Google says it has tripled the number of its big cloud deals year over year as its parent company Alphabet announced revenues of $26 billion (£19.9bn) for the most recent quarter.

In a call with analysts, Google CEO Sundar Pichai – who it was also announced is joining the Alphabet board of directors – discussed the company’s ‘impressive’ cloud assets. “[Google Cloud Platform] continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“To be more specific about our momentum with big customers, in Q2 the number of new deals we closed worth more than $0.5 million is three times what it was last year,” Pichai added.

This was about as specific as Pichai got, as Google puts cloud in its ‘other revenue’ bucket, alongside such products as the Google Play app store. Google’s other revenues for Q217 were at $3.1 billion, up 42% from this time last year but seeing a very slight decrease from Q1 this year.

Compared with Amazon, which is now reporting its AWS revenues separately, and Microsoft, which does not give specifics but instead puts revenues for ‘intelligent cloud’, including Azure and server products, it is relatively nebulous.

Yet while a lot of the focus has been on AWS and Azure’s competition in recent weeks – as this publication reported on – analysts have been noting Google’s relative rise. The company still only finds a place in the ‘visionaries’ section for Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant, however its growth remains higher than AWS if not at the same level as Microsoft, according to Canalys.

Google’s overall revenues were at $25.8 billion, with ‘other bets’, such as its autonomous car business, Waymo, at $248 million. Like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week, Pichai focused on the importance of artificial intelligence in the company’s strategy going forward. “Google continues to lead the shift to AI driven computing,” he said. “It’s our focus on infusing our products and platforms with power of machine learning and AI that’s driving our success.”

Among the company’s highlights in the most recent quarter were partnerships with SAP and Nutanix, opening four new cloud regions, with the most recent being in London, as well as the launch of Transfer Appliance, a product aimed at transferring data from local servers into their cloud.

You can digest the full Alphabet results here.

On-premises cloud infrastructure promises better security, governance, and performance than public cloud, but many enterprises don’t want to deploy it because they must invest in a team of cloud experts. But now, software as a service (SaaS) is being used as the management platform for some on-premises clouds, which greatly simplifies cloud management and reduces the need for cloud-savvy network administrators.

Here, we will see how the use of SaaS simplifies on-premises cloud operations in three areas: provisioning and configuration, monitoring, and management.

Why SaaS for private cloud?

SaaS has become a hit in the market because people want to consume computing resources, but they don’t want to build the infrastructure themselves. SaaS frees IT departments from having to manage a big infrastructure. According to Gartner, the cloud system infrastructure (SaaS) market will grow from $34.6 million in 2017 to $71.5 million in 2020.

Prior to the evolution of SaaS, the private cloud concept failed because many enterprises became disenchanted with the effort and cost involved in building a cloud from scratch using OpenStack, VMware, or other do-it-yourself cloud components. In contrast, SaaS enables remote management of private cloud and allows companies to consume private cloud resources and while the development and management is taken care of by a SaaS vendor.

The move to SaaS-managed cloud follows a growing trend in the industry toward cloud-managed infrastructure, a trend that began with Wi-Fi vendors like Meraki and expanded to include security, SD-WAN, and finally cloud vendors. There are two components to a SaaS-managed cloud: an on-premises cloud operating system and infrastructure (typically a hyper-converged platform) and a SaaS portal. The SaaS portal is the point of entry for management, but it can also deliver commands that automatically monitor and manage the on-premises infrastructure to further reduce enterprise overhead. Let’s look at some examples of how SaaS improves key aspects of on-premises cloud management.

Provisioning and configuration

Simply installing a cloud can be a complex process. One must assemble the necessary servers, storage and networking resources, and then implement an operating system and cloud software. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was no need for integration?

Some cloud vendors are starting to implement cloud software that is pre-installed into the operating system image, so that once a server is deployed and powered on, the cloud should come up automatically without IT administrators having to know anything about various services and their persistent stores. The image software should pool together servers, storage and networking resources to create a highly resilient cloud. Ideally, the user should be able to install a cloud and have it up and running in less than 30 minutes. Rather than sending a technician to provision the cloud, the SaaS portal can automatically discover the cloud hardware and register it automatically.

Monitoring

Rather than having an IT administrator continually monitor the cloud’s health (to see when VMs are under-provisioned, for example), the SaaS portal can do it and alert the IT staff when an issue needs to be resolved.

To reveal the state of applications and what actions other users have performed, the SaaS-managed cloud can monitor events, statistics, and dashboards in real time. It can get logs and audit the actions of all users. For example, if a service was down since 10pm last night, it is good to know if a user or script mistakenly shut down a VM that provides that service.

Management

Any system as complex as a cloud needs to monitor critical services and help monitor workloads. Companies can spend a lot of manpower resources to perform this function manually, but a SaaS-managed cloud can monitor and heal itself.

For example, if any hardware component or software service fails, the system should detect and fix the situation. Then, it can alert the administrator about which component failed, so the administrator could take corrective action to restore the capacity of the system. And beyond simply monitoring the cloud’s health, intelligent SaaS portals can respond to monitoring inputs by dynamically adjusting the storage and CPU allocations dynamically. Such a “cloud brain” could also watch for and shut down rogue VMs, push out required software patches and new software versions, for example, allowing IT administrators to focus on other, more important tasks.

SaaS-based private cloud management eliminates the most painful part of infrastructure management. IT administrators are perfectly willing to give up patching, maintenance releases and the need for new configurations and turn them over to a “cloud brain.” Essentially, a SaaS-managed cloud builds the foundation for a self-driving ­cloud, making deploying, running, and managing an on-premises cloud as “hands off: as using a public cloud. It eliminates over-provisioning and saves money by cutting the IT resources needed to run a private cloud while delivering the security, control, and performance that private cloud brings.

With a SaaS-managed cloud, IT departments can actively manage the capacity being used for on-premises cloud to optimise infrastructure spending on both manpower and hardware.

“DX encompasses the continuing technology revolution, and is addressing society’s most important issues throughout the entire $78 trillion 21st-century global economy,” said Roger Strukhoff, Conference Chair. “DX World Expo has organized these issues along 10 tracks with more than 150 of the world’s top speakers coming to Istanbul to help change the world.”

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While the focus and objectives of IoT initiatives are many and diverse, they all share a few common attributes, and one of those is the network. Commonly, that network includes the Internet, over which there isn’t any real control for performance and availability. Or is there? The current state of the art for Big Data analytics, as applied to network telemetry, offers new opportunities for improving and assuring operational integrity.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jim Frey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Kentik, discussed tactics and tools to bridge the gap between IoT project teams and the network planning and operations functions that play a significant role in project success.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Massive Networks will exhibit 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.
Massive Networks mission is simple. To help your business operate seamlessly with fast, reliable, and secure internet and network solutions. Improve your customer’s experience with outstanding connections to your cloud.

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A few headlines in the tech and business press over recent months have attempted to shed light on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the public cloud.

As reported by The Street last week, Brent Bracelin, senior research analyst at Pacific Crest, wrote: “We estimate that in the second half of this year, Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud segment could surpass Amazon Web Services in absolute revenue, becoming the largest public cloud platform for the first time in 10 years and firmly marking its transition from cloud laggard to cloud leader.”

Later that week, as reported by Business Insider, Deutsche Bank sounded a cautious note towards AWS, moving its price target down from $1,150 to $1,135. While noting the bank remains generally bullish towards AWS, criticism came from a ‘first-ever downtick from partners around the pace of large European enterprise cloud migrations.’

Amazon is expected to disclose its most recent financial results this week, while Microsoft posted overall revenues of $23.3 billion last week, as well as announcing new products in the shape of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack. So what does all this mean for both companies?

Comparing clouds

First of all, it is important to distinguish between clouds. AWS holds its most significant lead over Microsoft in infrastructure as a service (IaaS). According to Synergy Research figures from October last year, AWS held more than double the market share in public IaaS of Microsoft, Google, and IBM – the three nearest challengers – combined. AWS also holds the lion’s share of the public PaaS (platform as a service) market, although in this instance the combined market share of Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM amounts to slightly more than AWS’ total.

It is in software as a service (SaaS), however, where Microsoft holds the aces. According to more Synergy figures from March this year, Microsoft now leads the ‘burgeoning’ market ahead of Salesforce, with top three placings in collaboration and CRM software. As recently as April last year, again according to Synergy, Salesforce was the market leader, but with only 21% annual growth compared to 70% from Microsoft, and a continued push to the enterprise side, it was not a huge surprise when the overtake occurred.

To put all of these figures into context, Gartner’s analysis of the overall public cloud services market puts SaaS at 18.8% share, ahead of IaaS at 14%, and PaaS at 3.6%. By 2020, those numbers are expected to change to 3.7% for PaaS, 18.7% for IaaS and 19.8% for SaaS.

Comparing revenues

As previously mentioned, Microsoft posted overall fourth quarter revenues of $23.3 billion last week. Yet Bracelin mentioned Microsoft’s ‘commercial cloud’ segment was set to overtake AWS.

Microsoft does not disclose specific product revenues, but instead gives a guide. For IaaS, Azure revenue went up 97% year over year, according to the figures last week, with Office 365 commercial revenues, for SaaS, up 43%.

Here’s where things get a little confusing. Microsoft does not use ‘commercial cloud’ as one of its buckets for financial results. Instead, the company uses the categories ‘productivity and business processes’ – largely the Office 365 portfolio – which hit $8.45bn in the most recent quarter, compared with ‘intelligent cloud’ – largely where Azure and server products sit – at $7.43bn. According to Mary Jo Foley, Azure, Office 365 business services, Dynamics 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) form the lion’s share of ‘commercial cloud’.

AWS, in the most recent quarter, had net sales of $3.66 billion, with Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, telling analysts at the time: “We break out very clearly our AWS segment revenue and operating income, and you’ll also keep in mind that there’s price decreases that are part of the business, and we’re pretty public when we do those. In general, we’re very happy with that team and the progress they’re making.” The overall run rate for AWS, based on that quarter, is approximately $14.6bn.

Apples and apples?

It is no wonder therefore that Melanie Posey, research vice president at 451 Research, tells CloudTech it is ‘tricky’ to compare revenue across the hyperscale cloud providers. “If one broadens the market scope to include SaaS and PaaS…this is probably how you get to Azure surpassing AWS in revenue, but then it’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison,” she explained.

In April, Posey was lead analyst on a study which found that Azure was closing the gap on AWS for infrastructure. In Europe, Azure was cited by 43% of the more than 700 respondents as the primary IaaS provider, compared with 32% for AWS – although globally, the figure for the latter rises to 55%.

Posey says that AWS should not be worried by the various analyst notes, but does identify a couple of ‘could do better’ areas. “AWS could focus more on enterprise engagement,” she said. “For example, it could develop a framework for more solutions-focused engagement with enterprise customers – similar to Google Cloud Platform’s Customer Reliability Engineering program – rather than leaving the customer to figure everything out themselves or building their own partner network for broad-based solutions.”

The real potential, however, could come through Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack. Announced at the Inspire conference earlier this month, Microsoft 365 former brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and EMS to ‘deliver a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees’, while Azure Stack is an ‘extension of Azure’, effectively bringing Microsoft’s cloud into a company’s own data centre.

Javed Sikander, CTO of NetEnrich, a company which does a lot of its work with the Azure platform, puts it this way. “Azure Stack is an interesting offering, and has been in the works for years,” he told CloudTech. “For organisations that want to move to a cloud architecture but cannot move to a public cloud due to privacy, security or governance concerns, Azure Stack is a compelling offering.”

Posey says Azure Stack ‘uniquely bridges the old world and the new’. “No other firm has such a complete offering,” she added. “With Azure Stack, Microsoft is bringing the cloud on-premise rather than taking on-premise to the cloud.”

“At the keynote this morning we spoke about the value proposition of Nutanix, of having a DevOps culture and a mindset, and the business outcomes of achieving agility and scale, which everybody here is trying to accomplish,” noted Mark Lavi, DevOps Solution Architect at Nutanix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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“We provide IoT solutions. We provide the most compatible solutions for many applications. Our solutions are industry agnostic and also protocol agnostic,” explained Richard Han, Head of Sales and Marketing and Engineering at Systena America, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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“I think DevOps is now a rambunctious teenager – it’s starting to get a mind of its own, wanting to get its own things but it still needs some adult supervision,” explained Thomas Hooker, VP of marketing at CollabNet, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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