There are many reasons why Mac® devices are proliferating in organizations. Many say this is due to the fact that users practiced bring your own device (BYOD), bringing their private MacBook® computers into the office. Additionally, some think that employees asked for Apple® devices because it was in-line with their private preference or fitted in […]
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Revenue for Amazon Web Services (AWS) went up 49% year over year to $6.1 billion (£4.6bn) representing another stellar quarter for the cloud infrastructure giant.
The AWS revenues, up from $4.1bn this time last year and up from $5.4bn in the previous quarter, comprise 11.5% of Amazon’s total revenues of $52.9bn.
In an analyst call after the announcement was made, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky noted how AWS’ ability to save on infrastructure resources has helped not only the company’s customers, but also on the consumer side of Amazon’s business.
“Our growth is coming from customers that span from startups to enterprise customers to government agencies, and they start small and then they continue to build and shift their businesses to us,” said Olsavsky. “A large number have gone all-in on AWS, and have had a chance to lower their cost structures as a result.”
In the most recent quarter, various new customers have been announced, from Ryanair, to Formula 1, to Major League Baseball (MLB). Only in the case of Ryanair was a customer going all-in – Formula 1 would be migrating the ‘vast majority’ of its infrastructure from on-prem, while for MLB the dialogue was of extending the partnership.
Yet in all three cases, the importance of machine learning crunching bigger and bigger data workloads was cited as a key reason for choosing Amazon’s cloud. Ryanair is aiming to utilise Amazon Lex, the technology which underpins Alexa, on a trial basis, while Formula 1 is looking to deliver real-time insights and predictions drawing from more than 65 years of race data.
Regular watchers will be interested at how often AWS is mentioned during the lengthy highlights reel on each financials release – 30 this quarter, up from 26 three months before – with the company also citing the general availability of EKS, its managed Kubernetes service, as a key highlight.
So how does this compare with the rest of the field, who all published last week? Microsoft trumpeted an 89% uptick in Azure revenues over the course of a year, while Google’s $4.4bn in ‘other’ revenues – of which Google Cloud forms a part – was a 36% increase on the previous 12 months. IBM, meanwhile, secured another quarter of growth, with cloud revenue up 20% representing almost a quarter of the company’s total earnings.
Yet there is still of course a degree of filtering in play.
Ultimately, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research, the hyperscalers continue to squeeze the rest of the market, with each major player growing. Amazon controls more than a third of the overall market, larger than its four nearest rivals – Microsoft (14% market share), IBM (8%), Google (6%) and Alibaba (4%) – combined.
The research firm puts the market into three divisions; IBM, Oracle, Rackspace and Salesforce as strong niche players, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft as gaining market share ‘but a long way to go’, and Amazon ‘in a league of its own.’
“Amazon Web Services and its three main challengers all turned in some exceptional growth numbers in the quarter. Collectively those four firms alone accounted for well over three quarters of the sequential growth in cloud service revenues,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. “In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, they are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data centre infrastructure and operations.
“Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,” Dinsdale added.
You can read the full Amazon financial statement here.
Eric is a seasoned product marketing leader with 20 year’s experience building product messaging and positioning for numerous SaaS-based solutions. He has worked in five startup environments at the Vice President level creating in-bound marketing strategy for multi-channel content marketing and demand generation initiatives that compel an audience to action and affect revenue growth. More than just generating leads, he plays a critical role of influencing company relationships with customers, industry analysts and partners. He delivers digital engagement strategies that lower the cost of acquisition while driving the target audience through the buying cycle.
The traditional corporate WAN (wide area network) architecture became prolific in the client/server architecture era. We designed and built WANs to largely support branch-to-datacentre. On paper, these often looked like Clouds, but they are in effect hub and spoke networks – the hub being the data centre. This worked reasonably well when most of our applications were hosted in one or two datacentres, and access to the Internet was centralised and only available through the Data centre firewall.
Unfortunately, with the increasing use of the cloud this architecture has become costly and inherently inefficient, ultimately compromising application performance, business agility, and employee productivity. Most significantly the WAN is becoming a blocker to digital transformation, rather than an enabler.
The rising demand for cloud connectivity and Internet access at the branch is driving the need for a new architecture – one that SD-WAN (software defined – wide area network) is attempting to solve. So, what is it?
SD-WAN decouples the application from the underlying network transport. Doing this provides an ability to run any application over any transport or combination of transports. This could be MPLS (multiprotocol label switching), the Internet, mobile or even satellite networks. This ability allows SD-WAN to connect branch offices and remote sites in a different way to the traditional hub and spoke model, typically by creating a Hybrid WAN – one that includes at least two WAN connections from each branch office and leverages two or more different networks (e.g. MPLS, broadband internet, 3G/4G, etc.) – and where all branch WAN connections are active.
The SD-WAN centralised policy controller develops an application aware overlay network based on the underlying transport networks. This enables the SD-WAN to provide application-driven intelligent path selection across the WAN links based on policies centrally defined on the controller. For example, VoIP (voice over internet protocol) through the QoS (quality of service) enabled MPLS network while Office 365 and Facebook across the broadband Internet connection. This allows the SD-WAN to balance loads across the WAN connections, or to monitor application performance and send traffic over the lowest cost or the most reliable WAN links, depending on application requirements.
Cloud-based applications can route directly to and from cloud services and branch locations, instead of through the traditional route of a centralised Internet connection. SD-WAN ensures that branch offices and remote sites are configured consistently to connect users to applications while assuring security compliance and optimising network and application performance, reducing complexity and costs in the process.
What about the business benefits? The SD-WAN solution can improve network and application performance and availability, especially in relation to cloud applications and services, while providing cost-effective bandwidth at the branch.
But the real benefits are in providing cost-effective delivery of business applications and cloud-based applications and services through automated service provisioning, resulting in greater enterprise productivity and business agility. It is this business agility that will enable digital transformation to happen. Being agile is now key to business growth – this agility has enabled many enterprises to disrupt and quickly gain market share.
Traditional WANs are unable to provide the agility to drive the improved performance and speed of change business now requires. SD-WAN solutions are beginning to meet these challenges, creating better, agile solutions that can adapt quickly to meet our growing need for faster change and cloud delivered applications.
Blockchain is a new buzzword that promises to revolutionize the way we manage data. If the data is stored in a blockchain there is no need for a middleman – the distributed database is stored on multiple and there is no need to have a centralized server that will ensure that the transactions can be trusted. The best way to understand how a blockchain works is to build one. During this presentation, we’ll start with covering the basics (hash, nounce, block, smart contracts) and then we’ll create a simple blockchain and a web client for it.
There’s no doubt that blockchain technology is a powerful tool for the enterprise, but bringing it mainstream has not been without challenges. As VP of Technology at 8base, Andrei is working to make developing a blockchain application accessible to anyone. With better tools, entrepreneurs and developers can work together to quickly and effectively launch applications that integrate smart contracts and blockchain technology. This will ultimately accelerate blockchain adoption on a global scale.
A blockchain acts as a digital distributed ledger of transactions or records. The ledger, which stores the information or data, exists across multiple participants in a peer-to-peer network. There's no single, central repository. Distributed ledgers technology (DLT) allows new transactions to be added to an existing chain of transactions using a secure cryptographic signature.
Worldwide spending on blockchain solutions is forecast to reach $11.7 billion in 2022, according to the latest global market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).
IDC expects blockchain spending to grow rapidly throughout the 2017-2022 forecast period, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 73.2 percent. Moreover, worldwide blockchain spending will reach $1.5 billion in 2018 — that's double the amount spent on the emerging technology during 2017.
The United States will see the largest blockchain investments and deliver more than 36 percent of worldwide spending throughout the forecast. Western Europe will be the next largest region for blockchain spending, followed by China and Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan and China).
All nine regions assessed by IDC will experience significant spending growth over the 2018-2022 forecast period, with Japan and Canada leading the way with CAGRs of 108.7 percent and 86.7 percent, respectively.
Blockchain spending will be led by the financial sector ($552 million in 2018), driven largely by rapid adoption in the banking industry. The distribution and services sector ($379 million in 2018) will see strong investments from the retail and professional services industries while the manufacturing and resources sector ($334 million in 2018) will be driven by the discrete and process manufacturing industries.
In the U.S. market, the distribution and services sector will see the largest blockchain investments. The financial services sector will be the leading driver in Western Europe, Middle East and Africa (MEA), China, and Asia-Pacific in 2018.
The industries that will see the fastest growth in blockchain spending will be process manufacturing (78.8 percent CAGR), professional services (77.7 percent CAGR), and banking (74.7 percent CAGR).
Within the financial sector, blockchain lends itself to a number of common use cases including regulatory compliance, cross-border payments & settlements, custody and asset tracking, and trade finance & post-trade/transaction settlements. In the distribution and services sector and the manufacturing and resources sectors, the leading use cases include asset/goods management and lot lineage/provenance.
Cross-border payments & settlements will be the use case that sees the largest spending in 2018 ($193 million), followed by lot or lineage provenance ($160 million) and trade finance & post-trade or transaction settlements ($148 million). These three use cases will remain the largest in terms of overall spending in 2022 as well.
"We continue to see the greatest spending and growth for blockchain around lot lineage and asset and goods management. Highly visible scandals combined with complex supply chains and incomplete information set the stage for investments and projects in these areas," said Jessica Goepfert, program vice president at IDC.
From a technology perspective, IT services and business services (combined) will account for roughly 70 percent of all blockchain spending throughout the forecast with spending fairly well balanced across the two categories.
Furthermore, blockchain platform software will be the largest category of spending outside of the services category and one of the fastest growing categories overall, along with security software.
Google has introduced some new database features along with partnerships, beta news and other improvements that help users get most of their databases for their businesses.
One can choose cloud to host applications from a portfolio of database options – such as SQL, NoSQL, relational, non-relational, scale up/down, scale in/out – but Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a comprehensive package of managed database services to address a variety of workload requirements.
This is what Google is now offering:
Google is joining hands with managed service providers (MSPs) to provide a fully managed service for Oracle workloads for GCP customers. Such partner-managed services unlock the ability to run Oracle workloads and leverage the rest of the GCP platform.
It's possible for users to run their Oracle workloads on dedicated hardware and then connect the applications running on GCP. It can offer fully managed services for Oracle workloads with the same advantages as GCP services by collaborating with a trusted managed service provider.
Users can choose the offering that suits their requirements, along with existing investment in Oracle software licenses. Google is providing an opportunity to customers and partners whose technical requirements do not fit neatly into the public cloud. They will be able to move their workloads to GCP by working with partners and take advantage of the benefits of not having to manage hardware and software.
Recently, Google collaborated with Intel and SAP to offer Compute Engine virtual machines supported by the upcoming Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for SAP HANA workloads.
Google Compute Engine VMs with this Intel Optane DC persistent memory will offer higher overall memory capacity and lower cost compared to instances with only dynamic random-access memory (DRAM).
The company is continuing to scale its instance size roadmap for SAP HANA production workloads. It is working on new virtual machines that support 12TB of memory instead of the currently used 4TB by the summer of 2019, and 18TB by the end of 2019.
Google is expanding the availability of the Cloud Firestore beta to more users by bringing the UI to the GCP console.
Cloud Firestone is a serverless, NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing and querying data for your cloud-native apps at global scale.
According to the company, it will also support Datastore Mode in the coming weeks. Currently available in beta, Cloud Firestore is the next generation of Cloud Datastore that offers compatibility with the Datastore API and existing client libraries.
Google Cloud Bigtable – a high-throughput, low-latency, and massively scalable NoSQL database – is an ideal option for analytical and operational workloads. The company has announced its general availability for regional replication. It has also launched client libraries for Node.js (beta) and C# (beta).
Google will is also planning to launch Python (beta), C++ (beta), native Java (beta), Ruby (alpha) and PHP (alpha) client libraries in the coming months.
What are your thoughts on Google's latest announcements? Let us know in the comments.
To Really Work for Enterprises, MultiCloud Adoption Requires Far Better and Inclusive Cloud Monitoring and Cost Management … But How? Overwhelmingly, even as enterprises have adopted cloud computing and are expanding to multi-cloud computing, IT leaders remain concerned about how to monitor, manage and control costs across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. It’s clear that traditional IT monitoring and management approaches, designed after all for on-premises data centers, are falling short in this new hybrid and dynamic environment.
In our previous posting, we talked about the specific issues IT administrators face in the education environment. Today, we‘d like you to meet one of these admins, Ian North (Figure 1). Ian is in his mid-thirties and lives with his partner in the county of Hertfordshire near London. He works with great dedication as a […]
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