Huddle: The UK cloud software firm that grows by over 100% a year

 Cloud collaboration software supplier Huddle is on the verge of expanding into Australia, a move that will put the company within reach of markets in Southeast Asia.

 The company, which began in the UK in 2006, has grown rapidly in the US, with particular success in the government sector.

 It now has four offices in the US and is about to set up operations in Australia, which, according to CEO Alastair Mitchell, is “a jumping off point for the Southeast Asia market”.

 Huddle provides cloud-based collaboration to corporates and is seen as a direct replacement for Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration software. It is charged per user, can be accessed by any person with the relevant access rights, and requires no hardware to host it on the customer’s part.

 The company’s rapid growth is the result of both the cloud and collaboration becoming investment priorities for CIOs. It has reported 100% growth in revenues in its latest results.

 The increased focus on the cloud from the US public sector is being matched in the private sector, where cloud-based software has gone from “ambiguity to certainty” in the past six months, according to Mitchell.

 “In our discussions with CIOs, we hear that in the next three years 100% of service delivery will be in the cloud. They say they will not have any servers,” he said.

 Huddle has an impressive list of customers in the private sector. 

 The technology, which enables disparate people to collaborate online, lends itself to certain industries and large companies. It is successful in sectors where workers are in different places, such as transport and utilities, with Go-ahead and Centrica among its customers. It also does well in professional services where customers such as Grant Thornton need to be able to collaborate in real time with clients.

 But it is in the US where the biggest gains have been made in the shortest time. US public sector organisations are taking on Huddle as the US government sets a cloud agenda for IT.

 Since opening an office in Washington DC to focus on the US government sector, Huddle has had major wins. It now has central government deals with Nasa, the Department of Defense, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Department for Homeland Security, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

 A version of Huddle used by the UK government, which sits on a private cloud, was made available to the US government, which also started using the public cloud version, which is available to any business in the world.

>>Read More
                                 


World Earthquake Map and Beyond
ICT2013 brought together Europe's best & brightest in ICT research, with businesses old & new, web start-ups and digital strategists to chart a path for Europe's ICT research policy. 
ICT2013 - Create, connect, Grow - confirmed to be the largest event in Europe ICT for  research with nearly 6000 registered participants, 200 exhibitors, 180 networking sessions and 80 renowned global speakers. Furthermore, almost 4.000 people followed the conference  online and via social media.
Some of the panellists discussed Exascale computing as
Exascale means computing at a level 1000 times more than the top computers today, meaning the capability to manage both big data (extabytes) and extreme computing (exaflops). The main stakeholders and user community would be: climate scientists, astrophysicists, medical and bio-researches working in genomics, but it is not only scientists that will benefit. It would  be great gains in European industrial applications; a direct example given is the aerospace industry. In  the exascale level, there will be a need to develop new software and application paradigms, new supporting technologies for memory management, energy efficiency, and cooling, all of these are regarded as being grand research challenges.
For scientific projects to succeed different level of infrastructures support is needed. Policy makers have to establish laingy down general rules in High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure.
Suppliers of HPC cycles should listen more what user needs, not to just seek the idea of HPC. The roadmap of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) for the exascale is built in 3 phases. After development activities of the system including the challenges related to the integration of multi-petaflop systems, comes the optimization of software to higher performance and collaboration between the developers and users of large systems, in order to optimise applications.
Without HPC it’s impossible to model and represent how brain stores information, there is some theories but no experimental proof so far. It’s believed that by using HPC it would be possible to re-engineer a brain's communication protocol and apply it to smaller devices even handheld, it would be like having a brain inspired device in your pocket. 
The pan-European cloud computing infrastructure Helix Nebula is a new, pioneering partnership between big science and big business in Europe that is charting the course towards the sustainable provision of cloud computing - the Science Cloud. The partnership brings together leading IT providers and three of Europe’s leading research centres, CERN, EMBL and ESA in order to provide computing capacity and services that elastically meet big science’s growing demand for computing power. 
Helix Nebula' s research is not limited only to science. This is really big opportunity for public and IT sector to work closely.  There is an interesting example about earthquake modelling for whole earth using Helix Nebula system, facilitating the co-operation with the civil engineering HPC communities who through simple changes in infrastructure in poor countries could delay the time of collapse, thus savings people's lives.


THE POWER OF SOCIAL CODING

SAN FRANCISCO — Some employees at Github live a kind of transient existence that you might even call nomadic.
These workers, primarily software developers, live and work all over the world. It’s so common, in fact, that only about 30 percent of the current Github workforce live near the San Francisco headquarters.
If you’re not yet familiar with Github, the startup builds social coding tools for developers and has been around for about six years. The company recently raised $100 million from venture firm  Andreessen Horowitz to promote its tools to developers to share their code, and collaborate on projects.
Tom Preston-Werner, Github’s cofounder, offered some insights into how the company’s unique culture developed at our DevBeat conference. Github doesn’t just advocate and evangelize open source technology, according to Preston-Werner. Its founders and early employees believe wholeheartedly in the power of open data and the ubiquitous nature of the Internet.
The Internet makes it easy to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, so Github’s founders see no need for employees to be physically present at the office. This is a markedly different approach from Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, who notoriously frowns upon remote working.
“Everything we can do, we try to do online,” said Preston-Werner. This means that Github invests in the most innovative video technology, so meetings can be livestreamed, and any employee can tune in at any time from an Airbnb home in Tuscany or Tahoe. In addition, the company puts various internal development projects on Github to constantly improve the code — its open source Puppet repository had had 43 authors in the last 30 days.
“We took the concepts of the open source community and applied them to our own business,” he said.

The Internet shouldn’t just be sprinkled on top

During his rousing DevBeat keynote, Preston-Werner spoke in depth about the theoretical power of the Internet. He believes that over the past 20 years, not much has changed. Government agencies, for instance, have kept processes largely the same, but added “a sprinkling of the Internet.”
Preston-Werner recently drove to Sacramento, California’s state capital, to deliver papers in person for his wife, who is incorporating a company. This whole exercise would have taken minutes — even seconds — if it could take place online.
Most of us didn’t grow up with the Internet, so this doesn’t seem all that backward. But the next generation of entrepreneurs, the digital natives who can’t bear to part with their iPhones, don’t put up with this kind of experience. They are building new technologies that will fundamentally transform how we live and work.
Most importantly, the Internet will be central to the experience — not just a layer on top. Preston-Werner offers a few examples of startups he admires that were founded by entrepreneurs in their early 20s: Stripe and Snapchat.
“They [the founders] are thinking about new types of communication unfettered from the metaphors of yesterday… by keys and credit cards and cash,” he said. After all, he added, “The Internet is in way more places than even electricity is available.”

PageOne selected to G-Cloud


London, 05 November, 2013 – PageOne, a messaging solutions company across the public and private sectors, today announced its G-txt Service has been accepted under Lot 3 of the Government’s National G-Cloud framework and is now available in the G-Store.
PageOne’s G-txt is a secure web-based messaging service allowing users to quickly send individual or group broadcast messages to any combination of SMS, pager, email and landline. The service is simple, easy to use, and accessible from any internet-connected PC or mobile device and includes a host of features to manage messaging. G-txt is available from the CloudStore, the government-run online catalogue for services that have undergone vetting for the G-Cloud procurement framework.
The G-Cloud framework is a key component of the Government’s ICT strategy and was developed to give customers access to pay-as-you-go services as a more cost effective alternative to traditionally sourced ICT services. The framework is focused on introducing cloud-hosted services into government departments, local authorities and the wider public sector and provides simpler, faster and cheaper ways for them to buy digital services.
Nigel Gray, Director of PageOne commented, “PageOne is delighted to have been selected by the Government Procurement Service to be a supplier on the G-Cloud framework. The public sector is under intense pressure to improve services whilst cutting costs and due to these limitations, many are now recognising the potential for technology to improve efficiencies. We are excited to be able to offer our G-txt service and we look forward to engaging and working with a wide range of public sector bodies on some exciting projects.”
PageOne’s wider messaging solutions for the public sector are available via the Government’s national Public Services Network (PSN) framework, for which PageOne is an approved supplier.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)