Google Cloud’s shopping list shows no signs of abating, with the company announcing the acquisition of Cornerstone Technology, a mainframe specialist.

The 30-year-old provider, based in the Netherlands, has an overall remit of ‘helping customers protect and improve their investments in essential legacy enterprise applications’, in Cornerstone’s own words. Cornerstone uses automation to break down programs, turn them into services, and then make them cloud-native.

This includes COBOL, which to the potential surprise of many is still used by many enterprises. A recent study from Micro Focus, the language’s arbiter, noted that for more than two thirds of businesses polled, COBOL app modernisation was a preferred strategy to replacement and retirement.

“As the industry increasingly builds applications as a set of services, many customers want to break their mainframe monolith programs into either Java monoliths or Java microservices,” wrote Howard Weale, Google Cloud director of transformation practice in a blog post. “This approach to application modernisation is at the heart of the Cornerstone toolset.”

Google Cloud made a spree of acquisitions in 2019 under the leadership of CEO Thomas Kurian. The standout deal was for business intelligence platform Looker in June, valued as a $2.6 billion all-cash transaction. Other deals were for data migration service provider Alooma in February, storage firm Elastifile in July, and VMware workload runner CloudSimple in November.

The acquisition of Cornerstone will, as the name suggests, form a significant chunk of Google’s ‘mainframe-to-Google-Cloud-Platform’ offerings.

“For decades, companies have relied on a mainframe architecture to run their mission-critical workloads, but it often holds developers back from taking advantage of new technologies that enable them to innovate more quickly,” explained Weale. “Cloud computing presents the opportunity to modernise your applications and your infrastructure, resulting in better capabilities and allocation of your resources so your organisation can focus on your core business.”

The obvious target for this acquisition is IBM, whose mainframe business remains significantly profitable. At the same time the Cornerstone acquisition dropped, this reporter received a separate communique from IBM which touted the company as a top three cloud vendor ‘far ahead’ of Google.

IBM cites Google’s eventual disclosure of its cloud revenues – $2.6bn for the most recent quarter, compared with IBM’s reported $6.8bn – as key. Yet measuring an apples-to-apples comparison across all services remains tricky. For cloud infrastructure services alone, according to figures from Synergy Research earlier this month, Google holds 8% of the market, compared with 6% for IBM.

Financial terms of the Cornerstone acquisition were not disclosed.

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The hyperscale cloud providers are looking at Internet of Things (IoT) offerings and connectivity amid a swath of emerging technologies – and according to a new note from ABI Research, cloud suppliers will grow their share of IoT data and analytics management revenues from $6 billion (£4.6bn) to $56bn (£43bn) in the next six years.

The way to do this, the analyst firm notes, is through partnerships. As ABI sees it, public cloud vendor revenues, while impressive, still come primarily through streaming, storage, and data orchestration. Analytics services across cloud vendors, however, are less differentiated – and therefore the need for collaboration is key for now.

One area in which public clouds are doing it for themselves is through streaming. ABI said this was the one analytics technology that all cloud vendors were building into their solution portfolios; Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle all touting proprietary offerings while Cloudera, Teradata et al were building solutions leveraging open source technology.

Ultimately, a lot of strategy right now is focused on co-opetition in the IoT space. AWS and Azure, for instance, have partnered with Seeq for its advanced analytics capabilities, while Oracle, Cisco, and Huawei are expanding their edge portfolio.

“The overall approach shown by cloud suppliers in their analytics services reflects the dilemma they face in the complex IoT partnership ecosystem,” said Kateryna Dubrova, ABI research analyst. “Effectively, do they rely on partners for analytics services, or do they build analytics services that compete with them?

“Ultimately, businesses are moving to an analytics-driven business model which will require both infrastructure and services for continuous intelligence,” Dubrova added. “Cloud vendor strategies need to align with this reality to take advantage of analytics value and revenues that will transition to predictive and prescriptive solutions.”

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Alibaba Cloud hit more than RMB10 billion (£1.18bn) in revenue in its most recent quarter, with revenues up 62% year over year.

Total revenues for Alibaba were at RMB161.4bn (£17.7bn) for Q419, at a yearly growth of 38%, meaning Alibaba Cloud comprises 6.7% of the China-based retail giant’s overall revenues. Cloud revenues for Q2 and Q3 were at $1.13bn (£867m) and $1.3bn (£997m) respectively.

On a wider scale, major focus was placed on the emerging coronavirus epidemic, with chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang admitting that it will ‘present near-term challenges’ to Alibaba, already having a ‘significant impact’ on China’s economy. “At the same time, we will see opportunities created by the forces of change,” Zhang told analysts.

Perhaps the best showcase for Alibaba’s cloud infrastructure is the 11.11 one day shopping festival. Alibaba noted that its infrastructure was ‘scalable, reliable and secure’, handling almost $40 billion in transactions at more than 544,000 orders per second at its peak without disruption. Alongside this, Alibaba migrated its core eCommerce system to its public cloud. Zhang noted that the move should help ‘encourage others’ to adopt Alibaba Cloud for their infrastructure.

Among recent highlights for the company was the launch of its Alink machine learning algorithm to GitHub in November, as well as joining the Confidential Computing Consortium, a Linux Foundation cloud and edge security initiative, in August. Other inaugural members include Google Cloud, IBM, and Microsoft.

The company appears to be targeting media as an industry of interest. Last month, Alibaba Cloud was certified with the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) certification, an initiative between the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), touted as the first cloud provider to get such an award.

According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, Alibaba holds 5% of the cloud infrastructure market globally, in fifth position behind AWS (33%), Microsoft (18%), Google (8%) and IBM (6%). Not surprisingly, Alibaba continues to dominate the Chinese market, yet its focus on the wider Asia Pacific (APAC) region appears to be paying off.

Figures from Synergy in May found that due to China’s growing spend, Alibaba was the entrenched #2 player across APAC, behind only AWS. Alibaba Cloud issued what the PR industry calls a ‘momentum’ release – read: showing off – in December saying APAC client base growth had been ‘exceptional’ in 2019. Media was cited as a key industry, alongside fintech, retail, gaming, and agriculture.

You can read Alibaba’s full Q4 financial report here.

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A US judge has temporarily paused Microsoft’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract following an appeal from Amazon, signalling a significant win for the latter.

According to various reports, Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith, of the US Federal Claims Court, agreed to the initial step. While the existence of the injunction can be made public, the documents pertaining to them are currently sealed.

Amazon has been ordered to pay a $42 million bond – petty cash considering Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone hit almost $10 billion in revenues for its most recent quarter – to cover costs should the court find the motion was filed wrongfully.

The awarding of the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) cloud computing contract to Microsoft by the Department of Defense (DoD) elicited surprise and even derision from industry watchers. AWS has been running the CIA’s cloud for the past five years with little complaint following a lengthy battle with IBM for the contract.

Given the DoD insisted on a single cloud provider throughout the majority of the procurement process, the smart money was always on AWS as the cloud infrastructure market leader. Yet in the press release confirming the award of the contract to Microsoft in October, the DoD said it ‘continued… [the] strategy of a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment… as the department’s needs are diverse and cannot be met by any single supplier.’

AWS alleged in its appeal, the reports of which first came to light two weeks afterwards, of potential presidential interference – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post – making the contract process ‘very difficult’ for government agencies. Around the time Oracle’s legal challenge over its exit dismissed, President Trump announced he was looking into the contract, citing ‘tremendous complaints’ from other companies. A CNBC article reported that a book from James Mattis, former secretary of defence, alleged Trump told him to ‘screw Amazon’ out of the contract.

The company has separately filed paperwork to depose the President and current secretary of defence Mark Esper.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars Technica that “while we are disappointed with the additional delay, we believe that we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require.”

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Oracle’s cloudy partnership with Microsoft, announced in June, was one of the more eyebrow-raising stories of 2019. On the surface, it may have seemed peculiar, but digging down, the duo’s focus on retail customers – particularly with some retailers wishing to steer clear of AWS – made sense.

Now, the two companies are extending their alliance with the launch of a new cloud interconnect in Amsterdam. Organisations who are customers of both, already able to connect Azure and Oracle Cloud seamlessly in the US, will be able to build workloads which seamlessly interoperate between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud regions within the European Union data jurisdiction.

Alongside the interoperability between both clouds is integrated identity and access management, meaning customers do not have to play around with entering multiple passwords when accessing their cloud resources and applications.

MESTEC, a provider of software for the manufacturing industry, played the traditional role of the customer wheeled out to advocate the new solution. The company said it was implementing its application tier in Azure, connected to Oracle’s autonomous database and running on Oracle cloud infrastructure with ‘extremely positive’ results; a projected 50% reduction in infrastructure and management cost, and up to 500% increase in performance.

“By connecting Oracle and Azure, we’re able to rapidly introduce innovative technologies into our solution, ultimately resulting in a better, smarter solution for our customers enabling them to make dramatic improvements in manufacturing performance,” said Mark Carleton, director at MESTEC.

Both companies already have a data centre presence in Amsterdam, with Azure’s being marketed as West Europe. Oracle, meanwhile, in its comprehensive yet complicated list of haves and have-nots, notes Amsterdam has 33 of the 76 available features.

“Our new interconnect in Amsterdam is good news for many businesses that rely on software from both companies,” said Andrew Sutherland, SVP EMEA Oracle Cloud in a statement. “They can share applications and it will make it faster and easier for customers to run a combination of Oracle and Microsoft software. They can divide up workloads as needed across our enterprise-class cloud.”

This was by no means the only news which came out of Oracle towers this week. Among the list of customers touted was retailer N Brown Group, who extended its partnership, and Australian health insurance firm HBF. The company’s primary product update has been from the machine learning side, with the launch of the Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform.

Microsoft and Oracle plan to make direct interconnect available in other regions, including Europe, Asia, on the US west coast, as well as in a US government-specific region.

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Hedera Hashgraph, a provider of a decentralised network and distributed ledger technology (DLT), has selected Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider to push through enterprise-grade DLTs.

Hedera’s hashgraph consensus mechanism advocated by the company is touted as faster and more secure than other blockchain consensus offerings. The company sees itself as part of the third generation of public ledger technologies, after Bitcoin and Ethereum, promising more than 10,000 cryptocurrency transactions per second. Current clients, alongside Google, include Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, and IBM.

“The Hedera proof-of-stake public network, powered by hashgraph consensus, achieves the highest grade of security possible, with blazing-fast transaction speeds and incredibly low bandwidth consumption,” the company touts on its home page. “By combining high-throughput, low fees, and finality in seconds, Hedera leads the way for the future of public ledgers.”

The move to preferred cloud status deepens the working relationship between Hedera and Google Cloud, with the latter noting its ‘extensive geographical coverage’ to help improve the performance of Hedera developers’ applications.

“As we continue to evolve our infrastructure, we’re excited to expand our work with Google Cloud to now make DLT even more readily available for our community members, no matter their size or industry,” said Atul Mahamuni, SVP of products for Hedera in a statement. “This is about developing solutions that drive real business value.”

For many of the biggest cloud providers, the potential of blockchain technologies is being noted. According to an analysis of the managed blockchain platforms market by Everest Research Group in January, IBM and Microsoft Azure came out on top.

Google Cloud does not have the same offering – indeed, the Everest report misses them out entirely – but as well as Hedera other initiatives are taking place. In August Cypherium, a New York-based startup focusing on building an enterprise-grade blockchain platform, partnered with Google Cloud, following deals with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM.

Alongside this, Google – rather than just Google Cloud – is joining the Hedera Governing Council. As part of membership, Google Cloud will operate a Hedera network node, as well as make ledger data available to bolster Google Cloud Platform’s other public DLT datasets.

You can read more about the Hedera news here.

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Exclusive The domain onecloud.com is up for sale – and the upcoming battle for its signature could attract a seven-dollar sum.

That is the verdict of Andrew Miller, president at ATM Holdings. Miller is helping conduct the transaction having been contacted by an individual seller. The seller, who has owned the domain since the early 1990s and has worked as a senior technology executive, ‘had a very hard time deciding whether to let it go’, according to Miller, but relented after consultations and agreeing that the time was right.

“This is the most valid time I’ve seen because it’s private equity firms, venture firms… as soon as they raise a round of $20-$30 million, they go out and buy their category domain, or their exact match domain,” Miller told CloudTech. “I started to realise that in this space there are so many emerging companies, not only in the US but globally, and it’s a pretty powerful story.”

For dotcom domains, as Miller put it, there is “only one kick at the can”. With regard to the cloud industry, the battles for the best real estate were concluded the better part of a decade ago – or so many thought. Type in cloudcomputing.com, for instance, and you are taken to a Dell Technologies page. Dell had previously bought the domain before trying – and failing – to trademark the term ‘cloud computing’ in 2008.

The story of cloud.com is a somewhat simpler affair. A startup called VMOps bought the domain from a private collector, who according to a 2010 NetworkWorld article ‘wanted to sell [it] to a company he believed in.’ A year later the company, now rebranded as Cloud.com, was bought by Citrix, where it has stayed. In November 2011, it was reported that Citrix put a monetary value of the cloud.com domain at $18 million.

A cursory search reveals a variety of companies with valid claims at the domain. Arguably the most well-known is OneCloud.io, a provider of integration solutions for enterprise applications, with particular expertise in Oracle. Alternately, there is OneCloud Software, disaster recovery providers for VMware-based data centres. Or the Mozambique-based cloud service provider OneCloud. Or services firm OneCloud Consulting. Industry watchers may also recall several years ago the very similar name of Box’s enterprise app store.

Yet there can be many other potentials and possibles, Miller hopes. Following the example of Cloud.com, any cloud company with VC cash on the hip looking to rebrand their product may consider it.

As noted by fellow domain specialist Kate Buckley, perhaps the most eye-catching case study of this nature was smart home manufacturer Ring. CEO Jamie Siminoff bought Ring.com for $1m, rebranding from Doorbot, and noted how it was ‘critically important’ to the company’s success. “Putting it in dollar terms he said he would estimate the name turned out to be worth between $30m and $50m to the company,” DN Journal put it.

“[Onecloud] is a pretty powerful name for someone to take on at the beginning, or rebrand to as well, even if they’re not a product yet,” said Miller. “That’s why it intrigued me – it covers all.

“I see onecloud.com being a case study in two years,” Miller added.

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Cloud data warehousing provider Snowflake has announced the closure of a $479 million (£370.6m) funding round, taking the company’s overall funding to $12.4 billion.

The funding, which represents the eighth round since 2012, was led by two new investors, in the shape of Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce Ventures. The latter is especially pertinent, as a strategic partnership with Salesforce was also announced. More details of the partnership will be announced at an event in June, but for now Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, said the company was ‘looking forward to the positive impact our technologies and services will deliver to our customers and the broader market.’

Snowflake, which received two rounds of funding totalling $713m in 2018, has long since been a darling of the privately held cloud space. The company polled second, behind only Stripe, in Forbes’ most recent Cloud 100 list, with this publication noting at the time how B2B use cases were progressing significantly ahead of the consumer-based SaaS companies previously en vogue.

Salesforce Ventures, who alongside Bessemer Venture Partners consults with Forbes on its Cloud 100, therefore has a very interesting position to play here. Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft in 2018 showed the company’s strategy to help its customers tie up data across various clouds. Many how-to guides exist on how to connect Snowflake and Salesforce, as well as AWS, Azure and other clouds where Salesforce users will host data.

Speaking to the San Francisco Business Times, Slootman noted this round of funding was not about the money, but to ‘advance content strategy’ as part of the Salesforce partnership. “This is not a traditional fundraise. It is part of a strategic alliance with Salesforce that we initiated,” he said.

Other investors, alongside Salesforce and Dragoneer, were Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia, and Sutter Hill Ventures. “Snowflake’s rapid growth and ability to unlock real value for customers have been impressive,” said Marc Stad, founder and managing partner of Dragoneer in a statement. “We are confident Snowflake’s innovative and evolving technology, and its customer-first approach, will continue to drive sustainable momentum over the long-term.”

While Snowflake secured the silver medal in Forbes’ 2019 Cloud 100 list, don’t bet on their being there this coming autumn. The company’s next step would be to move for IPO, according to TechCrunch, although Slootman did not outline specific plans. Alternately, it does not take a huge leap of faith to imagine that, depending on the fruits of their combined labours, Snowflake’s name may be on a shopping list somewhere at Salesforce towers. The proposed $12.4bn valuation would be almost double that of the $6.5bn Salesforce paid for MuleSoft, the company’s largest acquisition to date.

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Sponsored If one were to put together a linguistic analysis of all the conversations held at MWC 2020, later this month in Barcelona, there is a fair chance that the most spoken word would be 5G.

Not surprisingly, the term will be everywhere this year – much of course as it was last year and the year before. Yet whether it is smartphone vendors looking to showcase their latest, speediest wares, or thought leaders looking to where the enterprise needs to focus, things have turned up a notch over the past 12 months.

Take, for instance, what Bejoy Pankajakshan, executive vice president of Mavenir, had to say for sister publication Telecoms last month. The need for discussion is vital for future strategy, Pankajakshan affirms, as the options are legion. “A 5G network is envisaged as the most open, powerful, flexible, and advanced network the telecoms world has ever seen,” he wrote. “At its heart, [it] is a software network and its development and deployment requires a new approach and a new way of thinking.

“If a 5G network isn’t built the right way, users may not come to the telco, and the OTTs could win again.”

Getting everything moving, across various stakeholders, will be no easy task. Charting a blueprint for 5G in concert with other technologies requires detailed planning. Take a session from Accenture set to take place on February 25 around unlocking the power of the cloud. The rise of edge computing, setting the stage for network transformation, will bring huge long-term benefits, but immediate challenges.

“Network cloudification and the disaggregation of hardware and software become necessary – with CSPs now embarking on the critical journey to move their networks to be fully in the cloud, built around cloud at the edge and mobile edge compute, with the ability to cater for all the new applications and use cases unlocked by 5G,” the session materials read.

For some, 5G will inevitably disrupt cloud computing as we know it today. Writing for this publication in August, Marty Puranik, founder, president and CEO of Atlantic.Net, noted how 5G would effectively kill latency – and in one fell swoop, potentially eradicate the need for cloud solutions.

“One of the main reasons the cloud is so beneficial is for numerous devices – either in an organisation for a private cloud or any user with an Internet connection for a public cloud – to connect to and transmit data with a central machine or hard drive located on the cloud,” Puranik wrote. “For an employee to share a large video file with a colleague who’s working from home that day, the cloud made it simple. But why go through all that if your device can connect with your colleague’s device with only a millisecond of latency and a minimum connection speed of 20 Gbps down and 10 Gbps up?”

Edge computing, essentially the older, more streetwise sister of cloud computing, is expected to receive a lot of attention in Barcelona. Microsoft for instance, from whom the taglines of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge are never far away, are expected to be unveiling edge computing services at MWC.

A report from Omdia, which looks to preview 5G developments at MWC20, noted that 5G and AI technologies could utilise edge computing, to the detriment of the cloud. “By 2025, two of three smartphones will include built-in AI capabilities, and global revenue for AI smartphones will increase to $378 billion,” the report notes. “To alleviate consumers’ privacy concerns, smartphone and smart speaker manufacturers will introduce 5G products which perform visual AI processing tasks on edge servers and appliances, bypassing the privacy risks involved in sending data to the cloud.”

The current technological landscape feels like the calm before the storm. Organisations need to fully research the terrain and find out the best use cases for edge, 5G and AI to ensure smooth sailing ahead.

Editor’s note: This article is brought to you by MWC20.

Cloud security provider Netskope has announced the closure of a $340 million (£263m) investment on a valuation of almost $3 billion.

The move represents the seventh funding round for the Santa Clara-based company, taking its total funding to more than $740m. Netskope’s most recent funding was a series F round in November 2018 which raised $168.7m.

Netskope’s primary offering is a cloud access security broker (CASB) product, alongside a secure web gateway (SWG) and public cloud security. The company has a private access Zero Trust solution, part of the Netskope Security Cloud, which is currently in beta.

As cloud usage continues to rise in the enterprise, security threats have risen with it. Plenty of venture capital money is being placed in the market; last month CloudKnox, a provider of identity authorisation for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, raised $12 million. While the biggest cloud providers are taking steps to remediate issues – Google in December announced a partnership with various security firms, including Palo Alto Networks and McAfee for instance – responsibility still rests with the customer for security in the cloud. In other words, what data sits where.

“We look forward to using this investment to continue to accelerate global demand for the Netskope Security Cloud Platform and continue to push the envelope on our vision of a cloud-native platform that secures data against all threats across all of an enterprise’s traffic – whether destined for the web, the cloud, or private apps,” wrote Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri in a blog post.

Sequoia Capital Global Equities led the round as a new investor, with additional funding being provided by all existing investors, including Accel, Base Partners, Geodesic Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Social Capital. Patrick Fu, managing partner at Sequoia, said in a statement that Netskope was “raising the bar for game changers successfully pushing beyond the limitations of existing technology to reshape a market.”

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