Resellers and channel partners can do more to guide organisations into a cloudy future by leveraging IaaS and PaaS solutions, according to a new report from Ingram Micro.

The study, which surveyed 250 UK-based cloud end users as well as 50 resellers, found Azure was the most popular IaaS solution sold by resellers, followed by Amazon S3 and Google Compute Engine – while Azure is significantly ahead on the PaaS side.

The paper’s hypothesis is simple. As organsiations’ cloud desires are often set back by security concerns, pricing, or a general lack of knowledge around the technology’s capabilities, resellers should have a role to play in smoothing the edges. But the resellers are not holding up their end of the bargain.

“Perceptions remain that procuring a cloud solution directly from a developer is a better option, but the fact that end users still have reservations about the technology in general demonstrates that further evolution is required in the way cloud products and services are offered,” the report opens. “With the tailored services and expertise they provide, resellers have the power to be central to this transformation.”

Azure is a product option for 68% of those polled on the IaaS side and for 88% of respondents on PaaS. Amazon S3 for IaaS was cited by 57% and EC2 by 56% for PaaS respectively, while Google Compute Engine and App Engine both scored the same (52%).

Yet only 8% of cloud end users said they worked exclusively in the channel for procurement. For comparison, half of respondents said they bought cloud directly from the developer. Three in five (59%) who do say it’s cheaper, while more than half (54%) cited support as key. The report notes that these figures are not overwhelming – so it is an area where channel partners can step in.

“Resellers need to reassure end users that they can match the price offered the developer,” the report notes. “In many cases, this is about changing the perception that working purely with developers represents the best value option. If resellers make their pricing structures and the ways in which they add value clear, and review these on a regular basis to make sure they remain competitive, this gap between developers and the channel will begin to close.”

Competitive pricing was cited by 74% of those polled as the most appealing element to a cloud solution, behind only security (83%) and ahead of scalability (68%). But more than a dozen options, including payments, business intelligence, and data warehousing and big data analytics, were cited by respondents. Here, the report argues, resellers’ expertise can again come to the fore.

“If partners are to effectively grow their presence in the cloud marketplace, it is essential that they build their offerings around a solution that is highly available, secure, scalable, and more importantly enables the business to be more agile within its operation,” said Apay Obang-Oyway, Ingram Micro UK&I director of cloud and software.

“The options are vast and the hyperscale nature of many offerings means that they can be leveraged to suit a wide range of business requirements,” added Obang-Oyway. “This represents a huge business opportunity for the channel, and explains why resellers typically offer solutions from a variety of providers.

“This need to be flexible and agile is exactly why these top three solutions seem to be most prevalent within end users.”

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

As enterprises are embracing the cloud, SD-WAN is more likely to be on the table for their technological roadmaps.

This is the primary finding from a survey conducted by analyst firm IHS Markit. The WAN Strategies North America study found almost three quarters (74%) of organisations polled conducted SD-WAN lab trials in 2017, with many of these moving into production trials and, eventually, live production, this year.

Investments in wide area networks more generally continue undimmed, with the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), company and traffic growth, and greater network control all cited. WAN bandwidth usage is expected to grow over 20% each year according to respondents, while total WAN expenditures rose almost 20%, to $300,000 per respondent, last year.

“As companies shift a greater portion of their IT infrastructure into the cloud and expand their physical presence to go after new markets or be closer to customers and partners, the need for reliable, secure and high-performance WAN and internet connectivity has never been greater,” said Matthias Machowinski, IHS Markit enterprise networks senior research director in a statement.

“However, companies don’t have unlimited budgets to fund growing WAN bandwidth consumption, which is why a majority are planning to deploy software-defined WAN in the next three years, to better control how their WANs are used,” Machowinski added.

The rise of SD-WAN has certainly been noted among industry watchers. Writing for this publication in February, Gayle Levin, director of solutions marketing at Riverbed Technologies, discussed the key steps and benefits of software-defined WAN in a cloud-first strategy.

“At the end of the day, cloud-first strategies are designed to provide the best possible user experience. The network is of limited value if the user experience is poor or inconsistent,” wrote Levin. “Effective SD-WAN tools provide deep visibility into application performance, network flows, congested areas, and which users devices are connected to the network, enabling IT to effectively deploy and manage their applications and the underlying infrastructure.

“Whether using leading IaaS offerings or something from the vast set of SaaS applications, software-defined WANs are essential to corporate agility and security,” Levin added. “Optimising applications by rapidly establishing and tearing down connections simply cannot be done without centralised network management and orchestration.

“Cloud first needs cloud networking.”

Find out more about the IHS Markit report here (client access).

Amazon and Microsoft have joined IBM and Google in reporting its quarterly numbers – and the good news just keeps on coming for the hyperscalers and the cloud market in general.

Amazon announced total revenues of $51 billion (£36.9bn) in the first quarter, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing $5.4bn (£3.94bn), or 10.6% of all revenues. This compares favourably with this time last year, AWS hitting $3.66bn of total revenues of $35.7bn in Q117, with AWS passing $5bn for the first time in the previous quarter.

The canned quote attributed to CEO Jeff Bezos, unlike previous quarters, singled out AWS; Bezos saying it ‘had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition…and the team has never slowed down.’

Fielding a question from an analyst after announcing the results, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, said AWS revenues, as well as enterprise migrations, were accelerating. “What is driving the growth, we believe… [is] the value that we create for AWS customers,” Olsavsky said. “We have the functionality and pace of innovation that others don’t. We have partner and ecosystem that others don’t, and we have proven operational capability and security expertise that’s highly valued to the AWS customer base.”

Microsoft, which is not quite as explicit as Amazon in its cloud reporting, posted total revenue figures of $26.8 billion. Of its main revenue buckets, Microsoft’s intelligent cloud segment – believed to be related to Azure and server products – increased 17% to $7.9bn (£5.7bn), while productivity and business processes, which focuses more on Office 365, was at $9bn, again with a 17% increase.

While specific revenue figures for Azure were not mentioned, the company said Azure had grown 93% in revenue year over year.

Speaking to analysts after the figures were posted, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cited cloud security as an area where the company was a ‘clear leader’, as well as discussing the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) within infrastructure.

“Our architectural advantage of a consistent stack from the cloud to the edge is resonating with customers, with Azure revenue growth of 93% this quarter,” said Nadella. “Recent CIO surveys affirm our leadership position in hybrid, developer productivity, trusted security and compliance and new workloads such as IoT and AI at the edge.”

As this publication reported earlier this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s cloud arm was ‘growing well’ and that larger, more strategic deals were being struck. Again, specific figures are not disclosed, but for Q1 Google’s ‘other’ revenues bucket – of which Google Cloud is a part – hit $4.35bn, a 35% increase on the previous year. For the second consecutive quarter, IBM’s revenues went up – albeit only in constant currency – to $19.1bn of global sales, with cloud revenues rising 20% year over year.

Analysis

Good results all round, therefore; but what is driving the change? It’s all about AI, machine learning and – to a lesser extent – blockchain, fuelling the new ‘cloud wars’ and becoming the next generation of cloud-enabled services.

AWS says ‘tens of thousands’ of customers are using its machine learning services with active users going up by more than 250% over the past year. Those who attended re:Invent in November would have been made more than aware of AWS’ push in the area, including SageMaker, a modular service which aims to help developers build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Dow Jones, NFL, and Expedia – the latter announcing at re:Invent they were all-in on AWS – are all confirmed machine learning customers.

The keynote theme of Google’s report was around how AI was ‘unlocking new opportunities for everyone’. Pichai cited Google Photos, Lens and the Google Assistant as products which were getting better all the time, but again the importance of getting developers onside, this time with TensorFlow, was cited. TensorFlow Hub, Pichai explained, was launched to “make it easier for developers to share and reuse models so that we can work together to tackle even more problems and get to better ideas faster.”

From Microsoft’s side, the company says more than one million developers are already on board with Cognitive Services, the company’s set of APIs and SDKs to make applications more intelligent. IBM, for its part, has introduced several offerings to ‘accelerate client journeys to AI’, as SVP and CFO Jim Kavanaugh put it, including a more conversational, enhanced Watson Assistant.

In terms of where the runners and riders are, AWS continues to trounce the rest of the field, according to analyst firm Synergy Research. The company notes that even though the market has almost tripled in size over the past few years, AWS’ grip on one third of the total cloud infrastructure services market remains. Microsoft’s growth, eating into AWS’ dominance, has slipped somewhat, with the Redmond giant taking 13% of share, with IBM, Google, and Alibaba Cloud making up the top five.

“Cloud growth in the last two quarters really has been quite exceptional,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Normal market development cycles and the law of large numbers should result in growth rates that slowly diminish – and that is what we saw in late 2016 and through most of 2017. But the growth rate jumped by three percentage points in Q4 and by another five in Q1.

“That is good news for the leading cloud providers, whose historically high levels of capex are helping to ensure that they are the main beneficiaries of that exceptional market growth,” Dinsdale added.

It turns out Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have been throwing us all a bit of a curveball with regards to blockchain. The cloud infrastructure giant has announced the launch of AWS Blockchain Templates – having previously said the technology wasn’t in the company’s plans.

Back in November, at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company’s dozens of announcements focused predominantly on how machine learning (ML) was going to transform user experiences, with the launch of SageMaker – a service which helps developers train and build ML models – as well as transcription and translation services among others.

At the time, Andy Jassy, AWS chief executive, told the audience: “If you think about the history of AWS, we don’t built technology because we think the technology is cool. The only reason we build that technology is to solve problems for you.” At a later press conference, Jassy reiterated the first statement, adding that while he thought many distributed ledgers had limited capabilities, the company was ‘intrigued’ by what its customers would do there.

Just under six months on, AWS is helping give customers a push in that direction. AWS Blockchain Templates aims to let users launch either an Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric network in a matter of minutes.

Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, summed up the company’s position in a blog post announcing the launch. “Some of the people that I talk to see blockchains as the foundation of a new monetary system and a way to facilitate international payments. Others see blockchains as a distributed ledger and immutable data source that can be applied to logistics, supply chain, land registration, crowdfunding, and other use cases,” Barr wrote. “Either way, it is clear that there are a lot of intriguing possibilities and we are working to help our customers use this technology more effectively.”

The offering is aimed at smaller businesses with minimal resources for building their own applications, and allows AWS to compete directly with other players in blockchain as a service (BaaS), including IBM and Oracle. The former, in particular, has made its focus particularly clear as a leader in emerging technologies; at IBM Think, according to CCS Insight’s Nick McQuire, blockchain got just as much coverage as artificial intelligence, cloud and quantum computing.

Perhaps Amazon was just a little more subtle in its intentions. As reported by ETH News in November, the company quietly registered three new domain names; amazoncryptocurrencies.com, amazoncryptocurrency.com, and amazonethereum.com. None of these sites are accessible as of publication time.

Elsewhere, AWS announced the general availability of AWS IoT Analytics, a managed service which aims to ‘empower customers to uncover insights that lead to more accurate decisions for their IoT and machine learning applications’, in the company’s words.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says his company’s cloud operations are ‘growing well’ with larger, strategic deals in place as more impressive financial results were revealed.

The company’s parent, Alphabet, posted Q118 financials earlier this week with $31.15 billion (£22.3bn) in total revenue for the quarter. Advertising revenues were at $26.6bn, while ‘other’ revenues – of which Google Cloud is a part – hit $4.35bn, a 35% increase on this time last year. Overall revenues were up 25% on the previous year’s analysis.

Earlier this year, Pichai said Google Cloud was running at more than $1bn per quarter while in July he said the company had tripled the number of its big cloud deals – rated at $500,000 or more – year over year.

“In Q1, we saw increasing momentum,” Pichai said of Google’s cloud bets. “We are growing across the board and are also signing significantly larger, more strategic deals for cloud. Our security capabilities, the easy-to-use advanced data analytics and machine learning solutions and the secure and industry-leading collaboration platform, G Suite, are winning customers over.

“Google Cloud is growing well,” Pichai added.

While cloud was an important factor in the Google chief exec’s remarks to analysts, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) – and how AI is ‘unlocking new opportunities for everyone’ – was evidently the keynote theme.

The combination of machine learning on Google’s cloud has the potential to be an irresistible one. Back in 2016, as regular industry watchers will recall, Evernote cited the capability as key to it becoming a Google customer, while yesterday it emerged Total is working with Google Cloud to develop AI solutions for analysing oil and gas data.

Pichai also noted the importance of Google’s expanding data centre and cable empire, saying the company’s global infrastructure ‘continues to expand to support demand.’ The launch of five new data centre facilities, in Finland, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Montreal and the Netherlands, alongside three subsea cables, were a key highlight for the company in the quarter. Google also secured an important renewable energy target earlier this month.

Alongside this, Google Cloud announced a series of updates to G Suite focused around security and our old friend, AI. On the security side, a new ‘confidential’ mode for Gmail was launched, alongside bigger bolder security warnings so users theoretically can’t miss the fact they are about to open a phishing email. On the AI front, the new features, such as nudging – Gmail proactively reminding you to follow up on unresolved messages – aim for greater productivity and ensuring users don’t ‘drop the ball’, as Google puts it. According to research issued alongside the release, nudging will prevent 1.6 million dropped balls for Google’s users each month – a painful problem indeed.

You can read the full financial report here.

What is the state of cloud analytics today? New research from Teradata argues that while most organisations want to run all of their analytics in the cloud by 2023, the journey is taking longer than anticipated.

The findings, which appear in the company’s latest report, titled ‘The State of Analytics in the Cloud’ polling leaders at 700 global organisations, show an apparent disconnect. 83% of respondents said public cloud was the best place to run analytics, but an even higher number (91%) argued analytics should be moving to public cloud more quickly.

Issues with getting analytics onto the public cloud include security – cited by 50% of those polled – poor performance of technology already available (49%) and regulatory compliance (35%). Other concerns cited include difficulties with connecting legacy systems and cloud applications and lack of in-house talent.

Larger organisations are doing better when it comes to analytics implementations, with one in three using deep learning and machine learning. 68% of respondents said they plan to adopt AI technologies in the coming 12 months. Yet a problem with immature technologies exist at the highest level; 63% of companies polled with revenues north of $10 billion say low-performing tech is a hindrance, compared to 41% whose revenues come in at $250-500m.

Naturally, Teradata has a solution to organisations’ concerns; the company’s software, which can run adeptly on AWS and Azure, is looking to push IntelliCloud, its ‘as a service’ offering for analytics at scale. Yet the survey results make for interesting reading – and showcase the problems which exist for running high-level analytics in the cloud.

“The results are clear,” said Martyn Etherington, Teradata chief marketing officer. “The market is marching toward cloud analytics, but so many of today’s cloud-only analytic engines lack the power or speed to handle enterprise-scale analytic workloads.”

You can find out more about the report here.

German software giant SAP has announced the launch of its Digital Manufacturing Cloud, which will enable manufacturing providers to deploy Industry 4.0 technologies in the cloud.

The announcement was made at the 2018 Hannover Messe, the yearly technological jamboree for all things industrial. The product includes business system integration, meaning greater visibility for the shop floor, as well as predictive analytics and a cloud-based collaboration system connecting customers with manufacturing service providers.

The cloud offering ‘extends and complements the digital manufacturing portfolio of on-premise solutions from SAP’, in the company’s own words, and is aimed at manufacturers of all sizes.

“Manufacturers in the era of Industry 4.0 require solutions that are intelligent, networked and predictive,” said Bernd Leukert, SAP board member for products and innovation in a statement. “Our manufacturing cloud solutions help customers take advantage of the Industrial Internet of Things by connecting equipment, people and operations across the extended digital supply chain and tightly integrating manufacturing with business operations.”

As far back as 2012, scientific papers were published on the role cloud computing could play in the manufacturing industry. One, published in the February 2012 edition of Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, asserted cloud could ‘transform the traditional manufacturing business model, help it to align product innovation with business strategy, and create intelligent factory networks that encourage effective collaboration.’

Writing for this publication in 2013, Louis Columbus explored software as a service (SaaS) adoption in the manufacturing sector. According to Cindy Jutras, founder of analyst firm MintJutras, manufacturing organisations showed confusion around the technology, with half not understanding the difference between single and multi-tenant SaaS architectures. By 2023, almost half (45%) of all manufacturing software was expected to become SaaS-based, up from 22% in 2013.

Last year, Columbus again wrote around how integrating ERP and CRM systems is set to change the shape of manufacturing, bringing it in line with many other industries. “Bringing contextual intelligence into manufacturing that centres on customers’ unique, fast-changing requirements is a must-have to keep growing sales profitably,” wrote Columbus. “By integrating ERP, CRM, SCM, pricing and legacy systems together, manufacturers can provide customers what they want most – accurate, fast responses to their questions and perfect orders delivered.”

Going back to the production line, SAP also announced SAP Connected Worker Safety, a product which offers project managers, as well as health and safety personnel, access to data collected by IoT devices in real time. The sensors will collect worker data, such as heart rate and body temperature, and can raise alarms based on incidents such as dehydration or fatigue.

You can find out more about the Digital Manufacturing Cloud here.

Picture credit: SAP

Netflix has always been considered the poster child of Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployment – but the streaming and entertainment giant is moving to Google Cloud for certain workloads, according to reports.

It is yet another sign of the multi-cloud world organisations work in today. According to a report from The Information (paywall), citing sources close to the company, Netflix is using Google’s cloud for several functions, from disaster recovery to artificial intelligence.

The report adds that ‘by working with other cloud providers, Netflix risks causing friction to its decade-long relationship with AWS… but it is a move Netflix eventually will have to make to meet the needs of its growing global subscriber base.’

In a statement, Netflix said: “There is no change in our comprehensive relationship with AWS. We’ve had a few disaster recovery workloads with Google for a while and we always experiment with new technologies. There’s nothing bigger here.”

Part of the reason why Netflix is so frequently cited as AWS’ most well-known customer is because the company itself is usually so open about its architecture. Just last week, the company announced it was open sourcing Titus, its container management platform, with another nod to Amazon. “Given that Netflix infrastructure leverages AWS so broadly, we decided to seamlessly integrate, and take advantage of as much functionality AWS had to offer,” the company wrote in an official blog post.

One aspect to consider, as the Information report does, is around Spinnaker, Netflix’s open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform. Plenty of articles have hit the press this year around how Spinnaker is Netflix’s secret weapon – with Mirantis recently launching a continuous delivery service based on it. Yet Netflix worked with Google on Spinnaker – and the two companies came together earlier this month to launch Kayenta, an offering which provides automated canary analysis.

From Google’s perspective, the news represents another high-quality client win in a year which has been full of them. Last March, the wider industry was made aware of how three major companies, Colgate-Palmolive, eBay and Verizon, were on board, while last month saw disclosures that Spotify and Apple were customers. The former, in its initial IPO filing, said it was in the process of transitioning all data storage from its own servers to Google Cloud Platform. In an updated filing, Spotify confirmed it would be paying €365 million to Google over three years.

So should we expect more of the same? As deployments become more complex and it gradually becomes easier to move workloads between cloud providers, then the simple answer is yes. According to 451 Research, in its Cloud Transformation Vendor Window study last year, around half of organisations polled who were confirmed AWS or Azure houses used the other vendor in some capacity. Speaking to this publication at the time Melanie Posey, 451 research vice president, said organisations were not actively using both providers to support the same workload, but leveraging two, or more, providers to host and support efforts in different regions.

CloudTech has reached out to Netflix for comment and will update the story as it gets it.

CloudHealth Technologies, Boston-based cloud management and cost optimisation provider, is expanding further into Europe by making ‘significant investments’ in the region.

The company is forming a development team in London, as well as the typical expansion bases of expanding its employee, partner and customer base. CloudHealth adds it has grown its London employee base by 300%, as well as hitting 83% revenue growth in EMEA. London is not the company’s only European office, with operations already set up in Tel Aviv and Amsterdam, alongside plans to open up in France and Germany.

Alongside this, the company announced a new series of partners, including KCOM, Softcat, and Vodafone. The latter is of particular interest and has echoes with its strategic partnership with Tangoe for telecom expense management (TEM), announced in 2016.

“London is the perfect location to expand and headquarter our EMEA operations,” said Tom Axbey, president and CEO of CloudHealth Technologies in a statement. “The talent we have in place today is unparalleled. As we broaden every operational function to better serve our EMEA clients and partner ecosystem, we continue to recruit the best in the industry.”

Back in June, CloudHealth raised $46 million in a series D funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. At the time the company told this publication the plan was in place to eventually go to IPO, adding that while there was no ‘definitive timetable’, the focus was on scaling the business to include geographical footprint, product line, partners and employees.

CloudHealth is by no means the only company looking at the European market. Alibaba Cloud – who touted itself at Mobile World Congress this year as the fastest growing cloud provider in the world – said it wanted to be ‘an enabler for technology innovation in Europe helping enterprises do business.’

According to figures from Eurostat at the end of 2016, 21% of European Union enterprises used cloud services – a 10% increase on 2014.

The RSA Conference in San Francisco is a hotbed of news, analysis and reports on the security industry, with research from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and automation software provider Sonatype being of particular interest.

The CSA report, State of Cloud Security 2018, assesses the steps cloud providers and enterprises are taking when it comes to security, as well as regulation and the changing threat landscape.

The report notes that as the landscape for cloud services expands, so do the security options with it. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) overlaps with platform as a service (PaaS), while serverless enables the hardware and software to be decoupled, and the software as a service market (SaaS) also expands. The rise of cloud access security broker (CASB) providers, and managed security services, is a sign that organisational security goes beyond the traditional corporate perimeter.

Regarding the role providers have to play, the report warns around the evolving landscape. “Training videos and manuals may not be enough as enterprises are using multiple cloud services and can’t keep up,” the report explains. “To help enterprises battle against the technology sprawl of features, the aim needs to be towards safe and secure default configurations and ensuring the proper use of new features.

“Any breach of a service, even due to user error, can negatively impact customer trust and reliability of a product,” the report adds. “User interface and behaviour should be just as important as the features themselves.”

The report concludes that, ultimately, technology moves faster than the business’ skills to adopt them, and the dreaded cloud skills gap needs to be met head on by the industry through partnership and collaboration.

Vinay Patel, managing director at Citigroup and chair of the CSA Global Enterprise Advisory Board, said that cloud security remained a ‘work in progress’. “It is incumbent upon the cloud user community to collaborate and speak with an amplified voice to ensure that their key security issues are heard and addressed,” he said.

“We hope this document will serve as a roadmap to developing best practices in the establishment of baseline security requirements needed to protect organisational data,” Patel added.

Elsewhere, a report from Sonatype concluded that organisations with mature DevOps practices were significantly more likely to integrate automated security than firms with no DevOps practice. More than three quarters of mature DevOps organisations have open source policies in place, with greater adherence than those without, while nine in 10 (88%) with mature DevOps practices are investing in application security training.

You can read the CSA report here (registration required) and the Sonatype report here (registration required).