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Posts Tagged ‘Asia’

Google Buys Land to Build Three Data Centers in Asia

September 28th, 2011

Google has acquired land in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore to build data centers in these three locations, it said Wednesday.

The data centers will be the “first Google proprietary data centers in Asia,” and will be fully owned and operated by the company, said Taj Meadows, the company’s policy communications manager for Asia Pacific.

More people are coming online every day in Asia than in any other part of the world, so locating data centers there is an important next stage of Google’s investment in the region, the company said Local data centers will help the company provide faster and more reliable access to Google’s services, it added.

There is a large surge in Internet use in Asia, particularly for consumer applications, said Jun Fwu Chin, research manager for virtualization and data center at IDC Malaysia.

A number of new data centers are coming up in the region as multinational Internet and hosting companies set up data centers to serve local customers, and also to meet governments regulations in some countries that require data to be handled locally, Chin said.

The costs of setting up data centers in Asia also tend to be lower than in the U.S., he added.

Google already has six data centers in the U.S., with one each in Finland and Belgium, according to its website.

It already has 15 offices and thousands of employees across the Asia-Pacific region.

The company has acquired 2.45 hectares of land in Jurong West, Singapore, and another 15 hectares of land in Changhua County, Taiwan, to build the data centers. It has also acquired 2.7 hectares of land in Kowloon, Hong Kong, for a data center there.

Google expects to invest over US$100 million in each of the facilities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, including the cost of land, construction and technical equipment. It did not specify the size of the investment in Singapore.

Google did not specify when construction would begin at these sites, as it is still working with its local partners and governments to finalize plans. Once construction begins, the facilities could be operational within one to two years, barring major delays, it said.

Google is however facing tough competition from local players in a number of local markets in Asia. In China, for example, it trails Baidu, the largest player, in Internet search.

In Taiwan, Yahoo and Facebook are ahead of Google as the top sites in the country, according to web traffic monitoring service Alexa. The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past month. In Hong Kong, Yahoo and Facebook are again ahead of Google, while it leads in Singapore.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/240728/google_buys_land_to_build_three_data_centers_in_asia.html

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Posted in Software News

Tags: Asia Center Data Google

Dell cautiously optimistic on Europe and Asia

September 14th, 2011

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Dell Inc, the world’s second-largest computer maker, is cautiously optimistic that its strong performance in Europe and Asia will continue, but is concerned about U.S. government spending, an executive said.

Steve Schuckenbrock, who runs the U.S. company’s $8 billion services business, told Reuters it was yet to be seen whether a typical September spending surge as U.S. federal budgets close would happen this year.

“We’re continuing to monitor demand big-time, as European issues, U.S. issues continue to get debated and discussed,” Schuckenbrock said in an interview in London on Tuesday.

Dell, which had been predicting 5 to 9 per cent revenue growth this fiscal year, cut its forecast to between 1 and 5 percent last month, even though sales in growth markets outside north America, western Europe and Japan increased revenues by 14 per cent, accounting for 28 percent of sales.

“We’re very happy with the performance of both Asia and EMEA throughout the second quarter … so we’re cautiously optimistic about both of those continuing,” Schuckenbrock said.

Dell, an economic bellwether because of its dependence on government, corporate and consumer technology spending worldwide, has been diversifying from hardware into higher-margin services, but at a slower pace than some rivals.

Hewlett-Packard Co said last month it planned to spin off its PC business and would buy enterprise search software company Autonomy Corp Plc for about $11 billion, in a strategic shift under new CEO Leo Apotheker.

IBM sold its PC division to China’s Lenovo Group six years ago.

NO HARDWARE EXIT

Schuckenbrock said Dell had no intention of following in their footsteps by selling its hardware business and could benefit from HP customers’ uncertainty as the company may take up to 18 months to make a definite plan for its PC unit.

“We’ve never even discussed exiting the hardware business and so we’re quite delighted to go tell customers we’re here for the long haul,” he said.

Dell began offering multi-vendor support for customers running non-Dell hardware or wanting to migrate to Dell two months ago in the United States, and has just begun to offer the same service in Europe.

Schuckenbrock said Dell had already signed up two major U.S. customers, before or around the time of the HP announcement.

Dell has, however, made 10 acquisitions totaling more than $6 billion in the last 18 months to beef up its capabilities in areas like storage, security and database management — and Schuckenbrock said there would be more to come.

The company was particularly keen to expand its services offering in Europe and was interested in software applications companies with expertise in particular industries, or verticals, like financial services, education or retail, he said.

Schuckenbrock said Dell, which has more than $16 billion in cash, was more interested in small or medium-sized acquisitions of up to $1.5 billion than mega-mergers that would come with unwanted legacy technology and could be hard to integrate.

“What I don’t want to buy is a company that has hundreds of outsourcing contracts that are kind of baked in yesterday’s customized services models.

“I think we want to lean very hard into where is the industry going, which is cloud,” he said, referring to cloud computing, in which data and software are stored and processed remotely in large data centers and delivered back to customers over the Internet.

Schuckenbrock said a major barrier to wider adoption of cloud computing was the pain of moving software applications into the cloud, and said Dell was therefore focused on buying companies which were strong in the applications business.

“That opens up the possibilities of companies across Europe a lot, because there are a good number of companies with talent in the applications arena, some of which are focused on one vertical,” he said.

Source:http://www.ciol.com/Global-News/Global-News/News-Reports/Dell-cautiously-optimistic-on-Europe-and-Asia/154374/0/

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Tags: Asia Dell Europe Software

New software aimed at making public transit easier

August 4th, 2011

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Cities across Canada are trying to boost public transit use by tackling one of the biggest frustrations for riders, the interminable wait at a bus stop in pouring rain or bitter cold wondering when the heck that bus will come.

Municipal transit services are turning to text-messaging systems, apps for mobile devices and even alerts for your desktop to make riding a bus, train or subway more predictable and user-friendly.

Winnipeg is on the leading edge, using global positioning software on all its buses to provide real-time information across multiple platforms. With a quick click on a computer or mobile device, you can see when your bus will arrive — and not the scheduled time, but an up-to-the-minute estimate based on its current position and traffic volumes.

“We’ve recognized from the onset that providing people with accurate and timely information enables them to take full advantage of the transit system,” said David Wardrop, director of Winnipeg Transit.

Winnipeg has spent more than $4 million on its information system, which includes a program called BusGadget. Designed for a home or office computer, the program lets users monitor one or more bus stops to see when upcoming buses are due. Users can also set up customized alerts.

Let’s say you want to catch the 59 down Main Street at 5 p.m. to get home from work, and the stop is a five-minute walk from your office. You can set BusGadget to remind you, via a pop-up bubble, 10 or 15 minutes ahead of time. The bubble will also tell you whether the bus is running late and provide a new expected arrival time.

Winnipeg has a mobile version of the program, called BusGuide, which lets you monitor all the buses coming to your stop. It’s updated every 30 seconds with the latest real-time estimates and works on the browser of any mobile device. If your preferred bus is late, you can see if another one is coming soon or run an errand until the next bus arrives.

The aim is to help riders avoid long waits on the streets of a city where winter temperatures can dip below -40. The cold weather is one reason why car culture is still dominant in Winnipeg, although that may be slowly changing.

Ridership has been growing by 2.5 to three per cent each year recently, while the city’s population has grown by about 1.5 per cent annually, Wardrop said.

Toronto’s transit authority has also moved to provide real-time arrival information through GPS locators on its buses. The system went on-line last month through a third-party website. The info is also available via text-messaging. Users can send a text that includes their bus stop number and get a message back that outlines the arrival times of upcoming buses.

The Toronto Transit Commission doesn’t have the type of desktop software that Winnipeg does to remind users of upcoming buses, but it is allowing software developers to access its data and come up with their own programs.

Other cities, such as Edmonton and Montreal, have plans to add GPS technology. Edmonton officials started offering scheduled bus times via text messages earlier this year and were surprised by the strong response.

“We projected about 10,000 text messages in January, and we rolled out January 4th . . . and we actually ended up getting over 118,000 messages sent in January,” said Nathan Walters, the supervisor in charge of the project at Edmonton Transit System.

“It was a big wake-up call for us in terms of realizing that the demand is clearly there for mobile information.”

Edmonton also has an open-data policy for developers, and showcases some third-party apps on its website. Programs for Android devices, iPhones and others are featured.

Transit services are also adopting new technology to make it easier for riders to pay their fare. Instead of fishing for exact change or tickets, riders in Regina and some other cities are able to use reloadable smart cards.

Eventually, a wave of a smartphone could be all that is needed to ride the bus, train or subway. People in many parts of Europe and Asia have banking information stored on their phone, so that it acts as a debit card in stores and at vending machines.

Source:http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20110803/public-transit-software-ttc-110803/