Cloud computing has reached a ‘tipping point’ in financial services with capabilities and cost efficiencies moving ahead of on-premise data centre equivalents, according to The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).

The company, which provides financial transaction and data processing services for the global financial industry, has issued a new report, titled ‘Moving Financial Market Infrastructure to the Cloud’. The tipping point, the report argues, comes from a change in questioning on cloud services; the conversation moves forward from ‘is the cloud safe?’ to ‘what compromises are we making by staying on-premises?’

DTCC itself says it has leveraged cloud services for almost five years, and is therefore looking at methods of expansion, with the proof of the pudding in the eating.

The report goes through the usual rigmarole of outlining software, infrastructure, and platform as a service, as well as discussing benefits such as scale, resiliency, privacy, security and cost. The paper also notes that public cloud vendors have significantly upped their game in recent years.

“The leading cloud vendors are at the forefront of security implementation and research, enabling them to attract and retain the top global talent,” the report notes. “Very few companies can replicate the reliability and built-in automation and processes of a public vendor that is installing tens of thousands of individual servers every day and monitoring and trouble-shooting tens of millions of active network components.”

Regulation is another important area DTCC goes into. While many of the concerns over cloud providers are similar to those across the regulatory community, the report notes, the four primary areas to move through are data protection and sensitivity, data integrity, continuity of service, and auditing issues.

“We believe cloud computing has moved past a tipping point and that the security, scalability, resiliency, recoverability and cost of applications in the cloud are better than many private enterprises could achieve on their own,” said Robert Garrison, DTCC CIO. “As a result, we will pursue a strategy of building a cloud ecosystem that supports best practices and standards.

“At the same time, we take seriously our responsibility to be in full compliance with all relevant regulatory requirements and pledge to work in collaboration with our supervisors to achieve this.”

You can read the full report here (registration required).

IBM and Nutanix have announced a ‘multi-year’ initiative which aligns Nutanix’s enterprise cloud platform with IBM’s Power Systems server line to give large enterprises greater opportunities with hyperconverged deployments.

The two companies aim to put together a product which brings new workloads to hyperconverged. Alongside the mission-critical elements, such as databases and enterprise apps, as well as cloud native workloads like containers, there is also scope for ‘next generation cognitive workloads’, increasingly featuring machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

The companies set the scene in the press materials. “Being able to react in real time used to give enterprises a competitive advantage, but this approach no longer guarantees happy customers,” the companies write. “The value has now migrated to the ability to rapidly gather large amounts of data, quickly crunch and predict what’s likely to happen next – using a combination of analytics, cognitive skills, machine learning and more.”

The move will also include exclusive virtualisation management with AHV, Nutanix’s open virtualisation platform.

“Hyperconverged systems continue on a rapid growth trajectory. IT teams now recognise the need, and the undeniable benefits, of embracing the next generation of data centre infrastructure technology,” said Stefanie Chiras, VP Power Systems at IBM.

“Our partnership with Nutanix will be designed to give our joint enterprise customers a scalable, resilient, high performance hyperconverged infrastructure solution, benefiting from the data and compute capabilities of the Power architecture and the one-click simplicity of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.”

According to a study from 451 Research in February, Nutanix was named the leading vendor for converged infrastructure, ahead of nearest rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Cisco. Comparing the two scores of ‘promise’ and ‘fulfilment’, Nutanix scored lower than HPE for the former, but higher for the latter.

The company’s 2016 paper on putting enterprise applications on hyperconverged infrastructure – available to download on this title – gives an intriguing insight into a ‘fundamentally different approach to enterprise application needs’.

“In the last few years, hyperconverged, web-scale infrastructure has emerged as a better alternative,” the paper notes. “Taking cues from web giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook, hyperconverged infrastructure combines x86-based compute and storage resources – including flash – with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that eliminate many of the pain points of deploying and managing IT infrastructure.”

The product will be sold exclusively through IBM sales and channel partners, with more specific details to be announced at the time of availability.

Read more: Enterprise cloud for dummies: Prepare your organisation for the new era of IT infrastructure (email required)

The analysts at Cloud Spectator have been assessing the best cloud vendors in Europe for price and performance, with French hosting provider OVH replacing 1&1 at the top of the rankings.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of Cloud Spectator’s shtick. The company analyses vCPU, memory, and block storage performance, and puts it alongside pricing to give an overall verdict. As a rule, the hypervendors – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, and IBM – often struggle.

In this analysis, with OVH given the benchmark default total of 100 out of 100, IBM SoftLayer finished dead last on 18, with AWS (23) and Azure (29) faring little better. Google, with a score of 61, was the best performing of the major vendors, although in fourth place overall, behind Rackspace.

Testing on the cloud providers – which also numbered DigitalOcean, CenturyLink and Dimension Data – took place in February and March, with more than one million data points collected. While 1&1, previously the leader in such tests, demonstrated the best combination of performance and high stability, OVH took the overall crown due to ‘strong VM performance and the most inexpensive packaged pricing found in the study for the majority of VM sizes’.

Previous research in February, which focused on the US infrastructure as a service space, warned enterprises were at risk of ‘significant’ overspend on cloud services. As with the European perspective, Google performed better than AWS, Azure and SoftLayer, but scoring only 48 with 1&1 as the leader.

“When making cloud purchase decisions, performance is a critical yet often overlooked component of the cloud, but can have a substantial impact on annual operating costs,” said Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator. “We have found no correlation between price and performance across the 10 providers included in this report.

“It is apparent that with the public cloud, you don’t always get what you pay for.”

You can read the full report here (registration required).

More than nine in 10 UK CIOs and IT decision makers polled by Trustmarque say they plan to migrate their on-premise apps to infrastructure, platform, and software as a service clouds within five years.

The study, which took the opinions of 200 CIOs and senior IT decision makers from enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, also found that public sector CIOs were more likely to move quickly compared to their private sector counterparts.

Not surprisingly, cost saving was the biggest benefit according to the respondents, cited by 61%, alongside scalability (60%), and improving their business ability to deliver projects and new requirements (51%).

Almost half (49%) said that retiring existing infrastructure was the primary driver of cloud migration, with more than half of CIOs saying the complexity of their existing infrastructure is slowing down their plans.

“CIOs and IT decision makers do clearly appreciate the benefits for their businesses from effective migration. However, many are wary of the potential pitfalls and challenges,” said James Butler, CTO of Trustmarque.

“Cloud-based models of IT delivery have a wide range of benefits that cannot be fully unlocked without transforming the architectural and IT organisation, which is never trivial,” he added. “Simple lift and shift projects are not enough to do that and may struggle to achieve a good return on investment.

“It’s vital customers put in place both the underpinning foundations for the new controls and operating models that are common across clouds, along with a holistic strategy that covers new innovation as well as the pre-existing IT estate.

“With those in place they can safely build and deliver the application roadmaps to move to the cloud.”  

Trustmarque has frequently gathered CIO opinion on cloud adoption. In January, a report found that more than half (55%) of UK CIOs saw out of date capex models as the reason for slowing down their adoption of cloud services.

The latest analysis of the global cloud infrastructure market from Canalys plays into the trends watchers of the industry have seen for some time: Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate but is growing more slowly than its nearest rivals.

AWS’ growth is still at 43% year over year according to Canalys, while Microsoft continues to be the quickest growing of the hypervendors at 93% growth. Google was up 74% year on year, while IBM held 38% growth. The result is that AWS holds a ‘stable’ market share of 31%.

“Competition for enterprise customers is intensifying among leading cloud service providers, which are investing heavily to secure key national and global accounts,” said Daniel Liu, Canalys research analyst.

“Timing is crucial, as many large accounts are assessing, formulating and executing strategies to move existing workloads and infrastructure to the cloud, and develop new types of workloads as part of digital transformation initiatives.”

The findings mirror similar analysis from Synergy Research on cloud infrastructure. Back in August, the company argued that AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google owned more than half of the cloud infrastructure market between them – but they were also growing quicker than the overall market.

Canalys also cites the channel as an opportunity for vendors to grow further and differentiate. “Go-to-market strategy, including both customer and channel partner engagement, will ultimately determine vendor success in this segment,” added Canalys senior analyst Jordan De Leon. “Larger enterprises will adopt a multi-cloud strategy to distribute risk.

“Ultimately, to challenge AWS, vendors will need deep financial resources to continue to participate and advance.”

Canalys says the overall cloud infrastructure services market hit $11.4 billion in Q117.

The DevOps landscape got something of a timely boost with a couple of recent pieces of news; open source software provider Puppet announced figures indicating ‘global momentum’ as well as product updates, while CyberArk secured the acquisition of Conjur for $42 million (£32.7m).

Puppet said Thursday that it had added more than 250 new enterprise customers over the past 12 months. The company added that more than 37,000 companies – including more than three quarters of the Fortune 100 – use its product in some capacity. New offices have also been opened in Singapore and Seattle, the latter as an R&D centre, as well as an updated facility in Sydney.

Product news includes updates to Puppet Enterprise, a new version of Open Source Puppet, as well as entirely new products which mark the first the company has brought to market since 2011. The two new products are Lumogon and Puppet Cloud Discovery, which aims to give enterprise IT teams greater insight into the services running across containerised applications and cloud infrastructure.

The company also revealed a series of new partner offerings for Enterprise. The cast list is pretty stellar, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco, Nutanix and VMware among the companies involved.

“Puppet’s momentum underscores the continued demand that we are experiencing from customers and organisations that need to improve agility, efficiency and reliability to support them through their DevOps and digital transformation journeys,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, president and CEO of Puppet in a statement.

According to research on DevOps salaries published by the company in August, IT manager salaries in the US had gone ‘off the chart’, with more than half of those respondents earning more than $100,000 per year. A report from Rackspace in June found practically all vacancies for cloud and DevOps skills – including Puppet – increasing in number over the past year.

Elsewhere, with the acquisition of Conjur, a provider of DevOps security software, CyberArk “uniquely empowers CIOs and CISOs to accelerate modern software development securely with the industry’s only enterprise class security solution that delivers comprehensive privileged account management and secrets protection”, in the words of the press materials.

Conjur was recently named as a ‘cool vendor’ in DevOps by analyst firm Gartner, in part due to its focus on protecting organisations from cyber attacks which have found their way through the network perimeter.

“While empowering organisations with more efficiency and speed, the DevOps process is also dramatically expanding the attack surface across the entire enterprise,” said Udi Mokady, CyberArk chairman and CEO in a statement. “CyberArk’s acquisition of Conjur further strengthens our market leadership position – providing the industry’s only enterprise-class solution for privileged account security and secrets management on premises, in the cloud and across the DevOps pipeline.”

Enterprises may be starting to move workloads to the cloud, but enterprise-owned data centres remain the ‘primary compute venue’ with workloads staying consistent over the past three years, according to new research from the Uptime Institute.

The study, which polled more than 1,000 data centre and IT professionals globally, argues that enterprises continue to see the data centre as ‘essential’ to their digital-centric strategies with the majority of budgets increasing or staying consistent through 2017.

Respondents reported that nearly two thirds of their IT assets were currently deployed in their own data centres. 22% were deployed in colocation or multi-tenant data centre providers, with only 13% deployed in the cloud.

Despite this, more than two thirds (68%) of companies polled say they rely on IT-based resiliency, relying on live application failover in case of an outage due to multiple, geographically distributed data centres. An overwhelming majority (90%) said their company’s management was more concerned around outages compared to this time last year.

“The survey findings reflect several key trends that are acting together as a powerful catalyst for change within the industry,” said Matt Stansberry, senior director of content and publications at Uptime Institute. “Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualisation, and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just five years ago. Through this change, enterprise-owned data centres have remained a central component.

“We urge data centre and IT professionals to focus on the business aspects of running their IT foundation, creating sets of repeatable processes to make it work efficiently and adopting new technologies and solutions when the business demands it,” added Stansberry.

You can find out more about the results here.

IBM claims it has the fastest cloud for deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) after publishing benchmark tests which show NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators on the IBM Cloud can provide up to 2.8 times more performance than the previous generation in certain cases.

The tests, when fleshed out, will enable organisations to quickly create advanced AI applications on the cloud. “Deep learning techniques are a key driver behind the increased demand for and sophistication of AI applications,” the company noted. “However, training a deep learning model to do a specific task is a compute-heavy process that can be time and cost-intensive.”

IBM purports to be the first of the large cloud providers to offer NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. Separate tests were carried out, first by IBM engineers and then by cloud simulation platform provider Rescale. For the IBM tests, engineers trained a deep learning model for image classification using two NVIDIA P100 cards on Bluemix bare metal, before comparing the same process to two Tesla K80 GPU cards.

The second performance benchmark, from Rescale, also picked up time reduction on deep learning training, based on its ScaleX platform, which features capabilities for deep learning software as a service (SaaS).

“Innovation in AI is happening at a breakneck speed thanks to advances in cloud computing,” said John Considine, IBM general manager for cloud infrastructure services in a statement. “As the first major cloud provider to offer the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU, IBM Cloud is providing enterprises with accelerated performance so they can quickly and more cost-effectively create sophisticated AI and cognitive experiences for their end users.”

Another cloud vendor utilising NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 GPU – although not of the same scale as IBM – is Tencent, who made the announcement back in March. As this publication noted at the time, virtually every major cloud player is an NVIDIA customer of some sort, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft.

You can find out more about the IBM tests here.

The latest OpenStack Summit has kicked off in Boston, with the Foundation naturally being tooled up with news and announcements for attendees.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, spoke of the ‘three Cs’ – capabilities, compliance, and cost – with organisations becoming more sophisticated in their approach to workload placement across public and private clouds.

Each of these Cs was exemplified by a company working with OpenStack in that area. GE Healthcare presented the benefits of their private cloud as a service in partnership with Rackspace for compliance, while the US Army Cyber School was cited for saving money through OpenStack. For capability, Verizon outlined how it was leveraging OpenStack for Virtual Network Solutions, a product which focuses on edge computing and the Internet of Things for compute, network, and storage.

The foundation also announced it had elected China Unicom and FiberHome Telecommunication technologies as gold members. The two companies both ‘demonstrate[d] OpenStack’s strategic value for networking and large-scale service providers’, the company said.

Recent headlines in the press have not been entirely kind to OpenStack. As reported by Fortune last month, Intel cut funding on an OpenStack initiative it launched alongside Rackspace, resulting in job losses for the latter.

Yesterday, Rackspace announced it was collaborating with Dell EMC to deliver OpenStack private clouds with the behemoth conglomerate providing the compute and storage side. Rackspace also took the opportunity to scotch the recent press cuttings in a blog post authored by Scott Crenshaw, SVP strategy and product.

“Clickbait headlines aside, the facts are clear: OpenStack deployments are growing,” he wrote. “It is becoming a standard cloud platform for corporations of all sizes, which are consistently growing their usage of OpenStack. That trend is [borne] out at Rackspace, where we’re seeing dramatic growth in our customers’ usage of OpenStack.”

Crenshaw cited a Forrester Research report from December last year which argued OpenStack had become a ‘de facto standard platform for the private cloud market’. While admitting the initiative had seen a couple of ‘false starts’, he added that those who were willing to take the plunge will reap rewards.

“OpenStack marks the point where open source infrastructure software became too complex to be delivered as traditional software distribution,” he wrote. “To successfully harness the power of open source innovation, the vast majority of users will consume open source infrastructure as a service, which is, after all, the way cloud was meant to be used.

“Some of the vendors who haven’t crossed this chasm are indeed exiting the OpenStack business. Rackspace’s billion server hours of OpenStack operational experience is probably an insurmountable lead,” Crenshaw added.

The negative headlines came amid a recent user survey from the foundation which said OpenStack was capturing 44% more deployments and input from 22% more organisations than one year previously. “Far from being in danger of demise, OpenStack has become the catalyst for a rich and vital transformation in the way the world consumes open source infrastructure,” said Crenshaw.

You can read the full Rackspace post here.

Oracle and AT&T have announced a strategic agreement whereby the telco will move thousands of its large scale internal databases to Oracle’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), the companies have announced.

AT&T will gain global access to Oracle’s cloud portfolio, both in the public cloud and on AT&T’s Integrated Cloud, to include Oracle’s IaaS, PaaS, database as a service, and software as a service. This will help ‘increase productivity, reduce IT costs and enable AT&T to gain new flexibility in how it implements SaaS applications across its global enterprise’, Oracle added.

“This is an historic agreement,” said Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle in a statement. “The Oracle Cloud will enable AT&T to use Oracle technology more efficiently across every layer of the technology stack. This includes AT&T’s massive redeployment of Oracle databases, which will be provisioned entirely from the Oracle Cloud Platform including our highly cost effective Exadata as a Service.”

AT&T partners with other cloud companies outside of Oracle. CEO Randall Stephenson took to the stage at IBM’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas back in March, arguing the importance of the Armonk firm’s ‘enterprise strong’ cloud message. “I don’t believe we’re more than three or four years away from being indistinguishable from the ‘data cloud’ to the ‘network cloud’…we’re riding off what you guys are doing,” he said.

The company also renewed its vows with Amazon Web Services (AWS) last October to ‘help both existing and new customers more efficiently migrate to and utilise the AWS cloud with the AT&T network’.

This announcement can also be analysed in the context of Verizon selling its cloud and managed hosting services arm to IBM earlier this week. While the companies described it as ‘a unique cooperation between two tech leaders’, others saw it differently, with John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, noting last year when Verizon shut down part of its cloud service, that “telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud.”