All posts by Lavanya

Microsoft

An Interesting Exchange Between Microsoft and Baidu

An interesting exchange took place between two top tech giants – Microsoft and Baidu.

Microsoft offered cloud services to Baidu and in return got an autonomous car!

Yesterday, China’s Baidu announced Microsoft as a partner on its new open-source driving platform that’s called Apollo. Baidu started building this platform using actual data bout autonomous driving from China’s streets, and it expects this car to hit the roads by 2020.

Baidu has been working on this ambitious project for sometime now, as it has opened centers in Singapore and the U.S to collaborate with local partners to build this new platform. According to a spokesperson of the company, Apollo is more an open-source autonomous platform that aims to power the global self-driving industry rather than restrict itself to a small geographic or technological niche.

Microsoft, on the other hand, will be providing the cloud services needed to power this platform. Both companies haven’t said much about the specific services that’ll be used. In fact, a question to Microsoft in this regard was not answered and at this time, it looks like both the companies want to keep the specifics under wraps.

Nevertheless, this move by Microsoft is a smart one, according to analysts. Since autonomous driving is likely to be the future of our roads, it makes sense for Microsoft to get on it at the earliest. Instead of focusing on building its own cars, this company is doing what it knows best, which is to provide the technology that can drive these cars.

Already, Microsoft has partnered with companies like Ford to power thier infotainment system called SYNC. Currently, this is running in about five million cars and over the next few years, it is expected to double. This product uses Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Automotive to create unique in-car experiences for automobile owners and drivers. To take this idea to the next level, Microsoft has entered into this agreement with Baidu.

This is a sensible move on the economic front too because China is a big market for automobiles, and getting a firm foothold in it early can give a big market lead for Microsoft. of course, in China, no foreign company can go alone. Rather, they have to tie up with local Chinese companies to reach the market and that’s exactly what Microsoft has also done.

The good part about this deal is that Baidu started exploring this option only in April of this year, which means, there’s room for a solid partnership and growth for both Microsoft and Baidu. When the self-driving car industry matures, both these companies would be in the driver’s seat to tap into the opportunities and the exploding revenue expected from it.

For all these reasons, it’s a smart move by Microsoft to enter into a deal with Baidu. Let’s hope this translates into a fruitful venture for both these companies and for the eager customers and self-driving industry as a whole.

The post An Interesting Exchange Between Microsoft and Baidu appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

News

A Look Into Travis Perkins’ Cloud Journey

Travis Perkins, the building and construction company, started its cloud journey in 2013. It all began with a five-year roadmap that included a big adoption of technology to improve the efficiency of its operations. In fact, the management saw technology as an enabler of change and wanted to use it to stay ahead of competition.

Four years later, everything seems to be working as per plan for Travis Perkins as efficiency and productivity have soared. The company’s self service portal supports about 30,000 staff who find these IT tools productive and less time-consuming. Undoubtedly, this company’s IT budget has doubled over the last four years to keep pace with the benefits that come from it.

So, what exactly has changed in this company?

First and probably the most important is a change in the mindset. The company’s culture has moved from one where technology was seen as a disruptor to an active adoption of the same and even making it an integral part of everyday operations. Employees were given training on how to handle the new internal systems and this has worked wonders for the company in terms of what its employees can achieve in the same given time.

The second change is to move from an environment where fast fixing a problem was the norm to an environment where the possibility of a problem was reduced. In other words, Travis Perkins moved from a “fixing” approach to a preventing one, and this has helped the company to save a considerable amount of time and money.

With technologies like cloud, it was in a better position to predict a problem even before it occurred and could fix it right away. As a result, there was no disruption or loss to its operations. This was way better than addressing a problem and finding a solution after it occurred.

Thirdly, adoption of technologies like cloud helped this company to move away from legacy systems. Now, its new systems are more unified and presents many advantages such as flexibility and speed – things that were impossible to achieve earlier. It’s also helped the company to achieve greater levels of integration among all its operations.

This is a remarkable improvement considering that Travis Perkins is a company that operates in the traditional construction sector. It also quashes the myth that traditional sectors are fairly slow to adopt IT when compared to sectors like ITES and finance. In fact, the approach taken by this company is an example for other players in this industry to follow suit, so that everyone can leverage the power of IT, especially its emerging technologies like cloud, AI, IoT and machine learning.

Going forward, Travis Perkins aims to create a successful product catalogue that’ll allow customers to buy their products through the self-service portal. It also wants more employees, even those in warehouses, to use its IT systems to log incidences and track their progress.

Though these goals are sometime away, the cloud process has nevertheless started.

The post A Look Into Travis Perkins’ Cloud Journey appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Technology

What does an AI-based future look like for companies?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next frontier that companies are looking to reach. A few years back, we’ve seen robots only in Hollywood movies where they co-exist with humans or in some cases, even take over the world and manipulate us.

Well, if those sights intimidated you, then you’ll be surprised to know that none of that is going to happen, at least not in our lifetime.

As a society, we have just begun our journey into the world of AI, fueled in part by development in technologies such a cloud, machine learning, storage, sensors and more.

From the perspective of companies that have taken a plunge into AI, the future looks fantastic. According to a report by Accenture Research and Frontier Economics, AI technologies are likely to fuel the profits of companies in the future. In fact, it may even be the driving force within the next couple of decades.

The report states that AI technologies can increase economic growth by an average of 1.7 percent across all the 16 industries it examined. Out of these, Information and Communication will get the highest benefit with an increase of 4.8 percent followed by manufacturing that can expect a growth of 4.4 percent. Financial services is also likely to join the party and have an economic growth of about 4.3 percent. These are the top three sectors that will gain from AI technologies, though other 13 industries will also see benefit in one form or another.

All this will increase output by $14 trillion that’ll be spread across 12 economies. And all this within the next couple of decades.

In addition, the report says that by 2035, this technology can increase productivity by a whopping 40 percent.

Where will much of these automation happen?

Education is expected to top the list at 84 percent followed by food services, construction and retail. If you look closely, many of the tasks in these sectors are fairly routine and can be performed without the need for human intervention. Such jobs would obviously be handed over to machines, and this can free up more time for humans to do other productive work.

On one side, there’s much debate about how automation will kill jobs and cause economies to stagnate. While this is true to some extent, it doesn’t take into account many factors. When automation starts spreading, undoubtedly many lower and middle class jobs will be lost. At the same time, they will be replaced by opportunities at the higher end where people can create machines, manage them and even come up with creative ways to put them to good use.

This way, jobs will not be lost, rather they will simply shift from one sector to another. It’ll be similar to what happened when the U.S moved from a manufacturing economy to a services one. We can expect a similar change to happen, and this will be a positive one not just for business, but for economies and for humans as a whole.

The post What does an AI-based future look like for companies? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Microsoft

Microsoft Could Lay off Thousands of Employees

In a clear sign of reorganization within the company, Microsoft has announced that it will be focusing more intently on its cloud services. The announcement said that Microsoft is reorganizing its global workforce to give more importance to cloud services than mere standalone pieces of software.

It’s not so much of a surprise due to many reasons. Firstly, its cloud business is doing amazingly well and has exceeded all expectations. At the same time, revenue from its traditional businesses has slowed down. Putting all this together, cloud is definitely the future of this company, so it’s only right that it focuses its resources on the most profitable sections.

Secondly, reorganization has been taking place in fairly frequent intervals since Satya Nadella took over as the CEO in 2014. Through his visionary ideas, he has been able to make Microsoft a key player in the cloud. At the same time, it has also necessitated many structural changes and Nadella has been doing it to improve the overall efficiency of the organization.

However, this is not good news for many employees who work here. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft plans to cut down thousands of jobs as a part of this latest reorganization. Most of these jobs are likely to be on the sales side.

Though the exact numbers and the locations where the layoffs will happen is not yet clear, it is worrying to some extent because economies of the U.S and other Western countries is slowly stabilizing after the 2008 financial crisis. Even unemployment rates are one of the lowest in a decade. Considering these improvements in the economy, it’s a spot of bother if Microsoft embarks on any mass layoff.

Also, countries like India and China are facing an economic slowdown, so if the layoffs happen here, it could again create an unpleasant effect.

Microsoft though expects no huge impact on its business on a day-to-day business. So, we’ll have to wait and see the impact these layoffs will have on economies and maybe even the IT industry as a whole.

But one thing that we can infer is the growing might of cloud. All major companies believe that we’re moving into a new phase of technology that is likely to be dominated by cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In fact, many analysts and economists are already warning about spikes in unemployment that can come when machines start performing many of the mundane jobs currently being done by lower and middle class residents of a country.

This doesn’t mean machines will take over humans, just like what happens in Hollywood movies. Rather what it means is that the nature of jobs will change. Many of the lower-end jobs will be replaced by machines and robots and we’ll move higher up to create robots or even do other things that’ll drastically improve the overall quality of our lives.

In this sense, there’s much to look forward to, even if Microsoft and others layoff people now.

The post Microsoft Could Lay off Thousands of Employees appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

News

Terark – A Company that Makes Cloud 200x Faster?

With infrastructure and technology in place, the next frontier that companies are aiming for is speed.  Terark, a Chinese company believes that it has the secret to make cloud 200x faster than its existing speed.

Is it true?

Apparently yes. Terark has developed algorithms that compress data to help databases run 200x faster than their existing speeds. This translates roughly to one Terark database doing the job of five servers running existing industry standard databases.

The inventor of this algorithm, Lei Peng, is also the CTO of Terark. According to him, existing databases store their data in blocks and each block has an index associated with it. To retrieve data, a search has to be made through the indices and the corresponding block has to be retrieved. To do this, these blocks of data have to be compressed and decompressed, and this puts a huge workload on existing servers.

Terark’s algorithm addresses this limitation by using a method called Nested Succint Trie that can index 100% of the data. For comparison, current systems index only one percent of the data.

This way, blocks don’t have to be compressed, decompressed and retrieved, rather they can be read into directly. Compression still happens,  but at the global level, so the query speeds are much faster than before.

An analogy for this method is the library. Let’s say a library has different sections such as art and gardening and each section has hundreds of books. Each of these books have their own index, mostly likely as the first page.

When you want a book, the librarian will direct you to the appropriate section, but you’ll have to go through each book’s contents to find the information you want. That’s the existing system.

With Terark, the index pages of all the books are stored in a single database, which means, you can simply search through the index to find the book you want. It’s almost like putting your entire library on Google and searching through it, according to Remy Trichard, the VP of Terark.

Such an innovative approach has definitely caught the attention of big players in the cloud market. Already, this company has entered into a $1 million contract with Alibaba Cloud.  Under the terms of this contract, the Alibaba will give its clients the choice to switch their databases to TerarkDB to get faster speeds during search. Though the pricing structure is not still clear, Alibaba claims that its customers can save a ton of time and money by switching to TerarkDB.

Undoubtedly, this is a big deal for Terark and inspired by the success of its model, it is looking to move beyond the Chinese shores. In fact, it is looking to expand into European and American markets to scour for potential clients and to help them understand this new technology.

That said, this company is not looking to expand their offices beyond China, at least not for now. There are only ten employees now, but it already has six patents. It’ll be interesting to see how this company moves forward in the coming months.

The post Terark – A Company that Makes Cloud 200x Faster? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

News

Google and Nutanix Enter Into an Agreement

Google and Nutanix have entered into an agreement to further application development.

With this agreement, it’s clear that Google understands that it needs help from smaller companies to share its workload on the cloud. Currently, Google has a big presence in the public cloud, but runs behind competitors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. In fact, all these three companies fight intensely for the same public cloud space, though AWS is the clear leader among the three.

Nutanix, on the other hand, is a successful startup that went public last year. It’s data hardware and software gives a hybrid approach to the cloud and bridges the gap that exists between on-premise servers and data servers in the cloud.

Google obviously stands to gain much from this partnership as it can expand its market offering to also include hybrid cloud, apart from its plethora of offerings in the public cloud. This is also more in tune with the market expectations as many companies want to adopt a hybrid approach.

Though security concerns on the cloud have been bridged to some extent, there are still some inhibitions surrounding it, especially when it comes to critical data. This is why companies prefer to keep their mission critical data and applications close to them and run their other applications on the cloud. Such a hybrid approach is what is becoming a preferred mode and this explains why Google has struck an important partnership with Nutanix.

In the past, Google has been a little hesitant in supporting cloud architectures that are based on a  hybrid approach where a part of the company’s data is stored on its own infrastructure. With this partnership, Google has clearly come out of those inhibitions and even wants to use this to its favor.

This agreement is a part of Google’s larger plan to diversify its cloud offering and score over that of its competitors. In fact, Google has been embarking on a multitude of strategies to grow its cloud business and much of it has been successful so far.

From Nutanix’s point of view too, this is a big milestone as it gives a worldwide customer base and access to resources that can probably take years for Nutanix to create for itself.

It’s good news for cloud customers as well because they can have more choices and a better level of service when the products of both these companies are combined.

The first integration that comes from this partnership will be available to the public from the first quarter of 2018 onwards. These products are expected to make it easy for customers to seamlessly move their data between their on-premise and cloud architectures.

Overall, this is good news for customers and the cloud market at large.

The post Google and Nutanix Enter Into an Agreement appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

News

Brazil’s Neoway Raises $45 Million

Neoway, a Brazilian company that provides analytics services to local companies announced that it has raised $45 million in funding. This round was led by QMS Capital and existing investors such as Accel, Monashees and Endeavor Capital joined in. Two notable new investors in this round were PointBreak and Pollux.

The main aim for this round of funding is that Neoway wants to expand its business outside of Brazil. In fact, it wants to bring its expertise to the U.S market as it believes there’s a lot of potential for its services here.

This company currently based in Florianopolis in Brazil specializes in collecting massive amounts of data and analyzing them to get meaningful insights that can help its customers to improve their businesses. It typically collects data from 6,000 different databases from more than 300 sources, collates them together and provides the analytics.

On the face of it, this process may seem simple, but in reality, it’s anything but simple. These 300 sources will have data stored in many different formats, so Neoway has to bring them to a common format first before any analysis can be run on it.

To give you a perspective, let’s say you’re a company that sells tour packages. To get an in-depth analysis of your customers and business operations, you need to collect data from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more. Each of this information can be in the form of a comment, like, text, image, video, audio or more. You’ll have to glean all the relevant information from these different data formats and put them together to get what you want.

Neoway uses bots to crawl the web and find any information that mentions your company or is relevant to you in some way. It identifies this relevance using advanced algorithms and machine learning technologies.

Based on this data, you can better understand the preferences of your customers and create packages that’ll appeal better to them. It can even help you to create and sell custom packages to customers based on their needs. In turn, this will increase your overall revenue and profitability.

Neoway has already help many Brazilian companies such as Raizen and Shell to tap into the power of analytics. As a part of its expansion plans, it has opened an office in New York City. To top it, it has partnered with a prominent data provider called InfoGroup and so far, has collected data from 50 million companies.

In addition, it’s also running a test pilot program with a prominent financial institution and a consumer goods company.

To gain a strong foothold in the U.S market, Neoway has hired Andrew Prozes, the former CEO of LexisNexis, another company that’s known for its work in the data warehouse industry. In fact, Prozes was also a part investor in this round of funding.

Let’s join together and wish this company a lot of success in its new stint in the U.S.

The post Brazil’s Neoway Raises $45 Million appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Amazon AWS

What’s Going On Between Amazon and Walmart?

Amazon has built a huge empire over the last decade. It started off as an online retailer of books and since then, has slowly and steadily built its business. Today, it is the online retailer that many people visit when they have to buy anything from pins to phones and everything in between. All this makes Amazon the biggest online retailer in the world.

Now, Amazon is furthering its ambitions by entering into the brick and mortar world of retail with its recent acquisition of Whole Foods for a whopping $13.7 billion. In addition, it has signed into an agreement with Nike to sell its shows directly on its website.

Amazon even plans to introduce a service called Prime Wardrobe under which customers can order and try clothes of different brands for a period of seven days before deciding whether they should buy or not. Such services are likely to change the face of retailing as it’s more customer-centric than before.

And this is the beginning of its clash with Walmart.

Walmart has been the largest retailer in the world and has dominated this market for many decades, even long before computers and the Internet came into being. With the entry of Amazon, there is a clear threat for Walmart because both these companies will compete in the same space over the coming years, at least that’s how it looks like now.

As long as Amazon was being the king in the digital space, Walmart had no problems because it was the king in the realm of physical shopping. But with Amazon entering this space, that comfort has clearly been breached.

Though Amazon has not given any kind of plan about what it’s going to do with this acquisition and how it will benefit its customers, it has definitely kick started a retail war.

Walmart, on its part, is putting pressure on Amazon to stay away. However, how Walmart is putting the pressure is what is making the whole process irksome. Instead of a direct clash, Walmart is pushing its vendors to move away from Amazon Cloud Services and opt for the services of companies like Microsoft and Google. With Walmart leading the way, other companies such as Target are also exerting pressure on their respective IT vendors to move their operations away from Amazon cloud.

Little wonder that Amazon is reacting strongly and is accusing Walmart and other large retailers of bullying.

Is it working?

Apparently not as many vendors are persuading Walmart and refuse to abide by its d\irection of changing cloud providers. But that’s not going to last forever because Walmart can simply outsource its IT operations to a company that stores data on Azure or Google Cloud Platform.

As customers, we can expect the war to get dirtier before subsiding. But eventually, we may the winners if Amazon sets up large stores like Walmart, as we can get the best value for our company through intense competition from retailers.

The post What’s Going On Between Amazon and Walmart? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Technology

Can Cisco Catch up with the Big Cloud Players?

Cisco, the world’s largest maker of networking equipment, is gearing up for the changing tech landscape.

First off, as more companies move to the cloud, their need for networking equipment falls greatly. They no longer need so many routers and switches and in turn, this is affecting the sales of Cisco’s core business. Even those companies that invest in infrastructure don’t seem to need an end-to-end networking gear, like in the past. All that they need now is precise equipment that fits well with their requirements.

All this means, Cisco’s existing operations and business structure is taking a beating. During the 2000s, technology and networking was expanding rapidly and Cisco simply rode that boom with its advanced networking equipment. it even became one of the most valuable company during that time.

But the picture is a lot different today. It’s now more about creating a niche and finding specialized equipment for that niche instead of building a complete networking solution from scratch.

To keep pace with the changing trends, Cisco moved into the cloud market to manufacture its equipment for cloud service providers like Amazon and Microsoft. It seemed like a good move then because Cisco simply decided to do what it knows best.

Unfortunately for Cisco, it didn’t work simply because cloud providers too wanted specialized equipment and not the general networking gear the Cisco specializes in. As a result, specialized network vendors like Artista looked more attractive than Cisco.

To top all these woes, software is becoming more central to cloud and even possibly IoT and machine learning because hardware is saturated and growing in an altogether different dimension. The focus is slowly moving towards sensors and other finer equipment rather than general networking.

So where does all this leave Cisco now?

Chuck Robbins, the new CEO of Cisco, is taking all out efforts to bring more relevance to Cisco. Robbins took helm in July 2015 and since then, has been entering into agreements to make custom products for different companies.

In addition to it, Cisco is also strengthening its software and service businesses, so it can generate a more stable and steady income from it. To this end, it has even made some acquisitions. It bought a company called AppDynamics that makes software to monitor the performance of corporate applications. It bought his company for a whopping $3.7 billion. Likewise, it bought a company called Viptela for $610 million, to tap into its expertise of making programs to manage different networks.

It has also taken the route of subscriptions, so many of its products are available under this pricing model. This is to keep pace with the new model of selling products to its customers.

All these changes have helped Cisco to some extent, as it continues to be a key hardware manufacturer for the new age tech industry.

Let’s hope it continues to build on these initiatives, so it can use its vast experience and expertise to fuel the growth of cloud and other new technologies that are likely to transform our society in a big way.

The post Can Cisco Catch up with the Big Cloud Players? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Computing

Oracle: Another Cloud Success Story

Old warhorses in the tech industry are leaping back into profits and relevance, thanks to their foray into the cloud world. A few days back, Adobe released its results that reflected in success, specifically in the cloud industry. Today, it is Oracle.

Oracle was a relatively late entrant to the cloud market, as rivals like Salesforce.com had already started making a name for itself when oracle decided to enter this market. But that was no deterrent for Oracle as it ploughed its way through competition and has emerged as one of the key players in this industry today.

The latest results announced by Oracle are a testimony to this success. It declared a profit of $10.89 billion, resulting in 89 cents per share. This was way above than what the analysts were expecting, as they were looking for around $10.45 billion in sales and an earnings of 78 cents per share.

These significantly high results took the share price of Oracle to new highs. It touched $51 for the first time, up from the $47 that it was trading the day before the results were announced. This is a significant jump and this could put the potential value of Oracle at around $200 billion, according to a report in MarketWatch.

During the same period last year, Oracle earned 81 cents per share.

The main driver of Oracle’s revenue is definitely the cloud. Total revenue from all cloud related business was $1.36 billion, and this represents a 58 percent increase when compared to last year.

To top it, the company also gave a favorable and positive outlook for the upcoming year. According to its c-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Larry Ellison, Oracle is expecting more big companies to migrate to its cloud platform in the coming year and this means, we can expect more revenue and earnings per share in the future.

Currently, AT&T is one of Oracle’s big customers with more than 10,000 Oracle databases. In an agreement entered into by both the companies, AT&T plans to move thousands more of its databases to Oracle, thereby signaling a deeper relationship, and more importantly, more revenue for Oracle.

Such positive events go well with investors and assuage many of the fears and uncertainties surrounding the tech industry. In fact, such a positive statement from one of the co-founders also contributed to the steady price increase of its shares. That’s not all. It has given a new sense of confidence to its investors and other stakeholders of this company.

All these numbers and statements go to show the power of cloud and how it has changed the landscape of the tech industry. Gone are the days of traditional hardware and licensing because more companies want to move to the cloud to leverage the many benefits that come with it.

It’s up to service providers to enhance their offerings and infrastructure to ensure that more of its clients move to the cloud, so it’s beneficial for everyone involved.

The post Oracle: Another Cloud Success Story appeared first on Cloud News Daily.