Late last week CloudTech reported that the state of California was moving to the cloud, thanks to a contract won by IBM, AT&T and KPMG. And according to George Cruser, general manager infrastructure for IBM Global Technology Services, it was a unique contract in the 25 years he’s done government work.

“It was kind of an interesting competitive bid because it was the standard government bid, and then they had a series of negotiations where they took two teams across and did day-long sessions with each team,” he tells CloudTech.

“We ended up doing four day-long sessions before being selected as the victor.

“I would say [it’s] the first time I’ve ever spent four days in live discussions with a government client, and the result was they knew exactly what they were getting, and they made adjustments to make sure they got what they wanted,” he adds.

The contract itself is at $37m, at five years open to all government entities within California. IBM said in a press release accompanying the launch that, alongside supplying and managing the infrastructure, it would “work closely with the state to transfer essential knowledge and best practices in security and systems integration to the Department of Technology.”

It’s like a private membership only cloud, and the state gets to choose who the members are

Cruser confirms this, adding: “One of the requirements was they would have a full understanding as opposed to just pure outsourcing.”

IBM confirmed that it was working with a couple of states “who were very much interested in the concept”, but couldn’t say any more than that. However Cruser adds: “California clearly is a leader, in showing that they’ve essentially built a private cloud for multi-tenant use.

“I view it somewhat as it’s a private membership only cloud, and the state gets to choose who the members are.

“At the moment they’ve said it’s going to be California government entities, all the way down through municipalities and local. In the future they can choose to extend it more broadly than that if they so desired.”

The future for CalCloud is adding platform as a service and software as a service capability to its infrastructure as a service offering at present. Cruser notes the advantages California holds as the shape of cloud computing changes.

“I think the beauty of it is all the things that we don’t know will be available in the next five years can be made available through this contract,” Cruser says. “As infrastructure grows, as platform grows, evolves and changes, software as a service evolves and changes, the state’s got a platform now in which to stay current.”

Elsewhere, IBM has announced with AT&T, its main network partner, and DARPA, a proof of concept technology that rapidly reduces set up times for cloud-to-cloud connectivity through software defined networking.

Amazon Web Services is still the dominant market leader in infrastructure services, but IBM and Microsoft are closing the gap in revenues with Google well off the pace, according to the latest number crunching by analyst firm Synergy Research.

For the research house, it represents the first changing of the record in some time, having previously been huge advocates of Amazon’s market offering. AWS was “in a league of its own” this time last year, and “dwarf[ed] all competition” in November, Synergy argued.

At the time it was an irresistible viewpoint, and one CloudTech heartily agreed with in an editorial piece at the time.

Yet things have changed. Microsoft, and IBM particularly, have upped their game in 2014. And it can’t go unnoticed. Microsoft and IBM have gained market share over the past four quarters while AWS and Google remained at similar levels, according to Synergy.

The overall effect of this can be seen in the table below:

It’s worth noting here that this study only examines cloud infrastructure services – IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid. Synergy assesses that AWS revenues in this market are ‘well in excess’ of $1bn per quarter, and while Microsoft and IBM have similar figures per quarter, a lot of this is tied up in software/SaaS and cloud-related hardware products.

So what does this report mean for the main players? According to chief analyst John Dinsdale, it appears to be a mere blip for AWS.

“I do not think that Amazon is resting on its laurels – quite the opposite actually,” he tells CloudTech via email. “It is continuing to innovate and introduce new service offerings, [and] is looking and feeling like a company that intends to maintain its leadership position.”

While the main pretenders to Amazon’s throne have all caught up, Google has stood still. Dinsdale argues its lack of enterprise presence is inevitably holding it back.

“Amazon didn’t but it is benefiting from being the first to market and staying in front of the pack – so it has built the scale and now has credibility with enterprise customers,” says Dinsdale.

“IBM and Microsoft do, and they can leverage that,” he adds.

The study focuses on a quarterly survey of cloud operators alongside extensive supplemental research, and having covered it in detail for over two years, Dinsdale feels Synergy has a pretty good grasp on the market.

Amazon is looking and feeling like a company that intends to maintain its leadership position

In other words, the goalposts haven’t moved – which may be interesting considering the amount of up-and-coming players who have made big bets in the space, including Fujitsu, HP and SAP.

Dinsdale says Fujitsu “is a major player”, but not quite big enough yet to feature in this report (the company ranks #7 in Synergy’s analysis), while adding that HP is “now moving quite aggressively and becoming a substantial infrastructure services player.” Salesforce, who could be seen as the black sheep when compared to AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google in this report, is there on the strength of its PaaS offering, Dinsdale explains.

Amazon reported a loss of $126m across its portfolio in Q2, with the company expecting to lose between $410m and $810m in Q3. Revenues in its ‘other’ business markets – of which AWS is a major part – suffered deceleration in the second quarter, suggesting that the price cuts on its AWS packages are beginning to be felt in the profit margins.

“We remain heads-down focused on driving a better customer experience through price, selection and convenience,” said chief financial officer Tom Szkutak, in an analyst call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“We believe putting customers first is the only reliable way to create lasting value for shareholders,” he added.

Despite this, the Q2 figures show Amazon definitely has challengers to its crown in both revenue and innovation – and they’re not going to go away soon, either.

Software as a service (SaaS) provider Cinolla has signed up with SaaS Assured, which enables its services to stay online even if the data centre hits the skids.

The company, which manages bookings and scheduling for outdoor activity providers, signed up to the SaaS Assured initiative to provide peace of mind for its clients.

SaaS Assured, which is provided by NCC Group, “helps to ‘keep the lights on’ while allowing time for end user to source and transition to an alternative solution that fits their requirements,” according to the NCC Group website.

This is particularly interesting news given the spate of downtime issues experienced by big cloudy vendors in recent months. CloudTech broke the news earlier this month that CRM provider Autotask was suffering serious downtime, whilst a Joyent server also went west recently due to what’s known in the trade as a fat finger.

“The SaaS Assured agreement gives our customers extra confidence to invest in our service,” said Rob Brasington of Cinolla in a statement. “The agreement is simple enough for all decision makers to understand, while the legalities are straightforward and clear.

“I’d highly recommend it to SaaS providers looking to strengthen their offering.”

SaaS Assured’s solution ensures that data will be available even if the company goes bust, with customers assured that they can access their application for three months continuously after a failure.

“SaaS Assured adds significant value to a SaaS provider’s offering, removing one of the major barriers to cloud adoption,” said Daniel Liptrott, managing director of NCC Group’s escrow division.

“Cinolla should be commended for being proactive about business continuity and addressing this common customer concern.”

Chief financial officers “hold the keys” to the next phase of cloud adoption, according to analyst house IDC, because they are among the last ones to move into cloud services.

The analysts, who have collected their findings in the latest Asia Pacific cloud survey, say the CFO has an important role to play in terms of moving to a more optimised business model. In other words, it’s to ensure that the CFO sees cloud as a strategic differentiator for companies, as opposed to just being a cost-cutting exercise.

IDC believes that this won’t be an overnight change, but will be “balanced in the short term by the rest of the CXO table.”

The Asia-Pacific report, of 2,300 businesses, examines how in New Zealand 100% of organisations polled have a cloud budget forecast by 2016. Almost four in five (79%) claim they are using between two and five cloud services already.

Similarly, the researchers note a correlation between enabling business projects and barriers to adoption decreasing was noted. The most frequently cited pain point was ensuring data was secure, according to 36% of respondents. This was followed by constraints of legacy architecture, cited by 16% of those polled.

Yet overall it was New Zealand, considered the fourth most mature Asia Pacific cloud nation excluding Japan, which was praised for its approach in the report.

Cloud is bringing the competitive landscape of NZ businesses closer than ever before

Adam Dodds, IDC New Zealand research manager, said: “Cloud is bringing the competitive landscape of NZ businesses closer than ever before. All business sizes and industries are adopting to the opportunity of leveraging compute services provided from outside of their premises to create go to market and business operations opportunities.

“The challenge to all is how you untangle your legacy infrastructure and align your organisation – with people and processes – to adopt cloud appropriately,” he added.

New Zealand’s prowess in the Asia Pacific arena was also noted by the Asian Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), who placed NZ second only to Japan in its latest rankings, calling it an “ever-ready leader.”

Compare and contrast with the 2012 verdict, which placed New Zealand in sixth, noting improvements in freedom of information and data privacy but placing dead last in international connectivity. This year, while still being the area of weakness, NZ outscored the four lowest ranked nations – China, Indonesia, India and Vietnam – as well as its Pacific rival Australia. New Zealand scored highest in green policy.

Do you agree with the view of the CFO in cloud?

The California Department of Technology, alongside IBM, has announced the launch of CalCloud, an infrastructure as a service private cloud rolled out across California.

The news marks an important client win for IBM after losing a widely publicised battle against Amazon Web Services for a lucrative CIA cloud contract back in October. IBM are involved alongside AT&T, which will provide network services, and KPMG to provide education and drive users to the new services.

By putting it in the cloud, government entities can scale their IT up and down as appropriate, with CalCloud “designed to allow around the clock access to a shared pool of easily configurable resources including compute, storage, network and disaster recovery services,” according to a press release.

“Transforming how the State of California delivers technology services is not only more efficient and cost effective, it will spur innovation with cloud capabilities that are open and secure,” said Erich Clementi, IBM global technology services SVP.

“California is setting an example for other states on how to use cloud technology to improve coordination across agencies and municipalities while reducing the barriers and duplication that can impede the delivery of government services.”

The solution is fully FedRAMP accredited, with more than 20 state departments having already requested services through CalCloud.

US president Barack Obama has long since advocated a cloud-first government policy, yet it’s often been difficult to implement fully without issues. The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, launched last October to a variety of technical issues. As this publication noted: “If HealthCare.gov is suffering from major IT failures, one can imagine the level of systemic dysfunction that plagues non-public-facing IT projects that do not receive the same level of scrutiny.”

Yet the theory and enthusiasm behind it is solid. As ASG’s Mark Keepax wrote on CloudTech earlier this month: “By utilising the cloud, council IT provision moves from being a static asset, to become a service that provides real value to the whole community.”

Find out more about IBM’s partnership with California here.

Virtualisation bod VMware has opened up a second UK data centre, with a new site in Chessington, London, adding to the current data centre in Slough.

The move is evidently designed to represent UK and EMEA customers who want quicker access to their data, and comes a few months after VMware launched its hybrid disaster recovery service (vCHS), which provides a continuously available recovery platform if a data centre goes down.

Gavin Jackson, general manager and VP cloud services EMEA, said: “Our customers have started off using our hybrid service on specific projects for the easy, affordable and seamless movement of workloads between private and public cloud, knowing they can move their legacy and new applications back and forth with ease.

“Now they have seen what VMware vCloud Hybrid Service can enable, they’re turning to it to power their strategic transformation programmes.”

According to VMware, more than 800 EMEA-based individuals at partner organisations have been accredited in its vCloud Hybrid Service since it launched in the UK.

Jackson said in a Q&A blog post on the VMware site that the hybrid cloud service is so popular as it’s “the answer to the cloud dilemma.”

“Businesses are challenged in moving their apps to the public cloud because of the perceived problems it can pose,” he said. “vCHS means you can scale to the cloud without risk, and it’s an example of where highly innovative and trustworthy technology is meeting the needs of increasingly demanding companies and truly responding to business problems.”

It is a bit gushy, yes, but opening up UK data centres and catering for more bespoke, hybrid options from clients seems to be de rigeur with cloud vendors. SoftLayer opened the doors to a UK data centre last month, with further expansion expected in Central Europe.

VMware isn’t the only vendor to advocated hybrid, either. Rackspace unveiled its Managed Cloud offering which enables customers to have a variety of public, private or on-prem, either managed by Rackspace or DIY, while one of IBM’s latest product releases, Cloud Modular Management, offers similar capability.

The prognosticators have been at the tea leaves and crystal balls again. This time, an IDC study has found that cloud hardware spending will break $4bn (£2.34bn) across EMEA in 2014.

The report, entitled EMEA IT Infrastructure Hardware for Public and Private Cloud 2011-2018 Forecast, saw year on year growth of 19% and “confirmed that cloud is the major disruption factor in the EMEA infrastructure hardware market”, according to a press release.

According to the researchers 15% of infrastructure spend in EMEA will be related to cloud environments in 2014. This went up from a miserly 8% in 2011 and will grow to more than 22% by 2018.

$3.4bn (£1.99bn) was spent on hardware going to cloud environments in EMEA through 2013, with the majority of it (42%) going on public cloud environments. 38% of spend went to on-premise private clouds, and 20% by hosted dedicated private clouds, showing a relatively even mix.

This won’t last though, with figures showing that public cloud spend will accelerate to the point of contributing almost $3bn in spend alone by 2018, as can be seen in the graph below:

Credit: IDC

Perhaps less surprisingly, strongest growth in EMEA is driven by Western Europe.

“In the longer term, IDC expects greater adoption of hybrid cloud with benefits for both private and public consumption”, said Monhammed Hefny, senior research analyst at IDC EMEA. “Hybrid cloud allows customers to retain sensitive data behind a corporate firewall while still taking advantage of cloud-related lower costs.”

Recent cloudy IDC predictions include a report from David Tapper on the state of the IaaS market which concluded that IBM was the vendor of choice for the US enterprise market, whilst the analyst house’s emphasis on big data, social, mobility and cloud for the future of IT is remarkably similar to Gartner’s Nexus of Forces – remember analyst firms usually like to disagree with one another, of course.

What do you make of this?

Cloudy ERP and CRM provider NetSuite has snapped up London-based e-commerce provider Venda in a move which signals a concerted effort by both companies for omnichannel commerce in the cloud.

The two companies told CloudTech they had first met about four years ago, with the deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – coming about as both firms “share the same DNA”, according to Venda CTO and co-founder James Cronin.

Pete Daffern, president EMEA at NetSuite, told CloudTech: “We’ve been talking to Venda for a number of years because if somebody doesn’t want our backend capabilities, and they’re using one of the competitive ERP solutions, it’s really giving them another solution to plug in to that as they might evolve to the next solution over time.

“That’s very much part of what this is about, as well as acquiring a company with a great set of customers and a great set of technicians to allow us to further enhance the e-commerce capabilities,” he added.

“It’s just us doubling down on our European investment.”

Cronin added: “What we’re going to be doing in the short term is further enhancing the integration that we have between the Venda platform and the NetSuite platform, continuing to sell both products, and allowing our customers the choice of an upgraded end to end solution as and when the time’s right.”

There are two technology plays here: firstly, it’s about companies moving more of their core business systems to the cloud, as well as omnichannel commerce, across devices and across all parts of the customer experience, from EPOS and order management to inventory and customer support.

For Venda, whose customers include Tesco, TK Maxx and Arsenal Football Club, there was a noticeable trend of becoming more integrated into their customers’ business as e-commerce became more important.

“It’s clear that businesses succeed now by having fully integrated business systems,” Cronin said. “Some retailers are running on business systems that were built maybe 10 or 20 years ago, so now almost all of those systems need upgrading and enhancing.

“NetSuite’s vision of being able to deliver all that capability in the cloud, in a way that upgrades are managed for you, that security’s managed for you, that availability is managed for you, is really exactly the same idea we had for e-commerce. They just have a more complete product set.”

NetSuite will discuss the financial implications of this deal on July 24. Find out more information here.

Internet content delivery provider Internap has today released a series of results which show a better benchmark performance on big data transfer from its bare metal offering as opposed to Amazon and Rackspace public clouds.

The numbers, which were crunched by performance aggregator Cloud Spectator, aimed to quantify performance differences when operating in-memory NoSQL databases in virtualised public cloud and automated bare metal cloud environments, and found that bare metal outperformed both Amazon and Rackspace across three different workloads in throughput and latency.

For Inserting Data Workload, Internap outperformed Amazon by 51% and Rackspace five times over in throughput speed, also easily having less latency, while in the Balanced workload – 50% read, 50% update – Internap beat Amazon by similar scores (50%), while overcoming Rackspace by 2.7 times better performance.

The Internap automated bare metal cloud also comfortably disposed of Amazon (61%) and Rackspace (x2.5) in the Read Heavy workload, which you’ll be unsurprised to hear is 95% read and 5% update. In the vast majority of the tests, Amazon beat Rackspace to the punch for second place.

The tests were conducted by selecting random records of a workable situation; in the Balanced workload, it was an application which tracked the activity of users at e-commerce sites and then personalised ads based on what they did.

The results, the researchers argued, ‘confirmed the prediction’ that bare metal would outlast cloud servers in these particular conditions, but added a note of caution.

“Compared with the large differential between Internap and Amazon for throughput speeds, Amazon instance throughput performed close to Rackspace’s cloud servers,” the researchers wrote. “Latency is also relatively similar between the Amazon and Rackspace servers.”

The report added: “Perhaps this is an indicator that at the larger instance sizes, there is a certain cap that performance reaches, whether due to throttling or physical constraints of the hardware.”

The researchers picked Internap’s bare metal offering – well they had to really, it’s a bit like a kid bringing a football to the park and not being picked for the game – alongside AWS for its “dominant position in the market and wide variety of instance types”, and Rackspace for good work in previous tests, showing high disk performance.

The report also duly noted its peers, including a report from Altoros Systems which looks at the methodology of benchmark testing on NoSQL databases.

It’s not the most common option, but some cloudy firms do have a bare metal option – SoftLayer, who recently celebrated its first anniversary of being bought by IBM, being one of them.

You can find the full report here (registration required).

It’s time to dust off the bunting and get out the birthday cake, as IBM commemorates one year since acquiring SoftLayer – and to celebrate, it’s announcing a series of new features linking up SoftLayer with Watson.

Last month CloudTech trailed the news that Watson and SoftLayer were going to coalesce, and so it has proved, with IBM announcing Watson Engagement Advisor on SoftLayer, which aims to give the insight of the Jeopardy-playing diagnosis-solving supercomputer into big data, as well as unprecedented access for third party developers on Watson Developer Cloud, powered by SoftLayer.

Regarded as one of the best partnerships in the industry to date, the acquisition of SoftLayer by IBM was the first step in its hugely expensive play to become market leader in cloud computing, with SoftLayer’s pure play IaaS complementing Big Blue’s SaaS and PaaS offerings.

“In its first year, SoftLayer has proven to be a pivotal acquisition for IBM Cloud,” said Erich Clementi, SVP IBM global technology services in a statement.

“SoftLayer has quickly become the foundation of IBM’s cloud portfolio anchoring our infrastructure, platform and software as a service offering and transforming the fortunes of many industry companies from Web start ups to established enterprises looking for the speed, flexibility and security that hybrid cloud environments provide,” he added.

With this in mind IBM has taken the opportunity to unleash a raft of updates and iterations, including the announcement of more than 300 services available within the IBM Cloud Marketplace on SoftLayer, as well as the rollout of Aspera on SoftLayer to enable high speed transfer of both structured and unstructured data between data centres.

Indeed, it’s all good news from both sides, with SoftLayer EMEA general manager Jonathan Wisler telling CloudTech that the partnership had thus far been “phenomenal.”

There’s been lots of innovation at the SoftLayer end as well, with a new London data centre recently announced alongside a plethora of expansion across France and Germany, as well as a drop of its prices to fit in more closely with the likes of Google, AWS and Microsoft.

With the price cuts in mind – announced as they were by IBM – CloudTech took the opportunity at Cloud World Forum last month to effectively ask Wisler who was wearing the trousers in this particular relationship.

He explained that the company was effectively performing two roles, both as a separate entity and one which was owned by IBM. It gives SoftLayer the opportunity to grow and expand in its existing environment, Wisler argued, as well as supporting IBM teams on enterprise accounts.

Elsewhere, IBM announced a new storage capability on SoftLayer, code named Elastic Storage – wait and see on that one – as well as IBM Cloud Modular Management, which helps companies decide whether they want to go their cloud deployment alone or have IBM manage it for them.