Amazon and Microsoft have posted their most recent financial results, and again both have delivered with a focus on cloud.

Amazon posted total revenue across all segments of $43.74 billion for the quarter with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing just over 10% of that at $4.58bn. The AWS revenue represented at 41% increase from this time last year.

Microsoft posted total revenues of $24.5 billion – and while the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, the company’s ‘intelligent cloud’ segment went up 13% from this time last year at $6.9bn, and the ‘productivity and business processes’ segment going up 28% at $8.2bn. The former refers to Azure and server products, while the latter focuses more on Office 365. The other segment, ‘more personal computing’, saw a 0.1% dip from this this time last year at $9.4bn.

Speaking to analysts following the results, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Azure Compute usage more than doubled over the quarter, with revenue growing 90%, while the number of monthly active users of Office 365 Commercial moved to 120 million.

“To support the emerging intelligent cloud, intelligent edge application pattern, you need a consistent stack across the public cloud and the edge,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Merely providing colocation services or connectivity between on-premise data centres and the public cloud is not sufficient to meet customer needs. You need consistency across the development environment, operating models and technology stacks.

“Azure provides this consistency across the entire stack, inclusive of identity, data, app platform, security and management at the edge and in the cloud,” Nadella added. “Our hybrid cloud is one of the reasons nearly every Fortune 500 company has chosen to partner with Microsoft.”

Amazon, traditionally a little more reluctant to divulge on earnings day through prepared remarks, revealed some snippets though analyst questions. Brian T. Olsavsky, Amazon CFO, described the quarter as “very strong” for AWS and added the company expected a ‘strong’ Q4, taking into account the previous year focused on price reductions. “Price cuts, and not only price cuts but new products that have lower average cost and can cannabalise more expensive products, is pretty much a part of our business all the time in AWS,” said Olsavsky.

Naturally, the biggest concern for those analysing Amazon was around the company’s acquisition of Whole Foods in August. For the first time, Amazon put sales from ‘physical stores’ in a separate bucket, with that number clocking in at $1.28bn. Olsavsky confirmed this was where the Whole Foods revenue appeared.

So how should these results be analysed? Synergy Research says it is essentially the status quo. AWS remains ‘in a league of its own’, with Microsoft best of the rest, ahead of Google and Alibaba. Growth in the total market for 2017 is at 40%. “There’s still something a little shocking about seeing a business unit the size of AWS consistently growing its revenues by over 40%,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director.

“Microsoft and Google too deserve plaudits for the growth rates they are achieving, while IBM is gaining market share in its sweet spot of hosted private cloud services. It is becoming increasingly difficult for cloud providers outside of the leading pack to make an impression on the market share rankings.”

You can read Microsoft’s report here and Amazon’s report here.

The clue is in the ‘shared’ part of shared responsibility: customers and providers have to work together to secure cloud data, yet new research shows two thirds of organisations polled export full responsibility for data protection, privacy and compliance on their cloud service providers.

The study, from Veritas, found that more than eight in 10 (83%) of the 1,200 global business and IT decision makers polled who plan to use infrastructure as a service (IaaS) believe their cloud service provider takes care of protecting their data in the cloud.

69% said they can place all responsibility for their data security in the provider’s hands, while more than half believe it is the cloud provider’s responsibility to securely transfer data between on-premises and cloud (54%) and back up workloads in the cloud (51%).

56% of those polled said they operate with a ‘cloud first’ mentality, compared to 43% who say they consider on-premises first before considering cloud. More than two thirds (67%) say they either already use or plan to use two or more cloud providers, with 42% at least aiming for three or more and 16% looking for five.

When it came to barriers against cloud implementation, lack of in house skills – cited by 38% of respondents – was most frequently cited, ahead of complexity with migration (37%) and limitations of legacy technology (36%). For factors which impacted cloud provider selection, data privacy, security and compliance, workload performance and uptime were key.

Yet the issues around what shared responsibility means have raised their head again. Let’s take Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two largest vendors, as an example.

“Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer,” Amazon notes. “This shared model can help relieve customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualisation layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates.

“The customer assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), other associated application software as well as the configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall.”

A post on Microsoft’s Azure security and compliance blog puts it this way. “Shared responsibility in public cloud is related to the fact that you have a partner when you host resources on a public cloud service provider’s infrastructure. Who is responsible for what (in terms of security) depends on the cloud service model you use.

“With IaaS, the cloud service provider is responsible for the core infrastructure security, which includes storage, networking and compute (at least at the fabric level – the physical level). As you move from IaaS, to PaaS and then to SaaS, you’ll find that you’re responsible for less and the cloud service provider is responsible for more.”

With GDPR on the horizon as well, businesses need to make sure they get this right. “Although cloud providers have a duty to ensure they help keep data secure and readily available, the ultimate responsibility of maintaining a compliance position with regulations such as GDPR lies with the organisation that owns the information,” said Jason Tooley, Veritas Northern Europe vice president.

Cloud infrastructure automation is becoming an increasingly hot space. HashiCorp, a vendor based in San Francisco, has secured $40 million (£30.2m) to support its growing customer base and boost investment in its engineering and go-to-market initiatives.

The funding round was led by GGV Capital and Redpoint, with contributions from Mayfield and True Ventures. Scott Raney, partner at Redpoint, said his company believed HashiCorp was a “key component for making cloud adoption work” in the enterprise.

The company offers four primary products, alongside an array of open source offerings: Terraform, which focuses on infrastructure provision; Vault, for securing apps and infrastructure; Consul, for configuring applications across infrastructure; and Nomad for running any application on any infrastructure.

Among its customers are Adobe, Barclays and Comcast, with the company also having partnerships with many of the largest cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Total download numbers for its open source products stand at 22 million, the company says, with 150 updates released across its enterprise and open source suite.

“Broad usage of our products by operations, security, and development professionals has meant that HashiCorp products play an increasingly critical role for many large enterprises as they adopt cloud,” said Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp in a statement. “Our products provide consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure, so we are uniquely positioned to help enterprises address the realities of multi-cloud.

“Our commercial customer base has grown significantly over the past 18 months and this funding will allow us to invest aggressively across the breadth of our organisation and with a particular emphasis on customer support and success,” added McJannet.

You can find out more about HashiCorp here.

Google and Cisco have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership in something of a first for the networking giant.

The partnership will enable Cisco’s customers to deploy applications and services across both on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform.

Alongside this, the increasing importance of open source was cited in the joint offering, with developers being able to leverage managed Kubernetes, as well as Istio, to secure, manage and monitor microservices.

Writing in a blog post, Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco’s cloud platform and solutions group, outlined the reasons behind the move. “One of the things that makes hybrid hard is that while cloud generally abstracts underlying hardware and resources, these abstractions are different in various clouds,” he wrote. “It’s actually a good thing – enabling the rapid innovation and expansion of cloud platform capabilities that we’ve seen over the last several years – but those differences can become a real hindrance for enterprises implementing hybrid cloud.

“It’s with these challenges in mind that engineering teams from Cisco and Google Cloud started working together on a new solution,” Compton added. “The result is a solution that will deliver cloud agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support.”

Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google Cloud, wrote similarly. “This partnership to enhance existing on-premises infrastructure and extend it to the cloud addresses tough operational problems that enterprises have traditionally struggled to solve,” Boden wrote. “It also takes advantage of Cisco’s best of breed capabilities, including the ability to extend Cisco’s network and security policies and configurations and monitor application behaviour across hybrid cloud environments.”

Google’s cloud push under Diane Greene – who said earlier this year the company was able to catch up to Amazon Web Services (AWS) within five years – has been concerted. In July, CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts amidst the company’s ‘impressive’ cloud assets, the number of its big cloud deals – worth more than $500,000 – had tripled year over year. Among its most recent customer wins was marketing automation software provider Marketo, who went all-in on Google’s cloud in August as part of a wider six year alliance.

The companies said the solution will be available to a ‘limited number’ of customers during the first part of 2018, with general availability being rolled out later in the year.

The cloud market may be a truly global one with the leading vendors being US-based – but in China, for the time being, the local market holds firm.

According to the latest figures from Synergy Research, the Chinese cloud and data centre market, comprising cloud services, colocation, content delivery networks (CDN), and data centre hardware and software, continues to be dominated by local providers.

In the services markets, Chinese operators total more than 80% of revenues, while for data centre hardware and software the figure is nearer to 50%. In cloud services, Alibaba, China Telecom and Tencent lead, while Huawei, Inspur and Lenovo are on top for data centre hardware and software. Annual revenues for these markets in aggregate are now at more than $15 billion per year, growing at over 16% annually.

“The difference between China and all other countries is striking,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research. “The markets for cloud services and for data centre infrastructure are truly global in nature and in all regions they are dominated by US-headquartered companies, but China stands out as the one huge exception.

“Going forward, it is difficult to see US companies making too much headway in China, but there is no doubt that some of the Chinese companies will have an increasing impact in countries beyond China,” added Dinsdale.

This is not to say that the leading global cloud providers do not have presence in China. Amazon Web Services launched its Beijing region in 2013, which now has two EC2 availability zones, while Microsoft has China North and China East regions.

On the other side of the coin, Alibaba’s recent Computing Conference, in Hangzhou, shed some light on its ambitions. As Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, told attendees, the company aimed to move from its recent milestone of one million cloud customers to 10 million. The company’s marquee customers as revealed in the conference were impressive, albeit all Asia-based.

According to the most recent analysis of Asia Pacific nations by the Asia Cloud Computing Association (pdf), China was ranked 13th out of 14 countries ahead only of Vietnam, scoring poorly on international connectivity, data centre risk, and freedom of information.

When Salesforce was founded by two ex-Oracle executives in 1999, not only would the software landscape be changed, but a new economy would form underneath it.

A new report from IDC puts the number of jobs created by Salesforce and its ecosystem at 3.3 million worldwide between the end of 2016 and 2022.

The Salesforce ecosystem, the analyst firm asserts, is almost four times as big as Salesforce itself, as organisations who spend on cloud computing products also need to layout on ancillary services. In the six year period until 2022, the finance sector is expected to see the greatest gains, with $164 billion in new business revenue and 585,000 new jobs, with manufacturing, at $159bn new revenue and 638,000 new jobs, not far behind.

Not surprisingly, the US is far in front in terms of business revenue created, as well as on top for direct jobs created. Yet India, with almost 724,000, is the clear leader in terms of indirect jobs created; positions available by spending in the general economy by people filling the direct jobs.

The report also assessed the overall impact of cloud computing in the economy and job creation, giving best practice tips to organisations utilising or interested in cloud. IDC says the payoff to the larger organisation is much greater than the impact to the IT organisation “just as digital transformation is more than an IT function”, while the variety of cloud apps and development platforms available today mean most processes and workflows can be migrated to the cloud.

“IDC’s forecasts show a significant payback from investments in cloud computing out to 2022,” the report notes. “But even by then, spending on public cloud computing will be less than 13% of spending on IT. We are still on the ground floor of cloud computing, with lots of headroom for more payback.

“Salesforce and its ecosystem are well positioned to help customers take advantage of that headroom.”

Commenting on the report, Tyler Prince, Salesforce executive president of worldwide alliances and go to market innovation, wrote: “Last year, IDC forecasted the Salesforce Economy would create 1.9 million jobs and $389 billion in new revenues by 2020. We are encouraged by this huge increase from last year, and the strong momentum from the community of Salesforce customers, partners and developers who power the Salesforce Economy.”

Alongside the report, Salesforce also announced updates to AppExchange, the company’s enterprise cloud marketplace. New features include intelligent search, personalised recommendations, and embedded learning with Trailhead, the company’s education platform.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a San Francisco-based organisation aimed at sustaining containers and microservices architectures, has secured 30 new members, including Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley, and Qualcomm.

The new members are all at the silver level, while six other companies have joined at the end user member and end user supporter level, including GitHub, Reddit, and The Wikimedia Foundation.

Membership had been swelled in the past few months with the arrival of major cloud providers such as Microsoft in July, Amazon Web Services in August, and Oracle in September, all at platinum level. The membership now comprises 20 at platinum, including all the largest cloud vendors.

The foundation cited a statistic from 451 Research which predicts the global DevOps and microservices market is set to reach $10 billion by 2021 ‘positioning cloud native technologies for rapid adoption.’ The previous addition of the hypervendors can also be seen as an affirmation of the technology’s potential. Oracle described Kubernetes and Prometheus as ‘critical parts’ of theirs and their customers’ development toolchains, while Microsoft said joining CNCF was ‘another natural step’ on its open source journey.

“CNCF is thrilled to welcome our many new members from around the world in diverse industries, including financial leaders like Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in a statement. “CNCF has now crossed over the 100 member mark in less than two years since we started, including the six largest public cloud providers.

“As our membership base diversifies, the ecosystem benefits from broader input, contributions and financial support to fuel more rapid adoption of cloud native computing,” Kohn added.

Writing for this publication earlier this month, cloud automation and managed services provider Logicworks noted how financial companies are leading the way in Docker implementation. “As public cloud platforms continue to evolve their container support and more independent software vendors enter the space, expect ‘canonical’ Docker security methods to change rapidly,” the company wrote.

“Nine months from now or even three months from now, a tool could develop that automates much of what its manual or complex in Docker security. When enterprises are this excited about a new technology, chances are that a whole new industry will follow.”

GPUs are becoming ever more attractive to cloud service providers and customers as the demand for intensive computing increases – and UKCloud has become the first European cloud service provider to offer a cloud GPU computing service through NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 and M60 units.

UKCloud, formerly Skyscape, offers services for the public sector as well as healthcare. The company said the move for GPUs came about through its ‘maniacal focus’ on service excellence following customer demand through its UKCloud Ideas service.

“The public sector is driving more complex computational and visualisation intensive workloads than ever before, not only for CAD development packages, but also for tasks like the simulation of infrastructure changes in transport, for genetic sequencing in health or for battlefield simulation in defence,” said Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud in a statement. “In response to this demand, we have a greater focus on emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Other cloud providers are tapping into this resource; in March, Chinese vendor Tencent said its cloud computing services would be beefed up by NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture, as well as P100, P40 and M40 GPU accelerators, to ‘help advance artificial intelligence for enterprise customers’. IBM touted its cloud as the fastest for deep learning and AI in May, purporting to be the first of the large providers to offer NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers the P2 instance for graphics-heavy workloads.

Naturally, with these advancements, NVIDIA’s stock continues to soar. An article for Seeking Alpha noted how the company has had ‘one of the hottest stocks of the last few years’ and ‘is a leader in some of the largest megatrends that are likely to dominate the 21st century’, while Donna Fuscaldo, writing for Investopedia, said that though the company’s stock has already gone up 88% this year there was more room for the rally to continue.

You can find out more about UKCloud’s GPU service here.

IBM and SAP have both declared their most recent financials with cloud growth continuing on both sides, but still questions to be answered overall.

For IBM, overall revenues were again on the slide – $19.15 million (£14.5m) for the most recent quarter compared with $19.23m for this time last year – but cloud revenue was up 20% and overall results beat analyst expectations, seeing IBM’s shares surge as a result. According to MarketWatch, the stock’s one-day post-earnings percentage gain was the biggest since IBM reported fourth quarter 2008 results.

IBM cited the strength of embedded cloud and cognitive capabilities across their business as a key factor in the financials’ success, as Martin Schroeter, senior vice president and CFO, explained to analysts. “Our strategic imperatives, as we’ve said, are a signpost of the progress we’re making in helping our enterprise clients to extract value from data, and become digital businesses,” said Schroeter, “and so our strategic imperatives aren’t separate businesses, but a view of the revenue across our segments that provide our clients with analytics, cloud, security, mobile and social capabilities.”

Schroeter added that ‘as a service’ revenue was up 24% in the third quarter, and cloud revenue going up 20% translated to a $15.8bn revenue base over the past 12 months, representing 20% of IBM’s revenue.

With SAP, cloud subscriptions and support were at €937 million (£839.4m), up 22% from this time last year, with overall cloud and software and total revenues up 5% and 4% from Q316 respectively.

New cloud bookings were at €302m, an increase of 19% from this time last year, with the figure prompting questions from analysts over the state of the growth.

CEO Bill McDermott described the quarter overall as strong, noted S/4 HANA grew new cloud bookings ‘triple digit’ in Q3, and said Q4 will be stronger. “As you may recall from Q3 2016, we experienced some seasonality in our cloud business on a smaller base,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “When you think about SAP’s cloud growth, we increasingly see customers pursuing more large-scale transformations, which have a tendency to close in Q4.

“You can expect a dynamite Q4, and very consistent with our year to date growth rate in revenues,” McDermott added.

Responding to a specific question around confidence on cloud bookings rebounding in Q4, SAP CFO Luka Mucic said the company was ‘waiting for the big brands’ to come through, citing Shell as already on board and adding two ‘global brand[s] of massive significance’ will be announcing in the near future.

“I have total unequivocal unwavering confidence in the cloud bookings for Q4. It’s going to be a really strong Q4 bookings number. I’ll count on it. On Q1, especially, inspired by S/4 HANA in the public cloud. We’re winning deals everywhere. We have the perfect alignment between the innovation and the field execution now.”

You can read the IBM earnings statement here (pdf), and the SAP statement here (pdf).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nokia are coming together to speed up the migration of service provider applications to the cloud, the latter has announced.

Through the deal, Nokia will support service providers throughout their AWS implementation with consulting, design, integration, migration and operation, alongside Internet of Things (IoT) use cases, through AWS Greengrass and Amazon Machine Learning among others.

On the strategic side, both companies will work together for 5G and edge cloud, including reference architectures, as well as providing an improved user experience for customers of Nuage Networks SD-WAN who also use AWS.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t ‘telco cloud’ in the strictest sense, but more ‘cloud-enabled’ for service providers. As far back as June 2014, this publication has examined Nokia’s strategy in this department, with Clare McCarthy, practice leader for telco IT at Ovum, saying at the time that the ‘key challenge’ in the coming few years for customer experience management providers was in assuring and monetising the IoT ecosystem.

“Our collaboration with AWS will accelerate the migration of service provider applications to the cloud and enable us to forge new opportunities together by delivering on next-generation connectivity and cloud services,” said Kathrin Buvac, Nokia chief strategy officer. “This is a wide-ranging collaboration, spanning our services capabilities in application migration, SD-WAN from Nuage Networks, 5G, and IoT, allowing new growth opportunities for our top customers across both the service provider and large enterprise market segments.”

“Service providers are accelerating their migration to AWS in order to drive innovation for their customers and deliver lower total cost of IT to their organisations,” said Terry Wise, AWS global vice president of channels and alliances in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Nokia to accelerate cloud transformation for service providers, and enable the digital transformation journey for our mutual large enterprise customers.”