NetApp has disclosed its most recent financial figures – revenues of $1.42 billion (£1.07bn) for Q218, up 6% year over year with CEO and president George Kurian telling analysts the company ‘continues to substantially outpace the growth of the all-flash array market and competitors’.

Alongside the total quarterly revenues, NetApp posted a GAAP net income of $175 million, up from $109m this time last year, with predicted net revenues to be in the range of $1.425bn and $1.575bn in the third quarter of fiscal 2018.

Wall Street appeared more than pleased with the results, with NetApp’s stock rising to its highest in almost six years following the announcement. Writing for The Motley Foo, Anders Bylund said NetApp’s stock jump was a ‘surprise’, adding that strong sales of flash-based storage arrays and cloud-based data analytics tools were key to its success.

“Unlike competitors’ approaches, which are siloed and do not embrace the cloud, we help organisations unify their data across the widest range of cloud and on-premises environments to realise its full value for competitive advantage,” Kurian told analysts. “Data is at the heart of companies’ digital transformation, and we are winning because we are enabling customers’ success through data.

“No one matches our expertise in data management, our leadership in growing market segments and our open ecosystem approach,” added Kurian. “Our advantage is the result of decades of software-based innovation, strategic focus and the ability to partner effectively.”

Among the company’s highlights in the most recent quarter included a partnership with Microsoft, powering Microsoft Azure’s enterprise network file system (NFS) service, updating Data Fabric, its solution to move and integrate data management across cloud and on-premises, and a customer win in the form of US public health information exchange Healthix.

You can read the full results here.

Say hello to the Cloud Analytics Academy. The program, launched today by Snowflake Computing alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Looker, Talend and WhereScape, aims to help executives lead their organisations in data warehousing, BI, and more.

The curriculum is designed by Kent Graziano, Snowflake chief technical evangelist, with the partnering companies chipping in with their expertise.

There are three courses; the ‘executive fast track’ is the one-size-fits-all course with five sessions on key technologies and key techniques; the ‘cloud foundation track’, being aimed more as a beginner’s course, and the ‘modern data analytics track’, which is focused more at advanced users and strays into topics such as agile data warehousing and Python.

Prospective students are encouraged to take all three courses; completing one track earns a Cloud Analytics Academy certification, while completing all three means they achieve Academy Master certification.

“Organisations of all sizes now face enormous pressure to deliver analytics faster and at a lower cost than ever before, and many are looking to the cloud to address these challenges,” said Mark Budzinski, CEO of WhereScape. “We’re excited to partner with Snowflake to help data professionals gain the knowledge needed to maximise the benefits cloud data warehousing offers.

“We also want to help data professionals understand how automation can help IT be more agile in their development and operational efforts to deliver value to the business faster,” added Budzinski.

The press materials cite a Gartner report which puts growth of the worldwide software as a service (SaaS) market at more than 63% by 2020. According to a study from BARC Research and Eckerson Group, four in five firms said they were planning to increase the use of cloud for BI and data management in the coming year.

You can find out more about the Cloud Analytics Academy here.

Facebook’s newest data centre in Nebraska will be entirely wind-powered, as work on a $430 million wind farm in the region begins.

The Rattlesnake Creek wind farm, built by Enel Green Power North America, the renewable energy arm of the Enel Group, will have a total installed capacity of 320 MW, 62.5% of which will be sold to Facebook to power its data centre in Papillon, approximately 120 miles from the installation.

The Nebraska data centre constitutes Facebook’s sixth data centre in the US, and ninth globally. Facilities already exist in Oregon, Iowa, and North Carolina, with plans underway in Texas and New Mexico, while its portfolio outside of the US consists of sites in Lulea, Sweden, Clonee, in Ireland, and Odense, in Denmark. According to a report from the Omaha World-Herald in June, when Facebook awarded contracts to subcontractors from neighbouring states, the site was expected to ‘take shape’ by Thanksgiving.

“This project consolidates our growing presence in the US as our company enters into a new state and expands our business with new partners,” said Antonio Cammisecra, head of Enel Green Power in a statement. “We are thrilled to be able to support Facebook’s growing renewable energy needs in Nebraska and be part of driving economic development in the region.”

On the other side of the coin, Digital Realty has announced the launch of a second data centre in Frankfurt. The company, with more than 130 data centres across the globe, says it aims to capitalise on what it describes as the second largest market in Europe behind London. Companies with operations in Frankfurt include Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Alibaba to name a few.

“Given its central location, excellent infrastructure, and concentration of leading international businesses, Frankfurt is widely regarded as the connectivity, commercial and financial capital of Germany,” said William Stein, Digital Realty CEO in a statement. “We are pleased to be able to support our customers’ global growth requirements on our state of the art Sossenheim campus.”

According to recent industry figures, Digital Reality continues to compete alongside Equinix for supremacy in the colocation market. The former confirmed its merger with Dupont Fabros Technology in September – with a total enterprise value of more than $35 billion as a result – while the latter completed the acquisition of 29 data centres from Verizon, beefing up their respective stakes.

Equinix’s most recent customer win came in the form of Singapore-based DBS Bank, who announced earlier this week that it would become the first bank in the country to launch a new cloud-based data centre. The move is alongside more general cloudy ambitions for the bank, with partnerships already in place with AWS and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Machine learning-optimised stacks, container-first architectures and DevOps for both software and hardware are among the key trends redefining enterprise IT infrastructure, according to a new report from McKinsey.

The piece, authored by Arul Elumalai, Kara Sprague, Sid Tandon, and Lareina Yee, looks at what is changing and how companies need to fight back.  

Many of these have frequently been covered by this publication; some, like the public cloud going mainstream, are long overdue. Yet there is an interesting titbit here. Given the long-established leadership of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google in public cloud, McKinsey argues that their entrenched dominance will mean only organisations with ‘significant capital investment capabilities’ will be able to compete in future. The article offers Alibaba as a potential suitor; the Chinese firm said last month its cloud business “continued to defy gravity”, while in September Gartner placed the company in third place for public cloud IaaS.

Other predictions which readers will have heard before – but are still invaluable – revolve around cybersecurity and increased usage of open source offerings. Examples of how the latter is gaining traction in the enterprise involves TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning system first launched in 2015. The customer list today is impressive, McKinsey notes, from Airbnb, to eBay, and Qualcomm.

It is the emerging technologies, however, which take the honours. According to McKinsey, B2B applications will account for almost 70% of the value coming from the Internet of Things (IoT) in 10 years’ time; and IoT business applications are now ready for adoption. Elsewhere, the article notes how the new DevOps business model is moving beyond app development to integrate operations and IT infrastructure, while artificial intelligence is ‘delivering benefits to companies across industries.’

“The scale of disruption in the technology infrastructure landscape is unprecedented, creating huge opportunities and risks for industry players and their customers,” the report concludes. “Executives at technology infrastructure companies must drive growth by transforming their portfolios and rethinking their go-to-market strategies.

“They should also build the fundamental capabilities needed for long-term success, including those related to digitisation, analytics, and agile development.”

You can read the full piece here.

It was a statement inferred during NVIDIA’s most recent earnings call – and now it has been confirmed.

The company’s Tesla V100 GPU has been chosen by every major cloud provider, with the likes of Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle and Tencent all announcing Volta-based cloud services.

Alongside this, the company’s financial results revealed record revenues of $2.64 billion, up 32% from this time last year, with data centre revenue of $501m, more than doubled from a year ago, and growth across all platforms. For the first three quarters of 2018, NVIDIA returned to shareholders $909 million in share repurchases and $250m in cash dividends.

Speaking to analysts following the financial results announcement, Colette Kress, executive vice president and CFO, said NVIDIA’s data centre business had an ‘outstanding’ quarter.

“As we have noted before, Volta delivers 10x the deep learning performance of our Pascal architecture, which has been introduced just a year earlier, far outpacing Moore’s Law,” Kress said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “The V100 is being broadly adopted with every major server OEM and cloud provider. We expect support from V100 from other major cloud providers as well.”

Replying to an analyst question for the next couple of quarters on the data centre side, CEO Jenson Huang said: “This ramp is just the first part of supporting the build out of GPU-accelerated service from our company for data centres all over the world as well as cloud service providers all over the world. The applications for these GPU servers has now grown to many markets.”

Huang added that there were five primary segments for its Tesla GPUs, including high performance computing, deep learning training, inference, and putting it all together in the public cloud.

You can take a look at NVIDIA’s financial results here.

When your correspondent wrote last week, to open the news that Google was becoming Salesforce’s preferred cloud provider, ‘meet the cloud’s newest strategic partners’, it was always going to be a short-lived title.

And so it has proved: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Rackspace have announced a partnership to offer what is claimed as the industry’s first pay as you go OpenStack private cloud.

The pay as you go pricing model will leverage HPE’s Flexible Capacity infrastructure service, with savings of 40% or more compared to leading public cloud vendors according to Rackspace internal pricing analysis. Aside from the pricing, other key features of the combined offering include instant scalability, enterprise-grade security, and managed services expertise.

Rackspace has been focusing many of its efforts on bolstering this expertise of late. The company acquired managed service provider Datapipe in September in what it called the ‘biggest acquisition by far’ in its history.

“With this innovative delivery model, Rackspace and HPE are removing the barriers to private cloud adoption, giving customers even more choice of technology platforms that best fit their application needs,” said Scott Crenshaw, Rackspace executive vice president of private cloud in a statement. “We are proud to partner with HPE to continue enabling customer success with private clouds.”

Michelle Bailey, group vice president at IDC Research, added: “The OpenStack Private Cloud offering from Rackspace and HPE specifically addresses organisations’ needs to provide security and performance benefits, the cornerstone of a private cloud environment.

“With Rackspace’s private cloud expertise and service-first culture, they are well positioned to address the needs of HPE’s large installed base of infrastructure customers and help reduce any cloud migration risk. This pay-per-use infrastructure is a new step forward in helping enterprises deploy private clouds with improved flexibility and cost transparency.”

The service will become generally available in all regions on November 28, with the two companies adding they plan to extend this model to Rackspace’s entire managed private cloud portfolio, including VMware and Microsoft Azure.

IBM has been solidly building its efforts in quantum computing over the past couple of years – and a new milestone has been reached with the launch of upgraded systems featuring 20 qubit processors, with 50 qubits on the way.

The company describes the latest news as “rapid advances in quantum hardware… as IBM continues to drive progress across the entire quantum computing technology stack, with focus on systems, software, applications and enablement.”

Quantum computing is gaining prominence as a significantly more powerful alternative to classical computing. The latter is based around bits which can only exist in 1 and 0 states, while the former, built on the principles of quantum mechanics, aims to take advantage of subatomic particles existing in more than one state at any time. A qubit is the quantum equivalent of the classical bit.

The idea therefore is that in this state, algorithms can be run and conclusions drawn which current computing methods simply cannot comprehend; ‘we expect them to open doors that we once thought would remain locked indefinitely’, as IBM itself puts it.

One issue in this is the concept of coherence, the amount of time machines can exist in this quantum state before reverting to their classical equivalents. Today, the maximum time available to researchers is 90 microseconds; not a huge amount one would normally think, but this does represent serious progress from even the past couple of years.

As this publication noted 18 months ago when IBM launched its five qubit quantum processor, the company stated that medium-sized quantum processors of 50-100 qubits will be possible ‘in the next decade.’

IBM added that the 50 qubit processor had been built and measured, adding that it will be made available in the next generation IBM Q systems, though not specifying a date.

“The ability to reliably operate several working quantum systems and putting them online was not possible just a few years ago. Now, we can scale IBM processors up to 50 qubits due to tremendous feats of science and engineering,” said Dario Gil, vice president of AI and IBM Q at IBM Research.

“These latest advances show that we are quickly making quantum systems and tools available that could offer an advantage for tackling problems outside the realm of classical machines,” Gil added.

You can find out more about the announcement here.

Read more: Why IBM believes quantum computing is the next big cloud hit after AI and blockchain

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of C5 instances, aimed at more compute-intensive workloads for the EC2 cloud.

The C5 instances – three from the sharp end in Amazon’s compute class, behind G2, P2 and F1 – were introduced as the newest iteration back in November last year at the company’s Re:Invent show. The C5 promises 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors and double the vCPU and memory capacity – up to 72 vCPUs and 144 gibibytes of memory – when compared with previous C4 instances.

Applications the C5 instances are better equipped to handle include batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, video encoding, and multiplayer gaming. The instances will be available in three regions; US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), with support for additional regions in the pipeline.

Alongside this, AWS dropped a few customer names into the mix. One customer is particularly well-known – having been analysed by this publication on several occasions – and is arguably the poster child for AWS itself. Netflix said it saw up to a 140% performance improvement in industry standard CPU benchmarks compared with C4.

For the high performance computing side, Alces Flight offers researchers on demand HPC clusters, or ‘self-service supercomputers’ in minutes. The company, a member of the AWS Marketplace, said C5 had a ‘direct benefit’ for its user base ‘on both price and performance dimensions.’

The press materials also made mention of a new hypervisor which AWS is rolling out for C5 instances to ‘allow applications to use practically all of the compute and memory resources of a server, delivering reduced cost and even better performance.’

According to this page, accessed by CloudTech earlier today (screenshot), and first spotted by The Register, the new hypervisor for Amazon EC2 “is built on core Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology, but does not include general purpose operating system components.”

KVM’s best known user in this sphere is Google. In January this year, the search giant issued a blog post advocating seven methods they use to security harden the KVM hypervisor. As Ariel Maislos, CEO of Stratoscale, pointed out in this publication last year, AWS has long been partnered with Xen for its hypervisor needs.

The FAQ page added that all new instance types will ‘eventually’ use the new EC2 hypervisor, but for now some new instance types will use Xen ‘depending on the requirements of the platform.’ Yet, as The Register reports, references to KVM have been disappearing from the company’s pages.

The cloud-first enterprise is gaining in prominence, through multi-cloud strategies, losing data centres, and adopting cloud-native infrastructures.

That is the key finding from a new report released by hybrid cloud IT operations management provider OpsRamp. The study, which polled IT leaders in companies with 500 or more employees, also found that public cloud services are grabbing a bigger share of IT budgets, and that security – again – is the primary reason for reticent companies sitting it out.

While the areas the paper covers have been commonly reported in this publication, it is interesting to see the trends all in one place. More than half of respondents say they have been using public cloud for more than three years, with 7% saying they have done for more than seven. Despite this, only 29% of those polled said their level of cloud adoption was ‘mature’, compared with 50% for ‘developing’ and 21% for ‘emerging’.

When it came to benefits of cloud-native infrastructure, scalability and flexibility, cited by 62% of those polled, came out on top, ahead of reduced capital investments (47%) and consumption-based pricing models (47%). More than half (53%) added that 30% to 50% of IT budgets would be cloud-based in the near future, while an additional 27% said more than half their IT budget would be.

“The survey results are consistent with what we’re hearing from customers and partners,” said Varma Kunaparaju, OpsRamp co-founder and CEO. “Cloud is becoming a bigger part of their IT portfolio, they’re likely to use more than one cloud platform, and oversight and management of cloud services is paramount.

“We expect these trends to accelerate over time, as the cost, scalability and flexibility advantages of cloud services become even more obvious.”

As far back as 2015, this publication wrote that ‘multi-cloud was the new holy grail of cloud computing’. The survey results showed that this was essentially a reality today; three quarters of respondents said they expect to work with different cloud providers for their business needs, with Microsoft Azure – not for the first time – the most popular, ahead of Amazon Web Services and Google.

You can read the full report here.

Revenues from the global public cloud services market stand at $63.2 billion (£48.2bn) with the market growing 28.6% year over year in the first half of 2017, according to IDC.

The largest segment, by some distance, remains software as a service (SaaS), totalling $43.4bn comprising 68.7% of the market share. This is down from the first half of 2016, where SaaS saw 71.8% market share, yet the segment still grew 22.9% year over year.

The fastest growing segment, whilst remaining the smallest, was platform as a service (PaaS), growing 50.2% year over year and hitting $8.6bn, at 13.6% of overall market share. IDC attributes the continued rise down to the ‘rapid’ adoption of container technology, giving developers additional tools to accelerate application development and deployment.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) comprised 17.8% of market share in 1H17 totalling $11.2bn in revenues and at a yearly growth of 38.1%.

In terms of regional growth areas, Asia Pacific saw the highest regional growth in the most recent figures at 38.9%, according to IDC, with a major contributing factor being strong public cloud spending in China, which was at 55.6% year over year growth.

“Businesses now think ‘cloud first’ when it comes to their IT strategy and software footprint, since the benefits of cloud are clear and have been broadly demonstrated in most industries,” said Eric Newmark, program vice president for IDC’s SaaS, enterprise applications and industry cloud research practices. “Many companies have picked the low-hanging fruit, in terms of apps that could be easily moved to the cloud, and are now evaluating the migration of their next set of larger strategic systems to a SaaS model.

“These projects, coupled with companies’ efforts to embrace digital transformation, will continue to fuel strong SaaS growth.”

As this publication reported earlier this week, IDC recently published its Worldwide CIO Agenda 2018 predictions, which offer the 10 most important shifts taking place in IT organisations over the next three years. Among the more interesting predictions include the forecast that the majority of CIOs who ‘cross the digital divide’ by 2020 will reap the rewards of their efforts to become digital business leaders for their enterprises.