HPE announces plans to transition into an as-a-Service company "over time"-- meaning the entire HPE portfolio will be available through a range of subscription-based, pay-per-use and as-a-Service offerings by 2022.

The company also promises to continue to provide hardware and software in both a capital expenditure and a license-based model, ultimately giving customers "choice" in how they consume HPE products and services.

To bring about such ambitions, HPE is scaling GreenLake to reach new market segments, new use cases and leverage the partner ecosystem to accelerate growth. As a result it will bring about new GreenLake offerings for the mid-market, new services for the edge and expanded partnerships with CyrusOne, Equinix and Google Cloud. In addition it will also invest in software delivered via subscription model, including Aruba Central, BlueData, Cloud Volumes, InfoSight and OneView.

VMware announces the acquisition of Avi Networks, a provider of multi-cloud application delivery networks currently deployed at "hundreds" of global enterprises. The financial details of the deal are not available.

The purchase, VMware says, will allow it to bring the public cloud experience to the entire datacentre, making it automated, highly scalable and more secure, with the ability to deploy applications with a single click. Once the deal closes, VMware and Avi Networks will deliver what they claim is the only complete software-defined networking stack from L2-7 built for the multi-cloud era.

The Avi platform allows organisations to overcome the rigidity and complexity of legacy systems and ADC appliance with modern, software-defined services. It includes a Software Load Balancer, Intelligent Web Application Firewall (iWAF), Advanced Analytics and Monitoring and a Universal Service Mesh to enable a fast, scalable and more secure application experience. A central control plane and distributed data plane deliver application services as a dynamic, multi-cloud fabric able to automate decisions and provide "unprecedented" application analytics and on-demand elasticity.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) management platform provider Zylo announces functionality to enhance enterprise SaaS management, allowing teams to more effectively and efficiently manage SaaS tools throughout an organisation.

According to a Zylo analysis of over 30 million transactions, total enterprise SaaS investments totals over $10000 per employee per year. Thus Zylo is set to address to address the full spectrum of enterprise SaaS management challenges, including the need to discover and contain shadow IT as well as develop mature processes to promote governance with reduced burden.

The blockchain might look like the perfect means for keeping transactions secure or digital delivery notes, but it does bring concerns over data privacy and the environment. Uniscon says it now has an alternative-- the Sealed Trust Anchor Network (STAN).

The blockchain, or distributed ledger, consists of a distributed database in which all participants in a network agree on the order of a series of transactions. All participants have constant access to the most recent version of the database, making for a decentralised data management structure with considerable transparency, as well as independence from intermediaries and, ultimately, a high level of tamper protection.

However maintaining a distributed ledger consumes a high amount of energy, since the proof of work processes allowing for contribution involve extremely processor-intensive tasks. As such, both performance and scalability of the blockchain are restricted.