As more and more traditionally slower-moving industries start to move their resources to the cloud, an interesting note from Evolve IP: healthcare IT professionals believe their data is safer in the cloud than on-premises when faced with a hardware issue or environmental disaster.

The report, which surveyed 180 healthcare professionals, found that for environmental disasters, 61% of respondents felt their information was safest in a private cloud, compared to 27.5% for a private cloud and 11.5% on premise, while for malicious attacks and hardware malfunctions 58.5% each also preferred a private cloud. Interestingly, for attacks on premise (32%) was significantly the second most popular option.

Healthcare organisations have on average between two and three services in the cloud with data backup, servers and data centres being the most widely deployed services. 85% of all organisations polled said they had at least one service in the cloud, while more than four in five respondents (81%) say they plan on adding new or additional cloud services in the next three years.

The research also found that rollouts had not been a universal success, however. Almost two in five said they had deployed a cloud solution on their own as opposed to using a third party provider – lower than the figure for all industries – with a third (32.5%) admitting they would outsource to a solution provider given the chance next time.

One of the key elements for healthcare organisations moving to the cloud is HIPAA accreditation; 85% of respondents said they were aligned with HIPAA requirements, with a further 32% also citing PCI (payment card industry) compliance.

Writing for this publication last year, Karin Ratchinsky, director of vertical marketing strategy at Level 3 Communications – since acquired by CenturyLink – argued that while using cloud-based technologies for back end functions was steadily rising, the use cases elsewhere were similarly important. “Healthcare leaders want to funnel capital into cash flow-generating activities that allow them to deliver improved outcomes,” Ratchinsky wrote.

“Cloud computing lets healthcare organisations focus on healthcare rather than data centres, digital real estate to house them, and skilled professionals to maintain and operate them.”

(c)iStock.com/tupungato

Deloitte has announced the acquisition of Day1 Solutions, a cloud consulting business, to expand its options and accelerate clients’ digital transformation.

The consulting giant is also adding 3,000 new US-based high tech engineering jobs, as well as opening a series of cloud studios in Orlando, New York, and Washington D.C.

Day1 Solutions is a certified Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, and its website now links to Deloitte’s cloud page. “Day1 Solutions’ customer base extends across commercial industries and government agencies, with significant success in the public sector,” Deloitte notes. “Their entrepreneurial spirit and high energy will help Deloitte reimagine how technology is delivered.”

Deloitte has frequently written about and released reports on the strength of the cloud ecosystem. The company’s 2015 report showed cloud computing was the strongest technology investment sector for the third year running, with an overall score of 4.18 out of 5 among venture capitalists polled, ahead of mobile (4.05) and the Internet of Things (3.95). In September, Deloitte reiterated its view that cloud infrastructure, big data and analytics were among the top technologies most likely to generate greater productivity.

“Cloud is the backbone of innovation and a conduit for clients to reimagine how they do business. For years, we’ve helped our clients view cloud integration as a critical driver for business transformation,” said Ranjit Bawa, principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP in a statement.

“By adding these significant investments to our portfolio, our clients will have access to deeper cloud expertise and even more innovative capabilities, as well as the talent they need to help them thrive in a fast-moving digital economy.”

“At the end of the day, our commitment to clients is to harness the power of cloud to accelerate their digital transformation,” added Luis Benavides, founder and CEO of Day1.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Tencent’s cloud computing services will be beefed up with GPU accelerators from NVIDIA to ‘help advance artificial intelligence for enterprise customers’, the companies have announced.

The collaboration will include plugging Tencent’s cloud into NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture to connect multiple GPUs, as well as offering services incorporating Tesla P100, P40 and M40 GPU accelerators.

In other words, this means companies on Tencent’s cloud will be able to harness features such as facial recognition, machine learning and natural language processing through combining a more traditional CPU with a graphics processing unit. “GPU accelerators now power energy-efficient data centres in government labs, universities, enterprises, and small-and-medium businesses around the world,” NVIDIA notes. “They play a huge role in accelerating applications in platforms ranging from artificial intelligence to cars, drones and robots.”

NVIDIA added that during the first half of this year the servers will integrate up to eight GPU accelerators. The two companies’ collaboration goes as far back as December, launching GPU servers based on NVIDIA’s Tesla M40 GPUS and deep learning software last year.

“Tencent Cloud GPU offerings with NVIDIA’s deep learning platform will help companies in China rapidly integrate AI capabilities into their products and services,” said Tencent Cloud vice president Sam Xie in a statement. “Our customers will gain greater computing flexibility and power, giving them a powerful competitive advantage.”

If you want souped-up GPU goodness, then NVIDIA is the best place to go. Pretty much every major cloud player, as Karl Freund notes in Forbes, is utilising ‘GPUs as a service’. Take Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example; at the higher end of its broad spectrum of capabilities on its cloud are P2 instances, launched in September last year for general purpose GPUs, with NVIDIA at the heart of it. Microsoft, Google and IBM – the rest of the ‘big four’ in cloud infrastructure – are also customers.

A report from Kantar Millward Brown earlier this month put Tencent as the most valuable brand in China, while a note from Gartner argued the country’s overall digital skills shortage could partly be attributed to the biggest companies hoovering up all the talent, citing Tencent with Baidu and Alibaba specifically.

An ‘enormous’ opportunity is afoot for cloud companies as more organisations move towards implementing hybrid cloud and managed services, according to a new study from Microsoft.

The report – which was conducted in association with 451 Research and which comes in at a whopping 127 pages – polled more than 1700 respondents in 10 geographies, and found that almost two thirds (62%) of overall cloud and hosting infrastructure spend comes bundled with value-added services. When it came to managed infrastructure spending, just over half (54%) was on managed and security services, as opposed to 46% on the basic infrastructure.

Not entirely surprisingly given the sponsor of the study, Microsoft came out on top for public cloud providers as part of hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Azure was cited by 61% of respondents, ahead of Google (53%), AWS (46%), IBM SoftLayer (43%) and VMware (33%). Interestingly, 86% of those polled in MEA (Middle East and Africa) are Google houses – albeit with only 14 respondents.

For cloud deployment interoperability, the most popular option, cited by 64% of respondents, was an ‘on-premise private cloud with a hosted private cloud’. Expanding a little further, 57% opted for on-prem private cloud with public cloud, 55% with a hosted private cloud with public cloud, and 49% with two separate public cloud or IaaS platforms.

When it came to adoption drivers of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, flexibility and choice won out, cited by almost two thirds (64%) of overall respondents, ahead of extending IT’s resource capability for existing on-prem infrastructure (56%) and maximising return on existing on-prem investments (56%).

Naturally, Microsoft looks at the potential of the landscape and offers that it is ‘uniquely positioned’ to help customers with their critical managed service needs, as Aziz Benmalek, Microsoft VP of worldwide hosting and managed service providers put it in a blog post. Yet the stats show potential across the wider industry in general.

“More than ever before, customers are looking to a single trusted advisor to provide transformation-oriented managed services and hybrid implementation,” said Melanie Posey, 451 Research vice president. “Customers are looking to service providers to not only transform IT but also transform their entire business – to rewire the building and support new requirements, all while keeping the lights on.”

You can take a look at the full report here (email required).  

Adobe and Microsoft have announced the first set of joint solutions to ‘help enterprises transform their customer experiences’, with Adobe’s Experience Cloud combining alongside Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power BI products.

Those with good memories will recall an announcement made last September which confirmed Azure would become the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s marketing, creative and document clouds, with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud doing similarly for Dynamics 365 Enterprise, Microsoft’s enterprise resource planning offering.

Adobe said this latest change builds on the previous partnership. “Bringing together Adobe’s and Microsoft’s sales, marketing and customer intelligence solutions enables brands to better understand and engage with their customers across all touch points,” said Abhay Parasnis, Adobe EVP and CTO.

What this means in terms of product is a combined Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Power BI for the enterprise audience, an integration between Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for marketing teams trying to create a single customer view, and the concisely named Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service – web content management, in other words – available on Azure.

“We believe the combined power of our technologies will allow enterprise businesses to harness their data in new ways, unlocking critical business insights and actionable intelligence,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft EVP in a statement. “Together, we are delivering compelling and personalised experiences that will drive brand loyalty and growth.”

In addition, Adobe unveiled a series of enhancements to its Cloud Platform product, including a new common data language, XDM, quicker time to market for developers with Launch, and partner integrations with Acxiom, AppDynamics, MasterCard, and more.

The press release summed it up nicely. “Advancements in cloud services have fundamentally altered the computing landscape. The next decade will bring even more disruptive changes in how brands create, immerse and engage their customers in their experiences,” it offered. “A modern experience platform that addresses these expectations needs to be designed with a common data language founded on content and data, an open ecosystem to enable others to build on and innovate, and intelligence at its core with AI, machine learning and deep learning.”

Picture credit: Adobe

The good news: enterprises are beginning to use technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and containers in production scenarios. Yet according to a new study from Dimension Data, management of hybrid IT environments remains a key challenge with automation the key.

The report, which polled 1,500 IT decision makers across four continents, found different motivators by region for utilising hybrid IT – defined here as ‘the usage of multiple deployment models to deliver a single workload or application as part of their data centre and cloud strategies’ – from end-user demand in the UK, US and Hong Kong, to cost for respondents in France, Singapore and South Africa.

Almost half of respondents (48%) said their migration processes were manual – and labour-intensive as a result – while 38% said they use automation for quicker application migration. “Hybrid IT is a becoming a standard enterprise model, but there’s no single playbook to get there,” the company warns.

44% of respondents said they found it challenging to migrate workloads to new locations, as well as assessing which option was best for a particular workload.

“With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, a new approach to management is called for,” said Jason Goodall, Dimension Data group CEO. “IT managers are under tremendous pressure to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments in an effective manner.

“Automation is important because it helps reduce the operating costs, as well as the pain caused by the growing complexity of business processes and management tasks,” Goodall added. “It is simply no longer appropriate or cost-effective for these tasks to be done manually.”

Speaking to this publication this time last year, Michael Allen, VP EMEA at digital performance monitoring provider Dynatrace, said “very few enterprises” were actively doing SDN and software defined data centres, but many were “looking at it.” From this research, it would appear small steps are at least being made.

“You need innovations that are going to continue to come out, and you need a cloud that will keep taking them on,” Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, told attendees at the Armonk giant’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas. “There’s a long pipeline coming, and that’s what an enterprise cloud does – it embraces that.”

Chief among this pipeline is blockchain and quantum computing, with IBM’s recent announcements playing into these trends in a serious way. Earlier this week, IBM unveiled its ‘blockchain as a service’ offering, while a new API for its Quantum Experience program – enabling developers to build interfaces between its cloud-based quantum computers and classical equivalents – arrived earlier this month.

Rometty spoke of the three key tenets of IBM’s cloud; being ‘enterprise strong’, ‘data first’, and ‘cognitive at its core’. “You’ve got to be more secure than on-prem and have a very solid roadmap and pipeline of innovation for the future,” the IBM chief exec explained. Being enterprise strong, Rometty added, was not just about geography – albeit in the same breath reiterating the recent move with Wanda to enter the Chinese cloud market – but data sovereignty and industry.

IBM’s moves in blockchain, for a technology in the midst of hype, have touched on a plethora of industries, from tackling food safety with Walmart, to the supply chain with Maersk. The total is some 400 projects. “I believe blockchain will do for trusted transactions what the internet has done for information,” Rometty said. “You can exchange anything in a safe and secure way.” As far as quantum computing was concerned, Rometty described that as going to a ‘new era of business, doing things you’ve never done, [and] solving problems you never knew you had.’

The announcements made yesterday were varied and vast; 19 in total on March 20. Among the highlights on the cloud side were collaborations with Veritas and Red Hat on data management and hybrid cloud adoption respectively, as well as additions to its Cloud Object Storage family and IBM Cloud Integration, which aims to ‘solve the integration challenge of bringing together enterprise data and applications across on-premises, private and public cloud environments’.

Naturally, friends and partners joined Rometty on stage. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce discussed the rising tide of artificial intelligence (AI); not especially surprising given IBM and Salesforce’s recent partnership to combine their Watson and Einstein systems respectively.

“Artificial intelligence is something we’ve all dreamed about, but when you look at things like machine learning, machine intelligence, things like deep learning, there’s an acceleration going on,” he said. “It’s honestly surprised me – I can’t believe how fast artificial intelligence is evolving and changing.”

Benioff used the example of elevator engineering firm KONE in how IBM and Salesforce are interacting; with every elevator and escalator being connected, Watson looks at predicted fail rates while the CRM side of Salesforce can put it all in a package and roll a service truck to fix issues in real time. “That’s a real big shift in how business operates,” said Benioff.

Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, noted Rometty’s ‘enterprise strong’ element of IBM cloud, adding that the telco was now pushing cloud technologies into the very core of its network. “I don’t believe we’re more than three or four years away from being indistinguishable from the ‘data cloud’ to the ‘network cloud’,” he said. “We’re riding off what you guys are doing.”

Above all, however, Rometty gave this piece of advice to attendees. “Our job is to really help prepare you for what you will become,” said Rometty. “I think you will become cognitive…it will be in your applications, your processes, and you will become a cognitive enterprise; and that’s what will separate the winners and losers.”

Postscript: Stephenson suffered a noteworthy slip of the tongue when mentioning the proposed acquisition of Time Warner, instead saying rival T-Mobile. “I’ll get a Trump tweet now, won’t I?” he joked.

The Dell-EMC mega-merger is starting to bear significant fruit: according to the latest analysis from Synergy Research, which shows a three-way tie alongside Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) at the top of the cloud infrastructure equipment market.

With the overall revenues for cloud infrastructure equipment surpassing $70 billion in 2016 – or in other words, about $3 billion more than Dell shelled out for EMC, VMware et al – Dell’s stock has risen considerably since 2016’s second quarter, with Cisco and HPE suffering slight dips in market share.

Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualisation software made up fully 95% of the overall market, with the remainder comprising cloud security and management. As readers of this publication will be aware, Cisco rules the roost when it comes to networking, while HPE has a clear lead in cloud servers. Dell EMC has the lead on storage, with Microsoft featuring heavily due to server OS and virtualisation and IBM ‘maintaining a strong position across a range of cloud technology markets’, Synergy added.

The previous quarter’s analysis, issued in December, saw HPE just ahead of Cisco with Dell EMC catching up fast behind.

“While spend on cloud services and infrastructure is already huge it is still relatively early days in the transition of enterprise workloads to the cloud,” said John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy. “That means that success in the cloud infrastructure market is vitally important to IT vendors and they will be fighting long and hard to maximise their market shares.”

The move from Dell to acquire EMC, first announced in October 2015, had mixed critical reaction at the time; one Wired article infamously described the two companies, alongside the likes of HP, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle, as “the walking dead”. With the deal officially finalised in September 2016, the company hopes its hardware and software ‘will power customers’ traditional data centres and act as the backbone to various private or hybrid cloud computing scenarios’, as Fortune puts it, with hyper-converged and software-defined at the forefront.

CIOs are preferring hybrid cloud models with security the primary motivation for adoption, according to a new study from NetApp.

The research, which polled 750 CIOs and IT managers in France, Germany and the UK, saw more than half of respondents in each country saying they use a combination of private and public cloud. Germany came out on top with 69%, compared with France (61%) and UK (58%). In terms of partner options, local service providers are the most popular, cited by a combined 26% of respondents, ahead of larger cloud service providers (18%) and global system integrators (17%).

56% of base respondents say security is the key motivation for cloud adoption, ahead of flexibility (55%) and cost savings (54%). For individual results, 61% of French respondents chose ease of use, while 53% in Germany cite data protection.

When it came to specific workloads, it was the usual routine on the whole. 60% of German respondents cite file storage compared with 56% for the UK and 53% for France. The study noted a wide variety of other workloads, from remote working, collaboration tools, analysis, and disaster recovery.

Only 3% of respondents say they are not using any cloud services, or are still in the gestation stage.

“Enterprises need to be able to choose which workloads belong in the cloud and choose the best partners to move them across a hybrid landscape,” said Martin Warren, NetApp cloud solutions marketing manager EMEA. “They need to have visibility into cost, performance and data placement to make informed business and regulatory decisions across the full data lifecycle. And they want to harness every advantage of cloud economics – from new ideas to concepts to production. We have strong solutions and strategies to deliver all of this.”

Writing for this publication last month, David H Deans noted the importance of the ‘torchbearer’ CIO when it came to hybrid IT and business models. “Torchbearer CIOs place far more emphasis on building an agile organisational culture – one that supports rapid software developer experimentation and IT services prototyping – to help their team reach the market first with innovative new offerings,” Deans wrote.

“In addition, the torchbearer CIOs are eager to form partnerships that exploit the full potential of digital business technologies. They recognise that few enterprises can provide the full array of products, services and experiences that their stakeholders need and want.”

When Larry Ellison moved from the CEO to the CTO chair at Oracle in 2014, he joked with analysts that “you’re going to have to wait a little while longer” before he disappears from the quarterly conference calls.

Fast forward two and a half years to the most recent Q317, and Ellison has explained how ‘generation two’ of Oracle’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering has the beating of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the rest.

Oracle posted total revenues of $9.2 billion for its most recent quarter, with total cloud revenues including infrastructure as a service at $1.2bn and total cloud and on-prem software at $7.4bn.

“Let’s say, generation two of Oracle’s infrastructure as [a] service cloud now has the ability to run customers’ largest databases, something that is impossible to do using Amazon Web Services,” said Ellison, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Many Oracle workloads now run 10 times faster in the Oracle cloud versus the Amazon cloud. It also costs less to run Oracle workloads in the Oracle cloud than the Amazon cloud.”

Meanwhile, co-CEO Mark Hurd’s quotes in the press materials had another target in mind. “Over the last year, we sold more new SaaS and PaaS than Salesforce.com, and we’re growing more than three times faster,” he said in a statement. “If these trends continue, where we are selling more SaaS and PaaS in absolute dollars and growing dramatically faster, it’s just a matter of when we catch and pass Salesforce.com in total cloud revenue.”

Bearing in mind that Oracle’s first billion-dollar-busting cloud revenue quarter was, well, last quarter, and Salesforce’s first billion-dollar quarter was in 2013, it’s an ambitious goal.

This level of rhetoric is not quite at the level of September last year, when Ellison proclaimed Amazon’s lead was ‘over’ when announcing its next generation data centres, which offered twice as many cores, twice as much memory, four times as much storage, and 10 times the IO capacity of AWS’ offerings.

“Fast growth in the infrastructure as a service business is new for us,” said Ellison. “We’ve done well on SaaS and in PaaS over the past few years, but this is the first time we’ve ever had a technology lead in infrastructure as a service.”

According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, IaaS and PaaS are the highest growing markets as operator and vendor revenues across the main cloud services and infrastructure market segments hit $148 billion in 2016.

For enterprise software as a service, Microsoft leads Salesforce with Oracle and Google having the highest growth rates. For cloud infrastructure, Synergy puts AWS in one bucket – its lead continuing to be so vast – with Microsoft, Google and IBM in the second bucket and the next 10 companies, including Oracle, in bucket three, albeit with a note saying the Redwood firm continues to grow at an ‘impressive’ rate.

“In summary, all of Oracle’s cloud businesses are growing rapidly and IaaS will be leading the way in the future,” Ellison added.