Hedera Hashgraph, a provider of a decentralised network and distributed ledger technology (DLT), has selected Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider to push through enterprise-grade DLTs.

Hedera’s hashgraph consensus mechanism advocated by the company is touted as faster and more secure than other blockchain consensus offerings. The company sees itself as part of the third generation of public ledger technologies, after Bitcoin and Ethereum, promising more than 10,000 cryptocurrency transactions per second. Current clients, alongside Google, include Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, and IBM.

“The Hedera proof-of-stake public network, powered by hashgraph consensus, achieves the highest grade of security possible, with blazing-fast transaction speeds and incredibly low bandwidth consumption,” the company touts on its home page. “By combining high-throughput, low fees, and finality in seconds, Hedera leads the way for the future of public ledgers.”

The move to preferred cloud status deepens the working relationship between Hedera and Google Cloud, with the latter noting its ‘extensive geographical coverage’ to help improve the performance of Hedera developers’ applications.

“As we continue to evolve our infrastructure, we’re excited to expand our work with Google Cloud to now make DLT even more readily available for our community members, no matter their size or industry,” said Atul Mahamuni, SVP of products for Hedera in a statement. “This is about developing solutions that drive real business value.”

For many of the biggest cloud providers, the potential of blockchain technologies is being noted. According to an analysis of the managed blockchain platforms market by Everest Research Group in January, IBM and Microsoft Azure came out on top.

Google Cloud does not have the same offering – indeed, the Everest report misses them out entirely – but as well as Hedera other initiatives are taking place. In August Cypherium, a New York-based startup focusing on building an enterprise-grade blockchain platform, partnered with Google Cloud, following deals with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM.

Alongside this, Google – rather than just Google Cloud – is joining the Hedera Governing Council. As part of membership, Google Cloud will operate a Hedera network node, as well as make ledger data available to bolster Google Cloud Platform’s other public DLT datasets.

You can read more about the Hedera news here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Exclusive The domain onecloud.com is up for sale – and the upcoming battle for its signature could attract a seven-dollar sum.

That is the verdict of Andrew Miller, president at ATM Holdings. Miller is helping conduct the transaction having been contacted by an individual seller. The seller, who has owned the domain since the early 1990s and has worked as a senior technology executive, ‘had a very hard time deciding whether to let it go’, according to Miller, but relented after consultations and agreeing that the time was right.

“This is the most valid time I’ve seen because it’s private equity firms, venture firms… as soon as they raise a round of $20-$30 million, they go out and buy their category domain, or their exact match domain,” Miller told CloudTech. “I started to realise that in this space there are so many emerging companies, not only in the US but globally, and it’s a pretty powerful story.”

For dotcom domains, as Miller put it, there is “only one kick at the can”. With regard to the cloud industry, the battles for the best real estate were concluded the better part of a decade ago – or so many thought. Type in cloudcomputing.com, for instance, and you are taken to a Dell Technologies page. Dell had previously bought the domain before trying – and failing – to trademark the term ‘cloud computing’ in 2008.

The story of cloud.com is a somewhat simpler affair. A startup called VMOps bought the domain from a private collector, who according to a 2010 NetworkWorld article ‘wanted to sell [it] to a company he believed in.’ A year later the company, now rebranded as Cloud.com, was bought by Citrix, where it has stayed. In November 2011, it was reported that Citrix put a monetary value of the cloud.com domain at $18 million.

A cursory search reveals a variety of companies with valid claims at the domain. Arguably the most well-known is OneCloud.io, a provider of integration solutions for enterprise applications, with particular expertise in Oracle. Alternately, there is OneCloud Software, disaster recovery providers for VMware-based data centres. Or the Mozambique-based cloud service provider OneCloud. Or services firm OneCloud Consulting. Industry watchers may also recall several years ago the very similar name of Box’s enterprise app store.

Yet there can be many other potentials and possibles, Miller hopes. Following the example of Cloud.com, any cloud company with VC cash on the hip looking to rebrand their product may consider it.

As noted by fellow domain specialist Kate Buckley, perhaps the most eye-catching case study of this nature was smart home manufacturer Ring. CEO Jamie Siminoff bought Ring.com for $1m, rebranding from Doorbot, and noted how it was ‘critically important’ to the company’s success. “Putting it in dollar terms he said he would estimate the name turned out to be worth between $30m and $50m to the company,” DN Journal put it.

“[Onecloud] is a pretty powerful name for someone to take on at the beginning, or rebrand to as well, even if they’re not a product yet,” said Miller. “That’s why it intrigued me – it covers all.

“I see onecloud.com being a case study in two years,” Miller added.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

When it comes to the future demand for data centre colocation services, it would be easy to assume there’s a large elephant in the room – in the shape of a large cloud ready to consume all before it.  

From what we are seeing, however, alongside our cloud provider hosting services and in line with market forecasts, this is far from actual reality. The signs are that colocation can look forward to a vibrant long term market. CBRE, for example, recently reported 2019 was another record year of colocation market growth in the so-called FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris) markets. There’s also a growing choice of high quality colocation facilities thriving in regional UK locations.

Perhaps more telling, however, amid all the excitement and market growth statistics surrounding cloud, some analysts are already predicting only about half of enterprise workloads will ultimately go into to it: best practice and business pressures will see most of the remaining share gradually moving from on-premise to colo – with only a minority remaining on-premise in the long term.

The case for colo

This is because a public cloud platform, while great for scalability, flexibility and ease of access, probably won’t totally satisfy all enterprise application and workload needs. Some will demand extremely high performance while others just need low-cost storage. And unless your own in-house data centre or hosting provider is directly connected to the cloud provider’s network infrastructure, latency is a consideration. This will impact on user experience as well as become a potential security risk. Then of course there’s the governance and security concerns around control of company data.

At the same time, there are serious engineering challenges and costs involved when running private cloud solutions on-premise. The initial set-up is one thing, but there’s also the ongoing support and maintenance involved. For critical services, providing 24 hour technical support can be a challenge.   

Sooner or later, therefore, enterprises will inevitably have to address the implications and risks of continuing to run servers in-house for storing and processing large volumes of data and applications.  Faced with solving the rising costs, complexities and security issues involved, many will turn to finding quality colocation facilities capable of supporting their considerable requirements – from housing servers for running day to day applications, legacy IT systems, and in some cases, mission-critical systems, and for hosting private or hybrid clouds. 

On the hunt

So where’s the elephant? Right now, the elephant is most likely residing in the board rooms of many enterprise businesses. However, the real-life issues and challenges associated with a ‘cloud or nothing’ approach will increasingly come to light and the novelty of instant ‘cloudification’ will wear off. CIOs will be once again able to see the wood for the trees. Many will identify numerous workloads that don’t go into cloud, and where the effort or cost of cloud is a barrier.  

This journey and eventual outcome is natural – an evolution rather than a sudden and dramatic revolution. It’s a logical process that enterprise organisations and CIOs need to go through, to finally achieve their optimum balance for highly effective, cost-efficient, secure, resilient, flexible and future-proofed computing. 

Nevertheless, CIOs shouldn’t assume that colocation will always be available immediately, exactly where they need it and at low cost. As the decade wears on, some colocation providers will probably need to close or completely upgrade smaller or power strapped facilities. Others will build totally new ones from the ground up. Only larger ones, especially those located in lower cost areas where real estate is significantly cheaper, may be capable of the economies of scale necessary for delivering affordable and future-proofed solutions for larger workload  requirements. Time is therefore of the essence for commencing the evaluation process for identifying potential colocation facilities.

In summary, the cloud is not going to consume colocation’s lunch. More likely, together, they will evolve as the most compelling proposition for managing almost all enterprise data processing, storage and applications requirements. They are complementary solutions rather than head to head competitors.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Zach Cooper

Bobby Hellard

Cloud data warehousing provider Snowflake has announced the closure of a $479 million (£370.6m) funding round, taking the company’s overall funding to $12.4 billion.

The funding, which represents the eighth round since 2012, was led by two new investors, in the shape of Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce Ventures. The latter is especially pertinent, as a strategic partnership with Salesforce was also announced. More details of the partnership will be announced at an event in June, but for now Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, said the company was ‘looking forward to the positive impact our technologies and services will deliver to our customers and the broader market.’

Snowflake, which received two rounds of funding totalling $713m in 2018, has long since been a darling of the privately held cloud space. The company polled second, behind only Stripe, in Forbes’ most recent Cloud 100 list, with this publication noting at the time how B2B use cases were progressing significantly ahead of the consumer-based SaaS companies previously en vogue.

Salesforce Ventures, who alongside Bessemer Venture Partners consults with Forbes on its Cloud 100, therefore has a very interesting position to play here. Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft in 2018 showed the company’s strategy to help its customers tie up data across various clouds. Many how-to guides exist on how to connect Snowflake and Salesforce, as well as AWS, Azure and other clouds where Salesforce users will host data.

Speaking to the San Francisco Business Times, Slootman noted this round of funding was not about the money, but to ‘advance content strategy’ as part of the Salesforce partnership. “This is not a traditional fundraise. It is part of a strategic alliance with Salesforce that we initiated,” he said.

Other investors, alongside Salesforce and Dragoneer, were Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia, and Sutter Hill Ventures. “Snowflake’s rapid growth and ability to unlock real value for customers have been impressive,” said Marc Stad, founder and managing partner of Dragoneer in a statement. “We are confident Snowflake’s innovative and evolving technology, and its customer-first approach, will continue to drive sustainable momentum over the long-term.”

While Snowflake secured the silver medal in Forbes’ 2019 Cloud 100 list, don’t bet on their being there this coming autumn. The company’s next step would be to move for IPO, according to TechCrunch, although Slootman did not outline specific plans. Alternately, it does not take a huge leap of faith to imagine that, depending on the fruits of their combined labours, Snowflake’s name may be on a shopping list somewhere at Salesforce towers. The proposed $12.4bn valuation would be almost double that of the $6.5bn Salesforce paid for MuleSoft, the company’s largest acquisition to date.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Sponsored If one were to put together a linguistic analysis of all the conversations held at MWC 2020, later this month in Barcelona, there is a fair chance that the most spoken word would be 5G.

Not surprisingly, the term will be everywhere this year – much of course as it was last year and the year before. Yet whether it is smartphone vendors looking to showcase their latest, speediest wares, or thought leaders looking to where the enterprise needs to focus, things have turned up a notch over the past 12 months.

Take, for instance, what Bejoy Pankajakshan, executive vice president of Mavenir, had to say for sister publication Telecoms last month. The need for discussion is vital for future strategy, Pankajakshan affirms, as the options are legion. “A 5G network is envisaged as the most open, powerful, flexible, and advanced network the telecoms world has ever seen,” he wrote. “At its heart, [it] is a software network and its development and deployment requires a new approach and a new way of thinking.

“If a 5G network isn’t built the right way, users may not come to the telco, and the OTTs could win again.”

Getting everything moving, across various stakeholders, will be no easy task. Charting a blueprint for 5G in concert with other technologies requires detailed planning. Take a session from Accenture set to take place on February 25 around unlocking the power of the cloud. The rise of edge computing, setting the stage for network transformation, will bring huge long-term benefits, but immediate challenges.

“Network cloudification and the disaggregation of hardware and software become necessary – with CSPs now embarking on the critical journey to move their networks to be fully in the cloud, built around cloud at the edge and mobile edge compute, with the ability to cater for all the new applications and use cases unlocked by 5G,” the session materials read.

For some, 5G will inevitably disrupt cloud computing as we know it today. Writing for this publication in August, Marty Puranik, founder, president and CEO of Atlantic.Net, noted how 5G would effectively kill latency – and in one fell swoop, potentially eradicate the need for cloud solutions.

“One of the main reasons the cloud is so beneficial is for numerous devices – either in an organisation for a private cloud or any user with an Internet connection for a public cloud – to connect to and transmit data with a central machine or hard drive located on the cloud,” Puranik wrote. “For an employee to share a large video file with a colleague who’s working from home that day, the cloud made it simple. But why go through all that if your device can connect with your colleague’s device with only a millisecond of latency and a minimum connection speed of 20 Gbps down and 10 Gbps up?”

Edge computing, essentially the older, more streetwise sister of cloud computing, is expected to receive a lot of attention in Barcelona. Microsoft for instance, from whom the taglines of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge are never far away, are expected to be unveiling edge computing services at MWC.

A report from Omdia, which looks to preview 5G developments at MWC20, noted that 5G and AI technologies could utilise edge computing, to the detriment of the cloud. “By 2025, two of three smartphones will include built-in AI capabilities, and global revenue for AI smartphones will increase to $378 billion,” the report notes. “To alleviate consumers’ privacy concerns, smartphone and smart speaker manufacturers will introduce 5G products which perform visual AI processing tasks on edge servers and appliances, bypassing the privacy risks involved in sending data to the cloud.”

The current technological landscape feels like the calm before the storm. Organisations need to fully research the terrain and find out the best use cases for edge, 5G and AI to ensure smooth sailing ahead.

Editor’s note: This article is brought to you by MWC20.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet