They are two companies who have spent more time espousing the benefits of the mainframe than most – and now IBM and CA Technologies have forged a new partnership designed to make the technology more accessible in a cloud and DevOps landscape.

The collaboration will see new services being launched to help organisations develop, test, and monitor applications in the mainframe. The services will be available on IBM’s Cloud Managed Services on zSystems, otherwise known as zCloud.

Clients using zCloud can now take advantage of four new services: CA Brightside, which aids in developing applications for the mainframe using existing open source tools and frameworks; CA Service Virtualization, which focuses on rapidly testing and modifying applications already in place; CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence, for monitoring applications in the cloud; and CA Data Content Discovery for data protection to assist with compliance regulations.

According to a blog post from the two companies, almost 80% of all enterprise data is managed on the mainframe, while more than 90% of the world’s top 100 banks house data on there. While many column inches over the years have opined on the death of the mainframe, many others have issued a rebuttal. The IBM and CA partnership can certainly be put into the latter category.

“Through this strategic relationship, the companies are architecting new and innovative ways to enable clients to develop, run and manage mainframe applications in the cloud,” wrote Phil Guido, IBM general manager of GTS infrastructure services and Greg Lotko, CA general manager of mainframe systems. “Our clients can now quickly access development, testing, application management and regulatory compliance services to deliver operational resiliency, efficiencies, and workforce agility that their businesses require.”

As is expected with such announcements, a customer or two gets rolled out to reveal the benefits of the collaboration. In this instance, Anthem, a US healthcare provider, was chosen, with Tim Skeen, Anthem CIO, saying the new service ‘demonstrates a real possibility for us to deliver new innovations and features faster and securely through a true cloud experience for the mainframe.’

Writing for this publication in 2016, Christopher O’Malley, CEO of Compuware – admittedly no friend of CA or IBM – discussed the importance of breaking down barriers in order to integrate the mainframe into mainstream DevOps and multi-platform IT environments.

“In order to encourage their acceptance of it, agile developers working in modern multi-platform environments need to realise that DevOps teams are only as strong as their weakest link,” wrote O’Malley. “Since mainframe code provides a huge chunk of the digital DNA that defines how the business runs, it’s impossible to turn DevOps into a true competitive advantage if that one mainframe element sits in isolation.

“It’s therefore in everyone’s best interests to bring the mainframe into the fold of mainstream IT.”

Picture credit: IBM

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Amazon EKS, its managed Kubernetes service – putting it alongside rivals Microsoft and Google in this regard.

EKS, which was announced at AWS re:Invent back in November, is now operational in US East and US West regions, with further expansion happening ‘very soon’, according to the company.

The move puts AWS alongside Microsoft and Google in terms of managed Kubernetes. Naturally, given Google originally designed the container orchestration system, there are no prizes for guessing that the latter has various solutions in place. Microsoft announced AKS (Azure Container Service) in October last year as a managed Kubernetes service, building upon the technology’s move to standardisation.

“Prior to Amazon EKS, customers either had to do considerable work to architect a highly fault-tolerant way to run Kubernetes, or just accept a lack of resiliency,” said Deepak Singh, director of AWS Compute Services. “With the launch of Amazon EKS, customers no longer have to live with either of those trade-offs, and they get a highly available, fault-tolerant, managed Kubernetes service. It’s no wonder so many of our customers are excited.”

Moving EKS to general availability does not mean AWS is struggling for customers in the meantime, however. A total of 25 companies were noted as being adopters of EKS in the press materials. One, GoDaddy, will be familiar to readers of this publication; the company specifically cited an active interest in containerised apps when they went all-in on AWS back in March.

Other companies confirmed as customers include Verizon – another who last month revealed AWS was its preferred public cloud provider – Snap and Pearson. Chris Jackson, director of cloud platforms at Pearson, said in a statement that the move to Amazon EKS ensured his team ‘built like a startup even though [it was] part of a major enterprise business.’

In some ways, the move could not have come sooner. According to data published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in December, Amazon EC2 and ECS continues to be the leading container deployment environment, with 69% of survey respondents citing it ahead of Google GCE/GKE (39%) and Azure (23%). The CNCF, which acts as a guardian for Kubernetes, ‘graduated’ the technology in March. Sarah Conway, CNCF senior director of PR services, said at the time the move signalled Kubernetes was ‘mature and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes.’

Everyone’s talking a good game when it comes to DevOps strategies – but automation is not as widespread in organisations as one might think.

That’s the key verdict from software management provider Puppet in its latest report. The report, State of DevOps Market Segmentation, aims to ‘reveal additional insights’ from the company’s most recent State of DevOps report, issued last year.

The 2017 analysis polled almost 3,200 technical professionals from organisations worldwide, and found that high performers have 46 times more frequent code deployments, significantly lower change failure rate, and 440 times faster lead time from commit to deploy.

Yet while there is an evident difference between the highest and lowest performers, the difference in low performers via industry is startling. The media and entertainment industry only had 23% who were categorised in the ‘low performer’ category, while financial services (54%), industrial and manufacturing (53%) and insurance (53%) were significantly more bottom-heavy in comparison.

Leadership particularly affects performance, as this publication reported analysing last year’s report noted – but in the highest cases, a good leader does not necessarily mean good practices across the board. DevOps success also required ‘suitable architecture, good technical practices, [and] use of lean management principles’, the report said.

The majority of respondents said they reported high levels of manual work across configuration management, deployment, testing, and change approval processes. Many organisations start their DevOps journeys at the areas where the pain is most acute; version control, continuous integration and infrastructure automation among others. Puppet says that while automation is ‘a key enabler’ across organisations’ journeys, the process remains ‘inconsistent and spotty’.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the study was assessing how expectations have changed in DevOps initiatives over recent years. “As practices become more widespread, expectations are rising,” the report notes. “What many might have considered ‘great’ IT efforts just a few years ago might appear as fair to middling today.

“That’s an interesting twist that suggests that the gains provided by DevOps – getting departments and teams to work better across an organisation – is no longer just a ‘nice to have’ but a given,” the report adds. “DevOps is simultaneously raising the bar and expectations of what’s possible.”

“Today, every company around the world has the same priority – automation at scale – and they’re achieving this through DevOps,” said Nigel Kersten, report author and chief technical strategist at Puppet in a statement. “While the data shows that companies of all types and sizes are making progress, we still have a long way to go to eliminate manual work that prevents companies from scaling automation success.”

You can find out more about the report here (email required).

How do you balance your cloud and on-premises budget – and how do you get the most out of it? It has long been a problem for organisations once they decide they want to move their systems to the cloud – and according to new research from SoftwareONE, companies continue to suffer from high costs and low visibility.

The study, which polled 300 C-level and IT decision makers in North America, had some interesting data points alongside some less surprising results. More than half (53%) of those polled said they were looking at a hybrid approach to IT – a stat for the latter category. Yet a similar number (45%) said they were either increasing or maintaining their on-prem investments in the coming year.

The problem is naturally built around cost and management. Even organisational budgets have discrepancies depending on who you talk to. On average, according to respondents, IT perceives its annual budget at $5.05 million, while the C suite sees it at $6.3m. What’s more, C-level sees 43% of their perceived budget going onto cloud services this year, where IT sees it more towards a third.

On the management side, 42% of firms polled said they rely on external, third party software to manage cloud deployments. A quarter (26%) believe cloud pricing models were more complex than on-prem equivalents.

A hybrid approach is therefore here to stay, with a four-phase application plan – retire, retain, re-host and re-platform – advocated. To avoid major cost headaches, the report argues that a fine grain approach to the architecture of applications is required – examining ‘how all aspects of the cloud can be used to finely engineer the on-premises applications to realise the maximum benefits.’

Regular industry watchers will be aware that a sub-genre of companies have sprung up with the goal of giving organisations better visibility into their cloud spend. With the most popular cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the plentiful resources and tools at their disposal means it can take a lot of expertise to use their products efficiently.

As this publication reported last year, the sector was becoming especially hot with M&A and funding activity ramping up. CloudCheckr, a Rochester-based cloud management platform, secured $50 million in series A funding last March, while Boston-based CloudHealth Technologies raised $46m a few months later in a series D – with European expansion plans coming to fruition.

“Challenges remain in migrating high availability applications to the cloud, and hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are only adding to that complexity,” the report concludes. “Organisations succeeding with the cloud are conducting full, purpose-built migrations and relying on third party tools to better manage and fully utilise their investments in cloud.

“Organisations must have a clear vision and strategy for governing, managing and optimising their IT investments – on-premises and in the cloud – especially as they embrace the hybrid cloud,” the report adds. “To fully reap the benefits of the hybrid cloud, organisations must have complete transparency from on-premises to the cloud in order to maximise the value of their IT investments.”

You can find out more and read the report here.

Microsoft Office 365 usage continues to accelerate significantly across organisations of all sizes while Google’s G Suite languishes in comparison, according to new figures from Bitglass.

The cloud access security broker (CASB), in its 2018 Cloud Adoption Report, analysed software usage of more than 135,000 companies globally and found Office 365 continues to rule the roost.

56.3% of the more than 135,000 companies analysed were users, compared with only a quarter (24.8%) for G Suite. The latter has actually decreased – admittedly from 24.9% – compared with two years ago, while Office 365 uptake in 2016 was at 34.3%.

In terms of Office 365 and G Suite houses by size, the trend for larger firms to go with Microsoft remains apparent. Regular readers of this publication may remember a 2015 survey from BetterCloud which found companies surveyed who ran Office 365 had IT teams on average five times the size of their Google compatriots.

Bitglass comes to a similar conclusion. Just under half (49.6%) of companies assessed with fewer than 500 employees say they are Office 365 customers, compared with 73.4% for 500-1000 and 73.7% for more than 1000. For G Suite – 24.1%, 24.3% and 25.8% respectively – the figures show little deviation.

Looking across all organisations, 13.8% of companies worldwide are using AWS, with technology (21.5%), education (19.7%) and media (15.3%) firms ahead of the global trend. For larger firms the figures are even more stark; 22.1% of companies with more than 1000 employees use AWS in some capacity, compared with 15.8% for organisations at the 500-1000 range, and 10.8% for those smaller.

For other apps analysed, the general trend is of gradually greater adoption the larger the organisation. More than half of organisations with at least 500 employees are Slack users, compared with 37.8% of smaller businesses. Box is used by 28% of the largest organisations polled compared with 12.7% of companies with fewer than 500 employees, while Salesforce (18.3% and 8.8%) has the same trend.

The dominance of Office 365 is evidently something those at Google have been trying to address. Last month, the company announced the launch of Google One, a premium tier cloud storage offering focused on replacing paid consumer Google Drive plans.

The most interesting aspect which leapt out, however, was around the change of price for 2TB of storage – half of what competitors such as Dropbox and Microsoft charge. As Microsoft bundles storage in with Office 365 subscriptions, this is a not insurmountable hurdle which Google continues to be up against.

Rich Campagna, chief marketing officer at Bitglass, said it was ‘no surprise’ that overall cloud adoption continues to skyrocket. “Organisations worldwide have come to trust platforms like Office 365 and AWS as vendors continue to bolster security and feature sets,” he said.

“Competition between major public cloud players such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft will only increase as they fight to grow market share,” Campagna added. “It remains to be seen which emerging apps will join them to become staples in the enterprise.”

You can find out more and download the report here (email required).

Equinix is moving ahead of Digital Realty and NTT in the colocation market helped by two acquisitions in the most recent quarter, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research.

The company completed its acquisition of Australian data centre provider Metronode last month – having been first announced in December – alongside announcing the acquisition of the Infomart building in Dallas for $800 million.

According to the Synergy figures, Equinix and Digital Realty are growing far quicker than the overall market, with Equinix having 13% of total share – all in retail colocation – and Digital Realty at just over 8%. Digital Realty continues to dominate the wholesale colo market at 28%, while Equinix had a 17% share of retail colocation.

Of the smaller players, NTT is clear in third place with just over 6% of the overall colocation market, with KDDI/Telehouse and China Telecom rounding off the top five.

While a lot of importance continues to be placed in the North America and EMEA heartlands – in January Digital Realty announced a deal with Oracle to add direct access for its US cloud infrastructure – Synergy argues looking globally is key to future operations. Equinix ranked as a leader in EMEA and Latin America, ranked second in North America, and third in APAC.

“When it comes to operating data centres and colocation services, scale and geographic reach are important. Enterprises are pushing more of their data centre operations into colocation facilities and are also aggressively driving more workloads onto the public cloud, where cloud providers themselves use a lot of colocation facilities,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Satisfying the needs of those enterprises and cloud providers often requires a large and widely distributed data centre footprint.

“In order to help achieve that scale there needs to be constant investment in existing data centres… in addition to which we’ve seen $42 billion in data centre M&A deals over the last 36 months, with Equinix or Digital Realty alone accounting for half of the total,” added Dinsdale. “There are good reasons why those two are the leading players in the colocation market.”

According to figures published by the analyst firm in January, 2017 was a record-breaking year for data centre M&A activity, with 48 transactions at $20 billion overall.

Google has clambered into the leaders’ section of Gartner’s latest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, while the wheat has been separated from the chaff.

The annual report concluded that the cloud IaaS market is now a three-horse race in the top right box, with the leaders’ zone not being an Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft-only area for the first time since 2013.

Indeed, Gartner hacked away many of the fringe players for the latest Quadrant. Only six companies make this year’s list, down from 14 this time last year. In effect, Google moved up while the other combatants in last year’s ‘visionaries’ section – Alibaba Cloud, IBM and Oracle – all moved left.

Regarding the two primary leaders, Gartner’s analysis probably won’t surprise those who have consistently followed the market. AWS’ dominance was evidently noted – one point of interest is that many enterprise customers spend more than $5 million annually with some spending more than $100m – but securing optimal use from the company’s extensive portfolio can be challenging for even expert IT organisations. For Microsoft, the company’s increased openness and sustained high growth rate was reported, with concerns over larger scale implementations.

Google, however, carried a few interesting notes. Gartner said the company had a ‘well-implemented, reliable and performant core of fundamental IaaS and PaaS capabilities – including an increasing number of unique and innovative capabilities.’ In terms of cautions, Google fell down on not having a large number of MSP partners, although Gartner noted the improvement the company had made in that area.

It is certainly fair to say that the past 12 months has seen serious improvements from Google’s cloud arm – and placement at the top table from Gartner can be seen as important validation of this shift. At the start of this year, Google outlined its infrastructure expansion plans, focusing on five new data centre regions – with more having since been announced – and three subsea cables. Last month, CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the company was striking ‘significantly larger, more strategic deals’ for cloud.

As this publication recently reported, it can also be seen as a case of keeping up with the Joneses. Capex spend from the ‘hyperscaler’ cloud vendors hit record levels in the most recent quarter, according to figures from Synergy Research. In a note published after financial results were disclosed, Synergy said cloud growth over the past two quarters had been ‘quite exceptional’.

Concluding the report, Gartner said the cloud IaaS market was ‘consolidating rapidly’, with the reduction of vendors reflecting heightened customer expectations, with services around hardware and software infrastructure, management and governance, and pre-integrated value-added solutions all necessary. The analyst firm added that of the six companies which made the cut, some already have this capability while others simply have the ambition to do so.

You can find out more about the report and download a reprint here (Microsoft landing page).

Postscript: As mentioned, Google’s inclusion in the leaders’ section means the five year run of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft only being at the top table has come to an end. But whither 2013? Well AWS was there, as one would expect, but Microsoft was a bit behind. One other company was in the leaders’ zone; CSC, who of course merged with HP Enterprise Services last year to create DXC Technology. If you remembered that, give yourself a pat on the back.

If you want to challenge the leading cloud infrastructure providers, you are going to need some seriously deep pockets. According to the latest figures from analyst firm Synergy Research, hyperscaler cloud capex spending hit a record $27 billion (£20.1bn) in the most recent quarter.

The top five spenders in the industry remain Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, with Alibaba, IBM, JD.com, NTT, and Tencent comprising the top 10.

Google kicked off the quarter by announcing various infrastructure expansion plans, including five new data centre regions and three subsea cables. Two of these regions – in the Netherlands and Montreal – are already open for business, with further plans to expand in Switzerland announced by Google earlier this month. Microsoft’s expansion plans for Azure this quarter include Australia and New Zealand, as well as Europe and the Middle East.

The big five spent on average more than $13 billion per quarter last year – but combined spending for Q1 of this year has seen that figure rise to more than $20bn.

It’s all about speculating to accumulate. The hyperscalers’ most recent financial results, published last month, saw strong growth all round. According to Synergy figures, Amazon continues to retain more than 30% of the market, ahead of Microsoft, IBM, Google and Alibaba.

Other trends come into play here. Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services announced that Verizon was choosing the Seattle firm as its preferred cloud provider, putting to bed once and for all the operator’s cloudy ambitions, which first blossomed with the acquisition of Terremark in 2011, before the service was sold off to IBM last year.

“This helps to explain why so many IT service providers and telcos have stopped trying to compete with the leading cloud providers,” John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy, explained. “Companies striving for leadership in this market need to consistently find billions of dollars per quarter to cover data centre investments, which is clearly beyond all but a very small number of companies.”

One in four respondents to a survey from IT community Spiceworks say they remain unconvinced by cloud storage security – with Microsoft OneDrive holding firm as the most popular service.

The study, which polled more than 500 respondents from organisations across North America and Europe, found more than half (51%) are currently using OneDrive, compared with 34% for both Google Drive and Dropbox, going down to 13% and 6% for Apple iCloud Drive and Box respectively.

When broken down by company size, OneDrive dominates further. 59% of large businesses are currently using OneDrive, compared with 29% for Google Drive and 25% for Dropbox. For small businesses, these figures come out at 47%, 39%, and 34% respectively.

Yet as security – not surprisingly – remains the most dominant factor, a fair proportion of respondents voiced concern around the security of the most popular cloud storage tools. 97% of those polled cited security as either ‘important’ or ‘extremely important’ in the buying process, ahead of reliability (96%), cost (93%), ease of use (93%) and vendor reputation (89%). However, 25% said their data in the cloud was either ‘not at all’ or ‘somewhat’ secure.

This lack of confidence can be seen in the way organisations want to keep an element of control, according to Spiceworks analyst Peter Tsai. More than half (57%) of those polled only allow employees to use cloud storage or file sharing services, compared with only 19% who are happy for their employees to do what they like. “IT departments clearly want a degree of control over data,” Tsai wrote in a blog post explaining the findings.

That said, instances of shadow IT are decreasing: according to figures from 2016, 78% of IT pros said employees were using Dropbox without company approval. The latest figures put this now at 54% – still the most ‘popular’, ahead of Google Drive (43%), Apple iCloud Drive (27%) and OneDrive (25%).

One trend Tsai has particularly seen over the past two years is around the struggles standalone providers are facing. Two years ago Dropbox was the most popular service; today, it has been usurped by OneDrive, while Google Drive has also toppled Dropbox.

Yet it is not Microsoft and Google against the rest – the battle is well and truly joined between the two behemoths as well. Earlier this month, Google launched Google One, a premium tier cloud storage offering with two goals; to simplify Drive and, perhaps more importantly, to undercut Microsoft. Google is offering 2TB of storage for $9.99 per month – a price that gets only 1TB from Microsoft, Dropbox et al.

Microsoft however, with Office 365 integration, still holds the aces, according to Tsai. “As organisations want to do more with less, it makes financial sense for companies to go with OneDrive if they’re already paying for Office 365,” he wrote.

“Going forward, with this bundling trend also extending to G Suite, it will be difficult for standalone cloud storage services to compete on price,” Tsai added. “Instead, they will have to innovate continuously on features and serve niche markets that aren’t satisfied with cloud storage offerings bundled with popular productivity suites from tech giants Microsoft and Google.”

A couple of interesting pieces of news from Rackspace; the company has launched a ‘Kubernetes as a service’ offering, as well as announcing the acquisition of digital agency RelationEdge.

The service, which will become available on Rackspace Private Cloud later this month, with planned support for public clouds later this year, is more affirmation of the rise of the container orchestration tool. At the start of this month, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon saw a truckload of announcements about Kubernetes, from certified courses to vendor support – and the latter is evidently key here.

Rackspace sees the problem thus. The application container software market will grow significantly in the coming years to almost $3 billion by 2020 – citing figures from 451 Research – meaning a gap will appear for those wishing to effectively manage Kubernetes environments on their own.

Like the company already does with public cloud providers, Rackspace wants to ease headaches organisations may have. Through the service, customers will be able to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across private and public clouds, as well as managing ‘day 2’ operations – updates, upgrades and patching in other words – and providing enterprise-grade security.

Rackspace also says customers will save up to 50% with its Kubernetes as a service, as opposed to running the environments themselves.

“We’re making the most modern infrastructure consumable by every enterprise,” said Lee James, Rackspace CTO EMEA in a statement. “With Kubernetes as a service, we are providing the industry’s simplest Kubernetes consumption model by delivering it fully configured, tested and validated at enterprise scale with the managed cluster services customers need to effectively run their applications.

“Rackspace’s combination of operational experience and open source expertise, coupled with the security, improved economics and a fully managed Kubernetes offering available on leading public and private cloud technologies, helps companies accelerate their digital transformation,” added James.

The acquisition of RelationEdge plays more into another of Rackspace’s themes: enterprise application management. Industry watchers will recall Rackspace acquiring TriCore last year, in what was virtually incoming CEO Joe Eazor’s first announcement. RelationEdge has expertise as a Salesforce platinum consulting partner – perhaps an odd choice therefore, but Rackspace said the acquisition would ‘expand [the company’s] ability to be a preferred partner for managing a customer’s complete application portfolio through continuous transition to modern technologies, including SaaS applications.’