Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to hold all the aces in public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) ahead of Microsoft – but Alibaba is ahead of Google to take third place in the market.

That is according to the analysts at Gartner, who argue the global IaaS public cloud market grew 31% in 2016 to total $22.1 billion (£16.5bn). AWS comprises 44% of that market share, at $9.78bn, with Microsoft in second on $1.58bn, Alibaba third on $675m, Google on $500m and Rackspace at $484m.

Alibaba, not surprisingly, was the fastest growing vendor year on year at 126.5% growth, with Google (100%) and Microsoft (61.1%) next. As other research firms have noted, the competition in the market continues to grow more quickly than AWS, although the latter is hardly standing still. Gartner puts AWS’ growth at 45.9% between 2015 and 2016.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, argues IaaS will show the fastest growth over the next five years, ahead of platform and software as a service. “The worldwide public cloud service market growth continues, driven by digital business initiatives, data centre consolidations and application migrations to the cloud,” said Nag. “Technology strategic planners must build both relevant offerings and partner-based ecosystems to seize the opportunity.”

Compare and contrast with Synergy Research. Earlier this month the company said the public cloud market had grown 35% between the second quarters of 2015 and 2017, with the private cloud – or cloud-enabled – market growing 16%. In comparison, spending on traditional, non-cloud data centre hardware and software had dropped 18%.

When it came to cloud infrastructure services, Synergy’s research has similarities with Gartner. This time last year – Q216 – their analysis was that Amazon held more than 30% of the market but growing at 53%, with Microsoft second growing at 100%, IBM third, Google fourth – growing at 162% – and Alibaba in the chasing pack.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have been the first of the major cloud vendors to announce per-second billing, but Google has become the first to implement it.

The company announced yesterday that customers of Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine flexible environment virtual machines (VMs) will move to the new system, applicable to all VMs.

Google’s change was made effective as of September 26, while AWS customers will have to wait until October 2 for their move. Google customers need to purchase for a minimum of one minute before the per-second billing kicks in.

“In most cases, the difference between per-minute and per-second billing is very small – we estimate it as a fraction of a percent,” Paul Nash, group product manager for Compute Engine wrote. “On the other hand, changing from per-hour billing to per-minute billing makes a big difference for applications (especially website, mobile apps and data processing jobs) that get traffic spikes.

“The ability to scale up and down quickly could come at a significant cost if you had to pay for those machines for the full hour when you only needed them for a few minutes,” Nash added.

As this publication noted when AWS made its move, another strong pull factor towards per-second billing is the rise of serverless computing, where code may not run for more than a few seconds.

Nash theorised that if the average business’ VM lifetime was rounded up by 30 seconds due to per minute billing, then at 2,600 vCPUs, you would save…99 cents per day. For per hour billing, naturally, it goes up to more than $100.

Either way, the customer does get greater control. “As you can see, the value of increased billing precision is mostly in per-minute,” wrote Nash. “This is probably why we haven’t heard many customers asking for per-second. But we don’t want to make you choose between your morning coffee and your core hours, so we’re pleased to bring per-second billing to your VMs.”

Nash added that Google had been using per-second billing for persistent disks since 2013, and for committed use discounts and GPUs since their introduction. The Google Cloud Platform has duly been updated with per-second billing, under the tagline “you pay per-second, which is how a cloud should work.” Previously, it was “you pay per-minute, not per hour, which is how a cloud should work.”

You can read the full blog post here.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Taica will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
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Google Cloud has beefed up its identity and access management game with the acquisition of Bitium, a Santa Monica-based firm.

Bitium, founded in 2012, offers a variety of identity management features, including secure access, user provisioning and deprovisioning, app management and single sign on.

In a short blog post confirming the news, Karthik Lakshminarayanan, director of product management for G Suite and Cloud Identity, said the move will help mitigate customers’ risks around managing and securing cloud applications.

“Our enterprise customers want a comprehensive solution for identity and access management and SSO that works across their modern cloud and mobile environments,” wrote Lakshminarayanan. “Bitium helps us deliver a broad portfolio of app integrations for provisioning and SSO that complements our best in class device management capabilities in the enterprise.

“As we add Bitium’s capabilities, we’ll continue to work closely with our vibrant ecosystem of identity partners so that customers are able to choose the best solutions to meet their needs,” he added.

From Bitium’s side, a note from the two founders, CEO Scott Kriz and CTO Erik Gustavson, thanked their investors and explained the move. “When we started Bitium, our goal was to change how people and companies work by fundamentally changing the way they interact with software, starting with single sign-on and identity access management,” the note read. “Joining the team at Google Cloud allows us to continue along this path and accelerate these efforts.

“The Google Cloud team shares our vision for improving the way companies use software, enabling them to innovate faster.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CIOs and CTOs are developing comprehensive hybrid IT infrastructure models, in response to growing demand from CFOs and line of business leaders that request access to applications hosted via both on-premises private cloud and off-premises public cloud offerings.

That’s why savvy technology leaders must therefore align with the most qualified vendors and service providers that enable them to manage and support these complex multi-cloud scenarios. Furthermore, the chosen provider must demonstrate vertical industry knowledge and prior experience.

A major shift is taking place in how enterprises select their financial management applications, with a migration to cloud applications happening faster than expected, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

Multi-cloud service market development

A recent Gartner survey of senior finance executives found that by 2020, 36 percent of enterprises will use the cloud to support more than half of their transactional systems of record (SoR) requirements.

Gartner surveyed 439 global senior financial executives (including 410 who had implemented cloud strategic and financial corporate performance management solutions) from January through March 2017 to explore their technology perspective, influence of IT, needs and priorities in technology investment.

Key findings from the survey include:

• Organisations of all sizes are moving to cloud solutions, such as core financial applications, for transactional systems of record.
• Cloud momentum is consistently higher across financial business applications year-over-year.
• Business analytics and enterprise business applications continue as top investment initiatives for senior financial executives.

According to the survey, smaller and midsize organisations are adopting cloud services more rapidly than larger organisations, with 44.6 percent of smaller organisations, 37.7 percent of midsize enterprises and 40.4 percent of large organisations planning to move to the cloud over the next three years.

«We have found that most clients asking about these financial business application markets are solely interested in the cloud option,» said John Van Decker, vice president at Gartner. «Many enterprises that currently run on-premises solutions want to move to newer solutions that put more control in the hands of the end user, and reduce the effort required when compared with on-premises upgrades.»

Gartner has found that the human capital management and procure-to-pay markets have already been migrating their business applications to the cloud, while the office of finance has been slower to move.

However, things are changing for the finance organisation. CFOs are usually more conservative about moving their data to the cloud, however, given the current change in the market there will be a steady migration over the next five to 10 years.

Outlook for multi-cloud service adoption

Multi-cloud solutions are still developing and do not have uniform capability to meet the needs of all industry verticals, company size and local markets. CIOs and CTOs will need to do their due diligence when evaluating integrated cloud solutions in these markets.

«The Gartner survey showed that 93 percent of enterprises see the cloud being utilised for half of enterprise transactions in the future,» said Van Decker.

According to the Gartner assessment, ongoing adoption of cloud services has changed the environment for financial management business applications. Vendors have responded with new and re-architected integrated platforms that incorporate cloud-based applications, and most have de-emphasised traditional stand-alone on-premises solutions.

As businesses evolve, they need technology that is simple to help them succeed today and flexible enough to help them build for tomorrow. Chrome is fit for the workplace of the future — providing a secure, consistent user experience across a range of devices that can be used anywhere.
In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, will take a look at various options as to how ChromeOS can be leveraged to interact with people on the devices, and formats they already love to use.

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Join IBM November 1 at 21st Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, and learn how IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems.
Cognitive analysis impacts today’s systems with unparalleled ability that were previously available only to manned, back-end operations. Thanks to cloud processing, IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems. Imagine a robot vacuum that becomes your personal assistant that knows everything and can respond to your emotions and verbal commands!

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Many companies start their journey to the cloud in the DevOps environment, where software engineers want self-service access to the custom tools and frameworks they need. Machine learning technology can help IT departments keep up with these demands.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ajay Gulati, Co-Founder, CTO and Board Member at ZeroStack, will discuss the use of machine learning for automating provisioning of DevOps resources, taking the burden off IT teams.

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