CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
Volocopter | May 17, 2022
Today, Volocopter, the pioneer of urban air mobility (UAM), announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to develop an aerospace cloud system in Microsoft Azure that will address the nascent cloud computing requirements for eVTOLs, UAM, and autonomous aviation. Once primed for commercial use, Azure will support the digital platform VoloIQ, the operating system for Volocopter's UAM services, and its subsequent transition to autonomous operations.
Volocopter plans to make the VoloIQ its standard UAM operating system for all electric passenger and drone flight operations. Its modular structure will be vast, covering aspects like booking and e-commerce, commercial scheduling, operational network planning, flight planning, flight monitoring, supplying airspace digital twins, and vehicle data logging and analysis. Volocopter has chosen Microsoft Cloud / Azure to securely interconnect all these UAM ecosystem elements into one integrated set of services.
"Having Microsoft on board as a project partner and investor is proof that the solutions Volocopter creates – like the VoloIQ – are pioneering and hold remarkable market potential. We're proud that Microsoft Azure is the one to provide a secure cloud and thus to ensure safety remains at the forefront of our operations."
Alexander Oelling, Volocopter's Chief Digital Officer.
Volocopter and Microsoft will begin collaborating by ensuring Microsoft Azure meets the VoloIQ's needs for commercial operations. Azure will then enable the VoloIQ's flight and service support for Volocopter's electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft (VoloCity, VoloDrone, and VoloConnect), alongside ground infrastructure (VoloPort) support in real time.
"From the newest technologies to regulation, creating solutions to seamlessly address the cloud computing requirements for supporting continued advancements in aviation is a complex endeavor. We certainly see the potential a secure, robust, and efficient cloud platform could offer aerospace and urban air mobility operators," said Uli Homann, CVP of Cloud and AI at Microsoft. "Working in collaboration with Volocopter, we will start to build the foundation for a commercial model for aerospace cloud."
The collaboration between Volocopter and Microsoft was first publicized in 2020, when Volocopter and Lufthansa Industry Solutions announced plans to develop the VoloIQ for autonomous aircraft operations using Microsoft Azure.
The VoloIQ's aim is a straightforward one: to provide complete digital transparency and greater ecosystem efficiency in real time. By utilizing this digital resource, Volocopter's services – and all the relevant process elements needed to realize this service – will be user-friendly and digitally accessible for customers, pilots, operators, and stakeholders alike. Furthermore, the VoloIQ's solid scope will streamline Volocopter's transition into an autonomous air taxi services provider when the time comes and bolster its efficient maintenance and infrastructure as soon as it becomes operational.
About Volocopter
Volocopter is building the world's first sustainable and scalable urban air mobility business to bring affordable air taxi services for goods and people to megacities worldwide. Volocopter leads and cooperates with partners in infrastructure, operations, and air traffic management to build the ecosystem necessary to 'Bring Urban Air Mobility to Life'. Volocopter has over 500 employees in offices in Bruchsal, Munich, and Singapore. The company has raised $579 million in equity from investors including Geely, WP Investment, Mercedes-Benz Group, Intel Capital, and BlackRock..
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CLOUD STORAGE
MongoDB | April 12, 2022
MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ: MDB), the leading modern, general purpose database platform, today announced the launch of a pay-as-you-go MongoDB Atlas offering, which can be launched directly from the Google Console. The offering provides developers with a simplified subscription experience, and enterprises more choice in how they procure MongoDB on Google Cloud. With this new pay-as-you-go MongoDB Atlas offering, customers only pay for the resources they use and can scale based on their needs, with no up-front commitments while using their Google accounts. This offering will also make it easier for customers to build, scale, and manage data-rich applications with MongoDB Atlas within the Google Cloud Console.
The addition of a pay-as-you-go-offering aligns well with how companies want to build modern applications– from bootstrap companies participating in the Google for Startups and MongoDB Startup programs, ranging to the largest, most complex Enterprises. This new offering is available through Google Marketplace, giving companies and resellers of all sizes more flexibility in selecting the technology stack and partners that best fit their needs.
"Our business has shifted significantly over the last few years with the majority of our revenue now coming through e-commerce related technology for ordering. We realized it was becoming difficult and cost-prohibitive to build modern cloud-native applications capable of scaling seamlessly for these higher volumes using relational database technology," said Murali Bandaru, EVP and Chief Information and Digital Officer, American Tire Distributors. "We embraced MongoDB on Google Cloud because its document data model enabled our developers to build cloud-native applications faster to support our volume growth in digital channels. We've since migrated to MongoDB Atlas and have over 50 clusters across 350 databases that are handling 250 million calls and 100 million events daily."
Customers love MongoDB Atlas because it provides developers with a multi-cloud database service built for resilience, scale, and security. With MongoDB Atlas, developers can build upon a trusted foundation that enables them to work with data the way they want – easily. MongoDB enables developers to integrate Atlas with Google Cloud products including BigQuery, Apigee, Tensorflow, Cloud Run, App Engine, EventArc, Cloud Functions, DataStream, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Dataproc, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub. In addition to these offerings, MongoDB and Google Cloud have expanded their joint reach across 28 global regions, including the recent availability in Toronto and Santiago.
Recently, MongoDB and Google Cloud made it easier and faster for customers to migrate their workloads to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud with migVisor by EPAM and Google Cloud StratoZone. Previously applicable only to migrations from RDBMS to cloud-based RDBMS, migVisor is now available for MongoDB On-Premises to MongoDB Atlas migrations. With the StratoZone assessment tool, customers can automatically discover existing infrastructure from any environment, analyze the cost-benefits of MongoDB on Google cloud, and plan the migration. The ability to assess the complexity of migrations helps customers prioritize and accelerate their journey to the public cloud.
"MongoDB and Google Cloud have a long-standing partnership, focused on driving customer success across multiple industries, such as financial services and retail, at a global scale. Developers benefit by having MongoDB Atlas now featured in the database section of Google Cloud's console, increasing the visibility and velocity of Atlas with a wider group of users," said Alan Chhabra, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partners, MongoDB. "Together, Google Cloud and MongoDB will continue to work with organizations looking to streamline cloud migrations and modernize application development in order to provide their customers with a first class experience."
Data is fundamental to digital transformation.Expanding the availability and simplifying the deployment of MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud will make it even easier for customers to benefit from MongoDB's capabilities alongside those of Google's data cloud, providing greater capability and opportunity to utilize their data as they digitally transform."
Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem at Google Cloud.
About MongoDB
MongoDB is the leading modern, general purpose database platform empowering innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data. Headquartered in New York, MongoDB has more than 33,000 customers in over 100 countries. The MongoDB database platform has been downloaded over 240 million times and there have been more than 1.5 million registrations for MongoDB University courses.
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CLOUD APP DEVELOPMENT
IBM | February 02, 2022
IBM announced it has acquired Sentaca, a leading telco consulting services and solutions provider. The acquisition will accelerate IBM's hybrid cloud consulting business, adding critical skills to help communications service providers (CSPs) and media giants modernize on multiple cloud platforms, innovate, and transform their businesses.
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Sentaca's team of highly experienced technology consultants across the U.S. and Canada build and migrate mission-critical applications on leading cloud service providers and open-source platforms like Red Hat OpenShift and OpenStack. Sentaca has supported digital transformation, next-generation networks and improved consumer experience for CSPs and media companies since its founding in 2008.
Sentaca will join IBM Consulting's fast-growing Hybrid Cloud Services business to solve clients' strategic and technology challenges such as cost-of-ownership, monetization, scalable and secure architecture, and address opportunities including 5G, IoT and streaming that can accelerate the creation and delivery of new services. Sentaca's domain expertise, assets and client relationships will help IBM meet industry demand and strengthen its position as a prime systems integrator for the emerging network and 5G market.
"Our goal is to help modern networks thrive in an open, hybrid cloud environment that will bring edge and 5G to life for enterprises and consumers. The proliferation of mobile devices, wireless connectivity, and new media platforms is driving convergence among telco, media, and entertainment, which makes our acquisition of Sentaca all the more valuable for our clients."
John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting
Since Arvind Krishna became IBM CEO, the company has acquired more than 20 companies – 10 in Consulting alone – to bolster its hybrid cloud and AI capabilities. The announcement of the Sentaca acquisition follows several acquisitions by IBM of leading cloud consulting firms – Nordcloud, Taos, BoxBoat and SXiQ – in 2021, which significantly expanded IBM's multicloud transformation, management expertise and capabilities in Europe and North America.
"Sentaca's deep knowledge and experience of telecom networks, coupled with our expertise in hybrid multi-cloud and automation services and solutions, is a perfect fit to compliment IBMs telco/5G strategy," said Phil O'Neill, CEO of Sentaca. "We are very excited to join the IBM team and to be in a position to access additional resources and platforms to deliver on even larger and more ambitious enterprise cloud transformation projects within the telco and media industry sector."
91% of high performing communications services providers surveyed by the IBM Institute for Business Value expect to outperform their current financial expectations in five years as a result of using 5G-enabled edge computing. 5G will allow CSPs to offer a range of tailored network experiences for use cases across industries. To innovate and modernize around 5G and edge, telcos are embracing a hybrid cloud future which is expected to grow into an estimated $50 billion annual cloud professional services market1 by 2025.
IBM has long been trusted by the world's leading CSPs to guide them through major technology inflection points, helping clients co-create unique solutions while supporting them on their network transformation journeys and enabling new revenue streams that deliver value to consumer and enterprise clients. Today, more than 80% of the world's largest telcos work with IBM, and more than 140 telcos are served by IBM and Red Hat.
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CLOUD STORAGE
ICF | June 01, 2022
ICF (NASDAQ:ICFI), a global consulting and digital services provider, is partnering with Google Cloud to expand its cloud and analytics services to public sector clients.
"As organizations across the public sector execute on their digital transformation strategies, there is an increased need for technology partners and solutions that seamlessly support these transformation goals," said Lesta Brady, director, federal sales, Google Cloud. "We're pleased to partner with ICF and continue helping customers across the public sector with the solutions and expertise they need to move into the next stage of their digital transformation journeys."
ICF's partnership with Google Cloud illustrates ICF's success in accelerating digital transformation for federal agencies on Google Cloud's platform, which includes supporting federal health clients such as the National Cancer Institute and many others.
The partnership further expands the company's digital and partnership ecosystem in support of its multi-cloud strategy. Combining ICF's deep domain and technology consulting expertise with new Google Cloud capabilities enhances ICF's capabilities to rapidly deploy digital solutions that advance our customers' missions and increase operational efficiency.
"ICF's partnership with Google Cloud strengthens our ability to bring greater innovation to federal agencies so they can deliver better citizen services, faster, With Google Cloud as a partner, ICF can provide more clients with the interdisciplinary partners they need to accelerate their migrations to the cloud and increase their mission impact."
Mark Lee, ICF executive vice president and public sector lead
ICF combines public sector domain expertise with an ecosystem of platform partners and digital practices to deliver responsive, scalable solutions that achieve clients' mission outcomes and a step change in productivity. The company's digital solutions help mission leaders solve critical problems, modernize systems, harness the power of data and analytics and optimize the customer experience to drive positive change from within.
Read more about ICF's digital transformation and federal health IT services and its technology partnerships.
About ICF
ICF is a global consulting services company with approximately 8,000 full- and part-time employees, but we are not your typical consultants. At ICF, business analysts and policy specialists work together with digital strategists, data scientists and creatives. We combine unmatched industry expertise with cutting-edge engagement capabilities to help organizations solve their most complex challenges. Since 1969, public and private sector clients have worked with ICF to navigate change and shape the future.
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