Quali, a company which specialises in providing cloud and DevOps automation software, took to a variety of US industry events during 2016 to ask attendees about their DevOps practices and the challenges they face. The verdict: almost half of applications in traditional environments were considered complex for cloud, while the current vendor ecosystem is open-ended with no main player winning out.

This makes for something of a refreshing change when compared to the majority of such studies which hit this reporter’s inbox; attendees at event x are most interested in technology y which just so happens to be linked to event x, and so on. Quali put together responses from more than 2,000 IT executives at Cisco Live, VMWorld, AWS re:Invent and more, finding that plenty of integration challenges remain.

The goal is clear. Quali cites a Forrester Research report, Master DevOps For Faster Delivery Of Software Innovation, in which the author, Diego Lo Giudice, explained: “For many companies, staying ahead of disruption means not only delivering new innovations but also modernising current software and systems. The underlying cultural shifts, process improvements, and automation of DevOps build the foundation for development teams to mature to the next generation of modern software development.”

Yet more than half (54%) of respondents said they had no access to self-service infrastructure, impacting productivity and increasing time to market, while more than a third said it takes up to a month to deliver infrastructure. Jenkins was the most frequently cited tool among those polled with 21% of the vote, ahead of Docker (16%), Puppet (14%) and Chef (13%).  

When it came to challenges of integrating DevOps environments, existing company culture (14%) won it by a nose, ahead of testing automation (13%), legacy systems (12%), application complexity (11%) and budget constraints (11%). Regarding hybrid cloud environments, those who have gone down that path are only adopting 23% of their apps on a hybrid cloud platform on average. Two thirds (65%) are running fewer than 24 applications in hybrid environments.

In the context of other research reports, these figures make sense. In January, B2B research firm Clutch set out to get a definitive answer to what DevOps means for organisations and how it is being implemented and, well, didn’t. 95% of the 250 organisations polled then either already use or plan to use DevOps methodologies, but nobody could agree on a proper definition.

The cultural aspect has also been mused upon by this publication. Writing last year, David Auslander noted the importance of the tenet that ‘sometimes the greatest change in the enterprise comes from non-technical places’, adding: “While we are implementing cloud environments, common code repositories, agile development practices and infrastructure as code, we need to keep in mind that the cultural aspects of DevOps implementation are just as important, if not more so.”

“What stood out most to us were some of the barriers around DevOps including culture, test automation and integration of legacy investments,” said Shashi Kiran, Quali chief marketing officer. “These issues are consistent with patterns we’re seeing every day.”

Read more: If you can’t take your lab to the cloud – bring your cloud to the lab

“Cloud is just an incredibly cool place to be working right now – it’s where a lot of the digital revolution for every industry is going on.”

So began Diane Greene, Google’s cloud SVP to launch the company’s Next conference in San Francisco. But aside from the hype, industry commentators have argued that this was the week in which Google’s enterprise cloud offering came of age. With new customers including Colgate-Palmolive, eBay and Verizon, and existing customers such as Disney and Home Depot seeing better than expected returns, they’re not wrong.

To borrow a line from Eric Knorr, writing for InfoWorld, and with the greatest of respect to the following two companies, there is a difference between tech firms such as Evernote and Snapchat – the former being announced as big news in September last year, the latter for so long being Google’s cloudy poster child – and genuine, real McCoy enterprises. Verizon ranks at #13 on the most recent Fortune 500. Colgate-Palmolive is at #174, with eBay at #300.

The stats were fascinating. In just over three months on moving to Google’s cloud, Colgate saw 90% of its almost 40,000 employees were collaborating on Google Drive, with 57,000 hours of video hangouts clocked up in February alone. Verizon has rolled out G Suite to more than 150,000 enterprises.

Alin D’Silva, VP and CTO digital workplace at Verizon, said that the trial process allayed any deep-seated trepidation around cloud, while the importance of real-time collaboration and the fact that employees in Verizon companies AOL and Telogis were already there helped seal the deal. “We also realised that we had to skate to where the puck is going,” he told delegates. “As the years pass, the talent that comes in to the company is going to expect a product like this.”

Another customer wheeled out onto the stage was HSBC. Darryl West, the bank’s CIO (above), said the company ‘took the plunge’ into the evolving Hadoop ecosystem three years and admitted it was a ‘tough road’ in some places. “Apart from having the $2.4 trillion of assets on the balance sheet, we also have at the core of the company a massive asset in our data, and what’s been happening in the last two to three years is a massive growth in the size of our data assets,” he said.

This translated to a somewhat out of date slide being beamed to attendees. The true volume of data at HSBC today, West explained, was more than 100 petabytes. With great data comes great insight, but only if you can get the right people working on it. “What we need to do as a bank is work with partners and enable us to understand what’s happening with this data, draw out the insights so we can run a better business and create some amazing customer experiences,” said West.

So those are the customer stories – what about the product? This publication has already covered the partnership with Rackspace for managed services, but also announced was a deal with SAP, principally to feature SAP HANA running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) was a key point during the keynote – Mike White, CTO and SVP at Disney frequently cited it as key in both retail and character development – and was mentioned again here with the SAP partnership. “Google and SAP intend to collaborate on building machine learning features into intelligent applications like conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows and transactions,” Nan Boden, Google Cloud head of global technology partners wrote in a blog post.

“This is just one example of how the Google Cloud and SAP partnership will enable digital business transformation using the power of machine learning, with deeper technology integrations to come.”

Plenty of other product news was bundled in elsewhere. Among the highlights were greater integrations with Google App Engine to include Node.js, Ruby, Java 8, Python and Go – “bring your code, we’ll handle the rest” – as well as a new service for BigQuery, automating data movement from certain Google applications directly into the analytics warehouse.

GCP will also be opening up new regions in California, Montreal and the Netherlands, bringing the total up to 17 locations in the future with the usual tenets of lower latency, increased scalability and greater disaster recovery promised.

You can find out more about the product announcements here and the SAP partnership here.

“Cloud is just an incredibly cool place to be working right now – it’s where a lot of the digital revolution for every industry is going on.”

So began Diane Greene, Google’s cloud SVP to launch the company’s Next conference in San Francisco. But aside from the hype, industry commentators have argued that this was the week in which Google’s enterprise cloud offering came of age. With new customers including Colgate-Palmolive, eBay and Verizon, and existing customers such as Disney and Home Depot seeing better than expected returns, they’re not wrong.

To borrow a line from Eric Knorr, writing for InfoWorld, and with the greatest of respect to the following two companies, there is a difference between tech firms such as Evernote and Snapchat – the former being announced as big news in September last year, the latter for so long being Google’s cloudy poster child – and genuine, real McCoy enterprises. Verizon ranks at #13 on the most recent Fortune 500. Colgate-Palmolive is at #174, with eBay at #300.

The stats were fascinating. In just over three months on moving to Google’s cloud, Colgate saw 90% of its almost 40,000 employees were collaborating on Google Drive, with 57,000 hours of video hangouts clocked up in February alone. Verizon has rolled out G Suite to more than 150,000 enterprises.

Alin D’Silva, VP and CTO digital workplace at Verizon, said that the trial process allayed any deep-seated trepidation around cloud, while the importance of real-time collaboration and the fact that employees in Verizon companies AOL and Telogis were already there helped seal the deal. “We also realised that we had to skate to where the puck is going,” he told delegates. “As the years pass, the talent that comes in to the company is going to expect a product like this.”

Another customer wheeled out onto the stage was HSBC. Darryl West, the bank’s CIO (above), said the company ‘took the plunge’ into the evolving Hadoop ecosystem three years ago and admitted it was a ‘tough road’ in some places. “Apart from having the $2.4 trillion of assets on the balance sheet, we also have at the core of the company a massive asset in our data, and what’s been happening in the last two to three years is a massive growth in the size of our data assets,” he said.

This translated to a somewhat out of date slide being beamed to attendees. The true volume of data at HSBC today, West explained, was more than 100 petabytes. With great data comes great insight, but only if you can get the right people working on it. “What we need to do as a bank is work with partners and enable us to understand what’s happening with this data, draw out the insights so we can run a better business and create some amazing customer experiences,” said West.

So those are the customer stories – what about the product? This publication has already covered the partnership with Rackspace for managed services, but also announced was a deal with SAP, principally to feature SAP HANA running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) was a key point during the keynote – Mike White, CTO and SVP at Disney frequently cited it as key in both retail and character development – and was mentioned again here with the SAP partnership. “Google and SAP intend to collaborate on building machine learning features into intelligent applications like conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows and transactions,” Nan Boden, Google Cloud head of global technology partners wrote in a blog post.

“This is just one example of how the Google Cloud and SAP partnership will enable digital business transformation using the power of machine learning, with deeper technology integrations to come.”

Plenty of other product news was bundled in elsewhere. Among the highlights were greater integrations with Google App Engine to include Node.js, Ruby, Java 8, Python and Go – “bring your code, we’ll handle the rest” – as well as a new service for BigQuery, automating data movement from certain Google applications directly into the analytics warehouse.

GCP will also be opening up new regions in California, Montreal and the Netherlands, bringing the total up to 17 locations in the future with the usual tenets of lower latency, increased scalability and greater disaster recovery promised.

You can find out more about the product announcements here and the SAP partnership here.

Even though software as a service (SaaS) is more mature than its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) brethren – and therefore at a lower growth rate – new figures from Synergy Research show that Microsoft leads the ‘burgeoning’ market ahead of Salesforce, with Oracle and Google having the highest growth rates.

Despite the relatively low growth forecast, Synergy argues that the enterprise SaaS market is expected to double in size over the next three years with ‘strong’ growth across all segments and regions.

ERP, with SAP, Oracle and Infor at its top, will have the highest growth rate with almost 40% year on year revenue growth, ahead of collaboration – headed up by Microsoft, Cisco and Google – HR, and CRM, with the latter going at a mere 20% yearly growth. The overall market, the analyst firm argues, hit almost $13 billion in quarterly revenues.

“There are a variety of factors driving the SaaS market which will guarantee substantial growth for many years to come,” said Synergy research director John Dinsdale. “Traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM are all pushing to convert their huge base of on-premise software customers to a SaaS subscription relationship; meanwhile, relatively new cloud-based vendors like Workday and Zendesk are aggressively targeting the enterprise market, and industry giants Microsoft and Google are on a charge to grow their subscriber bases, especially in the collaboration market.”

An example of the former was SAP’s announcement around a ‘new generation of intelligent cloud ERP’ last month which aims to help customers adopt business processes based on real-time insights through artificial intelligence (AI). Part of Oracle’s aggressive growth came in the form of acquiring NetSuite, announced in July last year and completed in November. At the time, Dinsdale told this publication that while the deal would naturally strengthen Oracle’s offering in ERP SaaS, it would also boost its CRM status, although remaining a ‘long way’ behind Salesforce and Microsoft.

Even though software as a service (SaaS) is more mature than its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) brethren – and therefore at a lower growth rate – new figures from Synergy Research show that Microsoft leads the ‘burgeoning’ market ahead of Salesforce, with Oracle and Google having the highest growth rates.

Despite the relatively low growth forecast, Synergy argues that the enterprise SaaS market is expected to double in size over the next three years with ‘strong’ growth across all segments and regions.

ERP, with SAP, Oracle and Infor at its top, will have the highest growth rate with almost 40% year on year revenue growth, ahead of collaboration – headed up by Microsoft, Cisco and Google – HR, and CRM, with the latter going at a mere 20% yearly growth. The overall market, the analyst firm argues, hit almost $13 billion in quarterly revenues.

“There are a variety of factors driving the SaaS market which will guarantee substantial growth for many years to come,” said Synergy research director John Dinsdale. “Traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM are all pushing to convert their huge base of on-premise software customers to a SaaS subscription relationship; meanwhile, relatively new cloud-based vendors like Workday and Zendesk are aggressively targeting the enterprise market, and industry giants Microsoft and Google are on a charge to grow their subscriber bases, especially in the collaboration market.”

An example of the former was SAP’s announcement around a ‘new generation of intelligent cloud ERP’ last month which aims to help customers adopt business processes based on real-time insights through artificial intelligence (AI). Part of Oracle’s aggressive growth came in the form of acquiring NetSuite, announced in July last year and completed in November. At the time, Dinsdale told this publication that while the deal would naturally strengthen Oracle’s offering in ERP SaaS, it would also boost its CRM status, although remaining a ‘long way’ behind Salesforce and Microsoft.

Rackspace has announced a partnership with Google Cloud to become its first managed services support partner.

The news, revealed at the time of Google’s Cloud Next event in San Francisco, represents an alignment between the two companies’ ‘obsession’ with customer service and support, Rackspace said. The two companies will collaborate on a new managed services offering for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers which will be made available later this year.

Rackspace already has extensive managed services capabilities for both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – so with Google the next cab off the rank it makes a natural step up. “The momentum around GCP is building, and as businesses move workloads to this platform, they’re looking for expertise and a support partner to help with that journey,” said Patrick Lee, Rackspace Google business general manager. “We will be able to help deliver value to joint customers and help them meet their evolving business needs.”

According to figures from 451 Research, adoption of Google’s cloud has ‘nearly doubled’ over the past 12 months. “The partnership between Rackspace and Google is a natural fit,” Michelle Bailey, chief research officer at 451 Research said in a statement. “Both companies have strong technical capabilities and the pairing of Rackspace’s strong service culture with Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering practice is an important step forward in providing enterprise-ready customer support capabilities on the Google Cloud Platform.

“We continue to see rising adoption of GCP globally, so there is real value to Rackspace in being the first to market with this type of managed services partnership that seeks to bring cloud-native capabilities to traditional enterprise customers and business-critical applications,” Bailey added.

In Rackspace’s Q216 results in August – the last before it became a private company with a $4.3 billion transaction from Apollo Global – CEO Taylor Rhodes said the firm had seen ‘strong demand’ for AWS cloud customers, alongside Microsoft and the OpenStack private cloud. The company noted 277 customers acquired on its AWS service over the previous nine months, with 60% of these choosing the higher tier managed services option.

“We plan to launch a bold marketing campaign to tell the world about the value we can deliver as the number one managed cloud services provider,” Rhodes told analysts in August, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Businesses today are being told that the cloud is simple, that it’s easy to manage on your own, and that whatever the platform the vendor is selling or supporting is the complete solution for every workload.

“What these businesses are learning, however, is that different workloads require different platforms across public cloud, private cloud and dedicated servers,” added Rhodes. “They are finding that the cloud is complex and fast changing, that they need help in managing it and that expert engineers are expensive and hard to find.”

According to industry figures from Synergy Research, AWS continues to hold 40% of the global public cloud infrastructure space – a minimal change from last year – while Microsoft, Google and IBM went up 5% to break the 20% threshold between them.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Rackspace has announced a partnership with Google Cloud to become its first managed services support partner.

The news, revealed at the time of Google’s Cloud Next event in San Francisco, represents an alignment between the two companies’ ‘obsession’ with customer service and support, Rackspace said. The two companies will collaborate on a new managed services offering for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers which will be made available later this year.

Rackspace already has extensive managed services capabilities for both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – so with Google the next cab off the rank it makes a natural step up. “The momentum around GCP is building, and as businesses move workloads to this platform, they’re looking for expertise and a support partner to help with that journey,” said Patrick Lee, Rackspace Google business general manager. “We will be able to help deliver value to joint customers and help them meet their evolving business needs.”

According to figures from 451 Research, adoption of Google’s cloud has ‘nearly doubled’ over the past 12 months. “The partnership between Rackspace and Google is a natural fit,” Michelle Bailey, chief research officer at 451 Research said in a statement. “Both companies have strong technical capabilities and the pairing of Rackspace’s strong service culture with Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering practice is an important step forward in providing enterprise-ready customer support capabilities on the Google Cloud Platform.

“We continue to see rising adoption of GCP globally, so there is real value to Rackspace in being the first to market with this type of managed services partnership that seeks to bring cloud-native capabilities to traditional enterprise customers and business-critical applications,” Bailey added.

In Rackspace’s Q216 results in August – the last before it became a private company with a $4.3 billion transaction from Apollo Global – CEO Taylor Rhodes said the firm had seen ‘strong demand’ for AWS cloud customers, alongside Microsoft and the OpenStack private cloud. The company noted 277 customers acquired on its AWS service over the previous nine months, with 60% of these choosing the higher tier managed services option.

“We plan to launch a bold marketing campaign to tell the world about the value we can deliver as the number one managed cloud services provider,” Rhodes told analysts in August, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Businesses today are being told that the cloud is simple, that it’s easy to manage on your own, and that whatever the platform the vendor is selling or supporting is the complete solution for every workload.

“What these businesses are learning, however, is that different workloads require different platforms across public cloud, private cloud and dedicated servers,” added Rhodes. “They are finding that the cloud is complex and fast changing, that they need help in managing it and that expert engineers are expensive and hard to find.”

According to industry figures from Synergy Research, AWS continues to hold 40% of the global public cloud infrastructure space – a minimal change from last year – while Microsoft, Google and IBM went up 5% to break the 20% threshold between them.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

A new study from Informatica and Deloitte has found that cloud is “well on the way” to being the dominant vehicle for business analytics.

The report, which was conducted at the end of last year alongside Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and consulted more than 400 global business and technology leaders, found that cloud was either a key or important part of the analytics strategy for 91% of respondents.

In addition, self-service was considered a key component with cloud-ready organisations more likely to go down that route for data management and governance; 94% of those polled said governed self-service was important for their organisations’ analytics implementations.

The benefits of using cloud-based analytics are stark, according to the report; 84% of respondents said business user agility went up through governed self-service for data integration, while similar numbers agreed for data mapping (83%), data modelling (82%) and data governance (77%).

Cost reduction was naturally the primary financial aspect driving cloud analytics, but the study also showed it was the key technical driver. Interestingly, while security and compliance remained the key barrier to adoption – cited by 40% of those polled – security fears lessened according to companies who were further down the road of cloud implementation.

“The key takeaways from our research is that cloud adoption is expanding quickly as companies find success with their first cloud analytics implementations and move to create more mature environments and drive broader adoption,” said Lyndsay Wise, EMA research director in a statement.

“As these environments become more mature and robust, analytics users are demanding access to their data in ways that make it fast and easy to interact with,” Wise added. “In this regard, governed self-service access is the great enabler of the upswell of analytic insight that companies need to stay competitive.”

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

A new study from Informatica and Deloitte has found that cloud is “well on the way” to being the dominant vehicle for business analytics.

The report, which was conducted at the end of last year alongside Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and consulted more than 400 global business and technology leaders, found that cloud was either a key or important part of the analytics strategy for 91% of respondents.

In addition, self-service was considered a key component with cloud-ready organisations more likely to go down that route for data management and governance; 94% of those polled said governed self-service was important for their organisations’ analytics implementations.

The benefits of using cloud-based analytics are stark, according to the report; 84% of respondents said business user agility went up through governed self-service for data integration, while similar numbers agreed for data mapping (83%), data modelling (82%) and data governance (77%).

Cost reduction was naturally the primary financial aspect driving cloud analytics, but the study also showed it was the key technical driver. Interestingly, while security and compliance remained the key barrier to adoption – cited by 40% of those polled – security fears lessened according to companies who were further down the road of cloud implementation.

“The key takeaways from our research is that cloud adoption is expanding quickly as companies find success with their first cloud analytics implementations and move to create more mature environments and drive broader adoption,” said Lyndsay Wise, EMA research director in a statement.

“As these environments become more mature and robust, analytics users are demanding access to their data in ways that make it fast and easy to interact with,” Wise added. “In this regard, governed self-service access is the great enabler of the upswell of analytic insight that companies need to stay competitive.”

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

IBM has released a new API for its Quantum Experience program, which will enable developers to build interfaces between its cloud-based quantum computers and its classical equivalents.

According to Gartner’s most recent hype cycle, from August last year, quantum computing – the process of using quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement, to perform operations – will take more than 10 years to hit the mainstream.

IBM defines it thus. “While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers,” the company notes.

Use cases of quantum computing could include improving cloud security through the application of quantum physics, greater modelling of financial data, and making machine learning and artificial intelligence more powerful, IBM added.

According to the Armonk giant, quantum computing is the next cab off the rank to be enhanced through cloud-based platforms after machine learning and blockchain, two technologies much further ahead in Gartner’s cycle.

“IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of hybrid cloud and director for IBM Research in a statement.

“Following Watson and blockchain, we believe that quantum computing will provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and promises to be the next major technology that has the potential to drive a new era of innovation across industries,” Krishna added.

IBM’s record of innovation continues to blaze ahead, with more than 8,000 US patents granted last year, well ahead of nearest competitor Samsung, according to figures released in January. Of that number, around a third were related to artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and cloud computing.

You can find out more here.

Picture credit: “Quantum Computer Interior”, by “IBM Research”, used under CC BY ND