The cloud market in New Zealand is booming and this has led to the entry of many players catering to varying niches within this segment. One such company is an Auckland-based start up called Consegna.

Founded in 2016, this company has made rapid strides within one year of its start. It is currently backed by AWS and is supported by a global team of cloud specialists.

It’s one of the few certified AWS consulting partners in New Zealand’s cloud space and is an Authorized Public Sector Partner. It offers a range of advisory services in the cloud market, data center migration, managed services and more for all businesses located within its country.

Specifically, it helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to migrate their data and applications to AWS, so that everyone can leverage the power of the most popular cloud services platform in the world. Besides SMEs, it also offers support and consultation to large corporations, government organizations and just about anyone else who want to move to the cloud. This company’s specialists take care of the entire journey, from early consultations to the actual migration, so every client makes an informed decisions throughout its cloud journey.

Consegna provides not just consulting service, but can also take care of the tooling required to prepare your organization to move to the cloud. Architecture, design, building, implementation are other things they work on.

Now that we have an idea of what Consegna is and what it does, let’s see how it can impact the New Zealand cloud market.

First off, New Zealand is one of the more stable economies in the Asia Pacific region with a mature market and a thriving economy. Given this environment, it’s no surprise that it has a growing cloud market too. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2018, the cloud market in New Zealand would be worth around NZ$14.7 billion, thereby making it one of the fastest growing markets in the world. It’s annual rate is likely to be around 14.7 percent year-on-year.

This strong growth is backed by a solid support from the government. It’s policies and regulations making it easy for the corporate world to use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), so that every company can leverage the many advantages like scalability and cost effectiveness that come with it.

New Zealand’s data centers are expected to grow by 18 percent and is expected to reach NZ$272 million by 2020. Many large IT organizations like IBM are already increasing their presence in this market, and they are aptly joined by smaller companies like Consegna.

An analysis of these growth numbers show that cloud management, security and consulting are likely to be the top growing segments, and Consgena has a firm footing in them. Also, the fact that it is backed by AWS and has accessed to a global team of cloud specialists means it’s in a right position to create a deep impact in New Zealand’s cloud market.

Overall, exciting times are ahead for Consegna and the cloud market as a whole.

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The cloud market is maturing and prices are becoming more stable and sustainable than before. A clear signal of this trend is the latest move taken by Amazon to end its unlimited cloud storage plan. According to a statement released by the company, members of its Prime subscription plan alone will be eligible for unlimited cloud storage and that too only for photos.

Anyone signing for an Amazon Drive from today on will not be able to select the unlimited storage option Their only choices will be the 100 GB plan that costs $11.99 per year, 1 TB plan that costs $59.99 per year or the 30 TB plan that’s available for $59.99 for every additional TB. This is a big change from the earlier plans that cost customers $11.99 for unlimited storage of photos and $59.99 per year for unlimited storage of everything else. Of course, the first 5 GB is still free for all users.

This is a surprise move considering that Amazon introduced the unlimited storage option only in March 2015. In fact, this move triggered the price wars among cloud companies. As soon as Amazon announced it, other jumped on this aggressive pricing to increase their customer base. Google, for example, announced its own unlimited photo storage option just two months after Amazon’s announcement.

Though these price cuts brought much cheer to customers, industry analysts were skeptic simply because it’s not a sustainable model. They even predicted that the pricing wars would end, but never would they have thought it would end so soon. Exactly two years after Amazon started the whole process, it’s now tightening the screws and this could become a familiar story among other service providers too. At this point though, none of its rivals such as Microsoft or Google has announced any changes in their pricing. But, we can expect it soon given that Amazon is the leader in the cloud storage market and any change is likely to be emulated by others as well.

This brings up the question of what happens with existing customers? They will get to keep this unlimited storage plan until their expiry date. After that, customers who had opted for the auto-renew program will be charged $60 as they’ll go into the 1 TB plan if the data they’ve stored is less than 1 TB. Otherwise, they will be charged according to their storage size.

If you don’t have the auto-renew option setup, you can go to your dashboard and choose one of the limited storage plans that work best for you.

In case, you don’t make any selection, then your storage will fall into the “over quota status” which means, you can’t add any more files. But, you’ll still be able to view and delete content. In such a case, Amazon will give 180 days for users to decide what they want to do with their data. If no action is taken, then Amazon retains the right to delete your data until it reaches the quota limit, with the latest ones getting the axe first.

Well, that’s a lot of changes.

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Amazon released its latest product called Amazon Connect, a contact center as an offering, that is hosted on the AWS Cloud. With this product, Amazon has also jumped into the growing cloud-based contact center market to make the most of the opportunities it presents. Currently, this market is dominated by SAP, Salesforce and Oracle.

This new service from Amazon is an extension of the contact center technology used by its own e-commerce operations. This tool can be launched through the AWS Management Console, and agents can start taking calls within just minutes after launch. In a sense, this is a ready-to-use product that can get a contact center operational in a few minutes.

Just like its other services, Amazon will scale up or scale down its virtual contact center based on the volume of traffic that passes through it. As a result, clients will pay only for the bandwidth they use. Also, clients can have access to other caller designer tools such as other AWS services, databases and even connections to third-party analytics tools and CRM.

There are obviously many advantages that come with Amazon Connect. First off, it’s a readymade solution that companies can start using right away, without waiting through setup times. Second and more importantly, the costs are greatly reduced. Companies no longer have to invest in large infrastructure to create a full-fledged contact center, as they can just activate this service and store all the information in AWS cloud. In addition, companies don’t have to spend time and resources in building their own contact center software, as this is available readily.

Another advantage is it gives employees the flexibility to work from anywhere. Gone are the days when employees have to be physically present in a particular location to take calls. With Amazon Connect, they can take calls from any location, thereby giving them greater mobility and a better work-life balance. From a company’s perspective, they get to save on rental costs as they no longer need large physical spaces to house employees. Due to these factors, Amazon Connect is expected to become a big hit among current and future contact center companies.

From the perspective of Amazon, this product reflects its evolution in the cloud industry. It started off as an infrastructure provider, and over the last few years, it has moved up the services chain to offer a slew of products in the areas of analytics, productivity and database. This move is significant because all the cloud services that AWS wants to sell is based on its popular infrastructure, thereby giving it an edge over its competitors.

Salesforce has already announced that it will integrate its Service Cloud with Amazon Connect, as a part of the alliance between the two companies. It’ll be interesting to see how Service Cloud and Amazon Connect collaborate and compete with each other over time. It’s also possible for both these services to ultimately decouple software and infrastructure in their overall cloud services, but that would depend on a host of factors such as demand and the prevailing business environment.

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Amazon’s S3 was down on Tuesday morning, and this created a partial chaos in the Internet world, though it didn’t completely break the Internet. AWS experienced a four hour outage, and this caused problems for the thousands of websites that depend on AWS for their storage and cloud computing needs.

Many major companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Spotify, Buzzfeed, Airbnb and Slack use AWS to store and retrieve their data at any time. An outage meant that these companies could not access the data they want, though the financial and operational loss for these companies is not known at this time. While this outage did not shut down websites completely, it affected certain functions like file sharing, collaboration and image uploads.

Again, not all its clients were affected, but still a substantial number experienced difficulties when a major chunk of S3 went offline on Tuesday. In fact, Amazon itself was affected by this outage, as it was not able to update its health dashboard for two hours, obviously because the data is stored on AWS.

AWS was not available for comments or updates on this issue immediately, but a message on their website read that they are working to fix the errors, and until then S3 customer applications will continue to have high error rates. Reports on Twitter pointed to the poor response given by AWS for such an outage. The dashboard of AWS did not display any real-time events or updates, despite the company acknowledging that there was an error.

Outages and the resulting impact on businesses is one of the worst fears of any organization, and this incident brought to light the data reliability issues that still plague the cloud industry, despite all the advancements made in these areas. Thankfully though, these incidents are not frequent, but when they come from large service providers, they become big news. The last outage from AWS that happened in September 2015 and lasted five hours.

While it’s not right to judge the industry as a whole and shun it completely, what is needed is a more cautious approach by everyone involved. Clients who depend on AWS should consider using a multicloud strategy or something like Nimble Cloud Volumes, that combines the power of Azure and AWS in the same platform. This way, even if there is a problem with one service, data reliability and business operations will not be affected in any way.

For AWS and other cloud providers, this outage may be a wake-up call, to increase the reliability and availability of their systems. This is definitely not something you would expect from the world’s largest cloud provider that has an annual revenue of more than $10 billion each year. It is estimated that more than one million companies, from established giants like GE to startups like Snap, and many government agencies depend on AWS for their data storage and availability.

It is hoped that such incidents don’t happen in the future, and cloud providers do whatever is necessary to increase the rate of data availability.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) reinforced its position as the continuing leader of the cloud market when it announced the fourth quarter results of 2016. During this time, sales from its cloud business touched a whopping $14 billion, signaling a 47 percent jump in its earnings. Though it was slight lower than expected, as analysts had predicted a revenue of $3.6 billion, it nevertheless is twice the growth of the company as a whole.

To give you a perspective, Amazon’s North American segment posted an earnings of $2.36 billion, which is lower than the earnings from AWS. Also, the operating profit of AWS increased by 25 percent, and this looks huge when compared to the paltry increase of 2.95 percent by the North American segment of its business.

Much of this growth can be attributed to the fact that almost every company in the Silicon Valley, starting from small businesses to giants use cloud in one form or the other, and they all seem to prefer to AWS because of its sprawling infrastructure. Many companies in other fields that are not based in the Silicon Valley are also looking to move their operations to AWS, with Capital One Financial and Workday being the latest to join this bandwagon.

Amazon’s total net income was $2.4 billion, resulting in an earnings of $4.99 per share. The overall revenue for 2016 increased by 27 percent to $136 billion, compared to a total revenue of $107 billion in 2015. The operating income was $1.3 billion during the last quarter of 2016, while it was $1.1 billion during the same time the previous year.

It’s no brainer to understand why its cloud segment had such a stellar performance. Besides the ever-increasing demand for cloud services, AWS introduced more than 1,000 new services and features in 2016, as against 700 in 2015. It also offered seven price cuts in the fourth quarter, and this made AWS cheap and accessible to many small and medium businesses.

In addition to this excellent performance by AWS, the company also showed a positive outlook for the upcoming year. In fact, Amazon as a whole feel confident about achieving higher growth levels in subsequent years. To this end, the company announced that it will create more than 100,000 full-time jobs in the US within the next 18 months, and this will include positions spanning across different education and skill levels. It also hinted that these new jobs will spans across the entire country, and not just within a specific region, thereby signaling that it is eyeing a country-wide expansion.

As for its cloud arm, AWS has announced that many companies like Matson, McDonald’s and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) have agreed to move tens of thousands of applications to its cloud over the next few years, and this means, more revenue for the company in 2017 and beyond. It also plans to open 11 new centers spread across the US, Canada, India, Korea and the UK.

All this surely points to an amazing year for AWS!

The post AWS is still the king appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Cloud is growing at such an enormous pace that it is hard not to embrace it, regardless of the sector in which a company operates. This is probably why we’re seeing companies across all sectors move some or all the operations to the cloud, along with the twin objective to save money and gain the benefits that come from it in the form of increased operational efficiency and higher productivity. The latest in that list is the banking industry, especially in Asia, that has always been known as a traditional industry with a conservative mindset. All that is changing now, as banking giants like the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), a well-known Japanese bank, is leading the way in cloud adoption.

MUFG announced that it is moving some of its operations to the cloud, and has chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its partner for this transition.  This change is expected to save the bank a whopping 10 billion yen or $87.2 million over years, not to mention the better quality of service it can offer for its customers. Currently, Japanese banks including MUFG are well-known for their not-so-user-friendly banking systems and slow processing times, and much of this is attributed to the fact that they use legacy systems where patchworks and updates don’t work so well.

With this transition, MUFG aims to be the first bank in Japan to offer a simple, convenient and yet sophisticated banking interface that’ll make it easy for customers to do all their banking transactions. In addition, it plans to introduce many fintech products that’ll expand its customer base and boost its revenue and market share in the long run. Also, MUFG plans to move its research operations to the cloud, so it can get better insights into customer behavior, and maybe even design products that’ll fill gaps in customers’ needs. All this means, cloud is likely to fuel MUFG’s strategic expansion over the next few years.

Besides better customer interaction, MUFG is also expected to save a lot of money. Presently, all data is stored in the company’s data centers that are becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. As data grows, this bank is forced to invest in more capital expenditure and this is also proving to be expensive for the company. With this shift to AWS, all data will be hosted at AWS’ datacenters, so MUFG doesn’t have to worry about capital expenses or maintenance. This is how it is expected to save more than 10 billion yen over the next five years, without cutting back on other areas of operations. The company plans to invest this additional saving back into the business, especially in areas of strategic IT investments and tech talent, so it can further improve its operations in the long run.

Overall, this move represents a big shift in the mindset of Japanese banks as they scramble to remain competitive in today’s business environment, and at the same time, provide the most easy and user-friendly interface for its next generation of banking customers. In this sense, it’s a great start for Japanese banks.

The post MUFG, a Leading Japanese Bank Moves to the Cloud appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Climate change is one of the hottest topics of discussion today, with many people for and against this idea. Though this debate rages on, the fact is we continue to use non-renewable sources of energy like coal to power our homes, businesses, and data centers. This is not sustainable for many reasons, the primary of which are these sources of fuel will dry out one day, and its extraction process has a definite impact on the surrounding environment. To avoid the hassles that come with this form of energy, many companies are striving to switch to renewable sources of energy like the sun and wind. Cloud companies are not to be left behind in this quest to move to green energy.

Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of cloud services, has opined that one day it’ll shift completely to renewable sources of energy, but it has not been too specific on the time line. This could be partly why it’s lagging behind in adopting green energy when compared to that of its competitors. A report by Greenpeace shows that only 17 percent of energy used by AWS is clean energy, while 30 percent of its energy consumption comes from coal and another 24 percent comes from natural gas. Out of the remaining, 26 percent comes from nuclear and the remaining three comes from other sources. These numbers are surprising considering that AWS has been a vociferous supporter of green energy, and it is also expected to take the lead in this regard because it’s the most dominant player in the cloud market today.

In contrast, Apple uses renewable energy for more than 83 percent of its operations. The remaining comes from coal (five percent), natural gas (four percent), nuclear (five percent), and others (three percent). Surprisingly, other major cloud players also fare better than AWS when it comes to green energy usage. For Google, 56 percent of its energy consumption comes from clean sources, 15 percent from coal, 14 percent from natural gas, 10 percent from nuclear, and five percent from other sources respectively. Likewise, 32 percent of Microsoft’s data centers are powered by clean energy that include renewable as well as large hydroelectric projects, 31 percent from coal, 23 percent from natural gas, 10 percent from nuclear, and four percent from other sources respectively.

Given these numbers, are we close to a green cloud? Not really, simply because AWS is the largest provider, and this company uses less than one-fifth of clean energy for its data centers. Hopefully, there’ll be a greater impetus from AWS in this area, especially after the many public announcements it has made to move to clean energy. The heartening news however is that other companies are moving farther along, and this is good for the industry as a whole.

In short, it may take a few more years, say around five years, for the cloud industry to transition to a green cloud model. Until then, we’ll have to live with the fact that our digital footprint is having an impact on the environment in a negative way.

The post How Close are we to a Green Cloud? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the undisputed leader in the cloud market today, and it is further expanding its reach by starting a new program for skills development. On Thursday, January 12th, AWS announced a program called re:Start, through which it aims to provide skills training for about 1,000 people in the UK. At the end of this training program, it plans to provide employment for these people within AWS or in partner companies and organizations.

This is an important move by AWS, and could signal the beginning of a new approach towards technology in general, and cloud in particular. Currently, the cloud industry is facing a big gap in skills. In other words, not many people are trained in cloud technology, and this is causing a big problem for companies like AWS. Due to this shortage in skills, their talent pool is greatly reduced. This also affects their expansion plans, as the growth is not supported by great minds that are well-versed in technology. As a result, some companies are forced to scale back their operations, and maybe even reconsider their growth strategy.

In addition, cost of labor is also high. The economics of job market dictates that when demand is greater than supply, companies will have to pay more to retain the knowledgeable workforce. Over time, these costs can really add up. Besides paying high salaries, companies have to depend on some critical resources for their continued operations. This dependence works against established management principles, and obviously can put projects at risk, especially when the critical resources are not available.

To overcome these multi-pronged challenges, AWS decided to start its own training division through which it plans to train employees, and later employ them for its own needs. As a first step, it has offered this training program in the UK. It’s interesting that AWS started this program in the UK, considering the fallout of Brexit and the widely reported skill gaps that have been reported in the UK. Last year, many MPs warned that the UK needs almost 750,000 people with advanced technical skills to meet the growing demands with this economy, and the existing government initiatives are not enough to fill this gap.

In a way, AWS has set an example for other companies to follow suit. Without waiting for any government action or program, it has started its own division for training. The obvious advantage with such a program is that AWS can train people based on the specific skills it needs. Hence, it has the flexibility to choose one technology over another, depending on its immediate and future need.

Such a move also augurs well for the economy as it reduces unemployment rate and increases the productivity and contribution of workers. This program aims to attract young adults, military veterans, reservists, spouses and other deserving candidates. As of now, AWS has entrusted the task of finding the right candidates to a HR outsourcing company called QA Consulting in partnership with the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and The Prince’s Trust.

The post A New Digital Training Program from AWS appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the undisputed leader in the cloud market today, and it is further expanding its reach by starting a new program for skills development. On Thursday, January 12th, AWS announced a program called re:Start, through which it aims to provide skills training for about 1,000 people in the UK. At the end of this training program, it plans to provide employment for these people within AWS or in partner companies and organizations.

This is an important move by AWS, and could signal the beginning of a new approach towards technology in general, and cloud in particular. Currently, the cloud industry is facing a big gap in skills. In other words, not many people are trained in cloud technology, and this is causing a big problem for companies like AWS. Due to this shortage in skills, their talent pool is greatly reduced. This also affects their expansion plans, as the growth is not supported by great minds that are well-versed in technology. As a result, some companies are forced to scale back their operations, and maybe even reconsider their growth strategy.

In addition, cost of labor is also high. The economics of job market dictates that when demand is greater than supply, companies will have to pay more to retain the knowledgeable workforce. Over time, these costs can really add up. Besides paying high salaries, companies have to depend on some critical resources for their continued operations. This dependence works against established management principles, and obviously can put projects at risk, especially when the critical resources are not available.

To overcome these multi-pronged challenges, AWS decided to start its own training division through which it plans to train employees, and later employ them for its own needs. As a first step, it has offered this training program in the UK. It’s interesting that AWS started this program in the UK, considering the fallout of Brexit and the widely reported skill gaps that have been reported in the UK. Last year, many MPs warned that the UK needs almost 750,000 people with advanced technical skills to meet the growing demands with this economy, and the existing government initiatives are not enough to fill this gap.

In a way, AWS has set an example for other companies to follow suit. Without waiting for any government action or program, it has started its own division for training. The obvious advantage with such a program is that AWS can train people based on the specific skills it needs. Hence, it has the flexibility to choose one technology over another, depending on its immediate and future need.

Such a move also augurs well for the economy as it reduces unemployment rate and increases the productivity and contribution of workers. This program aims to attract young adults, military veterans, reservists, spouses and other deserving candidates. As of now, AWS has entrusted the task of finding the right candidates to a HR outsourcing company called QA Consulting in partnership with the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and The Prince’s Trust.

The post A New Digital Training Program from AWS appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Cloud industry is growing at a rapid rate, and this is most evident in the performance and revenue numbers of the Big Seven providers, namely, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and Facebook. To meet the growing demand from their customers, these companies are increasingly moving their operations to super-fast accelerators that can provide more than ten times the performance of a powerful CPU, and these accelerators are called Field Programmable Gate Array (FGPA) and Graphics Processing Units (GPU).

NVIDIA is one of the leading manufacturers when it comes to GPU,  and many companies tap into its processing power for machine learning and AI applications. It’s little wonder that its revenue rose by almost 193 percent year-on-year.

Some companies like Microsoft and Amazon prefer to use FGPA instead of GPU, and this has led to their pervasive use. Xilink is one of the leading providers of FGPA, and so far, Microsoft, Baidu, and Amazon are known to use it for their complex data analysis, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and AI.

Recently, Amazon announced that it will be offering Xilink services to its customers, and this can be a significant one for Xilink as well as the FGPA industry as a whole. So, what makes this announcement significant?

First off, AWS is the leading cloud provider, so its adoption is sure to give FGPA a big boost.  Second and most importantly, Amazon is the first company to offer these services to their customers. Though Microsoft adopted it earlier, they have not yet offered it as a service to their Azure customers, but Amazon has already started building custom servers on it. As of now, it plans to offer new public F1 Elastic Cloud instances using eight 16nmXilink Ultrascale+ FGPAs for every instance. This will be initially offered as a developer’s platform, so the experienced FGPA community can start building on it.

At this point though, Amazon has made no mention of OpenCL – Xilink’s reconfigurable acceleration stack, but adding these capabilities in the future can create huge opportunities for the early adopters of this technology.

This adoption by Amazon is obviously big business for Xilink, and it helps it to score over its arch-rival, Altera that was acquired by Intel last year. Ironically, Intel announced at the time of acquisition of Altera that more than one-third of cloud nodes would be powered by FGPAs by 2020, and it looks like Xilink maybe the major beneficiary of this growth. If you’re wondering why AWS chose Xilink over Altera, it’s purely from a business standpoint. Xilink is almost a year ahead than Altera in terms of manufacturing technology, and this explains why many leading cloud providers prefer to work with Xilink. But, this doesn’t mean we can rule out Altera, or Intel now, completely. Some reports show that Intel is working hard on its FGPA business, as it believes this could drive its future business interest.

In short, Xilink is the clear leader when it comes to FGPA, though Intel may catch up soon.

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