The Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing are among the key application markets in driving semiconductor providers’ revenue streams over the coming year, according to a new report from KPMG.

Of the 150 semiconductor industry leaders surveyed by the professional service provider, three quarters said wireless communications, including smartphones and other mobile devices, are either important or very important. This number is down from 84% in 2016. IoT was cited by 63% of respondents, with robotics (45%), cloud computing (43%) and artificial intelligence (43%) also seen as important. Cloud and AI saw a notable increase year over year, from 27% and 18% respectively.

Not only are the technologies important in their own right, the report asserts that the applications have value to each other, with cloud infrastructure critical to enabling AI and capturing IoT-produced data.

This doesn’t mean that everything is rosy in the garden, however. When it came to strategic priorities for semiconductor providers, the most popular response – cited by 37% of respondents – was diversifying into a new business area. 29% said they are looking at merger or acquisition options, while 25% opted for talent development and management. Other responses noted a maturing market. While 24% and 23% said they were looking at greater speed to market and articulating their company’s vision respectively in 2016, last year saw these numbers drop to 12% and 6%.

According to a report from IHS Markit in September, the global semiconductor industry beat $100 billion for the second quarter of 2017, representing the sector’s best quarter in three years.

“The majority of semiconductor leaders said they expect their companies – and the industry as a whole – to increase revenue, largely driven by diversification into revolutionary new technology segments, such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and autonomous vehicles,” wrote Lincoln Clark, partner at KPMG’s US firm.

“We found that while most semiconductor executives recognise it will be nearly impossible to sustain such massive growth over the long-term, optimism exists about 2018.”

You can read the full report here (pdf).

What you look for in a cloud provider depends to a large extent on the drivers and challenges that you are experiencing.

People with large legacy estates, for instance, tend to be looking for a hybrid cloud solution that can support both their old legacy workloads and their new cloud ones. Some see this as a transitional arrangement to cover the period in which workloads are migrated to the cloud, but many realise that there are certain workloads for which migration will never be either technologically possible or economically practical.

Many people with heterogeneous environments, on the other hand, tend to be looking for a multi-cloud solution. They may be doing this by design, such as in moving their Oracle workloads onto an Oracle cloud environment and their Microsoft ones to an Azure cloud environment. There may also be an element of shadow IT, with some workloads strategically moved to SaaS environments like Salesforce while a host of other SaaS options may also have been adopted by individual departments.

There are others that are keen to collaborate with peers or partners in the cloud which tend to be looking for community clouds. In the USA, the main public cloud providers have set up dedicated regions as community clouds to allow US government agencies at the federal, state and local level, along with contractors and educational institutions to collaborate using sensitive workloads and data sets while meeting specific regulatory and compliance needs. Meanwhile in the UK, UKCloud has created a community cloud for public sector and healthcare that has succeeded in attracting over 220 projects, capturing over a third of the G-Cloud IaaS workloads.

Other sectors where such collaboration is becoming increasingly common include manufacturing with data sharing across the logistical supply chain, in public services and transportation where logistical and geospatial data is shared, and in health and social care where access to patient records or genomic sequencing data is shared.

There is no reason, however, for not being able to have the best of all worlds. New appliances, such as Customer@Cloud from Oracle and Azure Stack from Microsoft have been designed to enable seamless hybrid environments. However, these hybrid environments don’t need to operate in isolation. Heterogeneous environments can be created with hybrid appliances to support both Oracle and Microsoft workloads. Further combining these options with cloud native options like OpenStack and with container management as well creates a cross-over between hybrid and multi-cloud. Indeed, some providers are now starting to offer this kind of heterogeneous cloud with an array of technology stacks, all within dedicated community clouds, giving you the best of all worlds. You get a combination of hybrid and multi-cloud within a sector-specific community cloud.

There are many compelling advantages to this ‘have-it-all’ approach:

• Customer-centricity: As a technology matures, vertical-industry expertise and talent becomes the ultimate differentiator as customers want to know that their technology suppliers are just as committed to their industry and its specific needs as the customer itself is. In effect technology wizardry becomes table stakes, while customer expertise trumps all. And we are now seeing this in the cloud arena.

  With global public cloud providers, you can be treated a bit like a number, but the sector specific nature of community clouds enables them to be very customer centric – centred around key workloads and data sets. Then adding a multi-cloud dimension allows you to use API calls to access advanced functionality in the public cloud in areas like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Multi-cloud also allows customers to create rich heterogenous solutions that address a wider set of requirements than is possible using only cloud native technologies or any single cloud platform, while maximising choice and flexibility and minimising lock-in.
   

• The clustering effect – partners: Such sector-specific community clouds can spark a clustering effect, where, as more customers from a particular sector join, it attracts specialist application providers, both software as a service (SaaS) providers and independent software vendors (ISVs), which in turn then attract more customers in what becomes a virtuous circle.
   
• Minimising latency: appliances like as Oracle Customer@Cloud and Azure Stack are part of a movement away from big centralized clouds, to clouds that are closer to their data origins and help cut down on latency. This is taking two forms: fog computing, and intelligent edge computing. Latency can occur either between the users and the workload that they are accessing, or between different workloads and datasets that need to work together, but are often based on different technology platforms. In the first instance, the appliance can be located as close to the main user groups as possible in order to minimise latency. In the second instance, it is better to locate the appliance within a community cloud alongside as many of the key datasets, workloads and platforms that need to interoperate and if possible to provide connectivity to this community cloud via secure, high performance networks.

Whatever your current situation, bringing together the best aspects of Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud and combining them within a Community Cloud can create the best of all worlds – especially if you work within a sector where collaboration between partners and peers is important.

For example, an NHS trust in the UK may have a collection of legacy workloads that are Microsoft or Oracle based, along with a few newer cloud native applications. It might also have legacy systems that cannot be moved to the cloud, but that could be hosted in a secure facility and it might want to access cloud based applications offered by leading health provides (either SaaS or ISV) as well as core data sets like the 100,000 Genomes Project database. Ideally the trust would want as much of this as possible available in a single community cloud with close proximity between systems to minimise latency. The trust would also want to be able to access this heterogenous environment via HSCN and also to be able to connect onwards to peripheral workloads hosted elsewhere or even to public clouds via API calls for things like artificial intelligence. Fortunately for UK healthcare and the public sector this is all available today.

So why just focus on looking for hybrid cloud or multi-cloud or community cloud – when it is possible to have it all?

Read more: UKCloud partnership with Microsoft and Cisco pushes forward multi-cloud for public sector

Conquering the challenges that managing test environments brings is a huge obstacle to achieving DevOps efficiencies in enterprises today. Gaining automated, real time visibility across the enterprise portfolio to establish a single source of truth to align teams and identify and resolve resource conflicts is key. A tool to keep track of environments at all times makes the job of test environment managers easier by displaying strategic allocation challenges in a single, consolidated place. Gone are the days of having to fire up Excel and send emails to gather this data again.

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Development cycles are being squeezed into tighter timeframes than ever before – days, hours and even minutes. Organizations that fail to keep up will find themselves behind and struggling to keep pace. However, DevOps isn’t the hurdle that it may initially seem, and if an organization develops a proper strategy the obstacles to adopting DevOps can be successfully overcome.

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These slow, brittle, manual, error-prone deployments meant new features that were developed were taking longer and longer to actually be released into the market, and that on-boarding of new customers and applications were greatly delayed as well. The process of seeing Dev work actually getting delivered into the hands of end-users became risky and unpredictable. For example, looking at the JIRA tickets the Ops team was spending their time on – only 12% was being spent on “revenue generating” activities- such as releasing new games or onboarding new customers. Majority of the time – 88% – was spent on deploying bug fixes and patches.

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Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter? How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations? In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, answered these questions and demonstrated techniques for implementing advanced scheduling. For example, using spot instances and cost-effective resources on AWS, coupled with the ability to deliver a minimum set of functionalities that cover the majority of needs – without configuration complexity.

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As DevOps methodologies expand their reach across the enterprise, organizations face the daunting challenge of adapting related cloud strategies to ensure optimal alignment, from managing complexity to ensuring proper governance. How can culture, automation, legacy apps and even budget be reexamined to enable this ongoing shift within the modern software factory?
In her Day 2 Keynote at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Aruna Ravichandran, VP, DevOps Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies, was joined by a panel of industry experts and real-world practitioners who shared their insight into an emerging set of best practices that lie at the heart of today’s digital transformation.

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This week has seen a bevy of announcements from Oracle at its CloudWorld event in New York, from a launch of 12 new data centre regions, to product launches, to acquisitions.

Monday saw Oracle announce plans to ‘significantly expand its modern cloud infrastructure footprint’, including the opening of 12 data centre regions across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Countries include China, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, and Switzerland. The company claims customers in more than 195 countries are running applications on Oracle Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The company’s most recent big bet, around its autonomous database cloud, has also been expanded upon. Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development, demonstrated how to make all Oracle Cloud Platform services ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing’, with the capabilities set to be available in the first half of 2018. Among the potential examples available include automated code generation and security remediation for application development, as well as self-learning chatbots.

The first day also saw the Redwood giant expanding its enterprise service level agreements with what is claimed to be the industry’s first end-to-end financially backed cloud warranty for infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Tuesday saw the launch of new capabilities for Oracle’s Internet of Things Cloud around Industry 4.0. The new capabilities are based around the range of IoT Cloud applications, such as asset, production and fleet monitoring, connected workers, and service monitoring for connected assets. The IoT Cloud ‘enables organisations to gain rich insight into the performance of assets, machines, workers, and vehicles so they can optimise their supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics, reduce time to market for new products; and enable new business models’, as the company put it.

On the acquisition side, Oracle also announced an agreement to buy Zenedge, a cybersecurity firm and provider of malicious bot detection and DDoS mitigation technology. The company said that the combination will ‘allow enterprises to adopt cloud services without compromising performance, cost, control or security through an expanded Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.’

Oracle’s most recent earnings report in December saw total cloud revenues up 44% year over year at a total of $1.5 billion, with cloud revenues representing 16% of the company’s overall revenue, up from 12% this time last year. Speaking to analysts at the time, CTO Larry Ellison said the autonomous database should ‘dramatically accelerate the growth of our PaaS and SaaS businesses’.

Elsewhere, Oracle has released a report from Dr. Michael Mendel, senior fellow at the Mack Institute of Innovation Management at the Wharton School, which argues that a cumulative $2 trillion (£1.42tn) will be added to the US GDP in the coming 10 years as a result of cloud services.

The report, titled ‘Intelligent Finance: How CFOs Can Lead the Coming Productivity Boom’, polled CFOs, CEOs at companies ‘essential to US economic growth’ – Oracle customers such as Blue Shield of California and ConnectOne Bank being some of them – and found a widening productivity gap between the haves and have nots when it came to investing in software technologies.

“Many companies are holding back from widespread adoption of cloud services and new technologies because their current system is ‘good enough’ and they worry about the transition being too disruptive,” the report notes. “They don’t see how their reluctance hurts everyone – shareholders, workers, and the larger economy.”

The CFO, or equivalent head of finance, is therefore seen as the arbiter of change, the report notes, as the exec has a broad view of what’s going on across the organisation, through the finance function being transformed by new technologies. “These new capabilities put the CFO in the right position to advocate for the future,” Mendel concludes. “Any CFO who doesn’t understand what cloud services mean for her or his company is going to end up getting left behind.”

In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Michael Burley, a Senior Business Development Executive in IT Services at NetApp, described how NetApp designed a three-year program of work to migrate 25PB of a major telco’s enterprise data to a new STaaS platform, and then secured a long-term contract to manage and operate the platform.
This significant program blended the best of NetApp’s solutions and services capabilities to enable this telco’s successful adoption of private cloud storage and launching of virtual storage services to its enterprise market.

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In the past year, cloud technologies have dominated the headlines; not just the major players, but new and emerging platforms that promise to become mainstream in the very near future.

As more and more enterprises seek out the capabilities a cloud solution can provide, including data distribution, improved performance and controlled costs, we can anticipate this trend will only continue into the new year. This is apparent by the thousands of companies who already have a fully-baked cloud strategy in place or have one in the works. According to IDG’s 2016 Cloud Computing Survey, cloud technologies are now used by at least 70 percent of U.S. businesses, and Gartner predicts 90 percent of organisations worldwide will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities within the next two years.

Still, whether private, public or a hybrid mix of cloud computing models, there are many organisations who have yet to fully take the leap. So, let’s look at three compelling motivations for businesses to implement a cloud strategy in 2018.

Motivation #1: Reducing operational overheads

Most companies fail to realise the total cost of IT ownership, such as support, additional hardware, maintenance, etc. In fact, Gartner’s 2017 IT Budget reveals that healthcare companies often spend nearly 75 percent of their IT budgets on maintaining internal systems alone.

Since cloud services operate on a subscription model, companies only pay for their usage over time, preventing IT teams from spending all their budget at once. Moving to the cloud means a decrease in rack space, power usage and IT requirements, which results in lower installation, maintenance, hardware, upgrade and support costs. It also gives IT teams time to focus on building the business in more progressive ways instead of becoming bogged down by maintenance and support tasks.

Motivation #2: Increasing control and flexibility

Many enterprises that are growing at a fast-pace are often face a bottleneck when all operations are kept on-premise. By using a hybrid approach, data centre managers and IT teams alike can enhance innovation and create new systems that can scale and grow as demand increases, while providing the necessary flexibility to turn these cloud environments up, down, or off depending upon circumstances or needs.

Through a single network that connects an on-premise data centre to several cloud environments, companies can effectively manage both standard and critical workloads to move the business strategy forward.

Motivation #3: Boosting your data centre’s security

With a growing number of companies moving to the cloud, security measures are evolving to account for this growth, pushing providers to offer higher levels of security and data integrity. However, with the shifting role of IT in business now spanning strategic planning, revenue generation, efficient management of resources, and advancing innovation, organisations have little time for such comparatively mundane tasks.

It’s important to realise that the cloud is no less secure than servers managed internally by most companies. In fact, there’s a very good chance that these cloud infrastructures are more secure. By storing data in the cloud, businesses will be able to securely and remotely access this data from any location or device, as well as manage any potential breaches, including deleting or moving sensitive data at risk in real-time.

Now that we understand several compelling reasons why more companies will move their data to the cloud and experience the value it brings to their organisations, such as a reduction in operational overhead, increased control and flexibility, and boosted data centre security, let’s briefly examine how IT staff can best utilise a mixed cloud strategy to reach a company’s full data potential.

By providing greater visibility and real-time insight into power usage, thermal consumption, server health and utilisation, cloud infrastructure tools help IT teams better understand how their cloud is performing. Whether an organisation’s cloud computing model is private, public or hybrid, the major benefits are improved operational control, infrastructure optimisation and reduced costs.

Especially as a business transitions from private to public or hybrid clouds, an organisation’s IT staff needs to understand how its systems perform internally. Understanding the needs of its mission-critical applications — including memory, processing power and operating systems — should determine what to provision in the cloud. By collecting and normalising data to help IT staff better understand their current implementation on-premise, cloud infrastructure tools enable them to make intelligent decisions concerning the requirements of a new cloud configuration.

Cloud infrastructure tools can also identify idle or under-used servers. These so called “ghost servers” can draw as much as half the power used during peak workloads. At any point in time, 10 to 15 percent of servers can fall into this category. Hence, cloud infrastructure tools can assist data centre managers to consolidate and virtualise these servers to avoid wasted energy and space, which is essential in a hybrid cloud environment.

Additionally, given that energy costs are the fastest-rising expense for today’s data centres, cloud infrastructure tools deliver real-time power and thermal consumption data, providing IT staff with the clarity needed to lower power usage, increase rack density and prolong operation during outages.

There’s no question that hybrid infrastructure creates new challenges for IT staff. By ensuring that energy, equipment and floor space are used as efficiently as possible, cloud infrastructure tools assist IT staff to optimise their organisation’s multi-cloud environment.