Payments provider Stripe is the top private cloud computing company today with storage company Dropbox and messaging firm Slack making up the top three, according to the latest Cloud 100 list from Forbes.

Slack, which came top last year, finishes third with Dropbox taking second position for the second consecutive year. DocuSign was ranked at #4, completing a quartet of San Francisco-based companies at the top.

The list also recognises the growing influence of the Internet of Things (IoT) in valuations; among the highest new entries were Redwood City-based C3 IoT, at #19, and Uptake, based out of Chicago, at #22. Both companies participate in the industrial IoT space.

In total, almost half (48%) of companies in the Cloud 100 were based in the Silicon Valley area, compared with 13 in New York City, Boston with seven, and Utah with six. European companies in the mix include Adyen (#5), a payments provider based in the Netherlands and Veeam (#27) from Switzerland, while the UK’s only entry is NewVoiceMedia (#71), a provider of contact centre technology based in Basingstoke.

As new companies join the list – a quarter in all – others disappear, with 10 firms ‘graduating’, as Forbes puts it, to sale or IPO. Six of these 10 firms were in the top 20 last year, including Cloudera, ranked fifth in 2016, which went public in April this year, and AppDynamics, ranked ninth, acquired by Cisco in March.

In other words, the Cloud 100 list is not just for who is performing well today, but who is likely to go further tomorrow, as Alex Konrad, list editor at Forbes, explains. “Members of the second annual Cloud 100 list today will be tomorrow’s major IPOs and acquisitions, driving forward not just the tech sector but also the many industries that make up their customers,” he said.

Reuters, in an exclusive article earlier this month, reported that Dropbox was seeking to hire IPO underwriters – a story the company declined to comment on – while Stripe pocketed $150 million in series D investment in November last year and Slack secured $200m in a series F in April 2016.

The top 10 companies, in order, were Stripe, Dropbox, Slack, DocuSign, Adyen, Qualtrics, Medallia, Tanium, Mailchimp, and Squarespace.

You can read the full list here.

Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more business becomes digital the more stakeholders are interested in this data including how it relates to business. Some of these people have never used a monitoring tool before. They have a question on their mind like “How is my application doing” but no idea how to get a proper answer.

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“I’m here to leverage my secret sauce, which is using outsourced development and the company that I utilize is delaPlex Software and they’ve basically allowed me to win Fortune 500 companies,” noted Justin Witz, CTO of FRA and PlanTools, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Cloud robotics is set to generate new value chains, technologies, architectures and business models, according to a new paper.

The report, put together by GTI, a body focusing on the TD-LTE (time division long term evolution) ecosystem alongside SoftBank, CloudMinds, China Mobile, Huawei and Skymind, argues the advantages of cloud robots, with the same common network, are threefold; information sharing, offloaded computation, and collaboration.

One of the examples the report looks at – or gives an image of – is a machine learning project Google undertook last year featuring an array of robots sharing experiences to improve their grasping ability. “A human child is able to reliably grasp objects after one year, and takes around four years to acquire more sophisticated precision grasps,” the researchers wrote. “However, networked robots can instantaneously share their experience with one another, so if we dedicate 14 separate robots to the job of learning grasping in parallel, we can acquire the necessary experience much faster.”

Hence the potential of cloud as a common medium. The report argues the possibilities and use cases are many; from intelligent visual processing, to natural language processing, to facial recognition, giving opportunities in logistics, security, and education among others. According to Tractica, the value of the global robot market will grow from $34.1 billion in 2016 to $226.2bn in 2021.

By 2020, GTI adds, the proportion of connected robots globally will be 90%, with approximately 20 million new connections needed every year to support their day to day operations. The key to its success, the report argues, is 5G.

As 5G progresses, three application scenarios are predicted; enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC), backed up by software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV). For issues in cloud robotics, such as real-time control, video and voice processing, 5G, network slicing, and mobile edge computing, will fit the bill for applications.

“Network slices that have different specific performance characteristics can match the requirements of cloud robotics, match the needs for power consumption at the robot terminal, and provide appropriate roaming,” the report argues. “Using these approaches, 5G networks will also be able to meet the most demanding requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency and security.”

You can read the full report here.

In the world of DevOps there are ‘known good practices’ – aka ‘patterns’ – and ‘known bad practices’ – aka ‘anti-patterns.’ Many of these patterns and anti-patterns have been developed from real world experience, especially by the early adopters of DevOps theory; but many are more feasible in theory than in practice, especially for more recent entrants to the DevOps scene. In this power panel at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, moderated by DevOps Conference Chair Andi Mann, panelists discussed the patterns and anti-patterns of DevOps, and what it means to ‘do the right thing’ in a DevOps way, but in the real world.

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• According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, M2M connections will represent 46% of connected devices by 2020.
• 95% of execs surveyed plan to launch an IoT business within three years.

These and many other insights are from the recently published Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) study, The Journey to IoT Value: Challenges, Breakthroughs, and Best Practices published on SlideShare last month. The study is based on a survey of 1,845 IT and business decision-makers in the United States, UK, and India. Industries included in the analysis include manufacturing, local government, retail/hospitality/sports, energy (utilities/oil & gas/mining), transportation, and healthcare. All respondents worked for organizations that are implementing or have completed IoT initiatives. 56% of all respondents are from enterprises.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

73% are using Internet of Things data to improve their business

The data and insights gained from IoT are most often used for improving product quality or performance (47%), improving decision-making (46%) and lowering operational costs (45%). Improving or creating new customer relationships (44%) and reducing maintenance or downtime (42%) are also strategic areas where IoT is making a contribution today according to the Cisco study.

IT executives often see IoT initiatives as more successful (35%) than their line-of-business counterparts (15%)

With IT concentrating on technologies and line-of-business users focused on strategy and business cases, the potential exists for differences of opinion regarding IoT initiatives’ value. The following graphic provides an overview of how stark these differences are.

Engaging with the IoT partner ecosystem in every phase of a project or initiative improves the probability of success

The most valuable phases to engage with ecosystem partners include strategic planning (60%), implementation and deployment (58%) and technical consulting or support (58%). The following graphic provides an overview of most and less successful organizations by their level of involvement in the IoT partner ecosystem.

Other statistics:

• Only 26% of all companies are successful with their IoT initiatives. The three best practices that lead to a successful IoT implementations include collaboration between IT and business, the availability of internal and external partnerships to gain IoT expertise; and a strong technology-focused culture.
• 60% of companies believe IoT projects look good on paper but prove more complex that expected. This finding underscores how critical it is for IT and line-of-business executives to have the same goals and objectives going into an IoT project. Being selective about which integration, technology, and professional services partners are chosen needs to be a shared priority between both IT and line-of-business executives.

“NetApp’s vision is how we help organizations manage data – delivering the right data in the right place, in the right time, to the people who need it, and doing it agnostic to what the platform is,” explained Josh Atwell, Developer Advocate for NetApp, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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“We began as LinuxAcademy.com about five years ago as a very small outfit. Since then we’ve transitioned into more of a DevOps training company – the technologies and the tooling around DevOps,” explained Doug Vanderweide, an instructor at Linux Academy, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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