where competitors do not yet have a local presence.

Alibaba Cloud has launched a second data centre in Indonesia after launching the first data centre 10 months earlier. The second data centre enables Alibaba Cloud to increase capacity, provide higher availability and improve disaster recovery capabilities. The company also launched the Internet Champion Global Accelerator Program to support the growth of start-ups and local talents. The program will provide training, mentorship and venture capital opportunities to enterprises and professional services. The program is launching in Jakarta, and it will be extended to Bali in January 2019, as well as other global markets in the future. This is a strategic move since start-ups and SMEs in general are more ready to adopt a cloud-native approach and can become heavy cloud users as they scale up.

Social Media Roasts Apple over Its Subpar Response to the FacePalm Bug

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Reports surfaced that Apple ignored multiple efforts from an Arizona lawyer to alert the company that her teenage son had uncovered a bug which allows one FaceTime user to spy on another.
• Twitter users blasted Apple for ignoring the lawyer’s attempts and then being slow to disable the affected feature and issue a fix.

News that Apple seemingly ignored repeated reports for a week that its popular FaceTime video app had an alarming privacy-invading bug is going viral on social media. Twitter users questioned whether Apple was ignoring calls to investigate a FaceTime group chat bug that allows the initial caller to listen on the call recipient even if the person on the receiving end didn’t pick up, or if the company might have been surreptitiously working on a fix before notifying users about the embarrassing flaw.

SDN and the Future of Networking

Joel Stradling – Research Director, Business Network and IT Services

Summary Bullets:

• Demands of innovative collaborative communications and cloud-native applications are placing tremendous pressure on legacy WANs.

• As companies virtualize more and more IT functions and migrate apps to private and public clouds, the resulting network looks very different to legacy static and hub-and-spoke network configurations.

• Corporate networks need to evolve to support greater automation, more self-serve, and better operational simplicity and agility.

• New SD-WAN services are the key to effective control and management of network traffic within disruptive technology domains; such as cloud-native migration, 5G, IoT, big data analytics, augmented reality, and machine learning.

• The new era is identified by networks being applications-led; as opposed to being connectivity-led.

Introduction

A panel of industry thought leaders gathered at the Vodafone Global HQ in Newbury on October 3, 2018 to address the following questions:

• What does the future of networking look like?

• How will how SD-WANs will make an impact on corporate networks?

• What are the opportunities and challenges in the industry for SD-WAN technology?

The following blog summarizes the main insights and discussion highlights that emerged during the panel debate.

Old Making Way for the New

The majority of existing corporate WANs in use throughout the business world are based on IP/MPLS technologies. In the past several years there has been a strong desire on the part of enterprise buyers of IT and network systems to also leverage Internet VPN, in parallel with private IP VPN services, to take advantage of a far lower cost-base for non-critical corporate data traffic.

Reactive Microservices Breed Compelling New Reactive Networking Protocol RSocket

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• Reactive microservices will play a key role in furthering adoption of microservices in 2019.
• Important OSS technologies will further this mission, including RSocket.

GlobalData’s recent report on application platforms predictions for 2019 anticipates a two- to three-year delay for microservices application adoption among enterprise DevOps teams (please see: “Microservices, Serverless Apps Won’t Take Off in 2019, but Kubernetes Importance Is Elevated,” December 18, 2018). Delays are expected for the emerging app development architecture aimed at helping companies fulfill business transformations and move apps and systems to the cloud, due to complex networking implications around cloud-native architectures. Despite delays, there are promising open source software (OSS) technologies coming to light this year which offer the most likely scenario for microservices adoption among enterprise DevOps groups.

Need a Ride? Call a Self-Driving Taxi!

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Ford announced plans for self-driving taxis and delivery services; it expects to launch its fleet in Washington, D.C. in 2021.
• Ford is one of many companies around the globe that is developing commercial autonomous vehicles.

Soon, if you need a ride to the airport, to the pub, or just around town to run errands, you’ll have another decision to make. Do you hop in a cab? Request an Uber? Or, perhaps… you take a self-driving taxi. What just a few years ago seemed like futuristic technology right out of a sci-fi movie will be here before you know it.

The New Wave of Telecoms: How Open RAN May Cause Major Vendor Shakeups

M. Rogers

Summary Bullets:

• Rakuten has selected Nokia and Altiostar to build its RAN network, two members of the Open RAN Alliance, to have more flexibility in its network.
• Open RAN initiatives will likely cause a shift in the RAN vendor landscape with new faces like startups and non-traditional RAN vendors gunning for market share.

During its Q3 results update, Japanese Internet giant Rakuten announced the list of vendors which will supply equipment for its mobile network. Nokia and Altisostar were selected for the RAN portion.