Alibaba Group has recorded cloud revenues of RMB 2,975 million ($342.1m) for its most recent quarter, up 99% year on year, with CEO Daniel Zhang telling analysts its cloud business “continues to defy gravity.”

The company said it was seeing ‘significant traction and diversification of customers and revenue’ in its cloud service, and will ‘continue to invest to further expand the market through valuable services for our cloud customers.’

Total revenues for the quarter hit RMB 55,122m (£6.bn), with the vast majority of that through its ‘core commerce’ business at RMB 46,462m (£5.3bn). Other buckets include digital media and entertainment (£551m) and the vaguely worded ‘innovation initiatives and others’ (£102.5m).

Among the quarter’s highlights for Alibaba were 245 new products and features, alongside a variety of initiatives and customers. The majority of these were revealed at the company’s Computing Conference in Hangzhou. Customers include the Bank of Nanjing, Air Asia, State Administration Taxation and the IOC (International Olympic Committee), while products include the X-Dragon Cloud server, combining bare metal servers with VMs, and newly released relational database POLARDB.

The previous quarter saw revenues from cloud computing total RMB 2,431 million (£287m), and Zhang was in bullish mood in the earnings call. “Our cloud computing business continues to defy gravity,” said Zhang, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Revenue increased by 99% year over year. We continue to multiply our product portfolio, including the introduction of a new relational database and a state of the art server developed in-house that serve the needs of large enterprise customers.”

Alibaba’s cloud push appears to be paying off with the analysts. According to Gartner back in September, Alibaba has moved ahead of Google to take third place in the public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.

“Once again, we have delivered an outstanding quarter,” added Zhang. “The robust growth of our business speaks to the unique value proposition that we offer to customers through our strong execution and commitment to innovation.”

You can view the full financial statement here.

Research in quantum computing is closely tied to the discipline of information theory, a mathematical concept concerned with communication, coding, and encryption. Various applications of quantum information theory were developed in the last 50 years.

As a result, quantum computing has been high on the research agenda of governments and technology organisations worldwide. In a quantum computing model, the basic unit of information is called the quantum bit (qubit), which can be represented by photons.

Using qubits and quantum gates, the development of a quantum circuit model of computation has been made possible, enabling the use of algorithms to theoretically solve highly complex mathematical problems in a much shorter time frame than is currently possible.

Quantum computing market development

Most experts now agree that the creation of a quantum computer is simply a matter of engineering, and that the theoretical application will happen. Optimistic estimates for commercialisation by the private sector vary between 5 and 15 years, while more conservative estimates by academics put it at 15-25 years.

The drive to create the first quantum computer has been viewed as the new arms race. The milestone to reach is that of quantum supremacy, essentially the performance of computation that goes beyond the capability of the latest and best supercomputers in existence today. But this drive is underpinning another, more pressing race: quantum cybersecurity.

ABI Research forecasts that the first attack-capable quantum machines will make their market debut by 2030.  "When they do, even the latest and best in class cybersecurity technologies will be vulnerable," said Michela Menting, research director at ABI Research.

The race to quantum supremacy is real: governmental R&D is accelerating the crystallisation of the quantum computer, with more than $1.6 billion already invested globally. The potentially drastic repercussions on cybersecurity is equally real and has led to the focus on quantum-safe cryptography.

Also known as post quantum cryptography, such research looks to the development of new cryptographic algorithms that could withstand breaking by quantum computers, ideally before such computers become commercially available.

Outlook for quantum computing technologies

Beyond and ahead of quantum computers, the use of the theory has also aided in developing new cryptographic techniques, notably quantum key distribution (QKD). Considered as a type of quantum-safe cryptography, QKD will likely be commercialised before the advent of quantum computers, because it is achievable using current technologies such as lasers and fiber optics. In that sense, QKD is one of the first quantum theories to find real-world applications.

Heavy private sector investment is going into quantum R&D. Since 2012, venture capital funds have pumped over $334 million into companies specializing in the space. Clearly, this is an early-stage market development opportunity with lots of upside growth potential.

22nd International Cloud Expo, taking place June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and co-located with the 1st DXWorld Expo will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday’s debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Opsani will exhibit 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.
Opsani is the leading provider of deployment automation systems for running and scaling traditional enterprise applications on container infrastructure.

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IBM has rebranded its cloud, subsuming the Bluemix brand into an overall IBM Cloud offering.

Writing in a blog post announcing the move, Michael Mendenhall, chief marketing officer for IBM’s Watson and cloud arms, said the move was logical as the two brands had grown to be synonymous. There will be no changes to products offerings as a result of the move, while communications will start referring only to IBM Cloud and product names will change.

“Our goal is to provide a cloud that is easy to use, unified across multiple deployments and the world leader in supporting mission critical workloads,” Mendenhall wrote. “As part of our ongoing work to build the cloud designed for you, we are unifying the public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud under one brand. We are the IBM Cloud…the cloud for your business.”

When the platform as a service (PaaS) Bluemix was first launched, in 2014, pundits argued the PaaS opportunity was an interesting one for IBM to explore. “The Bluemix platform is the closest we’ve seen to something that can match Microsoft’s Azure when it comes to the developer experience,” wrote Gary Barnett for Ovum at the time. “If IBM continues to enhance the platform and can bring on enough partners, Bluemix could transform the PaaS market.”

Earlier this week, IBM announced the launch of IBM Cloud Private, which aimed to help give public cloud agility to private cloud or on-premises environments. As this publication has frequently explored, not everything can sit comfortably atop the public cloud. An example IBM gave of this was in the financial space, where security and regulatory concerns with customer data are key. The knotty stuff could remain in the private cloud, while, using IBM’s new product, the financial company could leverage analytics and machine learning in the public cloud.

Read more: IBM’s latest launch aims to take cloud-native benefits to private clouds

Every few years, a disruptive force comes along that prompts us to reframe our understanding of what something means, or how it works. For years, the notion of what a computer is and how you make one went pretty much unchallenged. Then virtualization came along, followed by cloud computing, and most recently containers. Suddenly the old rules no longer seemed to apply, or at least they didn’t always apply. These disruptors made us reconsider our IT worldview.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Opsani to exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Opsani is creating the next generation of automated continuous deployment tools designed specifically for containers. How is continuous deployment different from continuous integration and continuous delivery? CI/CD tools provide build and test. Continuous Deployment is the means by which qualified changes in software code or architecture are automatically deployed to production as soon as they are ready. Adding continuous deployment to your toolchain is the final step to providing push button deployment for your developers.

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United Technologies (UTC), a conglomerate which builds and services products including aerospace engines and elevators, is going to leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure in a strategic partnership.

The company says one of its core tenets is ‘giving employees the digital tools and capabilities to work in new and different ways at market speed.’ As a result, Microsoft technologies are set to be used in a variety of UTC businesses.

Pratt & Whitney, an aerospace manufacturer under the UTC umbrella, will be using Azure and Dynamics for cloud-based field service, sales and marketing to improve the customer experience, while Otis, a manufacturer of ‘people-moving products’, as the company puts it – elevators, escalators and walkways – will use Dynamics 365 CRM for its service technicians and sales teams.

“At UTC, we build products and services that are vital to business and impact lives everywhere. Through digital transformation, we are raising the bar on our capabilities to predict, prevent and respond to our customers’ needs,” said Vince Campisi, UTC chief digital officer and CIO. “Collaborating with Microsoft, and leveraging its intelligent cloud, we are changing how we define the customer experience.”

“United Technologies is a global leader in the aerospace and building industries and has a deep commitment to innovation,” said Judson Althoff, Microsoft EVP worldwide commercial business. “The combination of UTC’s customer service expertise together with Microsoft’s intelligent cloud will provide a digital business model for UTC businesses across multiple industries.”

This is not the only major customer deal Microsoft has inked in recent times. Earlier this week, energy giant Chevron signed a seven year partnership with the Redmond company, making Azure its primary cloud provider. The company added the move will accelerate the application of technologies such as analytics and the Internet of Things to drive performance and improve efficiencies.