Microsoft has extended its lead over Salesforce in the enterprise software as a service (SaaS) market with the LinkedIn acquisition starting to make its presence felt, according to Synergy Research.

The analyst firm, which has put out a note based on Q2 data, finds Adobe, Oracle and SAP round out the top five, with Salesforce still comfortably in the silver medal position.

Salesforce still bests Microsoft in the CRM space – the slowest growing of the buckets enterprise SaaS is measured in (below) – but Microsoft rules the roost in the collaboration category, ahead of Cisco and Google. Oracle comes out on top for ERP, with ADP leading in HR/HCM apps.

While enterprise SaaS is now considered mature in certain aspects, its spending power continues to pale against on-premise software, meaning growth will remain buoyant for many years, according to Synergy.

The company adds the SaaS market will double in size by the end of 2020.

As John Dinsdale, Synergy research director and chief analyst points out, Microsoft still has lots of on-premise customers it can turn into SaaS ones.

“Traditional enterprise software vendors like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM still have a huge base of on-premise software customers and they are all now pushing to aggressively convert those customers to a SaaS-based consumption model,” he said.

“At the same time, born in the cloud software vendors like Workday, Zendesk and ServiceNow continue to light a fire under the market and help to propel enterprise spending on SaaS,” Dinsdale added.

Announcing Microsoft’s most recent quarterly revenues of $23.3 billion last month, chief executive Satya Nadella made a number of references to LinkedIn, saying record levels of messages were sent through a new messaging overlay, as well as discussing opportunities for product overlap through Dynamics, Microsoft’s CRM and ERP solutions, with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

“In a world where customers are increasingly digitising every business process, we continue to invest and expand our portfolio of modern, modular business applications that are infused with AI,” Nadella told analysts.

As any medical professional will explain, prevention is always better than cure. So why are so many organisations reactive instead of proactive when it comes to cybersecurity threats? A new report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) aims to introduce new metrics for enterprises to improve their security game.

The report, titled ‘Improving Metrics in Cyber Resiliency’, introduces Elapsed Time to Identify Failure (ETIF) and Elapsed Time to Identify Threat (ETIT), as well as processes to measure and develop lower values in order to improve the resiliency of an information system. The research advocates the responsibility for measuring and reporting each metric should be transferred to intrusion detection system (IDS) providers.

The ETIF metric is relatively straightforward to understand. If one takes the standard graphical representation of a cyberattack, with time as the x-axis and quality of service (QoS) between 1.0 and 0.0 as the y-axis, a triangle appears as QoS goes down with the attack starting, before gradually rising back to 1.0 as the system recovers.

ETIF is therefore the time between the start and end of the cyberattack, and the triangle indicates loss of resiliency. Yet a further graph (below) shows how, if ETIF is reduced, the overall loss of resiliency goes down with it – in this instance, from triangle ABC to ADE. Indeed, if ETIF is reduced to zero – in other words, the cyberattack was identified occurred at the same time, being nullified at the IT/OT infrastructure – the researchers add the loss of resiliency would be zero with it.

ETIT, on the other hand, is ‘critical’ in changing limits on loss and recovery functions, and as a result impacting on the quality of service, the CSA adds. “If there is an ability for early identification of the threat that is causing the failure, then the overall time to recovery and hence the loss of resiliency could be reduced,” the report notes.

“It is our hope that this report will initiate discussion and eventually encourage competition within the intrusion detection system space,” said Dr. Senthil Arul, lead author of the document. “As more companies are storing operation assets away from local servers, it’s clear that we need to bolster asset resiliency in the cloud if we are to keep operational resiliency unaffected.”

You can download the full report here (registration optional).

The partnership between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is starting to bear fruit: the two companies have announced initial availability of the former’s cloud on the latter.

The announcement was made at VMworld in Las Vegas yesterday, where Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, joined VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger on stage to discuss the benefits of the two companies’ integration.

“This really is the ultimate hybrid solution that we’ve developed together – the ability to run any application on vSphere and seamlessly take that private cloud environment and move it into the public cloud and use VMware software that you’re familiar with to manage both your on-premise as well as your in-the-cloud infrastructure,” said Gelsinger.

As the press materials note, a variety of benefits were being offered to customers of both companies. Alongside the natural workload portability between private and public clouds, these range from flexibility to choose where applications are run based on business needs, to spinning up an entire VMware software defined data centre (SDDC) in less than two hours, to identical skills for public and private theoretically meaning consistency in operations, improved productivity and reduced costs.

This publication first referenced the proposed collaboration between the two companies back in October last year, with the ‘VMware Cloud on AWS’ effort being expected mid-this year. As Jassy put it, enterprises were previously forced into a binary choice; move into the cloud with AWS and ditch the VMware tools, or stick with VMware and find it more of a headache with AWS. “VMware Cloud on AWS gives them the best of both worlds,” he told attendees. “[It] gives them the world’s leading private cloud provider alongside easily being able to be used with the world’s leading public cloud provider.”

Early customers of the joint product include Moody’s, Symantec and Western Digital, while one of the more interesting use cases came from Ricoh, who are using VMware/AWS for cyclical computing and disaster recovery. Dell EMC was first to the punch in offering data protection for VMware Cloud on AWS, offering backup and recovery for workloads as made in a separate announcement.

Amidst the plethora of news coming out of VMworld over the past two days – you can catch up with them all here – the most interesting outside of the AWS collaboration was around new releases of VMware Integrated OpenStack and VMware vRealize Network Insight, to help organisations modernise their data centres through increased networking and security capabilities.

Picture credit: VMworld/Screenshot

Google has announced the launch of Network Service Tiers, offering customers cheaper, lower performance networking.

The move is claimed to be the first from a major public cloud provider offering a tiered cloud network.

Current Google Cloud customers are automatically on the ‘premium’ tier, with the new ‘standard’ tier – “an attractively-priced network with performance comparable to other leading public clouds”, as the company puts it – becoming available. Pricing for outbound traffic is priced up to 33% lower in standard than in premium.

“You enjoy the same infrastructure with Premium Tier. But for some use cases, you may prefer a cheaper, lower-performance alternative,” said Urs Holzle, Google SVP technical infrastructure, in a blog post. “With Network Service Tiers, you can choose the network that’s right for you, for each application.”

Google enlisted the help of Cedexis, an internet performance monitoring provider, to assess the differences between the premium and standard tiers for latency and throughput. For HTTP load balancing traffic at the 50th percentile (below), premium throughput was at 5,401 kbps, compared to standard of 3,223 kbps.

Elsewhere, marketing automation software provider Marketo is to go all-in on Google’s cloud, as part of a wider six year ‘alliance’ seeing expanded use of Marketo at Google internally, as well as Google’s tools being integrated into Marketo’s products.

“Our alliance with Google will simplify and improve how enterprises engage with their customers,” said Steve Lucas, Marketo CEO in a statement. “Marketo customers use our Engagement Platform to deliver personalised experiences, fuelling revenue growth and improving brand impact, while scaling to support the demands of today’s digital landscape.

“This collaboration with Google takes that capability to new heights, and I’m incredibly excited about what we’ll provide together for our customers,” Lucas added.

Last month, announcing Q2 financial results, Google said it had tripled the number of cloud deals above $500,000 year over year. CEO Sundar Pichai said Google Cloud Platform “continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors.”

Skytap, a Seattle-based public cloud provider, has announced it has raised $45 million (£35.2m) to push forward its product development and market expansion.

The round was led by Goldman Sachs, with Hillel Moerman, managing director who co-heads the investment firm’s private capital investing (PCI) group, joining Skytap’s board of directors as a result.

Skytap offers an alternative to the public cloud mindset of ‘forcing customers to rewrite their traditional applications before migrating’, as the company puts it. In other words, organisations who use Skytap’s cloud can migrate their core apps unchanged, and then modernise things from there. “These applications can then be evolved by combining new cloud services with traditional components to form hybrid applications that maximise existing investments, while accelerating innovation,” the company explains.

Skytap claims its total sales have more than tripled year over year in the most recent quarter, getting client wins in Fortune 500 organisations in healthcare, retail, financial services and media in the process.

The company found a position for the first time in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as a niche player. Despite the clear lead of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and then to Microsoft, the only two companies in the leaders’ zone, Goldman Sachs among others must believe there is room for other players in the market.

“We believe that Skytap is well-positioned to address the large and growing demand for helping enterprises modernise business-critical applications in order to harness the opportunity and full value of the public cloud,” said Moerman. “This untapped market is exciting, and we are pleased to support Skytap during this time of growth.”

More organisations are looking to hire server-based IT staff; but finding employees who can work across both traditional servers and converged infrastructure is increasingly tough.

That is the verdict of analyst firm 451 Research in its latest Voice of the Enterprise study, which finds that for two thirds of the more than 500 firms surveyed, recruiting for roles across both sectors is difficult. A similar number (67%) say the primary driver for more server-related employees is business growth, with 42% citing IT organisational changes as key.

Naturally, the continued interest in staff with specialisms in traditional servers means organisations aren’t quite ready to put all their eggs in the public cloud basket. Concerns continue over the long term costs of using public cloud, with some IT managers polled admitting they are even expanding their on-premises servers and converged infrastructure to support certain requirements.

“Most IT managers are closely scrutinising their deployment options instead of blindly following the pack to IaaS and other off-premises cloud services,” said Christian Perry, research manager and report lead analyst. “When determining the optimal mix of on- and off-premises compute resources, there is no doubt this is hampered by the availability of specialist skills and regional availability.

“Whether organisations will realise their expected server staff expansion remains to be seen due to hiring difficulties,” added Perry.

This said, 451 does agree that the worldwide pool of full time employees dedicated to server administration will decline. It’s a classic catch-22; almost seven in 10 (69%) said current candidates lack skills and experience in this department, while available talent is shrinking due to a lack of candidates by region and high salaries putting employers off.

As this publication has previously reported, if you can find the right role at the right company, then a lucrative opportunity awaits. According to figures from PayScale, AT&T, General Electric and Oracle are the likeliest to pay the most for experienced cloud computing professionals.

You can find out more about the report here (registration required).

Cloud computing skills continue to be in high demand – and new figures from PayScale reveal that AT&T, General Electric and Oracle provide the best remuneration for top performers.

The figures, first reported by Forbes, cover a variety of metrics, from employers, to different roles, to company size and years’ experience, with the data coming from more than 1000 US-based respondents in each case.

If you want to make the most money from your cloudy career, then enterprise IT architect, with a median salary of $138,051, just pips senior solutions architect, with $132,092, as the role with the best remuneration. Solutions architect ($122,593), IT architect ($120,811) and senior systems engineer ($106,170) also broke the six-figure barrier, compared with DevOps engineer ($97,135) and software engineer ($95,962).

When it came to specific companies, AT&T offers almost a quarter of a million dollars ($248,323) for their most experienced roles, with GE and Oracle the only others to offer more than $200k. Comparing against the salary data for the four hypervisor cloud infrastructure vendors, IBM came out with a top salary of almost $175k, with Microsoft ($166k) and Amazon ($164k) close behind and Google – albeit with less data to work from – at $115k.

Perhaps not surprisingly, larger organisations pay more, although the increments do not entirely match. Organisations with fewer than 600 employees will pay below $116k on average, however the salaries – based on more than 100 figures – do not see a noticeable pattern (2000-4999 employees, $124,059, 5000-19999, $123,569) until the largest category, enterprises with more than 50,000 employees, whose average salary is $129,291.

These figures may add colour to a UK study released earlier this month by IT resourcing provider Experis, who warned that while the number of cloud vacancies almost doubled – at a 97.73% increase – year on year, salaries for permanent roles only went up 2.7% on average.

The reasoning, Experis argued, was that as roles for companies maintaining, optimising and enhancing their existing cloud platforms proliferated, less specialised skills were needed for them, making them easier to fill and pay growth to stumble accordingly.

As a result, getting the best certifications is vital to forging a successful cloud career. Writing for this publication earlier this year, Alex Bennett, of IT training school Firebrand Training, put down six of the most sought-after specifications in the industry, from AWS, to Microsoft, as well as the (ISC)2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) certification.

You can take a look at the full data here.

Alibaba has broken the one million mark for paying customers of its cloud computing business with revenues increasing 96% year over year, according to the company’s latest financial statement.

Revenues from cloud computing totalled RMB 2,431 million (£278m) in the quarter ending June 30, while the total number of customers was 1,011,000, up 15.7% from 874,000 in the previous quarter.

Alibaba clearly defines its cloud computing revenue in its reporting – something of a change to many other cloud providers, as regular readers of this publication will know – and puts its paying cloud customers alongside its active commerce customers. Overall revenue for the company in the latest quarter was RMB 50,184m (£5.7bn), up 56% from this time last year.

Speaking to analysts, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Daniel Zhang, Alibaba chief executive officer, said the firm’s cloud business “continues to enjoy high growth at scale” and that the one million milestone is “merely a starting point.” Maggie Wu, chief financial officer, added: “Our cloud computing business enjoys first mover advantage and we’ll keep expanding our market leadership by continuously providing value-added services.

“Our technology advantage and the team’s strong execution have strengthened our market position as reflected in expanding customer reach spanning many industries, deepening existing customer relationships, and increasing adoption of innovative and value added products by customers,” said Wu.

The company’s cloud push has been long-documented. In 2015, Alibaba announced an additional $1 billion investment in Aliyun – now known as Alibaba Cloud – to expand its international presence. Alibaba has since been busy building out global data centres, announcing plans for Frankfurt, Dubai, Sydney and Tokyo towards the end of last year, and further plans for India and Indonesia in June.

You can read the full Alibaba statement here (pdf).

Read more: How companies can boost their website in China’s clouded market

Photo source: www.alibabagroup.com

The Nordics have long been a popular location for data centres – and a new development from Kolos could see the world’s biggest data centre being built in the Arctic Circle.

According to a BBC report, the proposed site, in the Norwegian town of Ballangen, is set to cover 600,000 square miles, or 6.46 million square feet, and stretch across four storeys. The current largest data centre in operation is in Langfang, China, with a size of 6.3m sq ft. The Citadel Campus site in Tahoe Reno, Nevada, is set to be 7.2m sq ft when it becomes fully operational.

The Kolos project has already received ‘several million dollars’ from private investors, the company said, adding it still needed to secure additional funds through working with a US investment bank. Mark Robinson, Kolos co-chief executive, told the BBC the company’s plans also involved tapping into a local university to employ their technology graduates.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the potential the Nordics area has, in no small part due to its colder temperatures and more natural processes for keeping servers chilled. The countries’ governments are also making things easier for companies; in November last year Sweden’s parliament confirmed new legislation giving data centre operators a significantly reduced electricity tax rate, in line with other manufacturing industries.

This publication first reported on the proposed legislation in 2015, with Anne Graf, then investment and development director of Swedish data centre hub The Node Pole, explaining that the proposal was both “just treating data centres the same way as other industries” and “a statement that Sweden is interested in this industry and wants to be a part of it growing.”

One company making the most of this opportunity is Facebook, who already has a site at the Node Pole, in Luleå, Sweden, as well as Odense in Denmark.

The social giant announced earlier this week a budget of $750 million (£583.2m) to spend on a new data centre in Ohio. According to a Firstpost article, Rachel Peterson, Facebook’s director of data centre strategy and development, cited several reasons for the proposed move, including the availability of renewable energy sources.

At the end of July, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved state tax incentives for a project called ‘Sidecat’; the Columbus Dispatch first broke the news that Facebook was the company behind the move last week.

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Connecticut-based Cycle Computing to help provide easier access to high performance computing (HPC) in Azure.

Cycle has been in business since 2005 and provides orchestration software running both off the primary public cloud providers as well as in private cloud environments. Its core tenet is that ‘greater access to compute enables people to ask bigger questions, faster answers and a better world’, in the company’s own words.

According to the company, its products will manage one billion core hours this year, growing 2.7 times every 12 months, and help companies who spend up to $100 million annually on cloud infrastructure.

“We see amazing opportunities in joining forces with Microsoft,” Jason Stowe, Cycle Computing CEO wrote in a blog post. “Its global cloud footprint and unique hybrid offering is built with enterprises in mind, and its Big Compute/HPC team has already delivered pivotal technologies such as InfiniBand and next generation GPUs.

“The Cycle team can’t wait to combine CycleCloud’s technology for managing Linux and Windows compute and data workloads, with Microsoft Azure’s Big Compute infrastructure roadmap and global market reach,” Stowe added.

For Microsoft, the move fits in with its pushes towards artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT) and deep learning, of which it says it has seen ‘explosive’ growth on Azure.

“Cycle Computing will help customers accelerate their movement to the cloud, and make it easy to take advantage of the most performant and compliant infrastructure available in the public cloud today,” added Jason Zander, corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure in a blog post.