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Microsoft has leapt ahead of its competition for second place in global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenues, yet still continues to be dwarfed by Amazon Web Services, according to the latest analysis from Synergy Research.

The analyst house, which has covered the IaaS market in depth over the past few years, released a graph today which showed competitive pricing for cloud infrastructure services in Q3. Amazon retains its huge lead in the market, yet Microsoft is racing clear of competitors Google, IBM, Salesforce and Rackspace:

AWS’ exact market share is put at 27% by Synergy, gaining ground after what the research firm called a “relatively soft” Q2. While the graph shows Microsoft having by far the highest percentage growth, it’s all relative: AWS revenue growth over the past four quarters is greater than Microsoft’s total cloud infrastructure revenue.

“AWS remains in a league of its own for scale,” the researchers argue.

The second quarter analysis can be found here, with AWS’ percentage growth at 49% compared with Microsoft’s 164% and IBM’s 86%. Back then the headline story was Google’s comparative lack of growth, at ‘just’ 47%.

Back then Synergy Research chief analyst John Dinsdale argued it was only going to be a blip for Amazon, telling CloudTech he didn’t think the company was resting on its laurels, “quite the opposite actually”. So it has proved in Q3.

Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues, including IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid cloud, have now hit the $4bn mark. The overall market grew by almost half (49%), yet the four main operators grew even more rapidly than that.

Microsoft announced last week it was offering unlimited OneDrive storage to Office 365 customers, while AWS launched a series of data centres in Frankfurt. Yet the Q3 revenue figures of the bigger players haven’t all hit the mark; Google’s came back lower than Wall Street expected, while IBM’s were also criticised.

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Opinion This week has seen two companies, very different in size, take two very different paths with its cloud storage capabilities.

Bitcasa announced last week it was binning its $10 a month unlimited cloud storage option for customers. The reason the company gave was two-fold; firstly there was a lack of demand, and secondly there was a group of “abusers” – in other words, businesses using individual storage accounts.

In a blog post, Bitcasa noted they could only see the amount of data stored in each account, and soon smelled a rat. While giving the usual apologies for inconvenience and telling customers they have until November 15 to migrate, the company ended its missive on a positive note.

“Our customer and developer base has grown and the change will allow the company to further focus on improving our offerings,” Bitcasa wrote. “We will continue to unveil additional features in the coming year and are confident in the value our new platform and infrastructure will bring.”

That’s all well and good, but over at Redmond Microsoft has been trying to obliterate the cloud storage competition, yesterday announcing unlimited OneDrive cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers. “Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365,” trumpeted Chris Jones, OneDrive corporate VP in a Microsoft blog.

Back in June Microsoft gave each Office 365 user 1TB of storage, a fairly hefty chunk of space as it was. Conversations I’ve had with various users of OneDrive felt similarly; it was difficult enough trying to fill a terabyte. On the surface this latest move doesn’t count for much. But it’s a bet to keep a customer base long term.

“While unlimited storage is another important milestone for OneDrive we believe the true value of cloud storage is only realised when it is tightly integrated with the tools people use to communicate, create, and collaborate, both personally and professionally,” Jones added. “That is why unlimited storage is just one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share and collaborate on all the files that are important to them.”

This is the key point. Microsoft doesn’t just want you to use OneDrive. It wants you to use Office 365, SharePoint et al, then spread out to Lync and Yammer for the rest of your business.

Despite this, Microsoft says you’ll get unlimited cloud storage even on the lowest Office price plan, Office 365 Personal, which amounts to about $7 a month at its lowest level.

Puts Bitcasa’s $10 plan into perspective, doesn’t it?

Alright, alright, this is being a little harsh. Microsoft and Bitcasa are clearly playing into different markets; one is enterprise-focused, the other developer. Yet for Bitcasa, this move to remove its unlimited package could well be for the best.

Cloud storage and enterprise file and sync has been a hot yet judicious market. Box and Dropbox have hoovered up more than $500m apiece in funding. The former, in its on again-off again IPO drama, picked up $150m of that in July this year.

Bitcasa, in comparison, has only picked up $22m. It almost feels like a Sunday league team turning up at the Nou Camp.

Or is it? One enterprise file sync and share provider which has raised less than a fifth of Box and Dropbox’s funding is Egynte. This is mostly down to a “slow and deliberate” style of management from boss Vineet Jain, who told CloudTech it was much more important to get the home ground solidified before fighting new battles.

The European branch was opened this year, with Egnyte announcing last month former Gigamon man Ian McEwen as its new EMEA chief. The message was pretty much the same, yet one interesting nugget which came from CloudTech’s chat with McEwen was that a new customer revenue base was emerging – the second generation enterprise customer, which had dipped its toe in a storage solution but wasn’t satisfied.

Steve Jobs once claimed Dropbox was a feature, not a product. He did so for a reason. Well yes, he wanted to buy Dropbox, that’s one reason. But it’s a view shared by the likes of Google and Microsoft; storage is just one subset of an overall product.

The big boys took a while to realise it, but they’re now starting to catch up. With Microsoft offering unlimited storage, then at lower margins Bitcasa might be wise to stop giving stuff away for free. As Egnyte shows, there’s still a route for the likes of Bitcasa – but it’s got to be the right play.

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Verizon’s yearly report on the state of enterprise cloud computing has found that the public v private debate, while “convenient shorthand”, is “inadequate to describe the massive variety of cloud services available today.”

The report, which features survey results from 451 Research of almost 1000 respondents, found a variety of interesting nuggets:

• 65% of enterprises are using cloud computing
• More than 80% of cloud spend is managed by the IT department – over half directly by the CIO
• 71% of enterprises expect to be using cloud for external-facing production applications by 2017
• 41% of enterprises who use IaaS say they’re using it for mission-critical workloads

Yet it was proclaiming the death of the public v private discussion which leapt from the page. Verizon argued that new terms, such as ‘virtual private cloud’, indicate the blurring of these definitions.

Choosing the right workload requires answers to three questions; would the risk profile allow it to be run on shared infrastructure; what proportion of the workload is on premise; and how much of the management of the cloud environment are you prepared to take on?

The last point is most interesting; increasingly cloud providers are offering managed services. But for those firms who want to have something in between, Verizon recommends a scorecard approach to determine the state of each workload. This can reveal whether it’s best for the firm’s IT to move to collocation, or managed hosting, or improve the architecture, such as application modernisation.

“More and more businesses are taking a planned, lifecycle approach to adopting cloud, recognising that every application under consideration has its own unique migration path to follow,” the report notes.

Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute, admitted he’d always “hated” the definition of public and private cloud when he spoke to CloudTech back in September and argued we had “jumbled up definitions” at the moment.

“The trouble is, people assume with public cloud you get that elasticity, you get that flexibility, but you don’t get security,” he said. “That’s not true. That’s you making an assumption of what public cloud is.

“Not all cloud computing platforms are purely internet facing. The version two ones which are network integrated give you the option to have that public cloud interface and experience and elasticity but in an entirely private domain, and the reason that’s occurred is because in the last 10 or 15 years, that’s exactly what networks have done,” he added.

Elsewhere, the report argued the continuing presence of software defined networking (SDN) and elastic networks to ensure the he network can be configured in tandem with the cloud computing resources that it connects.

You can find out more on the Verizon State of Enterprise Cloud report here.

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Danish beer brand Carlsberg is rolling out Microsoft Office 365 for greater enterprise collaboration, according to details of a customer case study from Redmond.

Carlsberg is rolling out this technology initiative under the banner of ‘GloCal’, which “aims for global efficiency while staying true to its local roots,” and chose Microsoft Office 365 as the optimal solution.

Employees use a full range of Microsoft products: Exchange Online for email; Lync as a messaging tool; SharePoint for collaboration; and Yammer for social networking.

“One way we are helping our employees work better together is by deploying Office 365,” said Etienne Dock, vice president of IT architecture and sourcing at Carlsberg.

“No matter what device or distance, the cloud is breaking down traditional barriers so we’re better able to focus on brewing the best beer in the world.”

From six markets in 2000, Carlsberg is now the fourth largest brewer of beer in the world with over 500 different brands to manage. The firm has also launched the Carlsberg Supply Chain (CSC) which utilises cloud technologies, such as Office 365, to streamline the business.

As a result, any opportunity to cut corners and improve the bottom line is a welcome one for Dock.

“Breweries are capital intensive, so we don’t want to build too many,” Dock said. “CSC gets huge business value from using Office 365 as a global collaboration tool to interact with our global markets and exchange the information we need to fine-tune the balance between these variables to optimise our operations and save money.”

This isn’t the only tech initiative Carlsberg has rolled out in recent weeks. The firm rolled out beer mats containing an NFC tag and a QR code at pubs across Denmark earlier this month, as well as installing Bluetooth beacons to drive traffic on its Crowdit venue discovery app.

A report released last week by Skyhigh Networks found that many enterprises weren’t using the full umbrella of Microsoft cloud apps. While Office 365 and SharePoint were popular, Yammer, Lync and OneDrive didn’t get as much traction.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened up a new European data centre in the German city of Frankfurt.

The move comes to assuage European customers they can keep all their data and services on the continent instead of the US, with the German data centre – or region, as AWS prefers – complementing their other European offering in Ireland. The Frankfurt launch brings the total number of AWS data centres to 11.

“To survive, businesses must be able to compete in today’s digital economy,” said Pontus Noren, co-founder of Cloudreach.

“Unrestricted use of the world’s number one cloud computing platform from AWS has become the essential part of any organisation’s ability to compete,” he added. “The German region for AWS will enable German businesses to do business in Germany without moving their data outside Germany.”

It can’t be said the move wasn’t coming. Back in March a Wall Street Journal article all but named Germany as the next data centre location for AWS. The new data centre will have two separate availability zones at launch, and is compliant with all applicable EU data protection requirements. Customers can also construct their cloudy architecture between the two EU regions.

“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said AWS SVP Andy Jassy in a statement. “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.”

AWS isn’t the only infrastructure provider looking to European expansion. IBM, through SoftLayer, launched a London data centre in July, and more recently announced expansion to France.

Earlier this week a report from Skyhigh Networks found that AWS remains the most popular enterprise cloud service, ahead of Microsoft Office365 and Salesforce.

Find out more about the AWS Frankfurt data centre here.

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This publication has often banged the drum for organisations to ensure their cloud disaster recovery plans are in order. Now cloud service provider Databarracks has put together a series of resources designed to be the “complete DR toolkit.”

We know cloud exits are not the most thrilling topic of conversation. Everyone would much prefer to keep their heads in the sand and talk about how more productive, lean and agile their business will be once they’ve moved the kitchen sink to the cloud. But whether it’s a data breach, or something as extreme as a CSP going under, orchestrating a hasty retreat is of vital significance.

There are three separate documents to the Databarracks disaster recovery toolkit:

• The cost of downtime calculator: This simply calculates revenue divided by number of working hours in the year, as well as totting it up per department and per IT system
• Disaster recovery responsibilities: This is a flow chart designed to tell which job department – IT administrator, IT manager, IT director, CIO and CEO – is responsible for what action in creating a disaster recovery plan
• Disaster recovery runbook: A 20 page document, personalised to suit each company, which aims to detail key internal and external contacts, and a step by step guide to recovering and testing servers. The runbook is modular, so organisations don’t have to follow it to the letter.

“We wanted to be able to provide one kit that contained everything an IT team needs to create and maintain a watertight disaster recovery plan”, said Peter Groucutt, Databarracks managing director.

“It’s difficult for a board to ignore hard figures,” he continued. “Organisations in the UK are risking too much by not having solid [business continuity plans] and DR plans in place. Our DR toolkit shows that good plans don’t have to be complicated or overly expensive, but they do need to be there and they need to be maintained regularly.”

Downtime continues to be the Achilles heel for businesses, especially if their IT architecture is that of an inverted pyramid. At the bottom is the data centre service – at the cheapest end of the scale is a £20 rack that could support £50-£100,000 of hardware and software.

Last month a Databarracks survey found that only 30% of smaller businesses had a business continuity plan in place, compared to 54% of medium organisations and 73% of larger businesses.

The kit can be found here (registration required).

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58% of attendees at the 2014 Cloud Expo and the AWS Summit, in New York, have indicated they are building hybrid cloud solutions for their organisations, according to a survey.

According to the survey, conducted by Avere Systems, the same number (58%) said they were planning on migrating at least some of their on-prem applications to the cloud within the next two years.

Archiving is the most popular aspect of enterprises that are being moved to the cloud, with 28% of the vote. This was followed by corporate file sharing on 22%, with 18% of respondents admitting they would move their entire business to the cloud.

Half (49%) of respondents said that Amazon Web Services was their cloud of choice for storage, compared with 19% for Google, and 13% for Microsoft Azure. More than half (56%) of respondents are looking at deploying AWS for object storage.

Over a quarter (26%) of those polled indicated their top level executive team was driving cloud strategy within their organisations. A similar number (22%) said it was their storage and data management teams leading the charge.

It’s yet more evidence that hybrid cloud – a mix of cloud and on-premise for mission critical applications – is seen as the way forward, not just for smaller businesses but for the enterprise market.

Cloud service providers are increasingly noticing this. VMware, for instance, has hybrid cloud as one of its three strategic priorities, alongside software defined data centres and end user computing. CenturyLink and Rackspace have also kickstarted initiatives for managed hosting services in recent months.

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EMC has announced it is to merge data centre biz VCE into its main organisation, buying out all but 10% of Cisco’s stake in the company.

The news comes weeks after EMC announced the buy of open cloud provider Cloudscaling, and can be seen as an advancement of the ménage a trois-esque relationship between EMC, VMware and Cisco in ownership of VCE.

The converged infrastructure (CI) provider was originally set up as a joint venture between EMC, VMware and Cisco in order to create Vblock, a cloud computing platform which morphed into CI. In a blog post reflecting on this alliance Gary Moore, president and COO of Cisco and Howard Elias, president and COO of EMC, described is as “the most successful in IT history.”

The duo put the success of the platform down to “the best technologies, combined with a maniacal focus on the customer experience and tremendous execution by talented teams.”

EMC noted VCE will remain intact under CEO Praveen Akkiraju, with Cisco and VMware continuing as “strategic partners and investors” in the firm.

“VCE was created to be a disruptive force by radically transforming and simplifying IT data centre architectures, accelerating a shift to cloud computing,” said Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC in a statement. “It has been a huge success and has changed the conversation with CIOs.

“Our commitment to increased investment will enable VCE to significantly expand the scale and scope of its solutions, helping customers take better advantage of hybrid cloud and next generation opportunities,” he added.

“We would like to welcome Praveen, VCE president Frank Hauck and the VCE team to EMC and congratulate them on the tremendous success of VCE.”

Earlier this month it was reported that EMC had bought Cloudscaling, an open cloud provider. A couple of theories were floated around at the time regarding the move – one was to keep EMC relevant, as a legacy IT vendor, while the other was a need to beef up its non-VMware operation, after hedge-fund manager Elliott Management sent a letter to the board of EMC advising them to cast off its VMware unit.

Arguably, both theories can be further refined with the VCE reshift news today. Not every analyst is keen though.

“We view the Cisco/VCE news as a ‘yawner’ given that EMC right now is facing a plethora of growth and strategic challenges and the last thing on investors’ minds is the future of VCE,” wrote FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives in a note to clients, as reported by Reuters.

VCE CEO Akkiraju, writing in a blog post, sees things a little differently. “Now that VCE is a $2bn company looking to expand beyond platforms to deliver hybrid cloud solutions, it’s critical to evolve to a structure that supports our broader mission from the technology and financial perspectives,” he wrote.

“As an EMC business we will benefit from being an integral part of an established leader in the data centre and cloud space.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular enterprise cloud service according to a report released today from Skyhigh Networks – but the research also fired a broadside at how companies are struggling to block consumer products.

The reports, which are quarterly and based on data from more than 1.6 million users, noted a huge disparity in companies saying they block certain services and the amount of employees actually blocked.

80% of companies say they block Dropbox, but only 21% of users are actually blocked

Take file sharing provider Dropbox. It’s a very popular service to block, with 80% of firms surveyed saying they nix it. Yet only 21% of users are blocked. It gets worse the further you look. Half of companies claim to block iCloud, yet the actual block rate is only 9%. For Netflix (40% and 4%) and Instagram (48% and 4%), it’s a similar story. Only Facebook has a good hit rate – 50% of companies say they block it, and 31% of users are actually blocked.

The remaining number – in Dropbox’s case, 59% of users – is what Skyhigh calls the “cloud enforcement gap.” This can come about in various ways. Either the cloud service provider proffers a new URL which isn’t picked up on by the IT department, or block rates aren’t enforced by certain geographies, or exemptions to particular groups get picked up on and shared around.

It’s a prevalent trend. The number of cloud services used by the average company rose 23%, from 588 in Q114 to 724 in Q3, yet almost three quarters (74.3%) of cloud services in use do not meet the current EU Data Protection Directive.

In other words, it’s shadow IT. Facebook is the most popular service in this category, followed by Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

It’s interesting to note the differences between consumer and enterprise in this instance. Box is the seventh most popular enterprise tool, yet Dropbox is positioned #11 in consumer cloud services. Other storage providers, Apple’s iCloud (#13) and Google Drive (#14) also feature in consumer.

The average company uses an eye watering 125 collaboration services

Ultimately, Dropbox is the most popular file sharing tool overall, ahead of Google Drive, Box and OneDrive. Office365 is the most popular collaboration tool, ahead of Gmail and WebEx, while workday is number one for HR. The average company uses 37 different file sharing services, and an eye watering 125 collaboration services.

The report also notes how the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, applies to cloud services, but in a much more extreme manner. 80% of data uploaded to the cloud goes to less than 1% of all services – Box (23%) is the most popular there, followed by Dropbox (11%), YouTube (9%), and Microsoft Office365 (7%).

In order, the 10 most popular enterprise cloud services are AWS, Microsoft Office365, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, Concur, ServiceNow, Box, LivePerson, Zendesk and Yammer. The top 20 also includes services from enterprise giants, such as BMC, Workday and GoToMeeting. Microsoft’s storage product, OneDrive, and NetSuite, were new entries in this edition.

Read the full document here.

Read more: How cloud doesn’t have to mean shadow IT takes hold

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Analysis If Google is struggling with its numbers, then there isn’t much hope for everyone else. The third quarter financial results have been a bit of a struggle across the board, but the big legacy tech vendors are really starting to feel the heat.

Oracle’s revenues only went up 3% year on year, lower than Wall Street expected, while SAP’s marginally went up but its software division took a hit. Now it’s IBM’s turn – and the findings don’t look good.

IBM posted its third quarter financial results, showing revenue of $22.4 billion, down 4% or 2% at constant currency, operating net income at $3.7bn, down 18%, yet cloud revenue was up more than 50% year to date.

Owch. Yes, the company has been making waves in its cloud computing investments, ever since it bought SoftLayer. CloudTech has generally been impressed with what IBM has done in cloud this year. A billion dollar investment, and a strategic rebranding to becoming a cloud company is certainly an impressive statement of intent. But it didn’t cut much ice among the analysts.

Toni Sacconaghi, of Sanford Bernstein, used the word “crisis” in his question to the IBM execs on the earnings call, which included CEO Ginni Rometty, who normally doesn’t appear on these calls.

Explaining the numbers were part of the reason she was on the call, Rometty replied: “Obviously we were disappointed in this quarter, but when we talk about what we’re doing for the long term and these actions, these actions go on the heels of what has been a series of what I think are very bold actions from the entire year with a very clear strategy,” she said, according to Seeking Alpha.

“The strategy’s correct, and now it’s our speed of execution that needs to continue to improve.”

This strategy includes lopping off limbs which are no longer profitable, such as its server division to Lenovo for north of $2bn earlier this year and earlier this month, its chipmaking business to Globalfoundries – but in that one, IBM is paying $1.5bn for the privilege.

Yet Rometty will hope this is a small price to pay so she can run the 102 year old International Business Machines her way.

There’s plenty of evidence and promise about that – take into account IBM’s recent partnership with Apple to give Cupertino the enterprise foot-up it needs, putting IBM software into iDevices. Similarly, the recent partnership with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is an interesting one.

The argument IBM, and SAP, and Oracle, are all using is the same one. Yes, the numbers don’t look great now, but look a bit further along the path and it’ll get better. We’ve got to move away from on-prem software revenues, and cloud sales can’t make up that shortfall straight away.

It’s an easy get out clause struggling companies make to keep the vultures away for the near future at least. But in this instance, it’s true. It will mean short term pain. IBM’s layoffs this year (known as ‘resource actions’) were especially brutal, with the Alliance@IBM employee page continuing to make depressing reading. But it’s happening to other companies too – take Microsoft as an example of that. And if it results in long term gain through cloud subscription revenues, then Rometty et al will consider it a job well done. But remember – it’s still an ‘if’.