The concept of ‘everything as a service’ has been around the industry for a few years – yet according to the latest note from 451 Research, the increased demand for managed security, disaster recovery and networking is forcing its rise to the mainstream.

The analyst firm argues that the ability to ‘connect the dots’ with managed services will provide a key differentiator to both channel partners and service providers, as new kinds of managed services emerge. According to the company’s Voice of the Enterprise: Hosting and Cloud Managed Services study, from earlier this year, managed services and security services are aligned to approximately half of the total hosting and cloud opportunity, with that number increasing year by year.

“This spending trend, alongside feedback from providers, indicates there is an appetite for a wider range of bundled offerings from the managed service sector including systems integrators, VARs, and others with service deliver experience,” said Rory Duncan, 451 research director for managed services and hosting in a statement.

“We see a significant opportunity for technology vendors to partner with service providers to offer higher value, niche and vertical offerings as these services rapidly emerge,” he added.

This publication first examined everything, or anything as a service (XaaS) back in 2014. The rather modest example given at the time was around desktop as a service, which would have included from a service provider an office suite, or the SaaS side, servers (IaaS), as well as maintenance and a physical endpoint, offering the customer one fee and one ‘throat to choke’ for the product’s delivery.

In other words, this example offers up a managed service. But as a blog post from Chargify, a subscription billing software provider, put it back in February, XaaS is ‘extending beyond cloud computing’, pervading multiple industry models, and could kickstart the smart home revolution.

“[We] expect to see a myriad of more traditional industries and non-subscription products pivot to include ‘as a service’ in their offerings,” the company wrote. “Consumers are businesses are embracing the many benefits of the subscription model, and businesses should be looking at how to incorporate XaaS into their own roadmaps for future success.”

Payments provider Stripe is the top private cloud computing company today with storage company Dropbox and messaging firm Slack making up the top three, according to the latest Cloud 100 list from Forbes.

Slack, which came top last year, finishes third with Dropbox taking second position for the second consecutive year. DocuSign was ranked at #4, completing a quartet of San Francisco-based companies at the top.

The list also recognises the growing influence of the Internet of Things (IoT) in valuations; among the highest new entries were Redwood City-based C3 IoT, at #19, and Uptake, based out of Chicago, at #22. Both companies participate in the industrial IoT space.

In total, almost half (48%) of companies in the Cloud 100 were based in the Silicon Valley area, compared with 13 in New York City, Boston with seven, and Utah with six. European companies in the mix include Adyen (#5), a payments provider based in the Netherlands and Veeam (#27) from Switzerland, while the UK’s only entry is NewVoiceMedia (#71), a provider of contact centre technology based in Basingstoke.

As new companies join the list – a quarter in all – others disappear, with 10 firms ‘graduating’, as Forbes puts it, to sale or IPO. Six of these 10 firms were in the top 20 last year, including Cloudera, ranked fifth in 2016, which went public in April this year, and AppDynamics, ranked ninth, acquired by Cisco in March.

In other words, the Cloud 100 list is not just for who is performing well today, but who is likely to go further tomorrow, as Alex Konrad, list editor at Forbes, explains. “Members of the second annual Cloud 100 list today will be tomorrow’s major IPOs and acquisitions, driving forward not just the tech sector but also the many industries that make up their customers,” he said.

Reuters, in an exclusive article earlier this month, reported that Dropbox was seeking to hire IPO underwriters – a story the company declined to comment on – while Stripe pocketed $150 million in series D investment in November last year and Slack secured $200m in a series F in April 2016.

The top 10 companies, in order, were Stripe, Dropbox, Slack, DocuSign, Adyen, Qualtrics, Medallia, Tanium, Mailchimp, and Squarespace.

You can read the full list here.

Cloud robotics is set to generate new value chains, technologies, architectures and business models, according to a new paper.

The report, put together by GTI, a body focusing on the TD-LTE (time division long term evolution) ecosystem alongside SoftBank, CloudMinds, China Mobile, Huawei and Skymind, argues the advantages of cloud robots, with the same common network, are threefold; information sharing, offloaded computation, and collaboration.

One of the examples the report looks at – or gives an image of – is a machine learning project Google undertook last year featuring an array of robots sharing experiences to improve their grasping ability. “A human child is able to reliably grasp objects after one year, and takes around four years to acquire more sophisticated precision grasps,” the researchers wrote. “However, networked robots can instantaneously share their experience with one another, so if we dedicate 14 separate robots to the job of learning grasping in parallel, we can acquire the necessary experience much faster.”

Hence the potential of cloud as a common medium. The report argues the possibilities and use cases are many; from intelligent visual processing, to natural language processing, to facial recognition, giving opportunities in logistics, security, and education among others. According to Tractica, the value of the global robot market will grow from $34.1 billion in 2016 to $226.2bn in 2021.

By 2020, GTI adds, the proportion of connected robots globally will be 90%, with approximately 20 million new connections needed every year to support their day to day operations. The key to its success, the report argues, is 5G.

As 5G progresses, three application scenarios are predicted; enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC), backed up by software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV). For issues in cloud robotics, such as real-time control, video and voice processing, 5G, network slicing, and mobile edge computing, will fit the bill for applications.

“Network slices that have different specific performance characteristics can match the requirements of cloud robotics, match the needs for power consumption at the robot terminal, and provide appropriate roaming,” the report argues. “Using these approaches, 5G networks will also be able to meet the most demanding requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency and security.”

You can read the full report here.

Public cloud services will be the fastest growing market segment for IT deployment in 2017, according to the latest note from IDC.

Spending on traditional data centres, which ranked at more than 60% of the market in 2016, will dip to less than half by 2021, the analyst firm argues, with public cloud taking the majority of the slack.

Total spending on IT infrastructure for deployment in cloud environments – server, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches – will reach $40 billion (£31.1bn) in 2017, at an increase of 12.4% year over year. Public cloud will grow at the fastest rate, of 13.8%, with off-premises private cloud environments at 11.9% growth and on-prem private clouds growing 9.6% year on year.

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For cloud IT environments, Ethernet switches will represent the fastest growing segment, with 25.8% year on year growth in 2017, with spending on enterprise storage at 12.0% and servers 9.1%.

IDC had previously examined the numbers by vendor, finding Dell and HPE just ahead of the faster-growing Cisco, and saying global cloud IT infrastructure revenues hitting $8 billion in the first quarter of 2017.

Natalya Yezhkova, IDC enterprise storage research director, said spending will continue on 2016 trends in general, not counting differences in specific technology segments.

“Enterprise adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud IT strategies and the proliferation of cloud-native applications and areas such as the Internet of Things, which embrace a cloud-first approach to supporting IT resources, will fuel further increases in end-user spending on services-based IT.

“In turn, this move will be reflected in a shift of the overall spending on IT infrastructure from on-premises to off-premises deployments and from traditional IT to cloud IT,” Yezhkova added.

Venture capital money for cloud technology continues to stream through, with more than $50 million announced over the past week for two companies in the identity and hybrid cloud space respectively.

Auth0, an identity as a service platform provider based in Bellevue, Washington, confirmed it has raised $30 million (£23.1m), while ‘open source as a service’ firm Platform9, based out of Sunnyvale, California, announced $22 million (£17m). Both rounds were series C.

For Auth0, the funding comes amidst a year of record growth, with revenue increasing almost three times year over year and new customers including Atlassian, News Corp, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Platform9, meanwhile, called the year’s performance ‘tremendous’ and pointed to a customer base growth of 360% and revenue growth of 300%.

Meritech Capital Partners led the Auth0 round, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and K9 Ventures, and new investors NTT Docomo Ventures and Telstra Ventures participating. For Platform9, the round was led by Canvas Ventures with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Redpoint Ventures, and Menlo Ventures, participating.

“In our dozens of calls with customers, it was clear that Auto0’s value proposition is resonating in the market,” said George Bischof, managing director at Meritech Capital Partners. “Developers can leverage Auth0’s extensible and easy to integrate identity platform and free up their cycles to work on the core application. Auth0 subscriber adoption is exponentially expanding and we are excited to support their rapid growth.”

Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9, wrote in a letter about the increasing importance of open source technologies for enterprise. “Enterprises will come to bet on solutions that are rooted in open source, instead of proprietary solutions that require the vendor to lock in the customer to remain a viable business over time,” he wrote.

“This will happen across a range of computing services, but is especially pertinent in the infrastructure space. Just ask any large VMware or AWS customer and chances are, they’ll tell you they are exploring open source alternatives.”

Elsewhere, Minjar, an AWS managed service partner, announced an undisclosed amount in a pre-series A funding round led by Blume Ventures. The company tweeted out news of Blume’s investment at the recent India Cloud Summit event. 

In 2013, building and construction firm Travis Perkins developed a five-year roadmap for its IT. Technology would be seen as a ‘key enabler of strategic change’ rather than a support function, with investments amounting to more than double the IT budget, enhancing infrastructure and getting to grips with open source and cloud architecture in the process.

Four years into the plan, things seem to be going swimmingly. The IT budget has been duly doubled, and the company’s self-service portal supports 30,000 staff.

The key to Travis Perkins’ success has been changing the IT service management (ITSM) environment from a firefighting ‘fix fast’ approach to focus on cloud-based technology and a ‘fail less’ outlook. This has come through the use of ServiceNow from UK-based IT solutions provider Fruition Partners.

“The previous approach was mostly a result of having a spread of legacy solutions in place and no unified way to manage them,” Wendy Collison, Travis Perkins project manager for service development, told CloudTech. “Now, we are creating greater integration and efficiency across the business by harnessing multi-channel transactional support, re-engineering and upgrading legacy systems to provide enhanced infrastructure to provide fix solutions quicker.”

In July 2014, the service delivery team launched SolveIT, the first iteration of a self-service website. To begin with, the portal was focused on IT support, which helped users log IT incidents and track progress, as well as provide information so users could fix issues themselves.

Today, it is now accessible to all 30,000 employees across the Travis Perkins group, with 10% of all incidents and service requests going through the portal. This is described by the company as a ‘good achievement’, taking into account the fact the many workers in stores and warehouses who are less likely to use the portal through their job role. The company also reports a more than 20% reduction in incidents, and quicker root cause analysis.

“It took a while to gain momentum as for some colleagues in branch and store locations they didn’t notice any significant changes to working methods,” added Collison. “But through further updates and enhancements with ServiceNow, colleagues are seeing a real difference to the updates and information they receive, they are better informed and service teams have more time to concentrate on delivering better services and anticipating problems before they happen.”

Ultimately, the goal is to ‘move fully to a services-based organisation based around a service catalogue, detailing all the business services the organisation provides along with associated costs and commitments’. One such development in the pipeline is putting together an online branded clothing store for Travis Perkins staff, with employees being able to select uniform, schedule delivery, and organise returns via an automated system.

“The first step was to create a successful product catalogue enabling colleagues to purchase devices from our self-service portal, such as phones, laptops [and] printers,” said Collison. “Moving forward, we aim to create a full service catalogue where businesses will be able to purchase readily available solutions such as websites, business analytics and customer relationship solutions.”

This shows there are still a couple of steps to go for Travis Perkins – but the journey already undertaken gives a glimpse of how a long-term cloud plan, properly executed, can reap rewards.

Main picture credit: Travis Perkins

Only one in five organisations are getting the most out of their cloud investments with 96% saying it could do with a ‘makeover’, according to new survey results from Fugue.

The research, which garnered the responses of more than 300 IT operations professionals, found the majority of those polled said compliance and security concerns, unexpected downtime, and a plethora of cloud management tools available today, means their investments are not hitting the right mark.

When asked why the cloud landscape needed a makeover, 33% said their experience needed to be simplified and easier to use, compared with 29% who cited security, with more ease controlling costs (13%) and easier to control generally (10%) also cited.

More than a third (36%) of respondents said the C-suite fails to understand its complexity, while a quarter (26%) said IT leadership struggles with it and one in five (20%) said the same for developers. This complexity is borne out in the number of disparate tools used by organisations; just under a third (31%) say they are using between six and 10 tools, compared with 38% using three to five, 16% for 11-15, and 7% who are using more than 15.

Naturally, these results bode well for Fugue, a company based in Maryland, as well as Washington DC and Silicon Valley, whose modus operandi is around cloud automation and simplifying lifecycle management of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure service stack.

“The promises of the cloud are tremendous, but they are hard-won,” said Josh Stella, CEO and co-founder of Fugue in a statement. “You hear you’ll get rid of data centres, save money and move faster; cloud’s essentially an infinite resource. But what happens is that IT departments lose control of it – they can’t keep track of everything that’s running, and there are security and compliance complications.

“If you’re Netflix, you have enough money to throw at the problem, but most companies trying to manage the cloud end up in a DIY headache of patch-ups and tools that were born in the data centre and adapted for use in the cloud,” Stella added.

It is a question almost as old as the concept: who should look after cloud security, the vendor or the customer? A new report from Barracuda Networks argues there is a ‘concerning’ lack of understanding with regard to the shared responsibility model for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers.

For Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two leading IaaS providers, the meaning is clear. Microsoft points out the difference between software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and IaaS. For IaaS, while the provider looks after physical security and shares demands on host infrastructure and network controls, as Microsoft puts it, the customer is responsible for app level controls, identity and access management, endpoint protection and data classification. AWS describes the vendor and customer as being responsible for security ‘of’ and ‘in’ the cloud respectively.

So why, therefore, did almost two thirds (64%) of the 550 EMEA IT decision makers polled by Barracuda say they believed securing customer data in the public cloud was the vendor’s responsibility? 61% believed the same around applications, 60% for operating systems, while only 57% said service providers control the physical security of infrastructure.

“The lack of clarity regarding organisations’ versus IaaS providers’ cloud security responsibilities creates grey areas that IT decision makers must address if they want to keep key data and systems secure,” the report noted.

Issues regarding public cloud security do seem to have been picked up by the organisations polled, however. 57% of all respondents said they had added additional security to its public cloud, with 37% saying they were planning to. The figure was highest in the Belgium and Netherlands – 70% affirmative – with the UK lowest on just 43%, albeit with 39% planning to invest.

Naturally, the advice from Barracuda was to ‘partner with a vendor agnostic security expert to advise on exactly which pieces of the IaaS puzzle is the customer’s responsibility’. “The bottom line is that organisations are continuing to invest in public cloud projects, but they need a trusted vendor-neutral partner to help them navigate the choppy waters of cybersecurity if they want to minimise risk in the process,” the report wrote.

“With sweeping new European data protection regulations landing in May 2018, no organisation can afford to ignore security today.”

You can read a blog post here and download the full report (registration required) here.

Global cloud IT infrastructure revenues hit $8 billion (£6.2bn) in the first quarter of 2017 going up almost 15% year over year – with Cisco the big winners, according to IDC.

The analyst firm has put out the latest figures on its Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker (below), and found Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) could not be separated at the top, with Cisco behind. The two main players saw their revenues dip compared with this time last year; Dell hit $1.289bn compared to HPE with $1.118bn, with a decrease in revenue of 0.2% and 8.6% respectively, while Cisco, in third with $902 million, saw its revenue go up 8.7%.

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It’s worth noting at this juncture that despite the disparity IDC declares a statistical tie if there is a difference of one percent or less between vendor revenues. It’s also worth noting that HPE’s revenues are combined, as of Q216, with the New H3C Group, a venture announced in May last year between HPE and Tsinghua Holdings.

Looking at regional figures, vendor revenue from cloud IT infrastructure sales grew fastest in Canada at 59.1%, followed by Asia Pacific – excluding Japan – at 18.7% and Japan at 15.3%. The US and Western Europe saw growth at 15.1% and 8.9% respectively.

“After a weak performance during 2016, storage purchases for cloud IT environments had a strong rebound in the first quarter, driving overall growth in this segment,” said Natalya Yezhkova, IDC research director for enterprise storage in a statement. “Overall, the first quarter set a strong beginning of the year for the cloud IT infrastructure market.

“With positive dynamics in purchasing activity by hyperscalers across all technology segments we expect a strong year ahead for the fastest growing public cloud segment,” Yezhkova added. “And as end users continue to embrace the benefits of private cloud infrastructures, spending in this segment will also expand.”

According to a missive put out in April by IDC, overall 2016 vendor revenue was $32.6 billion, at a 9.2% climb year on year.

Using either DevOps or cloud is good for your organisation – but using both is better.

That is the verdict of a report from Freeform Dynamics and CA Technologies, which polled 929 IT professionals on how well their organisations were meeting their software delivery objectives.

Almost half (48%) said they focused primarily on traditional delivery of software and applications, with 20% using cloud and DevOps extensively. 17% said they were predominantly a cloud house, compared to 15% for DevOps.

Yet despite this seeming disparity, transformational initiatives were very popular among those polled. The overwhelming majority (96%) are looking at operational efficiency – getting IT to do the same things but faster and cheaper – while operational and digital transformation were cited by 88% and 85% of respondents respectively.

When combining cloud and DevOps, respondents saw on average an 81% improvement in overall software delivery performance, almost double the speed of delivery, and 80% better predictability of software performance.

Speed of delivery and cost control brought the most advantage to organisations who had committed to DevOps before adding cloud, the research noted. When the analysis was done but flipping over with those who had committed to cloud first, the figures were similar.

“Both cloud and DevOps are ways to reduce friction in the delivery process, and the KPIs where friction have the greatest effect are speed and cost control,” the report noted. “Another key factor through all of this is that cloud minimises the need for people to ask others to take action… so if a developer needs a new test machine or a specific software tool, say, they can get it without having to involve system administrators or the ops team.”

Ultimately, the report argues that if the IT team’s performance levels are mixed, or if the company is falling short in terms of broader service delivery, then a combination of cloud and DevOps may be the answer. “Cloud, whether public, private or hybrid, changes the game in terms of expectations and mindsets from a software delivery and operations perspective. Of course there are pitfalls and distractions that need to be avoided, but done right, cloud can remove a lot of the barriers and friction.”

You can find out more and download the full report here (registration required).