Microsoft’s latest Azure update has managed to cover two of its more recent trends with the announcement of new regions for Australia and New Zealand.

The company has already this month focused on expanding its geographic footprint, as well as beefing up its government cloud options. With the new regions, Microsoft says it is the only global cloud provider to deliver services ‘specifically designed to address the requirements of the Australian and New Zealand governments and critical national infrastructure, including banks, utilities, transport and telecommunications.’

Microsoft offers Azure from three cities in Australia – Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra – with connectivity to Perth, Brisbane and Auckland. The latest development is in partnership with Canberra Data Centres, whereby customers can deploy their own applications and infrastructure hosted on the Canberra data centre, directly connected via Azure ExpressRoute to Microsoft’s network, or in the case of federal government, through their Intra Government Communications Network (ICON).

The move now gives Microsoft four regions in the continent, with the two new Australia Central regions alongside East and Southeast. For comparison, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has three availability zones in its Sydney region, with Microsoft pointing out it is the only major provider to offer availability from more than one city.

“Around the world, government and critical national infrastructure providers are transforming operations and the services they deliver to citizens and customers,” wrote Tom Keane, Azure head of global infrastructure in a blog post. “They are rapidly modernising their business and mission-critical applications through the flexibility, scale and reach of Azure, partnering with our unmatched partner ecosystem, and placing their trust in us to create a resilient and responsive platform for growth.”

With the latest additions, Microsoft now has 50 regions worldwide in 140 countries.

Hosting provider GoDaddy is going all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) moving the ‘vast majority of its infrastructure’ over to Amazon as well as maintaining an active interest in containerised apps.

The move, announced by AWS, will see GoDaddy utilise various services, including Amazon EKS, its elastic container service for Kubernetes launched at the company’s re:Invent event at the end of November. Other services being used include P2, AWS’ general purpose GPU instances ‘to substantially reduce the time it takes to train machine learning models’, as well as increase the performance of GoDaddy Domain Appraisals, the tool which helps customers understand the value of their domains.

AWS’ push on Kubernetes has been evident with the company joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – from where Kubernetes ‘graduated’ earlier this month – back in August. According to analysis from DZone at the start of this year, 63% of Kubernetes workloads were being deployed to the AWS cloud.

“As a technology provider with more than 17 million customers, it was very important for GoDaddy to select a cloud provider with deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support our rapidly expanding business,” said Charles Beadnall, GoDaddy chief technology officer in a statement. “AWS provides a superior global footprint and set of cloud capabilities which is why we selected them to meet our needs today and into the future.

“By operating on AWS, we’ll be able to innovate at the speed and scale we need to deliver powerful new tools that will help our customers run their own ventures and be successful online,” Beadnall added.

To compare and contrast on what ‘all-in’ means, Mark Okerstrom, president and CEO of Expedia, told re:Invent attendees that they expected 80% of the company’s critical apps to be on board within three years.

Larry Ellison praised Amazon for ‘inventing’ the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market – but with the announcement of the first service based on Oracle’s much-touted autonomous database, the company aims to go bigger and better than the IaaS behemoth.

At an event yesterday, Ellison announced the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud. As the company put it, the new product ‘delivers all of the analytical capabilities, security features, and high availability of the Oracle Database without any of the complexities of configuration, tuning, and administration’.

This news had been coming. Last month saw updates to the autonomous database cloud by making all Oracle Cloud Platform services ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing’, in the words of Thomas Kurian, president of product development. When Oracle reported its latest financials earlier this month, Ellison promised more of the same, expecting to deliver autonomous analytics, mobility, application development and integration services over the coming months. Attendees yesterday were told this was the ‘first of several’ autonomous PaaS services Oracle will deliver this year.

Ellison espoused his views on AWS during an impromptu break to fix slides at the beginning of his presentation. “Everyone knows, and everyone gives rightful credit to Amazon for kind of inventing the market for infrastructure as a service. They noticed that in a lot of ways it’s more efficient to rent computers than buy computers.

“Amazon pioneered the notion… but the way Oracle plans on – and is in the process of – differentiating itself from Amazon is to offer a complete suite of platform services that are at a higher level than low level infrastructure stuff,” added Ellison. “Rather than developing database applications like you used to develop, you’ll use these new PaaS services.”

Back in October, Ellison ran a series of benchmark demonstrations around running an Oracle database on an Amazon cloud, and on its own cloud, joking to the audience that he would have to skip some of the Amazon demos because they took too long to complete. The company still promises to cut Amazon bills in half running the same data on an Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud service, with the offer valid until the end of May 2019, which you can find out more about here.

Another day, another earnings report where cloud is cited as the primary mover. This time it’s Red Hat, whose fourth quarter and full year revenues have gone up 23% and 21% year over year respectively.

Full year revenues were at $2.9 billion (£2.05bn) while fourth quarter total revenue was at $772 million (£546.4m). The company’s subscription revenue from infrastructure-related offerings was at $510m for the most recent quarter, representing two thirds of total revenue, while total subscription revenue was 88% of overall revenue.

The key highlight for Red Hat over the past quarter was the acquisition of CoreOS, a provider of Kubernetes and container solutions, for $250m in January. The move was cited by president and CEO Jim Whitehurst when speaking to analysts and, on a wider scale, the importance of container technologies for Red Hat going forward.

“The acquisition of CoreOS further enhances our ability to help customers build applications and deploy them across hybrid environments,” said Whitehurst, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including OpenShift, we aim to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.”

Back in 2016, this reporter attended the London Red Hat Forum where open source software reigned supreme. At that time, Red Hat saw itself as the #2 player in Kubernetes and Docker. The company remains the second leading contributor to Kubernetes, which itself has gone from strength to strength, ‘graduating’ from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this month.

“We continue to believe that the next era of technology will be driven by container-based applications that span multi and hybrid cloud environments and that Kubernetes, containers and Linux will be the foundation of this transformation,” added Whitehurst.

You can read the full results here.

Pivotal Software, the arbiter of the open source Cloud Foundry project and one of the many horses in Dell’s stable, has filed for an IPO worth a potential $100 million (£70.4m).

The S-1 filing revealed Pivotal posted overall revenues of $509.4m for fiscal 2018, at an increase of 22.4% from the year before, with subscription revenue exceeding services revenue for the first time at $259m.

The company said it had 319 ‘subscription customers’ – defined as companies who spend at least $50,000 annually – at the end of the 2018 fiscal year, up from 275 compared with end-year 2017. Pivotal added that this increase was deliberately conservative as it was focusing on renewals rather than net additions but expected more of an increase in the coming 12 months.

Despite this, Pivotal has posted increasing losses – $282.7m for fiscal year 2018, compared with $232.9m and $163.5m respectively. Dell Technologies, the entity comprising Dell and EMC following the largest tech deal in history, will retain a controlling stake in Pivotal.

Pivotal has raised approximately $1.7 billion in funding across three rounds. The series A and B, both announced in April 2013, saw a $946m investment led by EMC and VMware – the former acquiring Pivotal Labs in 2012 – and a $105m raise led by General Electric (GE). 2016 saw a $653m series C round with five investors, most notably Ford.

Rumour and conjecture persisted at the start of this year around Dell’s wider plans. The latest theory is around a ‘reverse merger’ with VMware. Dell’s approximately 82% ownership of the virtualisation and end user computing giant forced the company to issue a filing at the beginning of February confirming it was ‘evaluating potential business opportunities’, while VMware for its part put out a statement saying it was ‘not in a position to speculate on the outcome of Dell’s evaluation of potential business opportunities.’

The scope of Pivotal’s filing however should not affect any wider speculation on Dell, according to Dale Peters, research director at TechMarketView. “Pivotal may have a big role to play in helping Dell move into the cloud, but this move is unlikely to be the major component of its wider strategic plans,” wrote Peters. “Rumours of a Pivotal IPO have been circulating for far longer than recent discussions concerning Dell’s future options. We will have to wait a little longer to see what its big move is going to be.”

Organisations still believe their information is safer on-premise rather than in the cloud – and it’s a mindset that IT security firm Barracuda Networks wants to change.

According to the company, who polled more than 600 respondents around their experiences with cloud security, more than four in five (83%) said they were concerned about deploying firewalls in the cloud, while more than half (57%) of EMEA-based respondents said their on-premises security was superior to cloud.

When it came to the struggle around firewalls and cloud, two in five (39%) said pricing and licensing was ‘not appropriate’ for a cloud model, while a third (34%) argued ‘lack of integration prevents cloud automation’. Almost all (93%) respondents who had adopted DevOps-based practices said they faced challenges with security integration.

Evidently there are still challenges which need to be overcome – but what about the positives? Those who have taken the plunge on cloud-specific firewalls say the primary benefits are integration with cloud management, monitoring and automation capabilities, as well as being easy to deploy and configure by cloud developers.

What’s more – if this particular set of respondents are anything to go by – the shared responsibility cloud security message is getting out there. 71% of EMEA respondents said cloud security was a responsibility shared with cloud vendors, with only 19% believing it is the vendor’s responsibility alone.

These figures certainly make for better reading when compared to a Barracuda report from July last year, which expressed concern over organisations’ misinformation. Yet Chris Hill, Barracuda director of public cloud business development, argues education is still needed in other areas.

“There still seems to be a lack of understanding in cloud security, and a misplaced belief that on-premises security is a lot stronger,” wrote Hill in a blog post. “One thing is for sure: as the move to cloud only increases in pace, for organisations that are used to operating under traditional data centre architecture, moving to the cloud will require a new way of thinking when they approach security.”

You can read the full survey results here (email required).

Those who attended Cloud Expo Europe earlier this week took their opportunity to assess the next level of cloud services, ranging from blockchain, to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

The cloud underpins these technologies and enables them to flourish, while as this publication has previously reported, the M&A cycle has been lit up by it. But what are some of the practical applications for cloud-enabled AI?

Lifesize, a cloud-based conferencing hardware and software provider, is exploring how AI can improve the meeting room – as well as outside of it. A recent video the company put out showed the concepts and potential available. The key is around machine vision; using analytics to assess each participant on a call, whether it is a workplace meeting, virtual classroom or anywhere else, to calculate engagement. But how much data is too much?

Andy Nolan, Lifesize VP of UK, Ireland and Northern Europe, argues it’s a value proposition more than anything else. “The practical side is to make sure that everyone’s getting value,” he tells CloudTech. “It’s not too different to when we do meetings. If you’re sitting in a meeting and someone’s sitting there typing away or writing, they’re either not participating or contributing enough to the meeting, or they’re not getting enough out of it.

“That’s where I’d like the technology to go. It’s about getting valuable time out of those meetings and classroom sessions,” he adds. “Commonly, we spend far too long giving a meeting because of all the unproductive time.”

Nolan says that, in the virtual classroom example, it would simply be ‘another pair of eyes and ears’ for the teacher, rather than anything too egregious. The issue of ethics in artificial intelligence is a vital and well-trodden path – and Nolan admits he has his concerns – but the innovation truly excites.

It’s not just inside the meeting room but after the meeting where productivity gains can be found. Many of the major cloud providers, from Amazon to Microsoft, have announced cloud-based transcription and translation services, all getting continually better through machine learning.

Nolan has tried out the latest real-time tools – with Northern Europe as part of his remit, a language barrier does exist – and was suitably impressed. “All I do is spend my time apologising to people who can speak more languages,” he says. “From a practical sense, the mock up we’ve done is me talking and it transcribing in real time.

“It’s not perfect yet, but the good thing is the learning,” Nolan adds. “If you’re using a set vocabulary and dictionary, it’s just there. What happens with this stuff that’s made it so useable is it learns. It gets better and better. You’re not going to get an exact match all the time… [but I] was really impressed by how accurate it was.”

Ultimately, it is another example of how the consumer world is influencing enterprise technology and making the workplace a more palatable experience for all. Take voice recognition technology as an example. Users on Lifesize can say ‘call X’, or join a meeting, and it will do it – but Nolan notes Alexa as a key example of how the shift takes place.

“If you think about the technology in that, it’s a hands-free way of driving what could be quite a complicated interface,” he says. “The reason it’s probably going to be make it more from the gimmick stage into some actual practical use is just because of the usability side.”

The coming few years will see whether AI-based tech will go the same way – but the prognosis looks pretty good for now.

Google Cloud has unveiled major security revamps to its portfolio, across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), G Suite, Chrome Enterprise, and more.

The company has made 20 announcements in total in conjunction with the CEO Security Forum in New York. GCP had no fewer than eight notes, with alpha services around security perimeters and cloud asset management the highlights.

VPC Service Controls aims to stop identity mismanagement, misconfigured policies and compromised virtual machines by creating a security perimeter around data stored in API-based Google Cloud Platform services, such as Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery.

This is a serious update as many data breaches happen accidentally based around seemingly negligible setup errors. “By expanding perimeter security from on-premise networks to data stored in GCP services, enterprises can feel confident about storing their data in the cloud and accessing it from an on-prem environment or cloud-based VMs,” Jennifer Lin, director of product management at GCP Security and Privacy wrote in a blog post.

Cloud Security Command Center, by contrast, lets users go through a variety of security options through a single centralised dashboard, from monitoring their cloud inventory, scanning storage systems for sensitive data, and reviewing access rights across critical resources.

Other GCP updates include Cloud Armor, a DDoS and application defence service, as well as partnerships with Dome9, RedLock, and Rackspace. The latter is offering managed security and compliance assistance services for Google Cloud; the company said it was ‘well positioned to deliver solutions for customers’ infrastructure and security needs’ as more organisations move to GCP to run critical workloads.

G Suite, Google’s productivity and collaboration toolkit, is seeing updates including stronger mobile management, built-in protections for Team Drives, and greater anti-phishing support. The latter includes provisions that can be set by default, including automatically flagging emails from untrusted senders and warnings against opening emails from similar domains or that appear to spoof employee names. Google claims its protections lead to 99.9% of what it calls BEC scenarios – business email compromise – being either flagged up or spammed out.

For Chrome Enterprise, the key announcement was around expanding partnerships with enterprise mobility management (EMM) providers, helping IT admins manage and implement security policies across every device in an organisation. The new partners, joining VMware AirWatch from last year, are Cisco Meraki, Citrix XenMobile, IBM MaaS360, and ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus.

Google all but said earlier this week that it was going to push out a variety of security updates, with Urs Holzle, senior vice president for technical infrastructure, writing in a blog that ‘more than ever, it’s important for companies to make security an utmost priority and take responsibility for protecting their users.’

This was backed up by a further missive yesterday from Gerhard Eschelbeck, VP of security and privacy. “It’s been our belief from the beginning that if you put security first, everything else will follow,” Eschelbeck wrote. “We continue to develop new ways to give our customers the capabilities they need to keep up with today’s ever-evolving security challenges.”

Earlier this month Google announced its App Engine and Cloud Machine Learning Engine were HIPAA-compliant – or the nearest thing to it, a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement. Around the same time, it was revealed that Spotify and Apple were both Google Cloud customers. The former’s disclosure was noted in its initial SEC filing; however it has been since updated to note that the music streaming service provider is paying €365 million (£317.6m) to Google over three years.

Earlier this week, analyst firm Cloud Spectator published its latest report on combining price and performance in the cloud. In the main, its results mirrored previous studies; that the Amazons, Microsofts and Googles of this world may not be the best option for some organisations compared with the high performance, cheaper price specialists.

So what of the behemoths, and how are their strategies changing? An illuminating session at Cloud Expo Europe today, featuring IBM, OVH – who bucked the trend by ranking second in the Cloud Spectator report – and Rackspace answered these questions and more.

For Rene Bostic, technical vice president of innovation and new technologies at IBM Cloud, the transformation in organisational awareness during the past two years was marked. IBM started with helping clients and customers understand the landscape; now there is a greater sense of nuance. Take integration with Watson as an example; the AI is used among IBM's customer service clients to help identify the tone of a customer, irate or otherwise, and tailor the response as a result.

"Our customers understand what cloud is, they understand the use cases," Bostic told the audience. "The focus now is on business innovation. How can you monetise the cloud environments that you have – how can you make sure your startup companies and other companies won't take your market share away fast?"

The realisation around open source was shared among all panellists. Rackspace is a given – the company co-invented OpenStack after all – while Russell Reeder, president and CEO of OVH US, advocated his viewpoint. The key, Reeder argued, is avoiding vendor lock-in at all costs. Customers have been there before, and don't ever want to go through it again. "As a customer, people should be really afraid of the cloud," he explained, "and choosing the wrong cloud provider and being locked in."

Reeder insisted that despite the maturation, we were still only at the beginning of what cloud can do. "We're at the most mature we've ever been," Reeder explained. Alex Hilton, CEO of the Cloud Industry Forum and moderator of the session, jokingly offered that the cloud was 'adolescent'. With maturation comes customer success – and innovative stories to go with it.

Bostic offered the example of an insurance provider integrating with IBM's cloud to help reduce the cost of claims. The solution was to integrate with The Weather Company – a firm IBM bought at the start of 2016, with certainly the raising of one eyebrow by this reporter at the time – and plug in to its API. Based on real-time conditions, the system sends a notification to affected users. 'A hailstorm is coming. You may want to move your car inside.' The upshot is at least one fewer claim – but on the backend, users are none the wiser about which cloud environment they are using.

It's certainly a multi-cloud landscape out there; plenty of research confirms it, and it's all part of the growing up process. Rackspace's recent strategy, of providing managed services for the most popular public cloud providersm certainly fits into this and should be well-known – although the fact the company secured the plumb position for advertising space outside the show's entrance may suggest it's not quite well known enough yet.

"For us, it's not about saying 'how do you justify the support on top of AWS?' – we expect all of you to be in a multi-cloud world, so how do we broker that for you? How do we optimise that for you?" said Lee James, Rackspace chief technology officer.

The company's much-vaunted fanatical support goes to the extent that if a customer changes provider, Rackspace will swap them over at no charge. James offered a couple of examples of innovative customer success; firstly a furniture supplier, whose usage can be both scaled up and scaled back, as well as a food manufacturer who runs completely on AWS with Rackspace keeping them cost optimised.

Ultimately, however, it is not all rosy in the garden. The dreaded skills gap, a common scourge according to a lot of market research, refuses to go away. How do the big cloud providers feel about it? OVH is building tools where customers can undergo the migration process themselves if they are able, while Rackspace has opened up a 'university' to train employees and IBM is focusing more on cloud-native apps.

Salesforce has announced the acquisition of application network platform provider MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, making it the largest acquisition in the company's history.

MuleSoft – which went public last year – offers a platform which connects SaaS and enterprise applications whether on-premise or in the cloud.

The company's role within Salesforce will be to 'power the new Salesforce Integration Cloud, which will enable all enterprises to surface any data – regardless of where it resides – to drive deep and intelligent customer experiences throughout a personalised 1:1 journey', in the words of the company.

MuleSoft's more than 1,200 customers include Coca-Cola, Barclays and Unilever. Naturally, these companies cited in the press materials are also key Salesforce clients. Unilever announced in July that it was combining with Salesforce and Accenture, as well as being a long-term customer of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, while Coca-Cola has used Salesforce for building custom apps on the Salesforce1 platform and Barclays utilises Salesforce Communities.

"Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will enable customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise across all public and private clouds and data sources – radically enhancing innovation," said Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO. "I am thrilled to welcome MuleSoft to the Salesforce Ohana." Greg Schott, MuleSoft CEO, added: "Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will accelerate our customers' digital transformations enabling them to unlock their data across any application or endpoint."

The largest acquisition from Salesforce previously, where monetary details were disclosed, was ExactTarget in 2013 for $2.5bn. Shares in MuleSoft rose significantly by 27.2% at close.