Meet the cloud’s newest strategic partners: Salesforce and Google. The two companies announced a deal at Dreamforce late yesterday, with Google Cloud becoming Salesforce’s preferred public cloud provider alongside new product integrations.

There were four primary integrations announced. Salesforce Lightning for Gmail enables users to surface Salesforce CRM data in Gmail, as well as customer interactions from Gmail directly within Salesforce. Lightning for Sheets allows the Google spreadsheet tool to be embedded anywhere in Salesforce, while Quip – the word processing and productivity app bought by Salesforce last year – will be able to integrated with Google Drive and Calendar. Salesforce will also integrate with Hangouts.

“Our partnership with Google represents the best of both worlds for our customers,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a statement, “There has never been an easier way for companies to run their entire business in the cloud – from productivity apps, email and analytics, to sales, service and marketing apps, this partnership will help make our customers smarter and more productive.”

“Our teams are working very closely to develop new integrations that will connect Salesforce CRM with G Suite to offer the only cloud-native collaboration platform of its kind,” wrote Nan Boden, Google Cloud head of global technology partners in a blog post.

“We hope this partnership enables more companies to take advantage of the cloud and that the combined solutions will provide an unmatched experience for customers,” added Boden.  

Salesforce naturally has plenty of other strategic partners in place. In March, the company signed up with IBM in what was described as a ‘landmark global strategic partnership’ focusing around artificial intelligence (AI), an area which Benioff is certainly tuned into. At IBM’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas that month, Benioff joined IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on stage to discuss their shared initiatives.

The company signed a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) last year stating the Seattle giant as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. According to Business Insider, Salesforce will still work with AWS in some capacity but Google has ‘taken some of its territory.’

For Google’s part, this represents another win in a year laden with them. According to financial results back in July, the company tripled the number of its big cloud deals – ranked as $0.5 million or above – year over year. Among its more recent customers, as announced at Google’s Next conference in San Francisco in March, include Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive, and eBay – three companies listed in the most recent Fortune 500.

OpenStack revenue will break the $6 billion barrier by 2021, with major advances in China and Asia Pacific being a contributory factor, according to the latest note from 451 Research.

Predictions concerning the overall market size have dipped slightly from the research firm’s previous analysis this time last year – the forecast for 2020 is now at $5.63bn, down from $5.75bn – yet 451 argues growth will remain strong (below) with a CAGR of 30% and an overall size of $6.73bn by 2021.

Service providers with OpenStack private cloud revenue will exceed revenue from those with OpenStack-based public cloud implementations as soon as 2018, according to the research. Deployments in China and Asia Pacific are now growing faster than in the rest of the world, with the research firm adding that part of this increase is down to the Chinese government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology advocating for OpenStack.

The research also assesses the growing prominence of containers and microservices technologies. According to Al Sadowski, 451 research vice president, OpenStack is no longer the ‘shiny new toy’ in the industry. Yet the most innovative and progressive OpenStack deployments feature the use of Docker and Kubernetes.

“While there is no clear answer yet about OpenStack coexistence with containers, it is worth noting that containers and container management are nascent markets in terms of production use cases,” added Sadowski.

The proclamation has been made to coincide with the latest OpenStack Summit, to be held in Sydney over the coming days. Before the festivities, the OpenStack Foundation announced it will use the event to help address how open source technologies can be integrated to solve real-world problems. This will be done in four parts; documenting cross-project use cases, collaborating across communities, fostering new projects at the OpenStack Foundation, and coordinating end to end testing across projects.

Of particular note is the recently announced Public Cloud Passport program. A global gaggle of public cloud providers, including OVH, Telefonica and UKCloud, are offering trials for users to ‘experience the freedom, performance and interoperability of open source infrastructure’, as OpenStack puts it.

Alibaba Group has recorded cloud revenues of RMB 2,975 million ($342.1m) for its most recent quarter, up 99% year on year, with CEO Daniel Zhang telling analysts its cloud business “continues to defy gravity.”

The company said it was seeing ‘significant traction and diversification of customers and revenue’ in its cloud service, and will ‘continue to invest to further expand the market through valuable services for our cloud customers.’

Total revenues for the quarter hit RMB 55,122m (£6.bn), with the vast majority of that through its ‘core commerce’ business at RMB 46,462m (£5.3bn). Other buckets include digital media and entertainment (£551m) and the vaguely worded ‘innovation initiatives and others’ (£102.5m).

Among the quarter’s highlights for Alibaba were 245 new products and features, alongside a variety of initiatives and customers. The majority of these were revealed at the company’s Computing Conference in Hangzhou. Customers include the Bank of Nanjing, Air Asia, State Administration Taxation and the IOC (International Olympic Committee), while products include the X-Dragon Cloud server, combining bare metal servers with VMs, and newly released relational database POLARDB.

The previous quarter saw revenues from cloud computing total RMB 2,431 million (£287m), and Zhang was in bullish mood in the earnings call. “Our cloud computing business continues to defy gravity,” said Zhang, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Revenue increased by 99% year over year. We continue to multiply our product portfolio, including the introduction of a new relational database and a state of the art server developed in-house that serve the needs of large enterprise customers.”

Alibaba’s cloud push appears to be paying off with the analysts. According to Gartner back in September, Alibaba has moved ahead of Google to take third place in the public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.

“Once again, we have delivered an outstanding quarter,” added Zhang. “The robust growth of our business speaks to the unique value proposition that we offer to customers through our strong execution and commitment to innovation.”

You can view the full financial statement here.

IBM has rebranded its cloud, subsuming the Bluemix brand into an overall IBM Cloud offering.

Writing in a blog post announcing the move, Michael Mendenhall, chief marketing officer for IBM’s Watson and cloud arms, said the move was logical as the two brands had grown to be synonymous. There will be no changes to products offerings as a result of the move, while communications will start referring only to IBM Cloud and product names will change.

“Our goal is to provide a cloud that is easy to use, unified across multiple deployments and the world leader in supporting mission critical workloads,” Mendenhall wrote. “As part of our ongoing work to build the cloud designed for you, we are unifying the public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud under one brand. We are the IBM Cloud…the cloud for your business.”

When the platform as a service (PaaS) Bluemix was first launched, in 2014, pundits argued the PaaS opportunity was an interesting one for IBM to explore. “The Bluemix platform is the closest we’ve seen to something that can match Microsoft’s Azure when it comes to the developer experience,” wrote Gary Barnett for Ovum at the time. “If IBM continues to enhance the platform and can bring on enough partners, Bluemix could transform the PaaS market.”

Earlier this week, IBM announced the launch of IBM Cloud Private, which aimed to help give public cloud agility to private cloud or on-premises environments. As this publication has frequently explored, not everything can sit comfortably atop the public cloud. An example IBM gave of this was in the financial space, where security and regulatory concerns with customer data are key. The knotty stuff could remain in the private cloud, while, using IBM’s new product, the financial company could leverage analytics and machine learning in the public cloud.

Read more: IBM’s latest launch aims to take cloud-native benefits to private clouds

United Technologies (UTC), a conglomerate which builds and services products including aerospace engines and elevators, is going to leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure in a strategic partnership.

The company says one of its core tenets is ‘giving employees the digital tools and capabilities to work in new and different ways at market speed.’ As a result, Microsoft technologies are set to be used in a variety of UTC businesses.

Pratt & Whitney, an aerospace manufacturer under the UTC umbrella, will be using Azure and Dynamics for cloud-based field service, sales and marketing to improve the customer experience, while Otis, a manufacturer of ‘people-moving products’, as the company puts it – elevators, escalators and walkways – will use Dynamics 365 CRM for its service technicians and sales teams.

“At UTC, we build products and services that are vital to business and impact lives everywhere. Through digital transformation, we are raising the bar on our capabilities to predict, prevent and respond to our customers’ needs,” said Vince Campisi, UTC chief digital officer and CIO. “Collaborating with Microsoft, and leveraging its intelligent cloud, we are changing how we define the customer experience.”

“United Technologies is a global leader in the aerospace and building industries and has a deep commitment to innovation,” said Judson Althoff, Microsoft EVP worldwide commercial business. “The combination of UTC’s customer service expertise together with Microsoft’s intelligent cloud will provide a digital business model for UTC businesses across multiple industries.”

This is not the only major customer deal Microsoft has inked in recent times. Earlier this week, energy giant Chevron signed a seven year partnership with the Redmond company, making Azure its primary cloud provider. The company added the move will accelerate the application of technologies such as analytics and the Internet of Things to drive performance and improve efficiencies.

Google Cloud Platform has announced the opening of its newest data centre region in Mumbai, India, promising to significantly improve latency for customers and end users in the area.

The region, known as asia-south1, has three zones and becomes the fifth in Asia Pacific, alongside Tokyo, Taiwan, Singapore, and Sydney. Previously, the closest region was Singapore, with Google saying hosting applications in the new region will improve latency by up to 90% for end users in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Customers in India will also be able to buy services in Indian rupees, from compute (App Engine, Compute Engine and Container Engine), big data (Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc and Cloud Datalab), storage (Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Persistent Disk) and networking.

Google rolled out four customers in the announcement, including Hungama, a Spotify-esque platform dedicated to Hindi and Bollywood songs. “GCP gave us a low latency network, better than expected SSL performance, and the ability to optimise costs further with custom machine types,” said Manish Verma, Hungama chief technology officer. “The new India region will help us bring our service even closer to Indian consumers.”

Among the updates Google has recently made in terms of its cloud operations include partnerships, product iterations, and acquisitions. In the former category is a hybrid cloud partnership with Cisco announced last week, while in the latter is the acquisition of Bitium, an identity and access management provider, in September. On the product side, Google added per-second billing to Compute Engine, Container Engine and App Engine in September, taking the fire away from AWS, who had previously announced it.

The move means Google now has 39 open zones in 13 regions across the globe, with further regions being planned for Finland, Los Angeles, Montreal, and the Netherlands.

You can read the full blog post here.

IBM has announced the launch of IBM Cloud Private, a new piece of software which aims to ‘extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds.’

As a study from AlgoSec earlier this week posited, organisations are on the whole expecting their public cloud usage to ramp up in the next couple of years. Yet not everything is suitable for the public cloud.

IBM Cloud Private is compatible with a variety of systems manufacturers, such as Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo and NetApp, as well as offering various developer tools and data and analytics services.

Cloud Private is also built on Kubernetes architecture and supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. This may not come as a huge surprise; in 2015 IBM became a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which has a specific focus on sustaining containers and microservices architectures. Over the past year the largest cloud players have all joined the party; Microsoft in July, Amazon Web Services (AWS) in August, and Oracle in September, all at platinum level.

IBM gave a couple of examples as to how Cloud Private could be used. In the aviation space, an airline could use the software to bring a core application that tracks frequent flyer miles into a private cloud environment before connecting it to an app in the public cloud, while a financial services provider could use it to combine analytics and machine learning in the public cloud while maintaining security and regulatory concerns with customer data.

One example of this combined strategy comes from Hertz. “Private cloud is a must for many enterprises such as ours working to reduce or eliminate their dependence on internal data centres,” said Tyler Best, Hertz chief technology officer. “A strategy consisting of public, private and hybrid cloud are essential for large enterprises to effectively make the transition from legacy systems to cloud.

“Hertz is an early adopter of both public and private IBM cloud and we could not accomplish our technology goals without private cloud as part of our overall cloud portfolio,” added Best.

To look at another offering which aims to perform similar tasks, the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS – first announced last year but made fully available in August – is a good place to start. The service offers VMware’s software designed data centre (SDCC) on the AWS infrastructure, enabling users to run VMware apps across consistent public, private, or hybrid vSphere-based cloud environments, alongside having optimised access to AWS services.

You can find out more about IBM Cloud Private here.

Chevron is making Microsoft Azure its primary cloud provider as part of a seven year partnership with the Redmond giant.

The energy corporation added the move will accelerate the application of technologies such as analytics and the Internet of Things to drive performance and improve efficiencies. According to Chevron CIO Bill Braun, the company saw Microsoft as a good fit because of its global reach.

The move is especially key because of the bountiful amounts of data energy companies, among others in similar industries, are harvesting. In Chevron’s case, its ‘things’ – in this instance, production facilities, drill ships and fiber optic cables inside well casings – can generate up to one terabyte of data per day. Through the partnership with Microsoft, Chevron hopes to act upon this data in real-time and apply analytics on top of it.

“Chevron has a long history of applying advanced technologies to develop the energy that improves lives and powers the world. We also understand scale, and the cloud at hyperscale is something we intend to leverage for agility and efficiency,” said Braun in a statement. “Through this strategic partnership, we believe Chevron will have a competitive advantage.”

“With Chevron and Microsoft, intelligent energy meets intelligent cloud,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure. “Our global cloud infrastructure – which has more regions around the world than any other cloud provider – will enable Chevron to leverage our capabilities across areas like high performance computing and Internet of Things to become a truly digital business.”

Microsoft posted its most recent financial results last week with total revenues of $24.5 billion. In the three buckets the company places revenues, its ‘intelligent cloud’ segment – focusing on Azure and server products – saw a 13% increase year on year to $6.9bn for the quarter while ‘productivity and business processes’, where Office 365 figures are based, went up 28% to $8.2bn.

A new survey released by AlgoSec sets the scene on organisational cloud deployments: almost a third of respondents say they plan to increase their public cloud usage in the next 12 to 18 months, but major security challenges remain across hybrid enterprise networks both during and after migrations.

The study, titled ‘Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security’, polled 450 senior security and network professionals and found a lack of visibility and managing security policies consistently were the biggest security management challenges enterprises face in hybrid environments.

As companies ramp up their public cloud deployments, needing complete visibility across both on-premise and cloud networks is therefore essential. Almost half of respondents say their organisation runs up to 20% of its workloads in the cloud, compared to a quarter (25.7%) who run between 21% and 40% and 11.7% of respondents running between 41% and 60%.

These numbers will almost certainly rise in future reports; yet security continues to be a primary concern. The biggest issue companies say they are facing is cyberattacks, cited by 59% of respondents, while unauthorised access by outsiders (53%), downtime or outages (46%), or misconfiguration of cloud security controls (41%) were also highly cited.

When it comes to specific vendors, Microsoft Azure took the honours, cited by 57.8% of respondents, ahead of Amazon Web Services on 52.4%. A yawning gap followed to Google Cloud Platform (18.8%), Oracle (9%), Rackspace (7.3%) and Alibaba Cloud (1.5%).

“As organisations increase their public cloud deployments and migrate applications, it’s essential that they have complete visibility across both their on-premise and cloud networks, together with the ability to automatically and holistically manage their security policies,” said Joanne Godfrey, director of communications at AlgoSec.

“This enables them to better protect the business and fulfil compliance demands, while taking full advantage of the cost savings and agility offered by the hybrid cloud model.”

You can find out more about the report here.

Data protection solutions provider Datto has announced it is to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners, with the company being merged with IT business management provider Autotask, another horse in Vista’s stable.

The move is a large one in the managed service provider (MSP) space, with the companies in their own words ‘creating the only complete, global IT business management and business continuity platform built exclusively for MSPs.’

Datto offers business continuity, backup and disaster recovery and network continuity services, while Autotask has traditionally focused on endpoint management, remote monitoring and management, alongside providing cloud backup, and CRM and service desk offerings under the banner of professional services automation (PSA).

Mark Banfield, SVP and general manager of international at Autotask, said Vista has been looking for opportunities to expand Autotask’s vision for a unified platform for ‘some time’. “The merger of Autotask and Datto is a natural next step for both companies who can now deliver tremendous value to the IT channel by providing technology providers with services to increase recurring revenue, grow and expand – all from one company,” he told CloudTech.

Andrew Stuart, managing director of Datto’s EMEA arm, added the company previously had suitors but was unwilling to sell until they found a good fit. “When it came to Vista, they shared our vision to create something meaningful in the MSP market,” said Stuart. “They were already working with Autotask and understood the potential for future growth and that we could make a serious impact in the IT space by combining Datto and Autotask.

“Things went fairly quickly once we realised that Vista could really take Datto to the next level and essentially create the largest vendor in the MSP industry.”

According to the press materials, a combined management team will lead the merged entity, with Austin McChord, Datto founder and chief executive officer, leading the company. Mark Cattini, president and CEO of Autotask, will be a strategic advisor to the board of directors. Regarding future product strategy, it is still early days but according to Stuart, while there will ‘eventually’ be a joint product roadmap it is business as usual for the time being.

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2017. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.