The year coming to a close is a time for both celebration and contemplation, especially when the year was as tumultuous as that known as 2018. In our case we ponder about the year in IT, so join us as we take a look at what we believe were the biggest stories.
Spectre and Meltdown Fixes Cause PC Slowdowns: 2018 started badly with the reveal of Spectre and Meltdown, two security issues affecting the processors powering just about every PC, server and mobile device in the world. The discovery brought about a flurry of patches and updates, but soon afterwards reports emerged of performance taking a hit as a result of said updates. Initially the industry was hesitant to confirm the reports, but later Microsoft and Intel admitted that, yes, the Spectre and Meltdown fixes affected the performance of at least some machines.
HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud: The HPE Discover event had the company reveal GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, a consumption-based service for optimising both public and private clouds using automation and remote services. As the latest addition to the GreeLake suite, GreenLake Hybrid Cloud manages cloud resources in different environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack.
Fujifilm and Xerox Form Join Venture, Drop It: On April 2018 Fujifilm and Xerox announced an agreement to combine Xerox with the longstanding Fuji Xerox joint venture, creating a combined print technologies and intelligent work solutions company. However this was not to be, as powerful activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason expressed their displeasure with the deal through legal action, leading to its termination.
IBM Buys Red Hat: Open source is truly big business, as IBM was the next major industry player to buy into the segment with the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, the company behind Enterprise Linux OS, with plans to transform the cloud landscape. The deal remains the biggest in open source history as yet, and shows the Red Hat model of Linux distribution is a success, to put it mildly.
Amazon Takes on On-Premises Cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS) extended beyond the public cloud to on-premises datacentre hardware with the announcement of AWS Outposts, an initiative in AWS-designed fully managed and configured compute and storage racks. Outposts is technically a take on hybrid cloud, since it offers on-premises systems acting as an extension of the AWS or VMware cloud in AWS. As such, Outposts hardware offers the same hardware, APIs and interfaces powering AWS cloud services, such as Amazon S3, Glacier and Elastic Block Store (EBS), only in on-premises form.
Brian Krzanich Steps Down as Intel CEO: June 2018 saw the resignation of Brian Krzanich as Intel CEO, following the revelation he had a "consensual relationship" with a fellow employee, a violation of Chipzilla non-fraternisation policies. So far CFO Robert Swan is Intel CEO, if in the interim, while Krzanich found himself a leadership position with CDK Global, a provider of software for automobile dealers.
Kubernetes Reaches Version 1.10: The open-source Kubernetes container orchestration platform gets a first major release in March 2018 with version 1.10, featuring the Container Storage Interface (CSI) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) bootstrapping capabilities. CSI is an API between container orchestrators and storage providers allowing a consistent runtime experience regardless of container orchestrator or storage provider used.
Alibaba Cloud Arrives in Europe: Chinese cloud giant Alibaba made its first strides into Europe in 2018. First, in August 2018 it formed a "strategic partnership" with Poland's ABC Data bringing the Alibaba cloud to 8 countries in CEE, namely Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia. A month later Alibaba Cloud opened a London region, with a quiet website update simply declaring "London is Calling."
