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VMware has announced its intent to acquire Bitnami, a provider of application packaging and delivery, to help accelerate app delivery for multi-cloud use cases.

Bitnami, based out of San Francisco, offers organisations the capability to deploy a multitude of applications through its libraries either natively or across a plethora of cloud providers. The company was a graduate of Y Combinator and was noted for a reticence on funding, only accepting a seed round in May 2013.

This need for greater enterprise presence and the funding required to do it ultimately precipitated the move, the company said.

“This was actually an easy decision and has to do with our shared vision for the future,” wrote co-founders Daniel Lopez and Erica Brescia in a blog post. “Our mission at Bitnami is to make awesome software available to everyone, everywhere… to make that software accessible to the largest number of users and developers possible.

“Over the past years, we expanded our focus to help enterprises use Bitnami in production, often as part of a migration of their application to the cloud or their adoption of Kubernetes,” Lopez and Brescia added. “We realised that if we wanted to continue to grow, we would have to raise money, as building an enterprise salesforce is not easy to do when you are bootstrapped.

“As part of the conversations we had during this process, we realised that VMware would be the ideal partner for us. We both believe in a Kubernetes and multi-cloud future. We both share large enterprise customers, including cloud service providers. We both are building products and services to help companies navigate this multi-platform, multi-vendor world with a focus on enterprises.”

From VMware’s side, the company said it was ‘committed to maintaining the deep partnerships that Bitnami currently has with major cloud providers.’ The company’s website has logos of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle, alongside VMware.

“Upon close, Bitnami will enable our customers to easily deploy application packages on any cloud – public or hybrid – and in the most optimal format – virtual machine (VM), containers and Kubernetes helm charts,” wrote Milin Desai and Paul Fazzone in a blog post. “Further, Bitnami will be able to augment our existing efforts to deliver a curated marketplace to VMware customers that offers a rich set of applications and development environments in addition to infrastructure software.”

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Connor Jones

PencilDATA helps organizations operate in a trusted environment by making it easy to take advantage of advanced blockchain technologies. Chainkit is a cloud-based API from PencilDATA that enables organizations to improve the data integrity in their existing systems and business processes using the immutable strength of blockchain.

The PencilDATA founding team is made up of industry veterans, with deep experience in enterprise software, security, data, and cloud, and is supported by a world-class team of advisors and investors.

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Google Cloud has announced the official launch of its Osaka cloud data centre region, making it the second facility in Japan and the 20th overall.

The Osaka region, as with all Google Cloud facilities aside from Iowa, has three availability zones and comes with the standard product set, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.

The move ensures the company is going ahead at a steady clip following the opening of the Zurich data centre region in March. According to Google Cloud’s map, Seoul, Jakarta, and Salt Lake City are next on the list, pencilled in provisionally for the first half of 2020.

Writing in a blog post confirming the launch, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted the strategic importance of Japan – and that with two cloud regions in the country, customers will benefit from greater business continuity, infrastructure, and more partners.

“We’ve invested more than $47 billion in our global infrastructure in the last three years, and we continue to invest to fuel the digital transformation journey of our customers across more than 150 countries,” wrote Kurian. “These key elements, combined with our global partner ecosystem and expanded go-to-market organisation, enable Google Cloud to be a strategic partner to the world’s leading enterprises.”

As ever with these things, a satisfied customer was rolled out, in the shape of beverage manufacturer Asahi Breweries. “We’re looking forward to the Osaka cloud region,” said Tatsuhito Chiku, corporate officer and general manager of IT at Asahi Group Holdings. “Using Google Cloud Platform services like BigQuery have enabled us to build a system with low latency and high resiliency, and the Osaka cloud region will further improve our system availability and achieve business continuity.”

Google was also placed as a leader for the first time in Gartner’s most recent infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant focusing specifically on Japan. This makes for an interesting analysis; when looking at the leaders, it remains an AWS-Microsoft-Google 1-2-3, with IBM as the only ‘visionary’ and a host of local providers, from Fujitsu to IIJ (Internet Initiative Japan) as niche players.

You can read the full announcement here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Leading hyperscale cloud service providers continue to disrupt the traditional IT infrastructure vendor landscape, as more enterprise CIOs and CTOs expand their adoption of multi-cloud strategies that marginalise the remaining applications for on-premises data centres.

Legacy IT vendors that were reluctant to evolve their business model will now seek niche cloud market segments where they can differentiate their offerings. There's no viable growth path that's based upon hardware or software market status-quo assumptions. However, distinctive professional services are still a source of new opportunities.

Cloud computing market development

The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.5 percent in 2019 to total $214.3 billion — that's up from $182.4 billion in 2018, according to the latest global market study by Gartner.

The fastest-growing market segment will be cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is forecast to grow 27.5 percent in 2019 to reach $38.9 billion — that's up from $30.5 billion in 2018.

The second-highest growth rate of 21.8 percent will be achieved by cloud application infrastructure services, or platform as a service (PaaS).

"Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry," said Sid Nag, vice president at Gartner. "At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organisations. What we see now is only the beginning, though."

Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three times the growth of overall IT services.

According to recent Gartner surveys, more than a third of organisations see cloud investments as a top three investing priority, which is impacting market offerings. Gartner expects that by the end of 2019, more than 30 percent of technology providers’ new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only.

This means that license-based software consumption will further plummet, while SaaS and subscription-based cloud consumption models continue their rise.

"Organisations need cloud-related services to get on-boarded onto public clouds and to transform their operations as they adopt public cloud services," said Mr. Nag.

Currently, almost 19 percent of cloud budgets are spent on cloud-related services, such as cloud consulting, implementation, migration and managed services, and Gartner expects that this rate will increase to 28 percent by 2022.

Outlook for cloud computing application growth

According to the Gartner assessment, as cloud computing continues to become mainstream within most organisations, technology product managers for cloud-related service offerings will need to focus on delivering solutions that combine experience and execution with hyperscale providers’ offerings.

This complementary approach will drive both the transformation and optimisation of an organisation’s IT infrastructure and operations. This vendor coexistence model is the multi-cloud market reality.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Meet Unravel Data. The California-based big data software provider has secured $35 million (£27.1m) in a series C funding round – with the aim of revamping the application performance management (APM) space.

The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Harmony Partners, as well as existing investors Menlo Ventures, GGV Capital, and M12, formerly Microsoft Ventures.

The company’s vision is based around the thesis that the current leaders in the APM and log management market – AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk et al – are not able to keep up with modern, data-driven, AI-enabled IT architectures. Among the company’s customers offering full stack observability for Azure, AWS, as well as big data platforms Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, are Deutsche Bank, Neustar and, perhaps not altogether surprisingly, Microsoft.

“CIOs in our network told us story after story of traditional application monitoring tools failing in a big data context because those tools were designed for the world of the past,” said Matthew Grande, chief market intelligence officer at Point72. “This new architecture requires a different product, one built from the ground up to focus on the unique challenges posed by big data applications.

“Unravel is poised to capture this emerging big data APM market,” added Grande.

The funding comes alongside various indicators of the company’s success. In what PR types call ‘momentum announcements’ – because there is not any news to speak of – the company cites annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth of 500% and the launch of Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud partner ecosystems as particular highlights.

Ultimately, there is major currency in making the most out of the deluge that is organisations’ data capacity. For some vendors, it is all about helping their customers filter the signal from the noise and glean insights on their data. For others, such as Unravel, it is about stability in performance.

“Every business is becoming a data business, and companies are relying on their data applications such as machine learning, IoT, and customer analytics, for better business outcomes using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, and NoSQL,” said Kunal Agarwal, Unravel Data CEO. “We are making sure that these technologies are easy to operate and are high performing so that businesses can depend on them. We partner with our customers through their data journey and help them successfully run data apps on various systems whether on-premises or in the cloud.”

Total funding for the company now stands at $57.2 million.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Keri Allan

The last six years have seen a rapid acceleration in the use of cloud computing. Enterprises of all sizes and across industries are now turning to cloud infrastructure and pursuing cloud-first strategies. As IT departments increasingly shift workloads into public clouds while they simultaneously convert existing on-premises virtualised environments to support cloud-like capabilities, optimising cloud spending has become an intense focus for many organisations.

In the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera, cloud users who were surveyed on their adoption of cloud identified two top priorities that, not surprisingly, correlate: moving more workloads to public cloud and optimising cloud costs.

As the use of public cloud has grown, so has the amount of spend. Public cloud spending is quickly becoming a significant new line item in IT budgets, especially among larger companies that typically run more workloads in cloud. More than 50 percent of enterprises are spending in excess of $1.2 million per year on public cloud in 2019.

Total annual revenue for the top public cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform exceeded $30B last year (the exact number is unknown because only Amazon breaks out revenue for its cloud infrastructure unit separately from its other cloud services). Much of that revenue comes at the expense of cloud users not understanding how they can prevent wasted cloud costs.

Cloud users can do more to optimise cloud spend

Even though managing cloud costs is a top initiative for cloud users in 2019, they continue to underestimate the amount of wasted cloud spend. Respondents estimated 27 percent waste, while Flexera has measured actual waste at 35 percent.

One reason there is so much waste in public cloud is because of the complexity of cloud pricing and billing: Cloud providers offer hundreds of thousands of price points, and bills often have millions of line items. Add to that the constant change in pricing and introduction of new features plus the decentralisation of cloud use and it becomes apparent why it’s difficult to get a handle on cloud costs.

There are four key ways to address the problem of overspending on cloud:

Identify wasted cloud spend

Common areas where companies waste cloud spend include:

• Running instances 24×7: Rather than running instances when they are not needed, implement auto-scaling for production workloads as well as automated scheduling for development environments to run only during working hours or when needed
• Overprovisioning instances: Typically about 40 percent of instance spend is on VMs that are running at below 40 percent of CPU and memory utilisation, with the majority of those running under 20 percent utilisation. By downsizing, you can significantly reduce costs
• Neglecting to clean up old storage data: Deleting storage volumes that are no longer attached to instances as well as deleting old snapshots that are beyond your snapshot retention policy can save you money

Take advantage of discounts

Another significant area for cost savings is to leverage discounts from the cloud providers by committing to instance usage. Each cloud provider has different rules and approaches to its discounts, but the basic principles for using discounts is the same and can result in significant savings.

Collaborate to save more

Because centralised cloud governance teams aren’t the owners of the cloud resources, the biggest challenge they face is taking action on areas of waste. Once they have uncovered possible savings opportunities, they need to collaborate with the resource owners to take action. A typical collaboration process would include several steps by various stakeholders:

• Cloud governance team identifies recommendations for savings and shares recommendations with resource owners
• Resource owners can then identify recommendations that should be ignored (a recommendation to downsize an underutilised instance may not be appropriate if it is used for a disaster recovery scenario, for example), take action on recommendations, and share recommendations with other team members.
• Cloud governance team then reviews the results of the actions and reports on savings

Leverage automated policies for cost control

The agility offered by cloud results in resources often being provisioned with no delays for approval processes, so costs can quickly escalate if there are no governance processes in place to uncover waste and ensure efficiency. If your enterprise, like many, is manually managing your cloud costs rather than using automated policies, you could be missing opportunities to significantly reduce wasted spend.

The key is to remember that cloud cost optimisation is not once and done. By using automated policies to continually optimise for both the quick fixes such as identifying idle and underutilised instances as well as tackling more complex scenarios like Reserved Instances planning, you can reduce wasted spend over the long term.

Optimising cloud costs delivers instant savings

Enterprises in virtually every industry are adopting cloud to transform their IT organisations to help them accelerate innovation, expand market reach, and drive IT costs down — all while unlocking investment capital that was previously tied up in costly data centres.

The variable cost model of cloud with monthly billing cycles enables you to immediately realise savings the minute that you turn off a resource or scale it down. But ongoing management of cloud costs must be more than a one-time event or once-a-quarter focus. Companies that become proficient in continuous, automated processes to monitor and optimise cloud spend will save the most over time.

For more information, please download the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.