Tag Archive for Microsoft

| March 1, 2019
Comments Off on VMWare Crossing the Streams

VMWare Crossing the Streams

The Ghostbusters warned us. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) warned us not to cross the streams. You should not cross the streams because as Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) explained it would cause total protonic reversal. Despite the warning, VMware is crossing the streams.VMWare Crossing the Streams

Rumors have it that Dell/EMC/VMware and Microsoft (MSFT) are crossing their streams with a VMware Cloud NSX on Microsoft Azure partnership could be coming soon.

VMware NSXVMware’s (VMW) multi-cloud approach combines the core VMware technology stack with services delivered through partnerships with other service providers including Amazon (AMZN) Amazon Web Services (AWS) Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. As well as an emerging development environment centered on the open source Kubernetes container orchestrator. Chennele2e hypothesizes,

The two companies are jointly developing software that will let their customers more easily run computing jobs, which rely on VMware software, inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service … could be announced … in the coming weeks … move computing chores from their own private data centers, where VMware’s software is a critical ingredient, to Microsoft’s “public” cloud service.

In the past, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger described a range of cross-platform work — including:

  • Azure: NSX and VDI with more VMware management products for Azure are on the way.
  • Google Cloud Platform: VMware has partnered with Google and Kubernetes. Also, Android- and  Chromebook-related offerings.

As the slide below shows, the deal with Microsoft links VMware to most of the enterprise VM’s in the cloud. What impact will the VMware-Microsoft deal impact the VMware-AWS relationship? Will AWS continue to enjoy “most favored nation” status in VMware’s public cloud partner ecosystem?

The number of virtual machines in the cloud - Enterprise based on Right Scale estimates

The Redmond Channel Partner points out that former VMware executive Ray Blanchard, who was in charge of the VMware partnership with AWS joined Microsoft a year ago.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| January 19, 2019
Comments Off on Zix Buys AppRiver – Bolsters Email Security

Zix Buys AppRiver – Bolsters Email Security

Zix Buys AppRiver - Bolsters Email SecurityCompetition in the email security market is intense. Most of the major endpoint security companies, Barracuda, Cisco (CSCO) Fortinet (FTNT), Mimecast (MIME), and Proofpoint (PFPT), have moved into email security — emphasizing training services to mitigate rising phishing threats. Plus, Microsoft (MSFT) has pushed into email security services that wrap around its core business productivity software Office 365.

email securityThe global email security market is expected to reach $18 billion by 2023, expanding at 22% from 2016, this report asserts. This growth has drawn the attention of venture capitalists. The latest VC deal is unique in that the smaller company is buying the larger firm.

Publicly traded Zix (ZIXI) is acquiring AppRiver for $275 million in cash. Zix is a Dallas-based maker of email archiving and security products including ZixMail which manages the key management to provide end-to-end email encryption that protects messages and attachments.

Zix is acquiring AppRiver AppRiver is a privately held Florida-based MSP-friendly cybersecurity and Microsoft Office 365 cloud solutions provider specialist. AppRiver, founded in 2002, supports more than 60,000 companies globally in 2019.

Zix and AppRiver each have about 260 employees. As part of the M&A plan, Zix expects to generate about $8 million in cost synergies — which typically means that layoffs are coming. AppRiver CEO Michael Murdoch is exiting the combined firm. Zix CEO David Wagner would not rule out further job cuts.

cost synergiesCEO Wagner has lined up financial backers to help finance the AppRiver deal. Among the financial players are:

True Wind Capital will make a $100 million equity investment with the closing of the AppRiver acquisition.

SunTrust Bank and KeyBanc Capital Markets committed to a new five-year $175 million term loan and a $25 million revolving credit line.

The combined company, known as Zix, expects to generate roughly $200 – $207 million in annual recurring revenue in fiscal 2019, up 11% – 15% year over year. The deal is expected to close by March 31, 2019. Bu purchasing AppRiver, the new Zix will grow its channel from about 400 to 4,000 partners and its customer base will go from 20,000 to 60,000.

AppRiver is no stranger to acquisitions as it worked to position itself as a one-stop-shop for commercial cybersecurity services.

In October 2017, VC firm Marlin Equity Partners purchased a majority stake in AppRiver with intention of expanding its global footprint.

In March 2018, AppRiver acquired Canadian company Roaring Penguin for its anti-spam and machine learning technologies. In October of 2018, AppRiver acquired Total Defense, a provider of subscription-based endpoint security for consumers and small businesses.

rb-

The last three places I have worked were AppRiver or Zix shops. It makes sense email is the gateway to the cloud for many firms. Email is mission-critical and complicated to secure so it gets moved to the cloud.

My experience with both firms was OK. We were an earlier adopter of hosted Exchange from AppRiver and then at a re-seller. In keeping with industry trends, my current employer moved from Zix as we moved to O365, maybe this deal is a year too late.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| December 10, 2018
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Please Take Lotus Notes

Please Take Lotus NotesIn a move to free up some cash and make room for its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Inc. (RHT), IBM (IBM) is selling off its enterprise software business for $1.8 billion to HCL Technologies.

Please Take NotesHCL Technologies is global services company valued at $8 billion. India-based HCL operates out of 43 countries, serving the financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, media, publishing, entertainment, retail, and other industries.

Lotus Notes

The sale includes most of IBM’s enterprise business, including Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration software, network management software Tivoli, and other titles. Lotus Notes was developed by Mitch Kapor in 1989 and was a pioneering enterprise software tool that swept the market with features such as email and collaboration workspaces, that we now take for granted.

Lotus 1-2-3 for DOSLotus, founded in 1982, rose to fame in 1983 with the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which drove the popularity of freshly minted IBM PC. IBM took over Lotus for the then astounding sum of $3.52 billion. IBM looked to the Lotus acquisition to change its white-shirt-and-tie culture to embrace the MTV age and the new Internet.

Lotus Notes and Domino ranked among the top client-server groupware and email systems in the 1990s, competing head-on against Microsoft Exchange. While Microsoft successfully migrated Exchange to Office 365 in the cloud, Notes and Domino largely missed the cloud era.

Lotus NotesBig Blue acquired Tivoli for $743 million in 1996. It ranked among the leading IT management software providers, competing against CA Technologies, BMC, and HP in the 1990s and early 2000s. Each of those companies stumbled in recent years — opening the door for ServiceNow to disrupt major portions of the market.

The IBM world-view

The HCL deal highlights IBM’s failure to navigate the shift from client-server to SaaS. Lotus Notes stayed a client-server system and lost business to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Now that the business has been lost, IBM is moving in a different direction. Older software like Lotus Notes and Domino don’t really play a role in the new IBM world-view. One IBM solution provider told CRN, “I can understand getting rid of Lotus Notes and Domino Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps are killing the hell out of Lotus Notes. ”

In addition to Lotus Notes, Domino, and Tivoli, the IBM Software asset sale to HCL includes:

  • IBM Appscan, a security-focused application for identifying and managing vulnerabilities in mission-critical applications;
  • IBM BigFix endpoint management and security software;
  • IBM Unica, a cloud-based enterprise marketing automation software; and
  • IBM WebSphere Commerce, an omnichannel commerce platform for B2C and B2B organizations.

rb-

While I am the PM on our move off of Notes to SaaS products like O365, every once in a while I find myself saying that Notes worked well. But then I remember that it is overly complex and proprietary. The client software is huge and bloated and lacks a simple client.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| December 7, 2018
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IPv4 Update

IPv4 UpdateThe IPocalypse struck the United States in 2015 and three years later – nobody cares. The end of IPv4 was going to mean the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) takes over the world. Well, recent updates say IPv4 is still the dominant protocol on the Internet.

IPv4 number trading between private partiesIPv4 number trading between private parties has proved to be an effective means of extending the life of IPv4 by redistributing previously allocated IPv4 numbers. Trading between private parties is very active in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific regions. This has allowed IPv4 network operators to support and extend their IP networks with excess unused supply through the IPv4 market.

Janine Goodman, Vice President and co-founder of Avenue4 LLC., a Washington DC-based IPv4 broker and advisory firm posted a 2018 Q3 update on the IPv4 market for CircleID. In the update, the author noted that during Q3 of 2018 there is still a voracious appetite for IPv4 numbers – 18 million IPv4 numbers were transferred in the quarter. There were nearly 42 million IPv4 addresses changing hands in the 2018 year to date, a 160% jump compared to 2017

will not hit the 50% mark until sometime in 2020The article states that IPv6 adoption in the U.S. (based on Google user stats) fell after the beginning of the year and has yet to recover. Ms.Goodman cites predictive models which suggest that U.S. IPv6 adoption will not hit the 50% mark until sometime in 2020. Globally, IPv6 adoption has been slow, peaking at 21.5% during weekdays and 25% during weekends. The data from Avenue4 confirms that IPv4 continues to be the dominant Internet protocol.

For those firms purchasing IPv4 addresses, the most common IP block size is the /24 (256 addresses), followed by the /16 block (65,536 numbers). Nearly 90% of those /16 blocks were transferred to large block buyers. The /17 (32,768 addresses) and /18 (16,384 addresses) are also popular as large block buyers are increasingly willing to accept a collection of smaller non-contiguous ranges from sellers.

prices are being driven up by fierce competitionBlock prices will rise over the next 6-12 months. The article reports that most block sizes are north of $17.00 / number with larger blocks reaching and occasionally exceeding $20.00 / number. Avenue4 says fierce competition among large block buyers is driving unit prices up. Until this demand is met, pricing should continue to escalate. IPv4 prices were $11.25 / address when I first wrote about Microsoft’s purchase of Nortel’s IPv4 addresses in 2011.

rb-

The switch to IPv6 is being slowed by two factors. The first is network address translation (NAT) which has become better understood and implemented. The other is the evolution of the buying and selling of IPv4 addresses, led by firms like Avenue4 and IPv4 Brokers.

One of the knocks against moving to IPv6 is CAPEX and OPEX costs. But neither really holds water anymore. The data from Avenue4 says that firms are willing to pay over $1.3 million for a \16 block. Firms could leverage $1.3 million to update to IPv6.  IPv6 is fully built into modern operating systems and networking hardware. Buy the right devices during your regular update cycles.

Microsoft (MSFT) recently decided to embark on the tricky transition from IPv6 and IPv4 or ‘dual stack’ to IPv6-only, which Microsoft believes will solve its problems with IPv4 shortages and enable simpler network management.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 14, 2018
Comments Off on Windows 95 – There’s An App For That

Windows 95 – There’s An App For That

Windows 95 - There's An App For ThatWith all the problems Microsoft (MSFT) Windows 10 has had lately – a few of us of a certain vintage may long for simpler days when we controlled what Windows did, not Redmond. Well, it’s time to relax because Windows 95 is now available as an app for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The Verge writes that Slack developer Felix Rieseberg is responsible for this ingenious app. The operating system is encased in electron, a framework for building cross-platform apps with HTML and CSS.

Windows 95 desktopNow nostalgia lovers can play around with Windows 95 in an electron app. Mr. Rieseberg has published the source code and app installers for this project on Github, and classic apps like Solitaire, Wordpad, phone dialer, MS Paint, and Minesweeper all run as you’d expect. Sadly, Internet Explorer isn’t fully functional as it simply refuses to load pages. It does have floppy disk support.

As Mr. Rieseberg suggests, if you were hoping to run Doom, you’re probably better off doing it through an actual virtualization app, but it surprisingly does work. He admits it only worked well “by accident and was mostly a joke.”

The app is only 129MB in size. Once it’s running it surprisingly only takes up around 200MB of RAM, even when running all the old Windows 95 system utilities, apps, and games. If you run into any issues with the app you can always reset the Windows 95 instance inside the app and start over again.

Enjoy this trip down memory lane.

rb-

OK – Cut Windows 95 some slack, the 20something-year-old OS is the first step-up from 16-bit DOS to 32-bit Windows NT. But more importantly, it introduced the Windows graphical user interface that so many of us have a love/hate relationship with.

As you’d figure, running Windows 95 these days is mostly just for a laugh. Windows 95 is still popular after 20 years. The OS has appeared on the Apple Watch, Android Wear smartwatch, and even the Xbox One.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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