Category Archives: Microsoft

AWS, Financial Results, Google, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

AWS rakes in $1.8bn in Q2 as ‘big four’ corner half the cloud services market

AWS is bringing in nearly $2bn in quarterly revenues

AWS is bringing in nearly $2bn in quarterly revenues

AWS revenue for the second quarter of this year topped $1.82bn, an increase of about 81 per cent year on year. The results come as other major IT service providers revealed strong cloud growth for the quarter.

Last quarter, the first time it pulled the curtain back on its cloud business, Amazon revealed AWS raked in $1.57bn in revenue. Operating income for Q2 increased 407 per cent to $391m.

Commenting on the results Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said “[we] continued to double down on our fastest growing geography — India, launched 350 significant AWS features and services so far this year, ahead of last year’s pace, introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms — enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40 per cent renewable energy.”

Speaking to analysts this week Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said the company is also getting more competitive on cost as it continues to optimise its services.

“We had over 350 significant new features and services and we believe that’s what resonates with customers. While pricing is certainly a factor we don’t believe it’s always the primary factor; in fact what we hear from our customers is that the ability to move faster and more agility is what they value,” he explained.

But he deflected questions about the capital intensity of the AWS business – which represent about 80 per cent of its overall capex.

Synergy Research Q2 Cloud Market Estimates“We do realise it’s a capital-intensive business and we have modelling that shows it’s going to be a very good business for us and that’s what we aim for as long-term return on invested capital and free cash flow. So, we’re certainly cognizant of the capital part of the calculation,” he said.

Amazon revealed the results as other large incumbents pulled back the curtain on their cloud performance. The second quarter saw Microsoft grow its cloud revenues 88 per cent and IBM 60 per cent.

But the results suggest some of the smaller cloud providers are being left in the dust. According to John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) are now approaching the $6bn, while trailing twelve-month revenues hitting close to $20bn. Synergy estimates AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google (the ‘big four’) control well over half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market.

“The cloud infrastructure services market is quite clearly bifurcating with a widening gap between the big four cloud providers and the rest of the service provider community,” Dinsdale explained. “Developing the necessary global hyperscale datacentre infrastructure along with the required marketing and operations support is simply beyond the reach of all but a very small number of players. This is not going to change.”

The good news for smaller and medium-sized cloud providers, he said, is that there does remain a wealth of opportunity for them to specialise in a particular niche industry or geography. At the moment the firm reckons North America accounts for over half of the worldwide cloud services market, followed by the EMEA and APAC regions.

Ginni Rometty, IBM, Kevin Turner, Luka Mucic, Microsoft, News & Analysis, quarterly results, SAP, Vendor

IBM, Microsoft struggle while SAP largely bucks the trend

IBM, Microsoft and SAP all released their financial results this week

IBM, Microsoft and SAP all released their financial results this week

IBM and Microsoft revealed steep losses this week as the two companies released their Q2 financial results, but SAP seems to have bucked the trend with close to 130 per cent growth in cloud revenues and 13 per cent growth in revenue.

IBM revealed second quarter net income from continuing operations was $3.5bn compared with $4.3bn in the second quarter of 2014, a decrease of 17 per cent, and revenue was down 13 per cent, much of which it blamed on recent large divestitures and related cash impairments.

Year on year growth in its cloud business – from $2.8bn in the second quarter last year to $4.5bn in Q2 2015 – and ten per cent growth in its analytics business hasn’t fully compensated for some of the challenges the company facing elsewhere in its business. The company’s revenues have been in decline for almost three years sequentially.

“Our results for the first half of 2015 demonstrate that we continue to transform our business to higher value and return value to shareholders,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. “We expanded margins, continued to innovate across our portfolio and delivered strong growth in our strategic imperatives of cloud, analytics and engagement, which are becoming a significant part of our business.”

Microsoft saw quarterly revenues hit $22.2bn in Q2 this year, but the company reported record losses of $14.7bn, much of which resulted from the impact of its $7.5bn write-down of its failing Nokia business, with other costs related to the restructuring nearing $1bn. The company also said the strengthening of the dollar relative to other currencies had a significant impact on its results.

But Microsoft reported commercial cloud revenues grew of 88 per cent in the quarter, driven largely by Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM Online uptake, while the division selling on-premise licenses for its productivity offerings declined 4 per cent; the company said it added roughly 3 million cloud users in the quarter.

“In our commercial business we continue to transform the product mix to annuity cloud solutions and now have 75,000 partners transacting in our cloud,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft.

German software giant SAP seems to be one of the few large incumbents bucking the trend this quarter. The company revealed cloud subscriptions and support revenue grew 129 per cent in Q2, new cloud bookings were up 162 per cent, and it more than doubled its SAP HANA customers year on year (from 3,600 to over 7,200). The company reported overall quarterly revenues rose 13 per cent to €1.39bn.

“Our second quarter growth in new cloud bookings was significantly higher than in the first quarter. This momentum showed across our entire cloud and business network portfolio,” said SAP chief financial officer Luka Mucic. “Our operating profit performance is beginning to reflect the business transformation we initiated to make SAP ready for the future. We are on track to achieve our full year business outlook.”

The results come as all three companies – Microsoft, IBM and SAP – continue ambitious redeployment and reorganisation efforts to address a shift in the market towards cloud services and away from legacy software and services.

Cloud computing, cloud security, Microsoft, News

Microsoft Plans to Buy Security Firm Adallom

Microsoft is set to be paying 320 million dollars in cash for Adallom, a startup with software for monitoring the use of cloud-based services. A source has claimed all 90 employees, including the 30 in the US, will function an independent unit of Microsoft and will manage material related to cybersecurity for Microsoft.

While Microsoft has refused to comment on the supposed deal, the Wall Street Journal claims, “According to the people familiar with the matter, Adallom, which employs 90 people world-wide, will continue to operate from Israel, building up Microsoft’s cybersecurity-focused operations in the country.” The first to report the deal were Israeli media outlets Calcalist and Globes, with reports later coming from the Wall Street Journal.

ht_microsoft_cc_120823_wg

Microsoft has continued making the cloud a priority throughout the whole company, and building an intelligent cloud platform is one of three areas of investment for the company. Cloud security is vital to the company as they switch to more internet based occupations, hence the move to purchase Adallom. Usage and revenue from application Office 365 has increased during the first quarter of 2015, and Microsoft want to protect this trend.

This is just one of Microsoft’s myriad of partnerships and acquisitions this year. Microsoft has previously attained a provider of machine learning technologies for e-discovery and information governance. The company’s software uses advanced text analytics to perform multidimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sorting documents into themes, grouping near-duplicates, and isolating unique data. In addition,  Microsoft has purchased N-trig and Aorato.

The post Microsoft Plans to Buy Security Firm Adallom appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Enterprise IT, GE, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Nokia, Office 365, Software as a service

Microsoft signs GE in massive cloud deal

General Electric has signed up to use Microsoft's cloud software

General Electric has signed up to use Microsoft’s cloud software

Microsoft announced this week that it has signed up long-time tech partner GE to its cloud-based productivity software in a multimillion dollar deal.

The move will see GE deploy Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite Office 365 to GE’s more than 300,000 employees in 170 countries.

Jamie Miller, senior vice president and chief information officer of GE said: “As we deepen our investments in employee productivity, Microsoft’s innovative approach to collaboration made Office 365 our first choice for providing scalable productivity tools to our employees worldwide.”

GE said it will integrate a number of its line of business applications with Office 365 and deploy cloud-based email and Skype for Business calling and meetings, real-time document co-authoring, and team collaboration.

“Microsoft and GE share many values in common — openness, transparency, data-driven intelligence and innovation — all of which are driving forces behind Microsoft’s own mission to help people and organizations achieve more,” said John Case, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office. “As one of the most innovative companies in the world, GE understands what it takes to unleash the potential of its employees. We’re delighted GE has selected Office 365 as the productivity and collaboration solution to empower its global workforce.”

GE and Microsoft are longtime technology partner. The two companies have even set up a joint venture together – Caradigm, a company that develops and sells a healthcare technology platform for clinical applications and population management.

Nevertheless, the deal comes at a critical time for the company and is in some ways a validation of Microsoft’s goal of turning its business around from a number of strategic stumbles and focusing on its core strengths in software and the cloud. Earlier this month the company reported it would write off its entire Nokia acquisition and shed about 7,800 jobs in the process, mostly from its phone business.

Adallom, M&A, Microsoft, Middle East, News & Analysis

Microsoft buys Islraeli security startup Adallom for $320, plans Israel cybersecurity centre – report

Microsoft has reportedly acquired Adallom for $320m in a cloud security push

Microsoft has reportedly acquired Adallom for $320m in a cloud security push

Microsoft has apparently added Israeli cloud security startup Adallom to its arsenal, with multiple reports claiming the software company paid nearly $320m for the firm. The reports also suggest Microsoft is planning to open a cyber security centre in the region using some of the local talent it has acquired.

Adallom has not confirmed the acquisition, while Microsoft spokespeople told BCN that the company has “nothing to share” about the reports.

Adallom (an abbreviation of the Hebrew saying “ad halom,” which means “up to here” or “the last line of defence”) is a security service that integrates with the authentication chain of a range of SaaS applications and lets IT administrators monitor usage for every user on each device.

The software works with a conjunction of end-point and network security solutions and has a built-in, self-learning engine that analyses user activity on SaaS applications and assesses the riskiness of each transaction in real-time, alerting administrators when activity becomes too risky for an organisation given its security policies.

The company, which has its headquarters in California and a research and development outfit in Israel, was founded by cybersecurity veterans Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik in 2012.

The acquisition, first reported by Israeli business paper Globes, comes over half a year after its last security purchase; according to that report Microsoft plans to put Adallom and a number of other Israeli startups at the core of a new cybersecurity centre in Israel, a thriving hub from cybersecurity startups.

In November last year Microsoft ended months of speculation when it confirmed it bought another Israel-based security startup, Aorato, which offered software that tracks user behaviour when accessing applications linked to Active Directory, both in the cloud and on premise.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, natural conservation, News & Analysis

The Natural Capital project deploys cloud, big data to better quantify the value of nature

Microsoft is teaming up with several US universities to use cloud and big data technologies to forward natural conservation efforts

Microsoft is teaming up with several US universities to use cloud and big data technologies to forward natural conservation efforts

The Natural Capital Project, a ten-year partnership between Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund and the University of Minnesota to determine the economic value of natural landscapes is using Microsoft’s cloud and big data technologies to help analyse and visualise data that can help municipal policy-makers improve the environment in and around cities.

The recently announced partnership will see Microsoft offer up a range of technologies to help the project’s researchers better analyse the features impacting natural ecosystems surrounding cities, and quantify the impact of natural disasters, development or how other dependencies are brought to bear on those ecosystems.

Mary Ruckelshaus, managing director of the Natural Capital Project told BCN the project is important because it will help demonstrate both how people depend on the environment and increase awareness of their impact on nature.

“City dwellers depend on nature in many ways–wetlands, marshes, and dunes protect them and their property from coastal flooding, trees and other vegetation filter particulates for clean air, and green spaces reduce temperature stress and improve cognitive function and mental health, just to name a few,” she said.

The researchers will collect data from that broad set of sources including satellite imagery, remote sensors, and social media, and use Microsoft Azure to model the data and deliver the results to a range of mobile devices.

“Our focus with The Natural Capital Project is on enabling leaders in the public and private sector to have access to the best data, powerful analytic and visualization tools so that they can more deeply understand historical trends and patterns within the city or company, predict future situations, model “what-if” scenarios, and gain vital situational awareness from multiple data streams such as satellite imagery, social media and other public channels,” explained Josh Henretig, senior director of environmental sustainability at Microsoft.

“The increased prevalence and availability of data from satellite imagery, remote sensors, surveys and social media channels means that we can analyse, model and predict an extremely diverse set of properties associated with the ecosystems on which we depend,” he said.

Henretig explained to BCN that the Natural Capital Project is the first to try and quantify the economic and social value of natural capital, which means developing the required models and tools needed to complete the analysis will be a challenging undertaking in itself.

“That is a huge, complex undertaking, without any precedent to guide it. As a result, we face the challenge of driving awareness that these tools and this knowledge is available for leaders to draw from. In addition, the sheer diversity of global ecosystems, shared ecosystems, their states of health or decline and differing local and regional priorities make creating tools that can be adapted to assess a variety of circumstances quite a challenge.”

While Henretig acknowledge that it’s often hard for municipal policy-makers to make long-term environmental decisions when people are struggling with more immediate needs, he said the Project will help generate both vital data on the economic value of natural systems as well as suggestions for how they can move forward in policy terms.

“In partnership with cities, we are going to help turn this data—produced across multiple systems for, among other things, buildings, transportation, energy grids, and forests, streams and watersheds—into actionable information and solutions,” he said, adding that the company hopes to apply the models and techniques generated by the research partners to other cities.

Azure, Enterprise IT, Features, Google, HP, hybrid cloud, Interviews, Microsoft, News & Analysis, ovum, Rackspace, Roy Illsley

Hybrid cloud issues are cultural first, technical second – Ovum

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

This week has seen a number of hybrid cloud deals which would suggest the industry is making significant progress delivering the platforms, services and tools necessary to make hybrid cloud practical. But if anything they also serve as a reminder that IT will forever be multimodal which creates challenges that begin with people, not technology, explains Ovum’s principle analyst of infrastructure solutions Roy Illsley.

There has been no shortage of hybrid cloud deals this week.

Rackspace and Microsoft announced a deal that would see the hosting and cloud provider expand its Fanatical Support to Microsoft Azure-based hybrid cloud platforms.

Google both announced it would support Windows technologies on its cloud platform, and that it would formally sponsor the OpenStack foundation – a move aimed at supporting container portability between multiple cloud platforms.

HP announced it would expand its cloud partner programme to include CenturyLink, which runs much of its cloud platform on HP technology, in a move aimed at bolstering HP’s hybrid cloud business and CenturyLink’s customer reach.

But one of the more interesting hybrid cloud stories this week came from the enterprise side of the industry. Copper and gold producer Freeport-McMoRan announced it is embarking on a massive overhaul of its IT systems. In a bid to become more agile the firm said it would deploy its entire application estate on a combination of private and public cloud platforms – though, and somewhat ironically, the company said the entire project would wrap up in five years (which, being pragmatic about IT overhauls, could mean far later).

“The biggest challenge with hybrid cloud isn’t the technology per se – okay, so you need to be able to have one version of the truth, one place where you can manage most the platforms and applications, one place where to the best of your abilities you can orchestrate resources, and so forth,” Illsley explains.

Of course you need all of those things, he says. There will be some systems that won’t fit into that technology model, that will likely be left out (i.e. mainframes). But there are tools out there to fit current hybrid use cases.

“When most organisations ‘do’ hybrid cloud, they tend to choose where their workloads will sit depending on their performance needs, scaling needs, cost and application architecture – and then the workloads sit there, with very little live migration of VMs or containers. Managing them while they sit there isn’t the major pain point. It’s about the business processes; it’s the organisational and cultural shifts in the IT department that are required in order to manage IT in a multimodal world.”

“What’s happening in hybrid cloud isn’t terribly different from what’s happening with DevOps. You have developers and you have operations, and sandwiching them together in one unit doesn’t change the fact that they look at the world – and the day-to-day issues they need to manage or solve – in their own developer or operations-centric ways. In effect they’re still siloed.”

The way IT is financed can also create headaches for CIOs intent on delivering a hybrid cloud strategy. Typically IT is funded in an ‘everyone pitches into the pot’ sort of way, but one of the things that led to the rise of cloud in the first place is line of businesses allocating their own budgets and going out to procure their own services.

“This can cause both a systems challenge – shadow IT and the security, visibility and management issues that come with that – and a cultural challenge, one where LOB heads see little need to fund a central organisation that is deemed too slow or inflexible to respond to customer needs. So as a result, the central pot doesn’t grow.”

While vendors continue to ease hybrid cloud headaches on the technology front with resource and financial (i.e. chargeback) management tools, app stores or catalogues, and standardised platforms that bridge the on-prem and public cloud divide, it’s less likely the cultural challenges associated with hybrid cloud will find any straightforward solutions in the short term.

“It will be like this for the next ten or fifteen years at least. And the way CIOs work with the rest of the business as well as the IT department will define how successful that hybrid strategy will be, and if you don’t do this well then whatever technologies you put in place will be totally redundant,” Illsley says.

Bob Stutz, Field service management, FieldOne, M&A, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft buys FieldOne in field service management software play

Microsoft has acquired FieldOne to strengthen its Dynamics CRM offering

Microsoft has acquired FieldOne to strengthen its Dynamics CRM offering

Microsoft has acquired field service management FieldOne Systems in a move aimed at complementing its Dynamics CRM customer service capabilities.

The cloud-based field service management software is already built on Microsoft technology on the back and front-end (Dynamics CRM), making integration with Office 365 somewhat more straightforward than it would be otherwise.

“Their industry-leading solution specializes in delivering a full set of capabilities that include work order management, automated scheduling, asset contract, inventory and procurement management, workflow capabilities and mobile collaboration – providing enterprises with a comprehensive modern field service solution,” explained Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

“FieldOne is a great fit for Dynamics CRM adding to our extensive customer service capabilities – which includes chat, knowledge management and self-service functionality from Parature which we acquired in January of 2014.  Like Parature, FieldOne is offered to customers as a cloud service. It’s built on Microsoft technology for fast integration, it already works great with other Microsoft productivity offerings like Office 365 and SharePoint, and has cross-platform capabilities meaning it can work on different devices enhancing the mobile experience which is so critically important in field service management.”

Microsoft said the FieldOne acquisition is a “major step” towards helping it round off its customer services software portfolio. The move is reminiscent of a similar acquisition made last year by Oracle when the database and ERP giant bought TOA technologies, which it rolled into its Service Cloud offering.

Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Microsoft, News

Microsoft Will Offer Azure In India

BqRtWXEIMAAQYhFMicrosoft will begin to offer its cloud computing service, Azure, for free to startups speeding up the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Microsoft’s Indian subsidiary has said, “Our Azure cloud services, valued at $120,000, will be given free to qualified startups under the ‘BizSpark plus program’ for building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country.”

Microsoft Ventures India director Rajinish Menon, has stated, “Startups need all the help they can to get access to the right tools, technology and guidance. At Microsoft, we are committed to supporting these startups and through the BizSpark Plus program we want to support India’s upcoming entrepreneurs.”

 

Microsoft also added qualifying startups must be privately held, below five years old with sub one million revenue annually and be a member of select accelerator or venture capital firm.

To begin, Microsoft is partnering thirteen startup accelerators, including 91Springboard, Reliance GenNext, Zone Startups, and Pitney Bowes. 91Springboard partner Pranay Gupta has said, “The BizSpark Plus program is a unique opportunity for startups who want to leverage the power of the Cloud and give a boost to their product development lifecycle.”

Microsoft BizSpark is a worldwide program that aids startups by offering free Microsoft software development tools, connecting startups with key industry players, investors and giving marketing visibility. Microsoft also added that startups will also receive the full suite of development and test software and Visual Studio, Windows and Office tools in this latest offering.

Microsoft currently has one hundred and fifty startup programs in forty seven countries.

 

The post Microsoft Will Offer Azure In India appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Cloud computing, Cloud Services, hybrid cloud, IaaS, Microsoft, News

Cloud News Daily 2015-07-14 05:38:21

Rackspace Hosting and has paired up with Microsoft to manage and offer technical support to Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform known as Azure. Azure support and managed services are currently available and expansion to overseas customers will begin in 2016.

Rackspace has struggled to compete with larger companies and their cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, and this agreement with Microsoft marks its first major deal to support public cloud services other than its own.

Rackspace Chief Technology Officer, John Engates, has said, “Stay tuned. As part of our managed cloud strategy, a tenet of that is we want to support industry-leading technologies. Our strategy really gives us the opportunity to apply fanatical support to any leading industry platform in the future. So stay tuned in terms of announcements.”

logo

Rackspace hopes to improve profit margins and reduce capital spending by offering managed services and technical support for public clouds, and it is starting with Microsoft’s Azure. Rackspace’s main strength has been providing fanatical service, training and technical support to smaller businesses.

Rackspace technical support will be available directly to clients through Microsoft. Rackspace may also resell Microsoft’s IaaS services to its cutomers. In the fourth quarter of 2014, IaaS Services accounted for thirty one percent of Rackspace’s total revenue.

Engates also added Rackspace will help customers build apps that run in hybrid, private-public cloud environments. Many companies are becoming interested in the public-private cloud model, with important business apps ran on private servers with accessing public IaaS providers on a as needed basis.

The post appeared first on Cloud News Daily.