What’s the first thought that comes to your mind when you think of cloud migration? Cost? Infrastructure? How about training?

Well, one of the most overlooked aspects of cloud migration is training. In fact, it’s more relevant to small businesses than large enterprises because they’re the ones that operate with limited resources.

According to Maria Roat, an administrator at the U.S Small Business Administration, finding knowledgeable trainers to train workers is one of the biggest challenge faced by small businesses that want to move to the cloud. Since cloud is a relatively new technology, not many people are familiar with how it works and other aspects. In turn, this means, they need trainers.

Due to the same reason, not many people are well-versed with cloud, so they’re unable to train others. This makes it a vicious circle that’s impacting hundreds of businesses, and is sometimes, even acting as a hindrance to a smooth cloud migration.

A research shows that this lack of training is making it difficult for small companies to make the most of the benefits offered by cloud, as they don’t have the confidence for cloud migration.

To help small businesses get around this problems, the SBA is offering to train people in cloud. Ranging from training in-house and getting them familiar to certificates, the SBA has started providing free training in many cities. They even have a combination of formal and informal training programs to help employees learn through formal channels as well as from their peers. All these efforts are being taken to make cloud training more pervasive and accessible to anyone who might benefit from it.

However, the SBA’s budget is not large enough to cover every city and every individual who is interested in learning about cloud. This is why it has been encouraging universities to offer cloud as a course.

Taking cue from these efforts from SBA, some universities like the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) has started offering programs in cloud. This university has started a new Master’s program in cloud architecture and management, and so far, the response has been fairly good, according to university sources.

This program requires six six-credit courses and can be completed within two years when students do part-time. The cost is also fairly nominal, as it is priced at $16,500 for Maryland residents and a little less than $18,000 for employees of the federal government including their spouses and dependents, provided they go through the College Alliance Program.

Let’s hope more universities will soon join the bandwagon and provide more cloud courses at affordable rates, so the economy as a whole can benefit from this knowledge.

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VMware’s partnership with AWS has truly been a game-changer for the company and has ushered in a new era of hybrid cloud, so as to speak.

In many ways, VMware now sees itself as a bridge in hybrid cloud deployments, and its latest cloud strategy also revolves around this thought. In VMworld 2017, the CEO, Pat Gelsinger made a slew of announcements. Here’s a look at some of them.

New security product

VMware has announced an expanded set of products and services that’ll help customers to connect, manage, and secure applications spanning all their devices and cloud storage. These products are expected to reduce operational complexities and challenges when customers have to work across different cloud providers.

More partnerships

After taking the first step with AWS, VMware has now decided to partner with other cloud giants like Google. In fact, the CEO announced that the company will be partnering with Pivotal and Google to create a new service called Pivotal Container Service (PKS). This service is expected to provide network and security provisioning with VMware and NSX.

New version of vSphere

During this conference, VMware launched a new version of vSphere platform that’s tailored specifically for big data and high performance computing, in addition to hyper converged infrastructure. This new version is likely to help businesses to virtualize their big data and other high computing workloads.

Improvements to VMware Workspace ONE

VMware’s Workspace ONE is going to see a ton of improvements over the coming months. It will have improved onboarding, app delivery and endpoint management, according to the announcements made during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

With all these offerings, it’s clear that VMware is increasingly seeing itself as a bridge between private and public clouds, and in the process, it is also acquiring new technologies such as containers and OpenStack. Its partnership with companies like Google also is expected to boost its customer base, as its customers will have more options to choose from.

Overall, Gelsinger sees VMware’s role to be a company that can clean up any kind of messy technological footprint, whether it’s bad choice of apps or infrastructure, or even an incompatible set of software and hardware components.

This strategy has worked well for VMware as it produced stellar results during the last quarter. These results are only going to get better as VMware has placed itself in a strategic niche within the cloud market.

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Western Digital is a big name in the world of physical data storage. Headquartered in the city of San Jose in California, it is one of the largest hard drive manufacturers in the world.

Recently, this company announced that it is buying a firm called Upthere to enter the world of cloud storage. Upthere specializes in apps that sync files and folders across many devices. Founded in 2011, this company made its apps available to the public only by 2015. After that, there hasn’t been much activity which suggests that the apps did not get a good response from the market.

By 2015, companies like Dropbox and Tresorit have established themselves as good cloud storage options and all of them offer this sync feature. That could possibly explain why Upthere’s apps did not take off well.

To make up for it, Upthere decided to include a search feature, but that wasn’t effective either because Google and Apple have some of the advanced search features that’ll make it easy to find files. Why do we need an app for this when the same service is offered for free? So, that pitch didn’t help either.

Considering these aspects, this buy out was probably the best way forward for Upthere. At this point, it looks like Upthere will continue its operations under Western Digital, so the chances for lay-offs will be fairly less.

From Western Digital’s perspective, is this really a good move? How is it going to integrate cloud with its physical hard drive business and even if it does, how it take on competition head on? There has been no clear directions from Western Digital in this regard.

That said, Western Digital’s cloud business will be led by Barbara Nelson. She has an excellent entrepreneurial track record and was the Vice-President of a cloud security firm called IronKey before she joined Western Digital. She may be able to turn around business for this company and can even accelerate the entry of Western Digital into cloud storage.

Will all this really happen? Well, time is the answer. Let’s hope this acquisition really helps Western Digital to further its cloud ambitions.

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India seems to be attracting a ton of tech companies of late, partly because of its young and educated population and a burgeoning middle class that’s ready to consume almost everything that comes to the market. The latest company to join this list is Oppo, the Chinese smartphone maker that wants to make the most of the opportunities available in this country.

According to media reports, Oppo plans to move its cloud service locations to India. This move is not just to better cater to the Indian consumers, but also to comply with the latest orders from the Indian IT ministry that wants Chinese companies to keep Indian data within its own territory.

This requirement has come in the wake of security questions in pre-loaded apps that are installed on these smartphone handsets. Though companies, including domestic smartphone producers, are waiting for clarification from the IT ministry on the security guidelines, it is largely expected that the government would want data to stay within its own country.

This is not so new considering that Germany and other countries have also brought in such territorial restrictions with a view to protect the safety of users within their respective countries.

To proactively comply with these yet-to-be-announced restrictions, Oppo has decided to open cloud services within India to store and manage the data of its Indian users.

Another Chinese smartphone manufacturing company called Vivo is planning to open cloud centers in India for the same reason.

Currently, Vivo and Oppo and the third and fourth largest producers of smartphone handsets in India, based on their market share. Both these companies though have refused to give out the exact details of their launch.

To give you a perspective, Amazon Web Services and Azure are the two leading cloud service providers in the world and both have a presence in India. Others like Google and IBM are looking for a slice in the Indian cloud market, so it’ll be interesting to see if Oppo and Vivo can make any in-roads in this highly competitive market or if they will use these services simply to cater to their own clients.

Either way, this would a cost-effective and long-term solution for both countries, considering the stand-off that’s been happening between India and China in the remote region of Doklam. Though none of the industry experts or political analysts expect a war, there’s a higher chance for the Indian government to put pressure on Chinese companies to comply with its security protocols.

Anyway, moving cloud centers shouldn’t be so expensive too and the entire shift can be done within a span of two to three weeks, according to cloud experts.

The positive side is that both such moves can bring more jobs for Indians, and that’s also something that the government would look into.

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Hitachi has unveiled a new Unified Compute Platform designed for customers who’re looking for hybrid cloud strategies.

This new platform, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, is a fully integrated and software-defined data center (SDDC) rack scale platform that gives customers the flexibility to deploy their product using an integrated SDDC stack. The other choice is to deploy by themselves using Hitachi’s vSAN ready node and the underlying Vmware software.

So, how is this platform from Hitachi useful? First off, it gives customers the power to deploy and manage applications by automating the process of monitoring SDDCs.  Also, this adds an extra layer of security through VMware’s NSX networking software that’s built into it. As a result, the entire system is micro segmented, thereby making it easy to secure it.

Probably, one of the key aspects of this software is that the hybrid cloud enabler and the cloud management software built into it makes it easier than ever before to move your work seamlessly between private and public clouds.

To top it, the entire on boarding process took less than five hours at Hitachi’s labs, though we’re yet to get an idea of how long it would take in the real world that comes with many dependencies.

These features sure make UCP an attractive option for customers who use hybrid cloud.

If we look at Hitachi’s products in general, they’re mostly innovative and are based on customer’s expectations. This product too came out of Hitachi’s customer feedback, which was to have real-time analytics built into a product, so they can make decisions faster  and can get their products and solutions to the market faster to get a competitive edge.

This is not all. Hitachi is also embracing many modern technologies and products such as Intel’s SkyLake and NVMe to provide critical services for managing data.  Going forward, we can expect to see many more such innovative products that will ease the work of customers and maybe even make cloud-related technologies a more attractive option for all segments of businesses.

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Goldman Sachs has pledged $45 million to a relatively unknown cloud company called Skytap that’s based in Seattle.

With this round, the total funding for Skytap has touched $100 million and it is planning to have its IPO within the next 18 to 24 months, if everything goes according to the management’s plan.

So, what is Skytap and what does it do?

Well, Skytap started off as a project at the University of Washington a few years ago. Over the last few years, it has garnered a niche area of the cloud, which is to help companies to update their old software to keep pace with modern technology.

Earlier on, Skytap understood that it can never compete with companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google simply because it doesn’t have the infrastructure and finance. Instead of working in the shadows of these companies, Skytap decided to carve a niche for itself by addressing an issue that’s not often considered as a mainstream cloud service.

But, in reality, working with legacy systems is a big problem faced by many companies today. When you have legacy systems, it’s difficult to migrate to the cloud, which means, you miss out on the benefits that come with it. To prevent that, Skytap helps companies to update their old software, so they’re in a better position to move their operations to the cloud.

How does Skytap do this?

Essentially, Skytap has a cloud computing platform that behaves like a legacy datacenter to make it easy for enterprises to bring their applications to the cloud. So, when companies move their applications, they can tap into the many benefits of cloud.

That’s not all. You can add or remove computing capacity on this platform, just like how you would on AWS. It even allows you to use software like Docker software containers to help you modernize your existing software.

This unusual idea has helped Skytap to have a growing list of clients that includes big names such as NBC Universal and GE Healthcare. It’s also growing in a big way as is evident from its second-quarter revenue, that was almost three times more than what it earned during the same period last year.

It’s also entered into an agreement with IBM, under which the latter gives Skytap’s technology for its own customers who want to upgrade their legacy systems.

With such an impressive clientele and a growing customer base, it won’t be long before we see Skytap listed on New York’s Stock Exchange.

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Looks like Alibaba is on a roller-coaster ride and there’s nothing to stop it, as is evident from the results of last quarter.

During the quarter that ended on June 30, Alibaba’s cloud business crossed more than one million customers the revenue during this period rose to 2.43 billion yuan, which roughly equals US$359 million.

According to the reports released by the company, it saw an increase of 137,000 paying customers. As a result, a good chunk of its revenue came from value-added services and it drove up the average revenue per user (ARPU) metric.

Among the high-paying clients, some of the notable ones are China’s CITIC Group, Huaneng Group and PICC Finance.

This good news is sure to motivate the company to take many more steps to widen its worldwide customer base. Already, it’s been opening many centers in different parts of the world, starting from Sydney in Australia to Dubai and even London to provide cloud services to a global clientele.

Besides cloud, many of the core business segments also saw a robust growth during the second quarter. In this period, Alibaba’s retail e-commerce business grew by a whopping 57 percent as it touched $5.4 billion in sales. A notable aspect is that the revenue per buyer as well as the customer base have increased, thereby setting the stage for increased growth over the next few quarters too.

Overall, Alibaba’s revenues increased a massive 56 percent year-on-year to reach revenue of around $7.4 billion. These numbers make Alibaba one of the largest companies in the world and it joins ranks with those of Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Much of this success can be attributed to the fact that Alibaba and its subsidiaries dominate the Chinese digital market. So, how can dominance in one country make it into the elite $400-billion and up club?

Simply because China is the world’s single largest Internet market with more than 700 million customers. To give you a perspective, that roughly twice the entire population of the United States. To top it, any average Chinese spends more money online than Americans.

This surge in Internet users has happened in a controlled space where many American companies don’t have access and this is probably why Alibaba was able to make such rapid strides within a short period of time.

Though we can continue to debate about whether this protectionism is right or wrong, one thing that’s going to stay for sure is Alibaba’s astounding growth as it marches on to capture the world market.

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