The figures keep going up and up for the hyperscalers – as new data from Synergy Research shows another new record for hyperscale operator capex in Q318.

Hyperscaler capex was at more than $26 billion for the most recent quarter, with spending for the first three quarters of 2018 up by 53% when compared with this time last year. This quarter’s figure is the second highest of all time; Q1 still takes the honours, yet Synergy ascribes that to Google’s ‘one-off’ $2 billion purchase of Manhattan’s Chelsea Market building in March.

Nevertheless, aside from a minor blip at the beginning of 2017, it has been a steady upward curve since 2015, with spending now almost double that of three years ago. For the big five – in this instance, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Amazon – these are heady days. Alibaba, IBM and Tencent are among those in the second tier, however the former ‘leapt’ in terms of capex spend during the most recent quarter.

“Business at the hyperscale operators is booming,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. “Over the last four quarter their year on year revenue growth has averaged 24% and they are investing an ever-growing percentage of their revenues in capex.

“That is a real boon for data centre technology vendors and for colocation/wholesale data centre operators, but it has created a huge barrier for companies wishing to meaningfully compete with those hyperscale firms,” added Dinsdale. “This is a game of massive scale and only a few can play that game.”

For a lot of cloud infrastructure research, the trends remain the same, but the figures are going up. Take Synergy’s exploration of public cloud leadership by region, issued earlier this week. The news was that there was, erm, no news. AWS continued to lead across the board, with Microsoft #2 and Google #3 aside from Asia Pacific, where Alibaba is the second player putting it as #4 overall.

Competing against the biggest players for a slice of their pie is therefore not an option, with Alibaba’s ultra-aggressive approach and huge resources seeing a moderate global dividend thus far. “There will remain opportunities for smaller cloud providers to serve niche markets, especially focused on single countries or local regions, but those companies cannot hope to challenge the market leaders,” said Dinsdale, noting China to be a key exception to the rule.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced extra steps to ensure customers’ S3 buckets don’t become misconfigured – but don’t assume responsibility has been taken away from the customer.

The new service, Amazon S3 Block Public Access, can work at the account level, on individual buckets, as well as future buckets created. Users can also block existing public access, or ensure public access is not available for newly created items.

The move can be seen as an extension of the various access controls users already have on AWS buckets, through either Access Control Lists (ACL), or identity and access management (IAM) bucket policies. Users will not be charged for this additional usage, aside from usual prices for all requests made to the S3 API.

As Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, put it in a blog post explaining the new system: “We want to make sure that you use public buckets and objects as needed, while giving you tools to make sure that you don’t make them publicly accessible due to a simple mistake or misunderstanding.”

This has been a long-term problem for both AWS and its customers. The model of shared responsibility states that the provider is liable for security ‘of’ the cloud, such as infrastructure, while the customer is responsible for security ‘in’ the cloud – in other words, ensuring data is properly configured.

A series of high profile breaches, including Verizon, Accenture and Booz Allen Hamilton, have exacerbated the issue. Last month, research from cloud access security broker (CASB) Netskope argued the majority of Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark violations found in AWS environments fell under the IAM remit.

AWS has taken steps previously to make the issue more visible – literally. This time last year the company revamped its design to give bright orange warning indicators as to which buckets were public. Yet the message of personal and organisational responsibility still needs to be hammered home.

In April, CloudTech published two articles exploring S3 security as part of its monthly topic focusing on the subject. Doug Hazelman, vice president of technical marketing at backup service provider CloudBerry, argued there were no excuses for errors of this nature.

“By virtue of having a service readable and writeable from anywhere in the world, this sort of [attack] is bound to happen, one might say. But that is not true: even the lowest functionality devices, such as sensors, can be configured to authenticate via a put request to an S3 bucket,” Hazelman wrote.

“Put simply: this shouldn’t happen. There is no reason to have a world-readable and world-writeable S3 bucket,” he added. “Preventing this type of lift of private data requires making sure one simple setting is configured as is the default when setting up a new Amazon S3 instance.

“To be honest, it is beyond me why projects make it into production with this setting at anything but its secure default, but too many breaches – and it’s a stretch to call them breaches because accessing the data is essentially as simple as browsing to a public website – have shown that for whatever reason, companies are not being careful enough in their S3 configurations.”

Micah Montgomery, cloud services architect at cybersecurity firm Mosaic451, cited a lack of understanding at the cloud’s complexity as a concern.

“The ease of using AWS or other cloud environments can make it easy to forget just how complex the cloud is,” he wrote. “This complexity is why the cloud is so visible, but it also decreases visibility. In many cases, AWS breaches happen because organisations have non-IT personnel, or IT personnel who do not fully understand the cloud, configuring their AWS buckets.

“In a general IT environment, there is a management console for every area and tool,” Montgomery added. “Once you add a cloud environment, you add another management console. There are already hundreds of ways to screw things up in an on-premises data environment. The cloud adds yet another layer of complexity, and organisations must understand how it will impact their overall cybersecurity.”

With this latest update, AWS is giving even more possibilities to get it right – but bear in mind they cannot hold customers’ hands every step of the way. Read the full blog post here.

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Analysis Diane Greene is to step down as Google Cloud’s CEO after three years, the company has announced – with former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian to take over the reins.

Kurian, whose more than 20-year stint at Oracle culminated in leading product development, resigned from the Redwood giant last month having taken a period of leave. In a blog post announcing the change, Greene said she would remain CEO until January and stay on the board of Alphabet, with Kurian joining the company on November 26.

“The Google Cloud team has accomplished amazing things over the last three years, and I’m proud to have been a part of this transformative work,” Greene wrote. “We have moved Google Cloud from having only two significant customers and a collection of startups to having major Fortune 1000 enterprises betting their future on Google Cloud, something we should accept as a great compliment as well as a huge responsibility.”

Greene’s stint had certainly exceeded her expectations at least in terms of timeframes, having expected to only be in the role for two years. Having joined Google after the company acquired enterprise development platform startup Bebop, Greene had committed the proceeds to philanthropical efforts, and is looking now to invest in female founders and CEOs. “I want to encourage every woman engineer and scientist to think in terms of building their own company someday,” Greene added.

So how will the past three years be remembered and analysed? Ultimately, while the company still trails behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, it doesn’t tell the full story – and the leadership and investment Greene has put in will enable Google Cloud to compete strongly in future on different fronts.

Missing the enterprise boat

As various sections of the tech media have pointed out, Google remains well behind AWS and Azure, in the cloud infrastructure market. According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, AWS holds 34% market share, with Microsoft at 14% and Google at 7%, alongside IBM.

Yet change has been strong at Google since 2015; both in terms of customers acquired, as Greene noted in her valediction, as well as technologies invested in. In May, Google was named for the first time as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service; a considerable feat considering the AWS/Azure duopoly. As this publication put it in March last year, when Google unveiled its latest roster of enterprise customers – three of whom all solidly in the Fortune 500 – “this was the week in which Google’s enterprise cloud offering came of age.”

Some, however, thought Google had been too late to make its move. Amir Hermelin, formerly product management lead at Google Cloud, took to Medium to argue the company dallied when it came to big ticket clients.  “Seeing success with Snapchat and the likes, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise space, it was easy to focus away from ‘large orgs’,” Hermelin wrote. “This included insufficient investments in marketing, sales, support, and solutions engineering, resulting in… being inferior compared to the competitors.”

Nick McQuire, VP enterprise at analyst firm CCS Insight, said that while Google were late to the party on enterprise, the long road ahead remains. “In fairness, they’ve had to shift a little bit of their approach, particularly over the last 12-18 months around open, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud,” McQuire told CloudTech. “Google is also making the point that it is super early in this progression.

“There’s still in my opinion not only a lot to play for, but we’re going to see a lot of meanders across the road in the industry in cloud over the next couple of years as well.”

Key to this open approach, and one area where significant investment had been made, however, was in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Hermelin cited this area as one of three ‘strong pillars’ for Google, alongside security and Kubernetes – the latter also being open and having gained significant momentum in the industry over the past 12 months.

In AI and ML, Google can be seen as having an advantage, with the launch of pre-packaged AI services in August being of particular interest. Much of this leadership has been down to the work of Fei-Fei Li, enlisted as chief scientist at Google Cloud AI before returning to academia in September. This is an area which is only going to accelerate; a prediction from analyst firm CCS Insight forecast that by 2020, cloud service providers would expand from general purpose AI to business-specific applications.

Trust us

Another bet CCS – and McQuire personally – made was around trust. Next year, the big cloud vendors won’t be using compute, storage, or even emerging technologies as their primary currency. It will all be around trust; and in particular, the long-standing fear of vendor lock-in, mitigated by the continued feasibility of multi-cloud workloads.

Netflix could be seen as a classic example of this. The streaming giant has espoused and evangelised all things AWS for several years, but uses Google for certain disaster recovery workloads. Expect this to continue, driven by transparency around trust and compliance. “Companies are trying to figure that through: what is the advantage of going all-in versus a multi-cloud strategy?” said McQuire.

“Google at the moment is getting some good traction with companies that are pursuing a multi-cloud,” he added. “They’re going to Google for AI and machine learning and they’re starting there; maybe over time they’ll migrate more. It’s that approach that Google’s being open and honest about, which I think is beneficial to their strategy.”

With regard to financials, Google, like Microsoft, does not give specific numbers. For Q318, Google’s ‘other revenues’ bucket, where Google Cloud is housed, reported at $4.64 billion, up almost 30% from the previous year. Compared with Q415, the nearest quarter to when Greene arrived, other revenues were at less than half ($2.1bn).

Google chief exec Sundar Pichai said earlier this year the company’s cloud arm was clocking more than $1bn in revenues per quarter. Replying to an analyst question for Google’s most recent financials, Pichai said the company was “definitely seeing strong indicators that the investment in product [was] clearly beginning to work”, as well as adding they were “thoughtfully looking” at hybrid cloud options.

The in-tray for the new boss

For the incoming Thomas Kurian, McQuire argued the former Oracle exec will have a few important items which will be straight on his to-do list.

“The main thing he’s going to want to focus on is the sales and go-to-market piece around Google,” said McQuire. “It’s part of a market education process that Google still needs to push. They have done better here, but they need to start to bring in more evangelists and business-oriented salespeople who can articulate Google’s business value proposition around cloud.

“More importantly, [Kurian needs] to help educate on the trustworthiness of Google’s strategy and its cloud overall as well,” McQuire added. “Google has been investing a lot – and I think the market doesn’t always appreciate that and fully understand that – but it’s that element I think that needs to be improved a little bit.

“Diane Greene has laid some pretty good foundations for Kurian to come in. We’ll see where they go from here.”

Picture credit: Google Cloud Platform/Screenshot

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Hybrid cloud is the ideal IT model for the majority of organisations – yet comparatively few have it in place today.

That was the key finding from a new report by hyperconverged infrastructure firm Nutanix. The study, the firm’s first Enterprise Cloud Index, polled 2,300 respondents and found that while enterprises plan to up their hybrid cloud usage, less than one in five (18%) said they were on the road to hybrid today.

The research found there needs to be more done than just a simple rollout. Public cloud is not a cure-all, with more than one in three (35%) respondents admitted to overspending their public cloud budgets. Key to getting initiatives right included matching applications to the right cloud environment; with visibility an interesting part of that. 88% of those polled said application mobility across any cloud would ‘solve a lot of problems.’

Yet for those who have already taken the plunge, success is tangible. 87% of respondents said hybrid cloud as an IT trend was having a positive effect on their business, with almost half (49%) saying their needs were met – higher than single public cloud users (37%). The concept is proving particularly popular in EMEA, with the report forecasting the region to overtaken both Americas and Asia Pacific in terms of adoption.

Nutanix has focused on this aspect as part of its strategy in 2018. The company acquired Netsil, a San Francisco-based app mapping, discovery and management software provider, back in March. In this instance, with multiple clouds, the rise of containers and microservices has meant many organisations lack visibility in key areas.

Plenty of M&A activity this year has been around the multi-cloud angle – Cisco buying Duo Security, Check Point Software acquiring Dome9 – but true hybrid cloud infers the need for private cloud, as well as on-premises applications and workloads that will stubbornly not fit in a cloud environment, and will take time to sunset.

“As enterprises demand stronger application mobility and interoperability, they are increasingly choosing hybrid cloud infrastructure,” said Ben Gibson, Nutanix chief marketing officer in a statement. “While the public cloud has increased IT efficiency in certain areas, hybrid cloud capabilities are the next step in providing the freedom to dynamically provision and manage applications based on business needs.

“The findings of this study reveal an important gap in the market,” Gibson added. “Organisations need IT talent to manage their hybrid cloud models, especially in the next 12 to 24 months.”

You can download the full report here.

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Cloud access security broker (CASB) Netskope has announced the close of a series F funding round of $168.7 million (£130.5m) to ‘further cement [its] position as the leader in accelerating security transformation throughout the enterprise’, in the company’s words.

The funding round was led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners – whose interests in the cloud security space have included Datrium and Zscaler – alongside investment from Accel, Base partners, Geodesic Capital, Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Social Capital.

CEO Sanjay Beri argued in a blog post following the announcement how, without security transformation, digital transformation will fail – and how Netskope is best placed to fulfil organisations’ needs.

“Legacy cyber security vendors have reacted to this [cloud] shift by acquiring companies and cobbling together disparate architectures and products in an attempt to present customers with a ‘unified’ solution, but in reality these products are unified in name only and they were designed for an environment where data and applications were placed in centralised data centres and IT teams were primarily the ones responsible for selecting and deploying applications,” wrote Beri.

“Unlike legacy vendors, Netskope was born in the cloud. We empower our customers to achieve the security transformation they need in order to make the shift to a digital-first model.”

Netskope’s vision is around protecting all assets with a unified SaaS, IaaS and web security platform. Having been purely cloud-focused, the strategic decision was made last year to increase visibility to the entire web. The company was named as a leader in Gartner’s CASB Magic Quadrant earlier this month. Gartner praised Netskope’s comprehensive risk database and access control policies in its analysis, but noted a caution around a ‘minor’ increase in inquiries around installation challenges and service performance.

Speaking to this publication on the occasion of Netskope’s series E funding last June, Beri noted how even traditional cloud laggards, such as healthcare and finance, were key customers. In some aspects, it was an ideal opportunity; these companies did not wish to fall behind in their technology roadmaps, but they were scared stiff around the data security element.

“You think [financial and insurance would] be the laggards but some of the largest financial institutions are Netskope customers, and they’re leveraging cloud not only because their end users want [it], but because it’s a corporate strategy now,” said Beri. “It’s a competitive advantage, if you can leverage these properly.”

Total funding for Netskope now stands at just over $400 million.

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The Oracle and Amazon mud-slinging shows no signs of slowing down. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has claimed its consumer businesses are now fully off Oracle’s data warehouse, with the vast majority of critical system databases running on its own solution by the end of the year.

The source comes right from the top; writing on Twitter, CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon’s consumer arm turned off Oracle on November 1 and moved to Redshift, Amazon’s equivalent data warehousing tool.

Oracle, and in particular co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison, has been taking sideswipes at all things AWS for almost as long as they have been in the cloud game. As this publication put it last month for the Oracle OpenWorld keynote: “Oracle’s autonomous database is certainly Ellison’s favourite topic right now – but bashing the biggest player in cloud infrastructure must rank a close second.”

Increasingly, Ellison had been telling customers, analysts, and anyone else who would listen of the irony that AWS was still a major Oracle customer. Back in December, following the company’s Q2 2018 results, questions turned to customers moving off the platform. Ellison said: “Let me tell you who’s not moving off of Oracle – a company you’ve heard of that gave us another $50 million this quarter. That company is Amazon.

“Our competitors, who have no reason to like us very much, continue to invest in and run their entire business on Oracle.”

Similarly, Oracle’s much-vaunted autonomous database technology makes Amazon look distinctly second best, according to Ellison. At OpenWorld, the Oracle CTO called Amazon’s upcoming offering ‘semi-autonomous’ and described it as akin to a ‘semi-self-driving car.’ “You get in, you drive, and you die,” he told attendees.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels added to Jassy’s remarks. Writing again on Twitter, Vogels said the company had “moved on to newer, faster, more reliable, more agile, more versatile technology at lower cost and higher scale.”

Vogels had previously taken to Twitter to claim a CNBC article which alleged Amazon’s moving off Oracle caused a debilitating Prime Day outage was inaccurate. The Amazon CTO refuted the article’s accuracy, claiming the internal document from which the story was based was from an unrelated issue. “Clickbait won,” he wrote.

According to the most recent figures from industry watcher Synergy Research, AWS continues to dominate the market holding more than a third (34%) of total share. Microsoft Azure remains a clear second player with 14% of the market, with Google (7%), IBM (7%) and Alibaba (4%) rounding off the top five. The analyst firm noted that while growth rates were starting to plateau, growing at 100% when reaching massive scale was not an option. More importantly, these companies are all still growing and all still increasing market share.

For now, two events later this month will make for interesting viewing from AWS’ side. Black Friday will give Amazon a chance to show off how good its data warehouse is – with hopefully no Prime Day-esque outages to fuel the fire – while AWS re:Invent kicks off in two weeks’ time. Jassy tweeted that his keynote would ‘squeeze four hours of content into less than three.’ Expect a couple of barbed comments about a certain Redwood-based company to still make the cut, though.

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SAP has announced the acquisition of research management software provider Qualtrics for $8 billion (£6.2bn) with the aim to ‘deliver the transformative potential of experience and operational data.’

Qualtrics, based in Utah and Washington, offers a platform which enables organisations to conduct internal and external surveys, gauging customer experience, employee expectations and brand advocacy. With SAP claiming its software is involved to some degree in more than three quarters of the world’s transactions, the two companies say their combined product sets will offer unparalleled reach into the decisions behind them.

“The combination of Qualtrics and SAP reaffirms experience management as the groundbreaking new frontier for the technology industry,” said Bill McDermott, SAP CEO in a statement. “SAP and Qualtrics are seizing this opportunity as like-minded innovators, united in mission, strategy and culture.

“We share the belief that every human voice holds value, every experience matters and that the best-run businesses can make the world run better,” added McDermott. “We can’t wait to stand behind Ryan [Smith, Qualtrics CEO] and his amazing colleagues for the next chapters in the experience management story.”

Writing in a blog post, Robert Enslin, president of the cloud business group at SAP – where Qualtrics will be housed – noted the importance of emerging technologies in marrying experience and operational data. “The next evolution of enterprise applications has begun with a real-time connection between the X-data in the system of action and the O-data within the system of record,” wrote Enslin. “Our ability to apply intelligence and machine learning atop these co-joined data sets unleashes the unprecedented power of the new experience economy.”

Across SAP, the need to inject automation and artificial intelligence into systems of record and enhance long-standing customer relationships has long been apparent. Speaking to this publication last year, Melissa Di Donato, chief revenue officer at SAP S/4HANA Cloud, explained the rationale. “We went from hypothesising about the business benefit of what IoT, machine learning, and AI can do for the enterprise, and then all of a sudden it’s become embedded into our ERP,” she said.

Qualtrics may be a company whose product works under the surface of organisations somewhat, but it has long since been a SaaS darling. For the past two years, the company has been placed in the Forbes top 10 list of privately held cloud computing companies, placing #6 in 2017 and #7 in 2018.

Either way, Qualtrics would certainly not have been in contention for 2019’s ranking. As reported by  Deseret News last month, the company had filed for IPO, with a proposed filing being the biggest in Utah’s history. The report noted that, while no details of stock pricing or shares were available, the company’s most recent funding had put it at a valuation of $2.5bn.

It has certainly been a high-profile few weeks in the M&A realm; IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat for $34bn still looms large, backed up by VMware buying Heptio last week. The SAP-Qualtrics deal is the second largest SaaS acquisition of all time, behind the $9.3bn Oracle shelled out for NetSuite two years ago.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2019.

Picture credit: SAP

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Plenty of factors have to be taken into account when choosing a cloud provider, from performance to price and everything in between. Indeed, many organisations have gone ahead of this process and are now weighing up more than one cloud provider, assessing which workloads fit best.

When it comes to the combination of price and performance, companies such as Cloud Spectator have shown the differences between the Amazons, Microsofts and Googles of this world and more specialised players. Yet for many organisations, the big three are a must.

ThousandEyes has put together what it claims to be the industry’s first report which measures the global performance of the public cloud behemoths. The report, which analysed more than 160 million data points, found subtle but crucial differences in how they worked.

For one thing, AWS takes a different approach to its brethren when it comes to connectivity. AWS’ traffic only enters its architectural backbone close to the target region; for instance, traffic from Singapore goes through multiple service providers before hitting Amazon’s systems in Dallas.

The reason for this is succinctly explained. “Why AWS chooses to route its traffic through the Internet while the other two big players use their internal backbone might have to do with how each of these service providers has evolved,” the report notes. “Google and Microsoft have the historical advantage. AWS, the current market leader in public cloud offerings, focused initially on rapid delivery of services to the market, rather than building out a massive backbone network.”

In terms of network performance, the research found generally consistent results, although there were exceptions in Asia and LATAM. The report took the cloud behemoth’s Eastern US data centre locations – Ashburn for AWS and Google and Richmond for Microsoft – and compared bi-directional latency between different geographies. Naturally, North America and Europe has the quickest times, with Asia and Oceania lagging, but when it came to fluctuations in latency, NA and Asia suffered the most.

Looking at specific countries, India proved a fascinating case. From each provider’s Mumbai region, Google struggled somewhat – particularly when it came to Europe, where almost three times the latency was experienced. Yet in terms of variance, AWS had particular difficulty when it came to Asia, although all providers recorded poor scores. “Such large swings can impact user experience and most likely corresponds to the relatively poor quality of the Internet in Asia,” the report noted.

The report also explored multi-cloud performance – with results here being consistent. Packet loss was at 0.01% across all relationships – AWS/Azure, Azure/GCP and GCP/AWS. “Multi-cloud performance reflects a symbiotic relationship,” the report explained. “Traffic between cloud providers almost never exits the three provider backbone networks, manifesting as negligible loss and jitter in end-to-end communication.”

“Multi-national organisations that are embracing digital transformation and venturing into the cloud need to be aware of the geographical performance differences between the major public clouds when making global multi-cloud decisions,” said Archana Kesevan, report author and senior product marketing manager at ThousandEyes.

You can read the full report here (email required).

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Hybrid cloud continues to be a strong trend. For many enterprises, their legacy data centre assets are going nowhere. Despite cajoling from cloud providers, the mix of cloud and on-prem remains a prudent one.

It is this theory which has seen the likes of VMware Cloud on AWS come to fruition. The two companies have successfully come together to provide customers with portability between private and public clouds.

Now, AWS is working with another such firm in the shape of Cisco. The latter has announced a new solution built for AWS to run production-grade Kubernetes applications on-premises, with the product being a combination of Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) and Cisco’s Container Platform (CCP), all tied up with Cisco’s networking, security, management and monitoring and AWS’ cloud.

A blog post from Cisco outlined some of the more technical aspects of the partnership. “Through the single CCP management UI, the customer can provision clusters both on-premises and on EKS in the cloud,” wrote Reinhardt Quelle, principal architect. “CCP uses AWS [identity and access management] authentication to create the VPC, instructs EKS to create a new cluster, and then configures the worker nodes in that cluster.”

Kubernetes continues to be a key pawn in organisations’ maturing cloud strategies – and indeed, the strategies of cloud vendors. VMware acquired Heptio, a company set up by two original Kubernetes engineers to give the technology more enterprise reach, while IBM’s planned acquisition of Red Hat was described by this publication as a ‘match made in container heaven.’

“Today, most customers are forced to choose between developing applications on-premises or in the cloud. This can create a complex mix of environments, technologies, teams and vendors – but they shouldn’t have to make a choice,” said Kip Compton, SVP cloud platform and solutions at Cisco. “Now, developers can use existing investments to build new cloud-scale applications that fuel business innovation.

“This makes it easier to deploy and manage hybrid applications, no matter where they run,” Compton added. “This allows customers to get the best out of both cloud and their on-premises environments with a single solution.”

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VMware appears intent on celebrating its 20th birthday in some style. The company's various announcements at VMworld Europe in Barcelona have further showcased its position as an enabler of enterprise cloud technologies, with acquisitions and partnerships key.

Regarding the former, VMware announced the acquisition of Heptio, a company set up by two founding Kubernetes engineers to help expand the container orchestration tool's reach into the enterprise. Craig McLuckie, co-founder, CEO and former Google product manager, explained the rationale behind selling in a congratulatory blog post with the URL tag of 'champagne.'

"When we first started conversations with VMware, the alignment of our respective visions was uncanny," McLuckie wrote. "With virtualisation, VMware helped enterprises changge the way their infrastructure operates. VMware values our products and serviecs – together we can apply these technologies to change the way business operates, and where they run their applications."

The companies' shared destination for utilising Kuberenetes as a framework to help untangle the complexity of multi-cloud infrastructure, with open source at its heart, is apparent. From VMware's perspective, Paul Fazzone, SVP and general manager cloud-native apps, explained: "Our shared goal will be to deliver a cloud-independent Kubernetes control plane for builders, operators and consumers of modern infrastructure and applications, with consistency and conformance across any cloud, and delivering the required enterprise services and tooling needed by the modern IT organisation."

Naturally, thoughts will turn to how this impacts the wider industry – particularly given this acquisition is somewhat in the shadow of IBM's blockbuster buy of Red Hat at the end of last month. Keith Townsend, formerly an analyst and now solutions architect at VMware, put it like this:

IBM was on the stage at VMworld to discuss the extension of its two year partnership with VMware, around extending mission-critical VMware workloads to IBM's cloud, as well as more integration to help enterprises get on board with Kubernetes and containers. Naturally, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger could not resist asking about the 'little announcement' IBM had made the previous week.

Arvind Krishna, SVP hybrid cloud and director of research at IBM, explained the combinations. "This acqusition is really about combining Red Hat's open source technologies with our hybrid cloud protfolio and bringing them together to market," he said. "It really is going to accelerate hybrid cloud, but in a multi-cloud world."

VMware continues to expand its moves with Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware Cloud on AWS will be hosted in a variety of new data centres, including AWS EU, in Ireland, AWS West, and AWS East, in North California and Ohio respectively. At VMworld in August, the Las Vegas audience was treated to a cameo from AWS chief executive Andy Jassy. No such luck this time around, but the partnership continues apace; the companies claim more than 200 partners have achieved solution competency in their environment within six months.

One of the more interesting announcements was around the beta launch of VMware Blockchain. Building off Project Concord, an initiative launched in Las Vegas, the offering is aimed at, again, getting the enterprise on-board. "The key thing we are focused on here is making sure that, as the blockchain pioneers are beginning to say 'I need to put something in production here', moving from concept to enterprise-class blockchain is where we're focused and that is where this beta is beginning to make those technologies available," said Ray O'Farrell, VMware CTO.

With power comes responsibility however; the company has long since distrusted the energy consumption blockchain technologies take up. Gelsinger affirmed this message again yesterday, describing its computational complexity as 'almost criminal.'

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