All posts by Lavanya

Google

G-Cloud Sales Soar in the UK

G-cloud is making a big impact in the UK, as is evident from the recent sales figures released by the company. For the first time since its inception in 2012, G-cloud has passed the £1.5 billion mark, and much of it comes from its  small and medium enterprise (SME) customers. According to the release £875 million came from SMEs, while £702 million came from large enterprises.

These numbers, in many ways, reflect the strength of the British economy, and its ability to stand firm despite Brexit. Also, it shows the growing presence of G-cloud, and the cloud industry at large in the UK. The rate of adoption of technology, especially cloud, is fairly high in the Western world, and these numbers are yet another indicator of it.

Along with the private enterprise, the Central Government also has adopted cloud in a big way. In fact, the central government uses G-cloud more than any other area of public sector. The percentage of sales made through the central government on G-cloud is a whopping 74 percent, while the remaining sectors account for a mere 26 percent. Through this large spending, the central government has set the right example for private and public sectors in the UK.

Much of this spending comes through the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) agreements that cam into being in April of this year to replace the Digital Services framework (DSF) that was in place since 2012. The new agreement is wider and more encompassing than its predecessor, and it aims to ensure greater adoption of tech among UK governments and businesses. The next iteration of DOS is expected to be released in February 2017 by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), and this iteration is likely to have the spending figures under the framework in the future. From a cloud perspective, this is good news, as the iteration’s budget for cloud is expected to increase to give a boost to the economy as a whole.

It is significant to note that AWS opened its new cloud data center in London to cater to the growing demands of its UK businesses. This also means that others like G-cloud and Microsoft are already taking steps or are in the process of doing it.

For G-cloud, though the sales numbers are impressive, it still has its task cut out. Local government spending is just short of £85 million, and this is abysmally low when compared to the potential. Local governments and other council services can tap into the power of cloud to improve their offering and streamline their operations, yet they are not willing to move forward. This is something that G-cloud should look into and address if they want to have a larger customer base. It’s best for the company to reach out to individual governments to see what is stopping them from using more cloud services, and how G-cloud can best address them.

In all, G-cloud has a firm grip on the market, but it still has a long way to go, especially in the public sector.

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Google

Google Cloud’s Presence in India

India is a growing market fueled by its economic aspirations and young demographics. It’s little wonder that every major company in the world has a presence here, and Google is no different. It plans to set up a dedicated data center in Mumbai during 2017 to cater to the growing demands of Indian businesses.

This is an important move for Google because the Indian market is too large to be ignored. Already AWS and Microsoft have a presence here. However, the Indian cloud market is still in the developing stage, so any investments here is likely to grow with the cloud sector. All the major cloud providers understand the current situation, as well as the potential it offers during the next decade or so.

Currently, many businesses in India are in the unorganized sector, especially small and medium enterprises. Many of these SMEs still prefer to use cash for their everyday transactions, and only have a limited exposure to technology. All this is expected to change within the next few years – thanks to awareness about the benefits of universal education and the Indian government’s robust economic policies.

India has a young population, and the education levels are slowly and steadily increasing. Many children attend private or government schools, and they are getting exposed to a lot of technology. This means, they will grow up in a digital space, and it won’t be long before they drive the digital world. Another significant factor is the Indian government’s push towards a digital economy. Single-window business clearances, demonetization, and other steps are ensuring that more people would embrace the digital world for their everyday needs. While the results won’t be imminent right away, it’s sure to make a difference within the next five years. When that happens, tech companies want to be in a position to tap into the demand, and this is why they’re planning ahead of time.

Another reason for Google’s Indian presence is its aim to become a leader in the Japan and Asia Pacific region. To this end, it has invested about $9.9 billion in 2016 alone, and this has led to the emergence of two centers – one in Taiwan and the other in Japan. In 2017, it plans to open three more centers in Asia, out of which one will be in Mumbai. The company reiterated that Mumbai will be a region with three zones, but this doesn’t necessarily mean three data centers. Rather what it means is that these zones will ensure a risk-free and fall-tolerant service, but could encompass any number of data centers, but all of them will be located in the Mumbai region.

Though there are many cities in India, Google announced that it chose Mumbai because it is the financial capital of the country, and many local businesses are already using cloud or are planning to move to it soon.

This announcement is good news for the Indian economy as it will generate more employment opportunities, and can also assist the government’s plans to move the country to a digital space.

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Computing

Alibaba Enters Japan

Alibaba’s growing aspirations to be the one-stop tech shop for all consumer and business products in Asia, became one inch closer to reality with its entry into the Japanese market. On Thursday, the company announced a couple of partnerships that are likely to give a big boost to its two growing business arms – content delivery and cloud storage.

One of the partnership is with the Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corporation. Already, SoftBank is one of Alibaba’s largest investors, and with this agreement, it has entered into a joint venture to run a local cloud center hosted by SB Cloud Corporation. With this partnership, Alibaba has officially entered the Japanese market, and it will offer cloud computing services to local clients. The other agreement is with Oriental DreamWorks, through which it plans to bring animated movies to its Chinese customers on its online streaming platforms – Tudou.com and Youku.com.

This entry into Japan is significant in many ways. Alibaba has been strategizing to have a global footprint with a stronghold in Asia. Already, it’s cloud product called Aliyun, has a presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, and with this data center, the total number of global data centers has increased to 14. Outside of Asia, it has a big presence in the US, and a growing one in Australia.

Currently, Alibaba is one of the largest conglomerates in the world, and owns the following companies:

  • Aliyun – Cloud computing platform
  • Tmall – Largest platform for businesses and retailers for B2B and B2C transactions in China.
  • Taobao – Largest online shopping platform in China
  • AliExpress – A global retail market platform
  • 1688 – Leading wholesale marketplace in China
  • Alimama – Largest online marketing platform in China
  • Youku.com and Tudou.com – China’s largest online video streaming platforms
  • Cainiao – Platform for logistics and operation management.
  • Alitalk – Instant messenger for merchants and businesses

With such an impressive portfolio of companies, it’s no surprise that Alibaba is looking beyond the Chinese shores. If you look closely, Alibaba and Amazon have a lot in common. Both companies started out as e-commerce retailers and branched into public cloud computing line of business. Also, these two companies are leaders in their respective geographical areas, though Amazon is much larger and has a wider global footprint when compared to Alibaba. This partly explains why Alibaba is trying to mirror Amazon, and even compete with it on the global market.

It is significant to note that Amazon opened its new cloud data center in London last week to meet the growing demands of its British clients, and also to prepare for the possible consequences of Brexit. Likewise, Alibaba also entered the Australian market a few weeks ago to cater to the growing needs of its Australian customers. In this sense, both the companies have been aggressively pursuing different markets, and it’ll be interesting to see how the competition plays out in the Asian market, especially considering that Gartner predicts the Asia Pacific and Japan cloud market to be worth $11.5 billion by 2018.

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Computing

Survey shows companies are looking to monetize the cloud

The number of cloud-based products and platforms available today is simply mind-boggling. Yet, there is space for more companies to join the bandwagon of providing cloud services to individual and corporate customers because the demand for cloud is so high. As more individuals and companies turn to cloud for storage and computation, this market is expected to see explosive growth over the next few years.

To tap into this power of cloud and to take a share in the burgeoning cloud market, many companies are looking to monetize their cloud service. In other words, companies that are both directly and indirectly involved in the cloud market, want to get revenue from their cloud products. According to a survey conducted by North Bridge, a growth equity and venture capital firm, and Wikibon, a research analyst firm, a whopping 79.9% of companies involved in the cloud market get some form of revenue through the cloud. Further, 42% of the 1,351 companies surveyed get at least 50% revenue from cloud.

These numbers are significant as they reflect the growing might of cloud, and its pervasiveness among both individual and corporate customers. Also, it shows that more companies are looking for ways to leverage cloud-based services to boost their income streams, rather than being passive players. For example, let’s say, company A has been taking the services of a cloud provider to achieve operational efficiency and to cut back on its costs. Seeing the potential of cloud, it wants to integrate this cloud service into its own product, so the benefits are passed on to the end customers. This reports shows that two out of every five companies that are using cloud services are thinking along these lines. They have either successfully launched such products or are in the process of doing so.

The report, however, does not mention how much monetization is happening, but it can be surmised that much of the revenue is coming from cloud-based e-commerce applications. A similar report published in July 2016 shows that cloud spending is growing by leaps and bounds. It is expected to increase from $75 billion in 2015 to $522 billion by 2026, resulting in an average annual compound growth rate of 19%. This represents a multi-fold increase in revenue, that is likely to come from a wider adoption of cloud across varied sectors including government, healthcare, insurance, and retail. Also, this adoption is expected to spread across the entire world within a decade, so the benefits are shared by customers, regardless of their physical location.

The report further states that cloud will account for nearly 50 percent of all spending related to hardware, software, and outsourcing services, by 2026. The biggest cloud providers are the ones who are likely to gain the most from this wider adoption of cloud, and this is already showing in the increasing revenue of companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Baidu, and IBM.  However, the others involved in this market are also expected to gain much from this trend. In all, it’s bounty time for anyone involved with the cloud.

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Amazon AWS

Amazon to Use Xilink’s FGPA

Cloud industry is growing at a rapid rate, and this is most evident in the performance and revenue numbers of the Big Seven providers, namely, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and Facebook. To meet the growing demand from their customers, these companies are increasingly moving their operations to super-fast accelerators that can provide more than ten times the performance of a powerful CPU, and these accelerators are called Field Programmable Gate Array (FGPA) and Graphics Processing Units (GPU).

NVIDIA is one of the leading manufacturers when it comes to GPU,  and many companies tap into its processing power for machine learning and AI applications. It’s little wonder that its revenue rose by almost 193 percent year-on-year.

Some companies like Microsoft and Amazon prefer to use FGPA instead of GPU, and this has led to their pervasive use. Xilink is one of the leading providers of FGPA, and so far, Microsoft, Baidu, and Amazon are known to use it for their complex data analysis, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and AI.

Recently, Amazon announced that it will be offering Xilink services to its customers, and this can be a significant one for Xilink as well as the FGPA industry as a whole. So, what makes this announcement significant?

First off, AWS is the leading cloud provider, so its adoption is sure to give FGPA a big boost.  Second and most importantly, Amazon is the first company to offer these services to their customers. Though Microsoft adopted it earlier, they have not yet offered it as a service to their Azure customers, but Amazon has already started building custom servers on it. As of now, it plans to offer new public F1 Elastic Cloud instances using eight 16nmXilink Ultrascale+ FGPAs for every instance. This will be initially offered as a developer’s platform, so the experienced FGPA community can start building on it.

At this point though, Amazon has made no mention of OpenCL – Xilink’s reconfigurable acceleration stack, but adding these capabilities in the future can create huge opportunities for the early adopters of this technology.

This adoption by Amazon is obviously big business for Xilink, and it helps it to score over its arch-rival, Altera that was acquired by Intel last year. Ironically, Intel announced at the time of acquisition of Altera that more than one-third of cloud nodes would be powered by FGPAs by 2020, and it looks like Xilink maybe the major beneficiary of this growth. If you’re wondering why AWS chose Xilink over Altera, it’s purely from a business standpoint. Xilink is almost a year ahead than Altera in terms of manufacturing technology, and this explains why many leading cloud providers prefer to work with Xilink. But, this doesn’t mean we can rule out Altera, or Intel now, completely. Some reports show that Intel is working hard on its FGPA business, as it believes this could drive its future business interest.

In short, Xilink is the clear leader when it comes to FGPA, though Intel may catch up soon.

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News

Cisco to Stop Intercloud by March 2017

Cisco has announced that it will stop its Cisco Intercloud Services (CIS) in March 2017, and the existing workloads will be moved to other infrastructure. A spokesperson of the company confirmed that some may even be moved to the public cloud, depending on the nature of the workload, though it did not specify which public cloud will be chosen for this move.

This is a part of Cisco’s cloud strategy, and has been in the pipeline for some time now. In October, it announced a timeline to move its workloads to other private and public, and according to that document, the last date to order CIS through point-of-sale mechanism is March 31, 2017. It is not known if support for CIS would also end on the same date, or if there will be an extension based on a case-by-case basis. According to Kip Compton, Vice-President for Cloud Platform and Services, all clients on CIS would be fully migrated by the specified deadline.

Cisco has stated that it’s evolving customer demands have led the company to change its cloud strategy. According to a release, Cisco believes that the cloud industry has undergone massive transformation over the last two years, and many of its customers are looking to develop applications that would drive their digital transformations. In the light of these developments, the company believes its best to move away from CIS, and focus on other aspects of it cloud business. Some reports show that Cisco is planning to focus extensively on enterprise hybrid cloud and SP network virtualization, to ensure that its existing resources are being utilized to the optimum.

The concept of intercloud was introduced by Cisco in 2014, to make it easy for cloud providers to move their data between different clouds. This was hugely beneficial to many companies, as they could offer better service to their customers by moving workloads to clouds that were closer to the customers’ location.

CIS’ Intercloud comprises of computing, storage, and networking services, that are on par with some of the leading cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. CIS offered Virtual Machine instances that were optimized for general purpose workloads, as well as instances that were optimized for compute, storage, and memory. In addition, it gives customers a wide range of operating system choices that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Windows operating system. It is based on OpenStack – the open source cloud software.

It is worthy to note that HP also launched an intercloud service in the past and killed it, while Dell made plans to launch an Openstack-based cloud, but later moved away from it. Rackspace, the company that helped develop OpenStack, has stopped offering cloud services on it. All these companies have moved away from intercloud, as they believe that it does not play an important role in the cloud market at this point in time. In the future, if the cloud industry transforms to accept intercloud, then maybe they will start thinking about it again.

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Computing

Oracle’s Cloud Transition Path

Oracle is the perfect poster boy for the growing might of cloud computing. This tech stalwart is steadily moving its operations to the cloud, and is slowly moving away from selling its traditional on-premise licensed software.  This transition is expected to reflect in its earnings too. In fact, many analysts are looking forward to the quarterly results that will be announced on December 15.

The street consensus is an earnings of $9.14 billion in revenue, that would lead to an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.60. They also expect Oracle to announce a positive outlook for the next quarter, and expect it to generate around $9.24 billion in revenue, amounting to an earnings per share of $0.64.

While it’s not a surprise to see tech companies growing and expanding their offerings, what’s special about Oracle is it’s move to the cloud. In many ways, this also reflects the growing might of the cloud industry at large.

NetSuite

A defining moment in Oracle’s cloud transition path came on November 7th of this year when it acquired a cloud based provider called NetSuite for a sum of $9.3 billion. NetSuite is a provider of customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software, and with this acquisition, Oracle took a big step forward into the world of cloud services. It’s worthy to note that Oracle’s co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison owned almost 40 percent in NetSuite.

Textura

Before NetSuite, Oracle acquired other companies in the cloud space as well. In May of 2016, it purchased Textura for a sum of $663 million. Textura is a cloud-based construction management company that handled around $3.4 billion in payments at the time of its acquisition. This company provided services to more than 6,000 companies in the construction sector by helping them manage projects within specified time and budget constraints, and also, by reducing risk for developers.

Opower

Oracle acquired Opower on May 2nd, 2016 for a sum of $532 million. Opower is a prominent player in the utilities market, with its offering of customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services for utility providers. This company has more than 100 clients, including some prominent names such as PG&E, Exelon, and National Grid. The big data platform of Opower is believed to store and analyze more than 600 billion meter readings from around 60 million end customers. The analysis from this data helps its clients to proactively meet regulations, and offer a digital experience for its end customers.

With these acquisitions, oracle expanded its reach across different sectors. In addition, many of Oracle’s services are moved to the cloud, so it was able to make a larger foray into cloud-based services. Some reports even show that the company is vying to become the first cloud provider to hit the $10 billion revenue mark in the Saas/ PaaS segment.

This ambition could become a reality soon, as the tech giant has overcome the initial bottlenecks that come with the acquisition of new companies. In this sense, the worst of cloud transition is behind Oracle now, and it can look forward to an exciting future in the cloud world!

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Computing, News

Sixa Gets Funding for a PC-free World

The tech startup scene sure looks promising, as more companies are coming up with innovative ideas, that are in turn, backed by some of the best venture capitalists of our times. Another such company that has obtained funding for its innovative product is Sixa. This company has got $3.5 million in funding from a group of investors led by Tandem Capital.

So what is so different about Sixa’s product and how is it going to impact the tech market?

Currently, cloud is a big technology, and more companies are moving their operations to it because of the many benefits that it offers. That said, many individual customers still prefer to keep their PC’s close to them, which means, most PCs are located on site and not on the cloud. While this has worked for so many years, individual customers are obviously missing out on the advantages of moving to the cloud.

To enable these customers also to make the most of cloud, Sixa aims to help them move to the cloud with their low-latency virtual machines. Launched about three months ago, this product is aimed mainly at developers now, though it can widen to other individual users in the future.

For many developers, this is the technology they were waiting for, so it’s little wonder that there is a waiting list in the thousands. To meet these demands, more than 15,000 employees were brought on board, and this helped the company to release its beta version last week. The additional funding is expected to further boost the presence of the company and help it to cater to a global demand.

Sixa’s product brings a ton of benefits for developers. The first and foremost benefit is they are PC-free, which means, they can work from any device and from any location of their choice. They are no longer confined to an office or home environment, and this flexibility can greatly boost the productivity of employees. Secondly, they don’t have to worry about upgrading hardware or software, as those aspects are taken care of by the cloud administrators. The same holds good for security patches and updates too. As a result, developers are free to focus on their task, without worrying about the overheads, and this makes them more productive than before. Higher levels of productivity is a good enough incentive for companies to subscribe to this service too.

There are already many platforms like Nitrous.io that provided this flexibility for users, so what’s new here? The answer is latency. Many services had latency problems with their virtual machines. This means, when a developer moves the mouse, he or she will see the cursor move only half a second later. This is frustrating to say the least, and can impact the effectiveness and productivity of employees. This product from Sixa overcomes this drawback by reducing the latency to 11 milliseconds on its end. Still the speed of your Internet Service Provider and your distance from the data center will continue to impact your access speed, but it is sure to be faster than before.

This service is available for $49/ a month or $0.49/ an hour.

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Amazon AWS, News

FINRA Leads the Way in Cloud Adoption

If you thought cloud storage is only for private companies, you can’t be any farther from the truth. In fact, many government agencies, including data-sensitive organizations like the US Army and FBI, are moving their operations to the cloud, mainly because of the many benefits that come with it. Some financial organizations have also started looking into cloud, thanks to the Financial Industry Regulation Authority (FINRA)’s move to adopt cloud in a big way.

At the recently concluded Amazon’s conference, Steve Randich, the executive VP of FINRA, opined that cybersecurity is better in the cloud than in private data centers, and this is why it’s a good idea for financial companies to move their sensitive and confidential data to the cloud. This step has allayed the fear of many financial institutions who believe that data security is one of the biggest problems of cloud storage. A few years back, cloud security was in its nascent stages, so these fears made sense. However today, cloud security has improved by leaps and bounds, and these advancements make cloud one of the safest places to park your data.

These reasons are exactly why FINRA chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its service provider. Randich trusts cloud so much that the organization moved its primary and mission critical applications to AWS in the first move itself. There was no question of pilot testing by moving smaller applications. FINRA’s surveillance application alone processes more data on a single day, typically around 75 billion events a day, and this is more than what credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard process over a period of six months. Such is the magnitude of the data handled by FINRA, and it’s heartening to see that all of it is done in the cloud now!

In addition, FINRA has to search through this data and run advanced queries to identify insider trading or any other wrongful trading from this vast amount of data, and AWS makes it possible with its advanced query tools that come with a simple interface. As a result, the search process is greatly simplified, and at the same time, the results are accurate – something that is a must for FINRA’s operations.

This successful adoption of cloud by FINRA has boosted the confidence levels of other financial providers too. Randich says that he gets queries from many financial organizations about their cloud adoption, and is confident that more companies will take to the cloud in the near future. Already CapitalOne has partnered with AWS to move its applications to the cloud, and it won’t be long before other financial companies also follow suit.

Such a move augurs well for not just AWS, but for the cloud industry as a whole. Traditionally, financial companies are the slowest to adopt cloud, and it looks like cloud has broken this final frontier too. Given this scenario, it’s no surprise that many cloud providers including Google and Microsoft, are creating new products and entering into partnerships with other service providers to offer top of the line cloud experience for its customers.

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News

Canonical Plans to Sue European Cloud Provider

Canonical, the company that distributes Ubuntu GNU/Linux, has announced that it plans to sue a European cloud provider for violation of its agreement terms. Canonical claims that the cloud provider distributed insecure and broken images of Ubuntu, despite repeated warnings to refrain from doing so. Though Canonical has not named the provider, it has already started taking legal steps to remove these  images from all places on the Internet.

According to company sources, this lawsuit is expected to act as a deterrent for other companies, so only approved images are published. The company’s management believes this is essential as it can undermine the success of Ubuntu’s certified images.

This incident also brings to light some of the problems that come with third-party Ubuntu images. According to the founder and executive Chairman, Mark Shuttleworth, clouds tend to have baked private keys into their public images, so this can lead to a potential security pitfall, as any user can SSH into any machine they want. When such a situation occurs, it becomes the responsibility of the parent company, Canonical in this case, to protect its customers, and that’s exactly what it claims to have done with the European service provider.

In addition, when broken images of a software are released, users tend to assume that something is wrong with Ubuntu, and may even refrain from buying it. The company believes such “homegrown” images may cause it to behave unpredictably, and this can lead the user to believe that Ubuntu is unstable, when in reality it’s not.

Though this incident has not translated to a significant loss of revenue yet, there is always a possibility for this to happen. To get the facts straight, and to let its users know that everything is fine with Ubuntu, such a lawsuit becomes imperative. In this sense, Canonical has taken the right decision to protect itself as well as its customers from security hazards and misinformation.

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that comes with Unity desktop. Currently, it runs in all cloud platforms such as AWS, Google, Rackspace, and OpenStack. The best part is Ubuntu offers same the look and feel, regardless of the underlying cloud provider, and this is what makes it easy for users, as they can use it on any cloud provider for their needs. Besides the cloud, Ubuntu also runs on different smartphone devices, PCs, and servers.

Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu. It is in-charge of helping organizations around the world make the most of Ubuntu with the right deployment on clouds, servers, and even desktops. In addition, it also offers 24/7 support for any question pertaining to this open-source software.

It’s a UK-based company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth in 2004. It employs more than 500 employees, and is headquartered in London. With a presence in more than 30 countries, its offices are also located in Boston, Montreal, Tokyo, Taipei, and Isle of Man. This company provides commercial support for many open-source projects including Ubuntu. Some of the other projects that it supports include Snapcraft, GNU Bazaar, Storm, Juju, Upstart, and Quickly.

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