Many organisations are now actively considering blockchain deployments, and a significant proportion are already anticipating integration of blockchain into their IT systems within the next 18 months, according the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research.

The Juniper survey found that among the largest companies (those with 20,000 of more employees) that were considering deploying or were in the process of deploying blockchain, 54 percent had reached the PoC (Proof of Concept) stage, with a further 16 percent involved in trial deployments.

Among all companies that have reached the PoC stage, 66 percent expected blockchain to be integrated into their systems by the end of 2018. Integration was expected to take longer as companies got larger among the smaller companies surveyed (i.e. those with less than 1,000 employees), 81 percent expecting integration to be completed by the end of 2018 – compared with 57 percent of companies with over 20,000 employees.

IBM leads blockchain market development

That being said, IBM is regarded by survey respondents as having the most proven credentials within the emerging blockchain sector, well ahead of all competitors. That’s based upon almost 400 company founders, senior executives, managers and IT leaders that responded to Juniper’s survey.

Among enterprises either actively considering, or in the process of deploying blockchain technology, 43 percent of the survey respondents ranked IBM first – that’s more than twice the proportion selecting second-placed Microsoft (20 percent).

According to the study, this reflected IBM’s high-profile R&D engagement with initiatives such as the Hyperledger project, and its extensive list of blockchain clients across an array of key verticals and use cases – including banking, asset tracking and the music industry.

Among respondents who were prepared to state their levels of investment in blockchain, 67 percent stated they had already invested more than $100,000 by the end of 2016, while 91 percent of these companies confirmed that they would be spending at least this amount in 2017.

The study findings stated that this suggested most initial investments had delivered results that were sufficiently encouraging for companies to pursue more extensive trials and/or integrations.

Outlook for blockchain application growth

When challenges are measured against the scale of the upside market opportunity, automotive, financial settlement and land registry emerge as particularly interesting growth prospects.

However, Juniper analysts urge interested companies and other organizations to focus on private blockchains for commercial deployments, rather than attempt to utilise public chains – such as Bitcoin.

It also argued that most corporate applications would require the capability to restrict access to permissioned users, while companies would also need to have a degree of control over the development of the blockchain on which their systems have become dependent.

“Even if companies conduct initial testing using a public blockchain, in most cases the shortcomings of these chains should disqualify them from many use cases,” said Dr Windsor Holden, head of forecasting & consultancy at Juniper Research.

Editor’s note: Read more about blockchain technologies at our sister publication, The Block.

Web-scale networking, also known as hyperscale, is a concept that has been popularized by companies like Google, Netflix and Facebook, who adopted this model for its proven cost economics, resiliency, scalability, and in some cases, better performance for large companies.
In recent months, the web-scale strategy has begun to gain the attention of enterprises in response to the changing data center landscape and growth of compute-heavy, complex technologies like AI, machine learning, and big data analytics initiatives. What should IT pros know about web-scale?

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Demand for DevOps professionals continues apace, according to the latest analysis from Robert Half, with nine out of 10 CIOs in the UK seeing DevOps as a core competency for developers and infrastructure professionals in the next five years.

The study, which is based on more than 100 interviews with CIOs from companies across the UK, found that for 90% of respondents DevOps would be effective if security was built into continuous service and application delivery. 94% agreed that DevOps would need to incorporate greater security measures.

When it came to more specific routes to success, 37% of those polled said establishing IT security checks was a primary consideration when thinking about skills needed for effective DevOps implementation. 34% opted for incorporating data regulation requirements.

Respondents, when faced by the challenges of DevOps implementations, found them much of a muchness. 32% said needing strong management structures was key, as well as enhancing communications within the IT team, while 31% opted for getting the right skills within IT.

As other research has shown, if you have the right skills in this domain then you can be set up nicely. Earlier this month, a report from Puppet revealed that 66% of DevOps engineers and 69% of software engineers in the US took home pay packets of more than $100,000 per year.

“In this new age of digitalisation, DevOps is creating new opportunities for technology professionals to support the business and opening up new career paths,” said Neil Owen, director at Robert Half Technology UK. “There is a growing need for IT and technology professionals to become more business and commercially savvy.

“As the DevOps movement increases the collaboration between technology functions and the business, this is a key way for technology professionals to improve their opportunities for career progression.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to hold all the aces in public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) ahead of Microsoft – but Alibaba is ahead of Google to take third place in the market.

That is according to the analysts at Gartner, who argue the global IaaS public cloud market grew 31% in 2016 to total $22.1 billion (£16.5bn). AWS comprises 44% of that market share, at $9.78bn, with Microsoft in second on $1.58bn, Alibaba third on $675m, Google on $500m and Rackspace at $484m.

Alibaba, not surprisingly, was the fastest growing vendor year on year at 126.5% growth, with Google (100%) and Microsoft (61.1%) next. As other research firms have noted, the competition in the market continues to grow more quickly than AWS, although the latter is hardly standing still. Gartner puts AWS’ growth at 45.9% between 2015 and 2016.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, argues IaaS will show the fastest growth over the next five years, ahead of platform and software as a service. “The worldwide public cloud service market growth continues, driven by digital business initiatives, data centre consolidations and application migrations to the cloud,” said Nag. “Technology strategic planners must build both relevant offerings and partner-based ecosystems to seize the opportunity.”

Compare and contrast with Synergy Research. Earlier this month the company said the public cloud market had grown 35% between the second quarters of 2015 and 2017, with the private cloud – or cloud-enabled – market growing 16%. In comparison, spending on traditional, non-cloud data centre hardware and software had dropped 18%.

When it came to cloud infrastructure services, Synergy’s research has similarities with Gartner. This time last year – Q216 – their analysis was that Amazon held more than 30% of the market but growing at 53%, with Microsoft second growing at 100%, IBM third, Google fourth – growing at 162% – and Alibaba in the chasing pack.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Taica will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have been the first of the major cloud vendors to announce per-second billing, but Google has become the first to implement it.

The company announced yesterday that customers of Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine flexible environment virtual machines (VMs) will move to the new system, applicable to all VMs.

Google’s change was made effective as of September 26, while AWS customers will have to wait until October 2 for their move. Google customers need to purchase for a minimum of one minute before the per-second billing kicks in.

“In most cases, the difference between per-minute and per-second billing is very small – we estimate it as a fraction of a percent,” Paul Nash, group product manager for Compute Engine wrote. “On the other hand, changing from per-hour billing to per-minute billing makes a big difference for applications (especially website, mobile apps and data processing jobs) that get traffic spikes.

“The ability to scale up and down quickly could come at a significant cost if you had to pay for those machines for the full hour when you only needed them for a few minutes,” Nash added.

As this publication noted when AWS made its move, another strong pull factor towards per-second billing is the rise of serverless computing, where code may not run for more than a few seconds.

Nash theorised that if the average business’ VM lifetime was rounded up by 30 seconds due to per minute billing, then at 2,600 vCPUs, you would save…99 cents per day. For per hour billing, naturally, it goes up to more than $100.

Either way, the customer does get greater control. “As you can see, the value of increased billing precision is mostly in per-minute,” wrote Nash. “This is probably why we haven’t heard many customers asking for per-second. But we don’t want to make you choose between your morning coffee and your core hours, so we’re pleased to bring per-second billing to your VMs.”

Nash added that Google had been using per-second billing for persistent disks since 2013, and for committed use discounts and GPUs since their introduction. The Google Cloud Platform has duly been updated with per-second billing, under the tagline “you pay per-second, which is how a cloud should work.” Previously, it was “you pay per-minute, not per hour, which is how a cloud should work.”

You can read the full blog post here.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Taica will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
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Google Cloud has beefed up its identity and access management game with the acquisition of Bitium, a Santa Monica-based firm.

Bitium, founded in 2012, offers a variety of identity management features, including secure access, user provisioning and deprovisioning, app management and single sign on.

In a short blog post confirming the news, Karthik Lakshminarayanan, director of product management for G Suite and Cloud Identity, said the move will help mitigate customers’ risks around managing and securing cloud applications.

“Our enterprise customers want a comprehensive solution for identity and access management and SSO that works across their modern cloud and mobile environments,” wrote Lakshminarayanan. “Bitium helps us deliver a broad portfolio of app integrations for provisioning and SSO that complements our best in class device management capabilities in the enterprise.

“As we add Bitium’s capabilities, we’ll continue to work closely with our vibrant ecosystem of identity partners so that customers are able to choose the best solutions to meet their needs,” he added.

From Bitium’s side, a note from the two founders, CEO Scott Kriz and CTO Erik Gustavson, thanked their investors and explained the move. “When we started Bitium, our goal was to change how people and companies work by fundamentally changing the way they interact with software, starting with single sign-on and identity access management,” the note read. “Joining the team at Google Cloud allows us to continue along this path and accelerate these efforts.

“The Google Cloud team shares our vision for improving the way companies use software, enabling them to innovate faster.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.