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

Cloud storage provider Box has announced it is cash flow positive for the first time after posting what it calls an ‘incredible’ fourth quarter – yet shares fell in the immediate aftermath of the results.

The company described the 2017 fiscal year as a ‘milestone’, hitting a record $109.9 million (£x) in quarterly revenue which represented a 29% from this time last year, with $398.6m, an increase of 26%, being the whole year’s total.

“Q4 was an incredible quarter for Box, closing out a record year of financial performance,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie, according to Seeking Alpha. “We’re excited to enter fiscal 2018 in a strong position.”

In its previous quarter’s analysis, as this publication reported back in December, the company said it was still on track to become cash flow positive. Levie told analysts that some of the firm’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the Box platform, revealing the depth of usage at the highest level.

Highlights for Box in the most recent quarter include expanded integrations with Microsoft and IBM, the launch of the new Box Notes web and desktop apps, as well as customer wins in the form of Volkswagen Goup of America, Discovery Communications, John Muir Health, and Spotify.

The IBM aspect was again noted in the analyst call, with Levie noting that while the alliance was currently going well, “you will see more success from the partnership this year than even last year.” The partnership with IBM has been cited as key to securing some of Box’s larger enterprise deals; Levie alluded to it here, while dissecting Q217 results back in September noting that IBM played a role in eight six figure deals closed in that quarter.

“Over the coming year, you will see us build amazing products that power how people work together. Our vision of cloud content management fits a major customer need and our product innovation will further drive enterprise adoption of Box,” Levie added. “We will also advance our global go-to-market efforts to extend our reach to enterprises all around the world.”

Shares in Box fell 8.1% after the company posted its guidance on Thursday. You can find out more here.

Cloud storage provider Box has announced it is cash flow positive for the first time after posting what it calls an ‘incredible’ fourth quarter – yet shares fell in the immediate aftermath of the results.

The company described the 2017 fiscal year as a ‘milestone’, hitting a record $109.9 million (£x) in quarterly revenue which represented a 29% from this time last year, with $398.6m, an increase of 26%, being the whole year’s total.

“Q4 was an incredible quarter for Box, closing out a record year of financial performance,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie, according to Seeking Alpha. “We’re excited to enter fiscal 2018 in a strong position.”

In its previous quarter’s analysis, as this publication reported back in December, the company said it was still on track to become cash flow positive. Levie told analysts that some of the firm’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the Box platform, revealing the depth of usage at the highest level.

Highlights for Box in the most recent quarter include expanded integrations with Microsoft and IBM, the launch of the new Box Notes web and desktop apps, as well as customer wins in the form of Volkswagen Goup of America, Discovery Communications, John Muir Health, and Spotify.

The IBM aspect was again noted in the analyst call, with Levie noting that while the alliance was currently going well, “you will see more success from the partnership this year than even last year.” The partnership with IBM has been cited as key to securing some of Box’s larger enterprise deals; Levie alluded to it here, while dissecting Q217 results back in September noting that IBM played a role in eight six figure deals closed in that quarter.

“Over the coming year, you will see us build amazing products that power how people work together. Our vision of cloud content management fits a major customer need and our product innovation will further drive enterprise adoption of Box,” Levie added. “We will also advance our global go-to-market efforts to extend our reach to enterprises all around the world.”

Shares in Box fell 8.1% after the company posted its guidance on Thursday. You can find out more here.

Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)’ S3 (simple storage service) suffered an extended period of service disruption knocking a multitude of sites and businesses offline – and the fault was all down to good old fashioned human error, according to the company.

According to a note published to customers, the fault occurred during a debugging session. “At 9:37AM PST, an authorised S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” the note reads. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”

As a result, this greater-than-expected removal prompted a full restart for US-EAST-1 region, which also meant that other AWS services, such as new instance launches of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Lambda, were also affected.

The resulting casualty list was vast, including Quora, Slack, and Medium. Some users reported that their Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled services, such as connected lightbulbs and thermostats, had gone blank because they were connected to the Amazon backend, while AWS itself could not change its status dashboard, meaning green lights were erroneously blinking away while the chaos unfolded.

AWS, as one would expect in such a situation, said it would make several changes to ensure the issue does not happen again. The first step, which has already been carried out, was to change its capacity tool to create a slower process, as well as adding safeguards to prevent capacity being removed when it goes past the minimum required level. The company has also said it will change the admin console of its status dashboard to run across multiple regions and have less of a dependence on S3, adding that while the AWS Twitter feed tried to keep users updated, it understood the dashboard provided ‘important visibility’ to customers.

So what happens from here? Naturally, the resultant conversation and best practice was to not put ‘all your eggs in one cloud’, as Chuck Dubuque, VP of product and solution marketing at Tintri put it. “This is a wakeup call for those hosted on AWS and other providers to take a deeper look at how their infrastructure is set up and emphasises the need for redundancy,” said Shawn Moore, CTO at Solodev. “If nothing else, the S3 outages will cause some businesses to reconsider a diversified environment – that includes enterprise cloud – to reduce their risks,” Dubuque added.

“We want to apologise for the impact this event caused for our customers,” AWS added. “While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses.

“We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”

You can read the full statement here.

Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)’ S3 (simple storage service) suffered an extended period of service disruption knocking a multitude of sites and businesses offline – and the fault was all down to good old fashioned human error, according to the company.

According to a note published to customers, the fault occurred during a debugging session. “At 9:37AM PST, an authorised S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” the note reads. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”

As a result, this greater-than-expected removal prompted a full restart for US-EAST-1 region, which also meant that other AWS services, such as new instance launches of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Lambda, were also affected.

The resulting casualty list was vast, including Quora, Slack, and Medium. Some users reported that their Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled services, such as connected lightbulbs and thermostats, had gone blank because they were connected to the Amazon backend, while AWS itself could not change its status dashboard, meaning green lights were erroneously blinking away while the chaos unfolded.

AWS, as one would expect in such a situation, said it would make several changes to ensure the issue does not happen again. The first step, which has already been carried out, was to change its capacity tool to create a slower process, as well as adding safeguards to prevent capacity being removed when it goes past the minimum required level. The company has also said it will change the admin console of its status dashboard to run across multiple regions and have less of a dependence on S3, adding that while the AWS Twitter feed tried to keep users updated, it understood the dashboard provided ‘important visibility’ to customers.

So what happens from here? Naturally, the resultant conversation and best practice was to not put ‘all your eggs in one cloud’, as Chuck Dubuque, VP of product and solution marketing at Tintri put it. “This is a wakeup call for those hosted on AWS and other providers to take a deeper look at how their infrastructure is set up and emphasises the need for redundancy,” said Shawn Moore, CTO at Solodev. “If nothing else, the S3 outages will cause some businesses to reconsider a diversified environment – that includes enterprise cloud – to reduce their risks,” Dubuque added.

“We want to apologise for the impact this event caused for our customers,” AWS added. “While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses.

“We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”

You can read the full statement here.

(c)iStock.com/oztasbc

MWC “I get the feeling the momentum is there – people are understanding architecturally how to make it work now,” says Steve Gleave, senior vice president of marketing at Metaswitch Networks.

Gleave could be speaking about any emerging technology within reason, but in this instance, it’s NFV (network functions virtualisation), the concept of taking old school network appliances and replacing them with software. And at Mobile World Congress this year, it’s more than likely to be one of the most used and abused terms at the Barcelona jamboree.

Cisco, Red Hat, and Altice announced this morning that they had all joined up for such an initiative, while ZTE and Telstra have also made moves in this area over the past day or so, and recent research from Heavy Reading showed that 99% of respondents were either using, testing, or considering OpenStack for their NFV deployments.

Plenty to mull over there – but is this a genuine tipping point or more bluff and bluster from the industry? Gleave argues that from Metaswitch’s perspective, the company’s Clearwater project – an open source implementation of IMS – gave it something of a head start. Yet the strategic thinking was off.

“The reality as we see it is that all of the promises of NFV everybody in theory understands – agile, cost efficient, software,” says Gleave. “Where NFV has struggled to get out of the gates is [when] people have essentially [got] software sort of running on the hardware, [and they think] ‘I’ll rip it off, stick it in this virtual machine, play around with the software emulation layer, and that’s it, we’re there’…it’s NFV because it’s working on a virtual machine in a hypervisor in the cloud.

“The reality is that if you just take this block of monolithic code and drop it in, you’ve got the same problems you had before.”

Gleave adds, while insisting Metaswitch did not fall into this trap, that the industry had been similarly bogged down in nomenclature one-upmanship. Are they calling it the next generation of NFV? Or NFV 2.0? Why is that company calling it NFV 3.0? Going forward, the ‘cloud native’ approach to development needs to be utilised.

So what does this entail? It’s essentially making sure your software is written as microservices instead of a huge block of code; small chunks of code, with well defined APIs, run in containers, with none of the baggage which comes with legacy material. “Over the next two or three years you’re going to see people rearchitect some of their software,” says Gleave. “They have to; and that will be the test of whether companies really are software companies or not.”

Elsewhere, Metaswitch announced the acquisition of OpenCloud, whose mission is to implement change in telecoms networks more efficiently and to ‘deliver the number one service layer for competitive advantage’. Clearly, and with NFV as well as 5G in mind, it’s an excellent fit. The two companies had previously partnered, and Gleave added that there was a ‘certain mentality’ which aligned, as well as cultural agreement.

(c)iStock.com/oztasbc

MWC “I get the feeling the momentum is there – people are understanding architecturally how to make it work now,” says Steve Gleave, senior vice president of marketing at Metaswitch Networks.

Gleave could be speaking about any emerging technology within reason, but in this instance, it’s NFV (network functions virtualisation), the concept of taking old school network appliances and replacing them with software. And at Mobile World Congress this year, it’s more than likely to be one of the most used and abused terms at the Barcelona jamboree.

Cisco, Red Hat, and Altice announced this morning that they had all joined up for such an initiative, while ZTE and Telstra have also made moves in this area over the past day or so, and recent research from Heavy Reading showed that 99% of respondents were either using, testing, or considering OpenStack for their NFV deployments.

Plenty to mull over there – but is this a genuine tipping point or more bluff and bluster from the industry? Gleave argues that from Metaswitch’s perspective, the company’s Clearwater project – an open source implementation of IMS – gave it something of a head start. Yet the strategic thinking was off.

“The reality as we see it is that all of the promises of NFV everybody in theory understands – agile, cost efficient, software,” says Gleave. “Where NFV has struggled to get out of the gates is [when] people have essentially [got] software sort of running on the hardware, [and they think] ‘I’ll rip it off, stick it in this virtual machine, play around with the software emulation layer, and that’s it, we’re there’…it’s NFV because it’s working on a virtual machine in a hypervisor in the cloud.

“The reality is that if you just take this block of monolithic code and drop it in, you’ve got the same problems you had before.”

Gleave adds, while insisting Metaswitch did not fall into this trap, that the industry had been similarly bogged down in nomenclature one-upmanship. Are they calling it the next generation of NFV? Or NFV 2.0? Why is that company calling it NFV 3.0? Going forward, the ‘cloud native’ approach to development needs to be utilised.

So what does this entail? It’s essentially making sure your software is written as microservices instead of a huge block of code; small chunks of code, with well defined APIs, run in containers, with none of the baggage which comes with legacy material. “Over the next two or three years you’re going to see people rearchitect some of their software,” says Gleave. “They have to; and that will be the test of whether companies really are software companies or not.”

Elsewhere, Metaswitch announced the acquisition of OpenCloud, whose mission is to implement change in telecoms networks more efficiently and to ‘deliver the number one service layer for competitive advantage’. Clearly, and with NFV as well as 5G in mind, it’s an excellent fit. The two companies had previously partnered, and Gleave added that there was a ‘certain mentality’ which aligned, as well as cultural agreement.

1&1 continues to be the best value for money cloud provider with Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) trailing, according to the latest report from cloud performance benchmarking firm Cloud Spectator.

The annual report, of which regular readers of this publication will already be aware, this time covers the US infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and aims to show that biggest is not always best.

10 cloud service providers were analysed, including the four largest players in the market – AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM SoftLayer – who had to be able to provide self sign-up, persistent block storage, and hourly billing intervals. The vendors were ranked on the median performance of vCPU-memory and storage, and ranked out of 100 when compared on price and performance.

With 1&1 as the leader and given 100 out of 100 as the benchmark, the major players struggled to get even half of that number. Google (48) was the best performer, while Azure (27), AWS (24) and SoftLayer trailed off significantly.

When it came to virtual machine performance, the bigger players were seen as most reliable – Amazon, Azure and Google scored lowest on performance variability – yet when it came to overall median performance, 1&1, Rackspace and OVH were in front. For block storage, Rackspace was on its own in terms of performance levels, with the majority not being too variable, Amazon’s disk variability being artificially high due to an anomaly aside.

“The 2017 highlights considerable differences in price, performance and stability across the leading IaaS providers,” said Kenny Li, Cloud Spectator CEO. “More than ever, the enterprise consumer is at risk of significantly overspending when it comes to selecting the right cloud products and vendors.”

Of course, the argument will be that the convenience and reliability of choosing an established player – the top four vendors in cloud infrastructure own more than half of the market, according to Synergy Research – helps it pay for itself. Yet speaking to this publication last year, Li emphasised the importance of due diligence. “When it comes to price performance, we see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” said Li.

“The volume [from the hypervendors] also comes with additional performance considerations, such as throttling to provide a standard user experience across the entire infrastructure, which may result in lower performance on cloud services.”

The 10 vendors assessed were 1&1, Amazon, Azure, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Dimension Data, Google, OVH, Rackspace, and SoftLayer. You can find out more about the report here (registration required).

1&1 continues to be the best value for money cloud provider with Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) trailing, according to the latest report from cloud performance benchmarking firm Cloud Spectator.

The annual report, of which regular readers of this publication will already be aware, this time covers the US infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and aims to show that biggest is not always best.

10 cloud service providers were analysed, including the four largest players in the market – AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM SoftLayer – who had to be able to provide self sign-up, persistent block storage, and hourly billing intervals. The vendors were ranked on the median performance of vCPU-memory and storage, and ranked out of 100 when compared on price and performance.

With 1&1 as the leader and given 100 out of 100 as the benchmark, the major players struggled to get even half of that number. Google (48) was the best performer, while Azure (27), AWS (24) and SoftLayer trailed off significantly.

When it came to virtual machine performance, the bigger players were seen as most reliable – Amazon, Azure and Google scored lowest on performance variability – yet when it came to overall median performance, 1&1, Rackspace and OVH were in front. For block storage, Rackspace was on its own in terms of performance levels, with the majority not being too variable, Amazon’s disk variability being artificially high due to an anomaly aside.

“The 2017 highlights considerable differences in price, performance and stability across the leading IaaS providers,” said Kenny Li, Cloud Spectator CEO. “More than ever, the enterprise consumer is at risk of significantly overspending when it comes to selecting the right cloud products and vendors.”

Of course, the argument will be that the convenience and reliability of choosing an established player – the top four vendors in cloud infrastructure own more than half of the market, according to Synergy Research – helps it pay for itself. Yet speaking to this publication last year, Li emphasised the importance of due diligence. “When it comes to price performance, we see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” said Li.

“The volume [from the hypervendors] also comes with additional performance considerations, such as throttling to provide a standard user experience across the entire infrastructure, which may result in lower performance on cloud services.”

The 10 vendors assessed were 1&1, Amazon, Azure, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Dimension Data, Google, OVH, Rackspace, and SoftLayer. You can find out more about the report here (registration required).

The cloud tech IPO landscape may have struggled a little of late, but the analysts at EY – formerly Ernst & Young – argue that on a global scale, 2016 saw an all-time record high in overall technology activity due to the “massive digital transformation” caused by disruptive technologies.

The overall aggregate 2016 value of $466.6 billion (£373bn) was up 2% over 2015’s previous record, while the Q416 figure of $117.2bn was down 38% year over year.

For the full year of 2016, the consultancy put together a graph of number of deals in the sector compared with average value of deal. As expected from a more mature market, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) was miles ahead in terms of volume – between 1,200 and 1,400 – but paled in monetary terms compared to connected car and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

The report coins the term ‘background radiation’ when describing cloud deals, adding that the IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to fuel high tech-targeted M&A in 2017.

In terms of specific regions, cloud and SaaS was a factor in more than a quarter (28%) of EMEA deals in Q416, compared with the Americas where it factored into almost 950 deals.

The standout, as the report affirms, was the Oracle-NetSuite acquisition for $9.3bn, announced in July but only completed in November. Microsoft’s $26.2bn outlay for LinkedIn was described by EY as a reflection of “the way social networking is transforming business, the rising role of big data and the potential for both those technologies to transform Microsoft products.” Equinix’s $3.6bn move to snaffle 29 data centres from Verizon in December was also noted.

Earlier this month, the yearly analysis issued by Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), came to a pretty similar conclusion. While IPOs ran comparatively dry in the cloud space, with Twilio the star performer, companies acquired in the public cloud space represented 40% of the $300bn market cap. The top 100 private cloud companies, as noted by Forbes in September, also represented more than $100bn of private enterprise value alone.

The artificial intelligence (AI) market is set to reach $3,061 billion by 2024 according to recent research. The AI Expo world series looks at the future impact of these technologies, including business intelligence, machine learning, and chatbots. Find out more here.