(c)iStock.com/RonBailey

Microsoft has announced the launch of the Azure IP Advantage program to help protect intellectual property from ‘patent trolls’ in the cloud.

Patent trolls, defined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as companies or people who ‘use patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming up with new ideas’, are becoming an increasing problem with code and products hosted on cloud servers.

As a result, Microsoft is making 10,000 of its patents available to customers who use Azure services as something of a protection racket; the patents are ‘broadly representative of Microsoft’s overall patent portfolio and are the result of years of cutting-edge innovation’, according to the company.

Picture credit: Microsoft

Brad Smith, Microsoft president and chief legal officer, cited in a company blog post a Boston Consulting Group article which argued that there was a 22% rise in US cloud-based IP lawsuits over the past five years.

“Our goal is to help foster a community that values and protects innovation and investments in the cloud,” Smith wrote. “We want software developers to be able to focus on coding, and businesses and enterprises to be able to respond to the changing needs of their customers with agility without worrying about lawsuits.

“It’s a goal that we believe deserves more attention than it has received to date,” Smith added.

This naturally comes at a price, however; Azure customers eligible for patent protection must be spending more than $1,000 per month over the past three months and have not filed a patent infringement lawsuits against another Azure customer for their Azure workloads over the past two years. Only patent litigations after February 8 are part of the package, meaning companies currently fighting lawsuits and who see this as a get out of jail card are out of luck.

“We take seriously our responsibility to make sure the cloud is used for good, and we stand with our customers to protect them against intellectual property risk,” added Smith. “In partnership with our customers, we are committed to creating an ecosystem where developers, entrepreneurs, enterprises and customers can innovate with confidence.”

You can find out more here.

(c)iStock.com/ymgerman

The cloud and IT skills gap has been a long-suffering gripe for many organisations; and a new research study from Robert Half Technology shows the problem is by no means resolved yet.

According to the study, which was based on interviews with more than 100 CIOs and IT executives across the UK, three quarters (74%) of CIOs and IT directors polled admitted they frequently encountered IT professionals who were not up to the task. Yet only two in five (38%) say they use standardised skills testing before making job offers.

Anyone reading this who has ever spent the occasional lunchtime browsing LinkedIn will have undoubtedly seen memes around how qualifications are not a barrier to success in the workplace. With that in mind, the number of CIOs and IT directors who see certifications as a measurement of skill is at 61%. A similar number (60%) focus on years on experience, while more than half (53%) ask for examples of previous work in their job testing.

Evidently, the gap is clear to see. “The rate of technological change combined with the digital evolution of business today is exacerbating the current IT skills shortage in the UK,” said Neil Owen, director of Robert Half Technology. “The pace of hiring to support business growth, digital transformation and IT security challenges, while using the latest software and systems to meet best practice standards is seeing IT professionals continually needing to upskill.

“To cope, many businesses are needing to reassess their hiring requirements, considering the ‘need to have’ and ‘nice to have’ skill sets alongside cultural fit,” added Owen. “Finding high-potential candidates who can be trained and mentored to company specifications will be a key strategy for surviving – and thriving – in the technology war for talent.”

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Antonella Corno argued the need for certifiable cloud skills. “With cloud skills and the certifications, IT professionals can demonstrate that they can help an IT department drive cloud deployments in a consistent and centralised manner,” she wrote. “They become more valuable to any organisations because they know how to help to bring about desired business outcomes, such as greater business agility and lower IT architecture spending.”

(c)iStock.com/ymgerman

The cloud and IT skills gap has been a long-suffering gripe for many organisations; and a new research study from Robert Half Technology shows the problem is by no means resolved yet.

According to the study, which was based on interviews with more than 100 CIOs and IT executives across the UK, three quarters (74%) of CIOs and IT directors polled admitted they frequently encountered IT professionals who were not up to the task. Yet only two in five (38%) say they use standardised skills testing before making job offers.

Anyone reading this who has ever spent the occasional lunchtime browsing LinkedIn will have undoubtedly seen memes around how qualifications are not a barrier to success in the workplace. With that in mind, the number of CIOs and IT directors who see certifications as a measurement of skill is at 61%. A similar number (60%) focus on years on experience, while more than half (53%) ask for examples of previous work in their job testing.

Evidently, the gap is clear to see. “The rate of technological change combined with the digital evolution of business today is exacerbating the current IT skills shortage in the UK,” said Neil Owen, director of Robert Half Technology. “The pace of hiring to support business growth, digital transformation and IT security challenges, while using the latest software and systems to meet best practice standards is seeing IT professionals continually needing to upskill.

“To cope, many businesses are needing to reassess their hiring requirements, considering the ‘need to have’ and ‘nice to have’ skill sets alongside cultural fit,” added Owen. “Finding high-potential candidates who can be trained and mentored to company specifications will be a key strategy for surviving – and thriving – in the technology war for talent.”

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Antonella Corno argued the need for certifiable cloud skills. “With cloud skills and the certifications, IT professionals can demonstrate that they can help an IT department drive cloud deployments in a consistent and centralised manner,” she wrote. “They become more valuable to any organisations because they know how to help to bring about desired business outcomes, such as greater business agility and lower IT architecture spending.”

(c)iStock.com/KatarzynaBialasiewicz

The majority of managed service providers (MSPs) believe their hottest competition is coming from cloud providers as opposed to fellow MSPs, with Google the vendor to fear most, according to a new piece of research from Sonian.

The study, released today and titled ‘A New World Order: How MSPs are Trying to Survive and Thrive in a Cloud-First World’, featured responses from more than 300 managed service vendors, and found in general a rather nervous landscape.

More than half (55%) of respondents say they aim to revitalise their portfolio by beefing up in-demand services such as storage, hosting, and data analytics, while more than two thirds (67%) plan to launch new or expanded security products to reclaim market share.

When it came to finding out which cloud provider represented the biggest threat, the reply of Google may not have been highest on most lists. Yet given the choice between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Microsoft, survey respondents said they most often lose deals to Google. What’s more, MSPs expect Google to become the cloud market leader by 2021 – a prediction which somewhat flies in the face of current research findings, which puts AWS way in front.

“The new survey findings confirm what we already have seen play out in the industry: that cloud vendors are having a real impact on MSPs’ bottom lines by interfacing directly with end users,” said Jeff Lippincott, Sonian VP business development. “To not only cope with this threat but thrive in the market, MSPs must take advantage of the opportunity to invest in new services such as secure data storage, business intelligence applications and hosted email applications.”

Naturally, it makes sense for Sonian to push through this research; the company works with and partners extensively with MSPs for their range of products. Yet MSPs can take some easy steps. Writing for this publication in October, Pete Fuduric discussed how managed service vendors can ‘humanise’ their marketing efforts, including avoiding buzzwords, include real stories in marketing, and build email lists organically through content and other inbound campaigns.

(c)iStock.com/KatarzynaBialasiewicz

The majority of managed service providers (MSPs) believe their hottest competition is coming from cloud providers as opposed to fellow MSPs, with Google the vendor to fear most, according to a new piece of research from Sonian.

The study, released today and titled ‘A New World Order: How MSPs are Trying to Survive and Thrive in a Cloud-First World’, featured responses from more than 300 managed service vendors, and found in general a rather nervous landscape.

More than half (55%) of respondents say they aim to revitalise their portfolio by beefing up in-demand services such as storage, hosting, and data analytics, while more than two thirds (67%) plan to launch new or expanded security products to reclaim market share.

When it came to finding out which cloud provider represented the biggest threat, the reply of Google may not have been highest on most lists. Yet given the choice between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Microsoft, survey respondents said they most often lose deals to Google. What’s more, MSPs expect Google to become the cloud market leader by 2021 – a prediction which somewhat flies in the face of current research findings, which puts AWS way in front.

“The new survey findings confirm what we already have seen play out in the industry: that cloud vendors are having a real impact on MSPs’ bottom lines by interfacing directly with end users,” said Jeff Lippincott, Sonian VP business development. “To not only cope with this threat but thrive in the market, MSPs must take advantage of the opportunity to invest in new services such as secure data storage, business intelligence applications and hosted email applications.”

Naturally, it makes sense for Sonian to push through this research; the company works with and partners extensively with MSPs for their range of products. Yet MSPs can take some easy steps. Writing for this publication in October, Pete Fuduric discussed how managed service vendors can ‘humanise’ their marketing efforts, including avoiding buzzwords, include real stories in marketing, and build email lists organically through content and other inbound campaigns.

(c)iStock.com/Prykhodov

Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit $3.54 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016, representing an almost 50% increase from this time last year, according to Amazon’s latest financial results.

The cloud infrastructure leader earned $926m in operating profit at a 26% margin, while its annual operating profit margin was at more than 25%. Third quarter revenue for AWS was $3.2bn, while overall Amazon revenue was at $43.7bn.

The press release across all of Amazon’s portfolio has a full 38 bullet points in the ‘highlights’ section – go on, count them yourself – with AWS being mentioned 51 times in total. Customer highlights included Workday, whose migration was announced at Re:Invent in November, Capital One, and Matson, which this publication covered last month.

AWS meanwhile ‘continues to grow, and enterprise customers have committed to migrating tens of thousands of applications’, the company noted. Speaking to analysts, and fielding a question around the impact of AWS price cuts in November, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon SVP and chief financial officer, said the company was ‘very happy’ with the response from customers.

“I feel we’ve got a very broad base of customers from startups to small medium businesses to large enterprises to the public sector,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “We’re continuing to see strong growth across all those sectors.”

With all of the market leaders having now declared their fourth quarter results, it is worth examining AWS’ results with the competing players. IBM said its fourth quarter cloud revenues had gone up 33% to $4.2bn, Microsoft said Azure revenue went up 95% in constant currency, while Alphabet’s ‘other revenue’ bucket went up 62% to $3.4bn in the most recent quarter.

This, roughly translated, means while AWS continues to maintain its strong leadership, Microsoft, Google, and IBM are snapping at the incumbent’s heels – and according to figures released by Synergy Research yesterday, this means bad news for companies further down the table.

Comparing Q4s of 2016 and 2015 (above), Synergy sees minimal change in the 40% market share for AWS – if anything, ever so slightly down – while Microsoft, Google and IBM go up 5% to break the 20% threshold between them. The next 10 players, who include Alibaba and Oracle – Synergy says these two firms are bucking trend and growing at ‘impressive’ rates – do not have 20% share between them.

How best to sum this up? A recent Quartz article, published before Amazon declared, said AWS was the “financial life preserver that Amazon desperately needs”, and cited the fact it was still growing, but not as quickly as before. Synergy’s figures confirm this is the case, although it is a drop in the ocean in comparison.

“While a few cloud providers are growing at extraordinary rates, AWS continues to impress as a dominant market leader that has no intention of letting its crown slip,” said Synergy chief analyst and research director John Dinsdale. “Achieving and maintaining a leadership position in this market takes huge ongoing investments in infrastructure, a continued expansion in the range of cloud services offered, strong credibility with the large enterprise sector, consistently strong execution, and the wholehearted and long-term backing of senior management.

“AWS is checking all of those boxes and any serious challengers need to do likewise.”

(c)iStock.com/Prykhodov

Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit $3.54 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016, representing an almost 50% increase from this time last year, according to Amazon’s latest financial results.

The cloud infrastructure leader earned $926m in operating profit at a 26% margin, while its annual operating profit margin was at more than 25%. Third quarter revenue for AWS was $3.2bn, while overall Amazon revenue was at $43.7bn.

The press release across all of Amazon’s portfolio has a full 38 bullet points in the ‘highlights’ section – go on, count them yourself – with AWS being mentioned 51 times in total. Customer highlights included Workday, whose migration was announced at Re:Invent in November, Capital One, and Matson, which this publication covered last month.

AWS meanwhile ‘continues to grow, and enterprise customers have committed to migrating tens of thousands of applications’, the company noted. Speaking to analysts, and fielding a question around the impact of AWS price cuts in November, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon SVP and chief financial officer, said the company was ‘very happy’ with the response from customers.

“I feel we’ve got a very broad base of customers from startups to small medium businesses to large enterprises to the public sector,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “We’re continuing to see strong growth across all those sectors.”

With all of the market leaders having now declared their fourth quarter results, it is worth examining AWS’ results with the competing players. IBM said its fourth quarter cloud revenues had gone up 33% to $4.2bn, Microsoft said Azure revenue went up 95% in constant currency, while Alphabet’s ‘other revenue’ bucket went up 62% to $3.4bn in the most recent quarter.

This, roughly translated, means while AWS continues to maintain its strong leadership, Microsoft, Google, and IBM are snapping at the incumbent’s heels – and according to figures released by Synergy Research yesterday, this means bad news for companies further down the table.

Comparing Q4s of 2016 and 2015 (above), Synergy sees minimal change in the 40% market share for AWS – if anything, ever so slightly down – while Microsoft, Google and IBM go up 5% to break the 20% threshold between them. The next 10 players, who include Alibaba and Oracle – Synergy says these two firms are bucking trend and growing at ‘impressive’ rates – do not have 20% share between them.

How best to sum this up? A recent Quartz article, published before Amazon declared, said AWS was the “financial life preserver that Amazon desperately needs”, and cited the fact it was still growing, but not as quickly as before. Synergy’s figures confirm this is the case, although it is a drop in the ocean in comparison.

“While a few cloud providers are growing at extraordinary rates, AWS continues to impress as a dominant market leader that has no intention of letting its crown slip,” said Synergy chief analyst and research director John Dinsdale. “Achieving and maintaining a leadership position in this market takes huge ongoing investments in infrastructure, a continued expansion in the range of cloud services offered, strong credibility with the large enterprise sector, consistently strong execution, and the wholehearted and long-term backing of senior management.

“AWS is checking all of those boxes and any serious challengers need to do likewise.”

(c)iStock.com/KIVILCIM PINAR

Cloud storage firm Dropbox has announced two new products focusing on cross-platform storage and collaboration, as well as revealing it has become the fastest software as a service (SaaS) vendor to hit the $1 billion revenue run rate threshold.

According to various reports, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced the financial milestone at an event in San Francisco earlier this week. Fastest of course does not mean first; the company has a way to go before it catches up with the likes of Salesforce, who announced its first billion-dollar quarter back in 2013, but Dropbox becomes one of only five companies to achieve the feat.

The new products, as detailed in a company blog post, are Smart Sync – formerly Dropbox Infinite – which aims to provide the industry’s first on-demand, cross-platform cloud storage offering, and the long trailed general availability of Dropbox Paper, a collaborative tool which was launched in open beta as far back as August.

“We’re redesigning Dropbox to be fundamentally designed for teams,” said Houston in a statement. “We’re reinventing sync, bringing a modern collaboration experience to all your files, and launching Paper, a new way to work together that goes beyond the document…and we’re building this all on top of a strong business foundation.”

Dropbox said users in more than 200 countries and territories had created documents in Paper, totalling in the millions, while the product was in beta. Other recently released features in Paper include a presentation mode, improved search functionality, and mobile folder functionality on iOS and Android. With Smart Sync, Dropbox ‘becomes a centrally manageable, secure hub for teams to work together on all their files,’ according to the press materials.

“Team members gain full visibility and unprecedented access to their entire Dropbox right from their desktop file system, no matter how large,” the company added.

According to Business Insider, Dropbox is ‘not in any rush’ to go public; the company continues to be at the forefront of articles of rumoured 2017 IPOs. Dropbox was ranked as the second most influential private company leading cloud computing last year by Forbes, behind Slack and ahead of DocuSign.

(c)iStock.com/KIVILCIM PINAR

Cloud storage firm Dropbox has announced two new products focusing on cross-platform storage and collaboration, as well as revealing it has become the fastest software as a service (SaaS) vendor to hit the $1 billion revenue run rate threshold.

According to various reports, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced the financial milestone at an event in San Francisco earlier this week. Fastest of course does not mean first; the company has a way to go before it catches up with the likes of Salesforce, who announced its first billion-dollar quarter back in 2013, but Dropbox becomes one of only five companies to achieve the feat.

The new products, as detailed in a company blog post, are Smart Sync – formerly Dropbox Infinite – which aims to provide the industry’s first on-demand, cross-platform cloud storage offering, and the long trailed general availability of Dropbox Paper, a collaborative tool which was launched in open beta as far back as August.

“We’re redesigning Dropbox to be fundamentally designed for teams,” said Houston in a statement. “We’re reinventing sync, bringing a modern collaboration experience to all your files, and launching Paper, a new way to work together that goes beyond the document…and we’re building this all on top of a strong business foundation.”

Dropbox said users in more than 200 countries and territories had created documents in Paper, totalling in the millions, while the product was in beta. Other recently released features in Paper include a presentation mode, improved search functionality, and mobile folder functionality on iOS and Android. With Smart Sync, Dropbox ‘becomes a centrally manageable, secure hub for teams to work together on all their files,’ according to the press materials.

“Team members gain full visibility and unprecedented access to their entire Dropbox right from their desktop file system, no matter how large,” the company added.

According to Business Insider, Dropbox is ‘not in any rush’ to go public; the company continues to be at the forefront of articles of rumoured 2017 IPOs. Dropbox was ranked as the second most influential private company leading cloud computing last year by Forbes, behind Slack and ahead of DocuSign.

(c)iStock.com/DrAfter123

“We changed our business model to align with cloud,” explains Nick McNamara, VP sales Europe at connectivity provider Eseye.

The company has doubled down on both the Internet of Things (IoT) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) strategically, as McNamara, speaking at the IoT Tech Expo event last week, explains. “All connectivity providers, whether you’re an MNO, an MVNO, or like us a smart MNO, sell megabytes per month,” he says. “We no longer sell megabytes per month, we sell messages per month.

“The guy who’s building, or has built, his web application inside Amazon, will know how many messages per month his application consumes,” he adds. “We ask him that, he gives us an answer, and he buys enough messages which gives him global security connectivity within that price – it’s very easy to budget with.”

Among the deals Eseye has forged with AWS include achieving AWS IoT competency status, as well as a new product which the company describes as a ‘breakthrough’ in IoT security, called AnyNet.

Here’s how it works; once the factory is connected to the AWS Cloud Console, which triggers the creation of a certificate and policy, AWS sends a unique certificate and request to provision the SIM to Eseye, Eseye sends the certificate to the AnyNet Secure SIM, and the device is provisioned, certified and secured by the manufacturer. Thus secured, it can go out into the field.

Makes sense? It does to Eseye, who spoke with Amazon last year and found many things in common. “We saw blockage in the high volume deployment of our customers’ projects – we saw blockage in their rollouts,” says McNamara. “In trying to speak to [customers], what they were trying to do to deal with those problems, much of it was to do with security, and some of it was to do with global scale and shape inside their organisations scaling.

“[Amazon] expressed exactly the same pain that we saw inside our customer base, which was ‘we have to get security right somehow’. We can’t provide a silver bullet because everybody’s interpretation of risk is different, everybody’s interpretation of security is different, but we can apply a layer of an onion that looks to help.”

Of the various industry areas in which Eseye plays, two stand out; healthcare and consumer. They are both separate, but they of course both overlap. One customer is Everon Biosciences, which produces a wrist-worn device for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. “In terms of how you build one or either of those, it’s very similar, and in particular the greater majority of healthcare programs – non-invasive, so it’s really about assisted living, or support for the elderly, or assisted mobility – is really a consumer product, but it’s positioned inside healthcare,” says McNamara.

Both of those markets are key to the company’s future, but with Europe as his primary focus, McNamara adds that data sovereignty is key, especially in an IoT universe.

“When we hear stories of chief security officers saying [about] 90% of [their] enterprise scale IoT applications ‘we’ll never allow it to happen, because I don’t have the tools, the infrastructure, the people and processes in place to protect the data’, we understand that entirely,” he says.

“Of course, it’s not like the growth of laptops and the enterprise scale they achieved today, where they bought disk encryption to protect themselves when MPs got drunk on trains, or they had mobile device management when people started to do BYOD in enterprise computing.

“None of those commonalities can be crafted because the greater majority of IoT programs are singularly unique.”