Archivo de la categoría: Google

Google

Google Cloud Platform Extends Support for More Tools

Google Cloud Platform has extended support for a range of tools to make it easier for developers working across different platforms to integrate Google Cloud into their applications. One of the prominent changes made by Google in this respect is to extend support for applications built on ASP .NET – the open source web application framework that was created by Microsoft.  With this change, other related tools such as Visual Studio, C#, Microsoft SQL Server, and PowerShell will also get support from Google Cloud. The best part of this support is that all the APIs are open source and are available for free on github.

Let’s briefly go through each of these APIs.

C# Bindings

Though Google used many innovative technologies, its internal APIs did not really benefit its end-users. This is why the Google Cloud Platform started using public APIs for many things such as machine learning, logging, and so on. The obvious advantage is you can add any capability you want to these APIs, without ever having to worry about the complex infrastructure that executes them for you.

These public APIs come from many platforms including C#. In fact, the Google Cloud Platform receives million of C# clients from around the world every day, and it services them. If you’re wondering what’s new – it’s the support for newer APIs that require a set of advanced features like bidirectional streaming. To service these new APIs, Google is providing support to run them on a high-performance universal RPC called gRPC, instead of the regular HTTP/REST protocol.

PowerShell

Google Cloud’s tools for the Windows PowerShell helps you to manage the different resources of Google Platform easily. These tools include:

  • Google Cloud DNS – This tools allows you to manage Google Cloud DNS to publish information pertaining to your zone and record in the DNS, without the burden of managing your own DNS server.
  • Google Cloud SQL – This tool makes it convenient to setup, manage, and maintain your own MySQL database on the Google Cloud Platform.
  • Google Cloud Storage – This tool makes it easy to store and retrieve any data at any time of your choice. This flexibility allows you to use Google Platform for a wide range of scenarios such as storing web content, archiving data, distributing large objects, and more.
  • Google Compute Engine -This tool helps to create and run virtual machines on the Google Cloud Platform. Compute Engine offers many advanced capabilities that makes it easy to launch large compute clusters. Also, this tool is known for its speed and consistency of performance that is sure to add value to your application.

Visual Studio

Cloud tools for Visual Studio is a powerful way to build .NET applications and to deploy them directly on Cloud Platform. It also gives you the choice to run or test your application locally, and also deploy them directly to the cloud, right from your Visual Studio.

With these tools and support, Google plans to reach out to users across different platforms.

The post Google Cloud Platform Extends Support for More Tools appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Google

Latest Changes in Google Cloud Platform – A Peek

Google is the latest of cloud storage providers to announce changes to its service. In the GCPNext Event in London, the company announced the launch of Coldline, a new cold storage service that would store archival data. This storage offers a cheap rate for customers to store data that they’re likely to access less than once a year. The cost for this service is 0.7 cents for every gigabyte of data.

This announcement has come as a surprise because Google’s rates are already one of the lowest in the market. Also, a closely related service called Nearline is already offered by Google for users who access data less than once a month. This service costs only one cent per gigabyte, so a further slash and a new product along the same lines is a surprise.

Besides Coldline, Google made a few other changes to its cloud storage services. Firstly, it has slashed the price of its regular single-region Cloud by 23 percent, which means, it’ll cost only two cents per gigabyte per month starting from November 1st. In addition, calls to its Application Programming Interface (APIs) will cost only half a cent for every thousand operations, and this is a whopping 50 percent cut in price. This rate is applicable for both regional and multi-regional storage, that are also called Class A types of API calls.

If Coldline is one end of the spectrum, Multi-Regional Cloud Storage Service is the other end. This service is available for customers who require incredibly high levels of data availability. To meet the needs of these customers, Google will replicate data across its many cloud data storage centers spread across different regions. This way, latency will be low and customers can access data from any location quickly.

Both these offerings are designed to capture a larger market share in a highly competitive cloud storage industry. It widens their reach to include more types of customers with varying cloud storage needs, within their business circle.

Another interesting change is that Google now allows its customers to move their data from one tier to another at any time, regardless of the bucket in which the data is stored. This is a significant change, and one that corporate customers have been asking for some time now, as it helps them to make the most of economical IT resources without compromising on the needs of the users as well as regulatory stipulations.

These announcements come at a time when Amazon AWS and Microsoft have been making headlines about their cloud business, especially in terms of the new partnerships and offerings they have been able to clinch in the recent past. For Google, these changes represent a significant shift in its cloud business, as it gears up to take on the challenges from AWS and Microsoft. Capturing a larger market share begins with excellent products at affordable rates, and Google is right on target. The next few months is sure to be interesting for Google, and the cloud storage market as a whole.

The post Latest Changes in Google Cloud Platform – A Peek appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Google, News

Google Announces New Strategies for its Cloud Services

Google has announced a slew of strategies in a bid to take on the likes of its competitors – Amazon and Microsoft. These announcements were made at an invitation-only gathering at its cloud computing conference called Horizon, that took place in San Francisco on 29th September, 2016.

Here’s a look at some of the key strategic changes.

“Google Cloud” is the new name

If you’ve been using any cloud platform from Google, you’ll be thrilled to know that it’s going to be called Google Cloud from now on. Though the functionality doesn’t change at this point in time, the new name is definitely more encompassing and relevant.

According to Diane Greene, Senior Vice President, Google Cloud, this new name will be an umbrella term for any Google Cloud Platform, all user facing and productivity applications that use the cloud, machine learning tools, APIs, Android devices that access the cloud, and pretty much anything that is built for the cloud.

Also, G Suite is the new name for productivity apps like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps for Work.  Google also announced that it has introduced artificial intelligence capabilities in G Suite to help employees work more efficiently.

So, why this new name? Well, it’s not a complete surprise as this idea was in the pipeline for some time now. Greene believes this name change will send a positive signal to its customers that Google is serious about its cloud offerings. Also, it is more descriptive and less unwieldy when compared to Google Enterprise or Google for Work.

Launch of BigQuery

Urs Holzle, the Senior Vice-President of Technical Infrastructure at Google, launched a new feature called BigQuery for Enterprise. This feature, available in Google Cloud, will allow users to create a full data warehouse based on their needs. This move is seen as the answer for Microsoft’s SQL Data Warehouse and Amazon’s RedShift cloud data warehouse.

New data centers

Google also took this opportunity to reveal the location of eight new data center regions, and they are: Mumbai, Finland, Frankfurt, London, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, and Sao Paulo. A new region for its Cloud Platform is expected to be announced within a month. The addition of these new centers reflect the growing might of Google in the public cloud market. Though it is trailing behind Amazon and Microsoft, Google’s revenue increased by 33 percent in the last quarter, and analysts attribute much of it to gains made in the area of cloud computing.

Partnership with Accenture

Google has entered into a partnership with Accenture to bring to market advanced cloud solutions that’ll help customers to improve their business performance and to accelerate their digital transformation. These solutions will be industry-specific to meet the needs of clients in areas such as finance, healthcare, consumer products, energy, and retail. This partnership is also expected to give Google Cloud a wider reach among corporate customers.

With these strategic announcements, Google is all set to close the gap with its competitors. The next few months will give a clearer picture of the impact of these new strategies.

The post Google Announces New Strategies for its Cloud Services appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Google, News, Services

Google Acquires Orbitera

Google has recently announced the purchase of Orbitera, which will improve Google’s enterprise service sector and allows Google to become a stronger competitor against companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. While terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, TechCrunch estimates that it closed for about $100 million.

orb

Orbitera CEO Marcin Kurc will continue to operate the company as a separate entity and will continue to support existing customers. Orbitera’s technology will improve support of software vendors on Google’s Cloud Platform.

 

This acquisition marks a great addition to Google, as Orbitera has already launched upwards of 60,000 enterprise stacks, including Adobe and Oracle. Orbitera focuses on four parts of constructing cloud marketplaces: billing and cost optimization, marketplace and catalogs, packaging and provisioning, and trials and lead management. This acquisition also improves Google in terms of personnel and perspective, as CEO Marcin Kurc had previously worked at Amazon Web Services.

 

About Orbitera:

Based in West Hollywood, California, Orbitera was co-founded in 2011 by Firas Bushnaq and Brian Singer and had accumulated $2 million in venture funding. The company was founded with the thought of breaking the mold in which enterprise software is sold and bought by making this process easier, and thus the Orbitera Cloud Commerce Platform was created. Since establishment, Orbitera has launched upward of 60,000 enterprise stacks.

 

Comments:

Nan Boden, Google’s head of global technology partners: “Orbitera has built a strong ecosystem of enterprise software vendors delivering software to multiple clouds. This acquisition is not only meant to improve the support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform, but it also aims to reinforce Google’s support for the multi-cloud world.”

 

Boden: “The current model for the deploying, managing and billing of cloud-based software does not easily fit the way today’s modern enterprises operate. Orbitera automates many of the processes associated with billing, packaging and pricing optimization for leading businesses and ISVs (independent software vendors) supporting customers running in the cloud. More than 60,000 enterprise stacks have been launched on Orbitera.”
Orbitera CEO Marcin Kurc: “When we first started Orbitera, our mission was to enable frictionless sales of cloud-based enterprise software and services. Becoming part of the Google Cloud Platform team allows us to continue and accelerate toward this goal…. We will continue to deliver the products and services our customers rely on with the added scale that Google provides.”

The post Google Acquires Orbitera appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

AWS, Google, IaaS, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Google backs multi-cloud strategy with Orbitera purchase

Googlers having funGoogle has confirmed the acquisition of cloud commerce platform Orbitera, marking an alternative strategy to its main cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft, reports Telecoms.com.

The Orbitera platform acts as a marketplace for cloud solutions which simplifies the way in which customers search and purchase products. The platform currently supports deploying applications on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but not currently Google Cloud Platform, though the company said it would continue to support software deployments on platforms other than its own.

As the practise of cloud computing has become normalized throughout the industry, multi-cloud strategies have become more common as enterprise organizations aim to spread workloads to reduce risk. It would appear Google are using the move to multi-cloud environments to further establish its platform and build credibility in the industry. Although Google is generally ranked in the top three cloud providers worldwide, the gap between Microsoft and AWS, and Google in third place has been widening slightly in recent quarters.

Microsoft and AWS do also support multi-cloud propositions, though the majority of the marketing messages are focused on standardizing on a single platform. It would seem Google are moving to a position which would be more aligned with customer trends in the cloud ecosystem.

“At Google, we partner closely with our enterprise customers and software providers to ensure their transition to the cloud is as simple and seamless as possible,” said Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners, on the company’s blog. “We recognize that both enterprise customers and ISVs want to be able to use more than one cloud provider and have a way to conduct product trials and proofs of concept before building a full production deployment, all using their trusted SIs (System Integrators), resellers and normal sales cycles.”

The deal ties in well with another acquisition which the internet giant made in recent months. Back in November the company acquired enterprise development platform start-up bebop, which some industry commentators believed was a move to lure former VMware CEO Diane Greene to head a new business-oriented cloud service. The bebop business created a set of tools which simplified the process for enterprise organizations to build cloud apps. Combining Orbitera with Bebop could potentially form the central theme of a new marketing message for Google; simplifying the cloud.

Google are still playing catch-up with cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft, though it does have lofty ambitions. Last year, Urs Hölzle, SVP for Technical Infrastructure, stated he believes the cloud business has the potential to exceed advertising revenues for the internet giant, which stood at $19 billion for the last quarter. Although the company has been growing in the cloud space, its competitors are expanding at a faster pace. Taking Microsoft and AWS on at their own game does not appear to be working, though a new strategy have the potential to act as a differentiator, as it does match customer trends moving towards multi-cloud strategies.

AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM continue cloud market dominance

male and female during the run of the marathon raceNew research from Synergy states while the cloud market is growing at a healthy rate quarter-by-quarter, the four dominate cloud brands are continuing to pull away from the pack, controlled more market share month-by-month, reports Telecoms.com.

Data from Synergy Research claims the four companies now collectively control more than 50% of worldwide cloud market share (IaaS, PaaS and Hosted Private Cloud), with AWS maintaining its lead at the top of the leader board controlling almost a third of worldwide share. Over the course of the second quarter of 2016, the top four grew revenues by 68%, while the next 20 players, who roughly account for a quarter of the market share, grew 41%. All other vendors in this space grew by a collective 27%.

“In a variety of ways Amazon and the other big three players have distanced themselves from the competition in this market and continue to widen the gap,” said John Dinsdale, Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “What marks them out as different is their global presence, marketing muscle, ability to fund huge investments in hyper scale data centres and, in most cases, a determination to succeed in the market.

“The ranking of the next 20 largest cloud providers features some interesting companies, with Alibaba and Oracle growing particularly strongly, but they are all starting from a long way behind Google, which is itself growing by well over 100% per year and yet remains only a sixth the size of Amazon.”

Although AWS is still the dominant market player, growth is slowing. Google and Microsoft both posted growth figures of more than 100%, though it is far too soon to write AWS’ obituary, as it still controls more than three times the market share of its nearest rival, Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft has been going through a number of transformation projects in recent years, and while the market share for cloud shows it will still be some time before it catches AWS, the team are finding success in other arenas. According to additional research from Synergy, in the data centre infrastructure market, HPE and Cisco may be leading the way for public and private cloud hardware, but Microsoft now accounts for just over 40% of cloud software share, with VMWare its nearest competitor at roughly 20%. The research including share for servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualization software.

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50% per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30%, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Chief Analyst. “But on the enterprise data centre side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”

AI, fibre, Financial Results, Google, News & Analysis

Google grows (again) but ‘Other Bets’ cost the giant $1bn

GoogleGoogle has reported its Q2 numbers, continuing a strong run of performances within the technology industry, though efforts to diversify its overall business are not paying off just yet, reports Telecoms.com.

The Alphabet brand was announced last year, with aim of allowing the team to invest in other projects more freely, without being impeded by the advertising business. It would appear the management team are not afraid to throw R&D money at its innovation team as it searches for another billion-dollar business, as the ‘Other Bets’ segment, which includes Google Fibre and the autonomous cars projects, accounted for an operating loss of $859 million. Revenues did grow to $185 million, up 150% on the same quarter in 2015, though this number was made almost insignificant by the $19 billion generated in the advertising business.

The technology industry on the whole has been providing strong numbers over the last couple of weeks, though there has been a question as to whether two advertising giants can co-exist. With Facebook reporting significant growth yesterday, advertising revenues across the period increased 63% year-on-year to $6.2 billion, these numbers were dwarfed by Google, perhaps demonstrating there is potential for both organizations to share advertising revenues, which are decreasing in value, and grow healthily.

With regard to the dwindling value of advertising revenues, Google would appear to be combatting this with volume. CFO Ruth Porat highlighted the mobile search capabilities were the primary driver behind the year-on-year growth, though the desktop and tablet search did also grow.

Numbers such as these will grab headlines, meaning it can be easy to forget about the Google cloud business, one of the top priorities for the Alphabet business moving forward.

On the same day which AWS reported revenues of $2.9 billion for the quarter, Google’s cloud business also demonstrated solid growth. Although the numbers are not specific, the ‘Other’ revenues segment which includes the cloud business, and other services such as Google play, accounting for $2.1 billion through the three month period, an increase of 33% on Q2 2015.

“Many tremendous digital experiences are being built in the cloud today, and businesses are working to take advantage of the cloud as part of their digital transformation,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “We’ve been integrating our cloud and apps products to create more unified solutions for companies large and small, and these efforts are paying off.”

Following on from Pichai’s previous comments on the role of artificial intelligence on the Google cloud platform, and the wider Google business, its importance has been reiterated once again. Machine learning is being prioritized as the differentiator for Google in a competitive technology market, and only last week the team introduced two cloud machine learning APIs for speech and natural language to help enterprise customers convert audio to text and easily understand the structure and sentiment of the text in a variety of languages.

In terms of footprint, the team are not done growing yet. At the end of last month, Google and friends completed work on a new trans-Pacific submarine cable system, which will help the team launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo. Back in March, the team confirmed it would be investing heavily in expansion of its cloud footprint with 12 new data centres around the world by the end of 2017.

AWS has previously stated it intends to break the $10 billion barrier in cloud revenues during 2016, though Google may not be that far behind. With its history of not being afraid to invest, and the growth numbers which have been witnessed over the last few quarters, Google could be set to accelerate.

Avanto, Google, Media, News & Analysis, TV

Google adds media capabilities with Anvato purchase

Google AvantoGoogle has bolstered its capabilities in the video streaming market through acquiring video platform Anvato which will join its cloud business unit.

Anvato provides a software platform that fully automates the encoding, editing, publishing and secure distribution of video content across multiple platforms. The acquisition will improve Google’s capabilities to recruit media companies to its cloud storage business, in the long-term quest to gain ground on Microsoft Azure and AWS in the cloud market segment.

“Anvato’s Media Content Platform, which counts many large media companies as customers, will complement our efforts to enable scalable media processing and workflows in the cloud,” said Belwadi Srikanth, Senior Product Manager at Google. “The cloud is transforming the way video content is created and distributed to an array of connected devices, as well as the way users engage with this content. And in recent years, the adoption of over-the-top (OTT) technologies has emerged as a critical platform for delivering rich audio, video and other media via the Internet.”

Offerings such as Anvato’s have been pushed to prominence in recent years as more video content moves into the OTT category. Google already counts a number of media outlets as customers, including Sky News and Spotify, though the continuing OTT trend will generate more demand for cloud services. The Anvato purchase will add several other media heavy hitters to the customer list such as NBCUniversal, Univision, Scripps Networks, Fox Sports, Media General.

“We are thrilled to bring together Anvato with the scale and power of Google Cloud Platform to provide the industry’s best offering for OTT and mobile video,” said Alper Turgut, CEO at Avanto. “This will allow us to supercharge our capabilities, accelerate the pace of innovation, and deliver tomorrow’s video solutions faster, enabling media companies to better serve their customers.”

AI, Artificial intelligence, Google, Image Recognition, News & Analysis

Google adds image recognition to growing AI portfolio

Googlers having funGoogle has continued its charge on the artificial intelligence market through purchasing French image recognition startup Moodstocks, reports Telecoms.com.

Moodstocks, founded in 2008, develops machine-learning based image recognition technology for smartphones, which has been described by developers as the ‘Shazam for images’. Financials of the agreement have not been confirmed to date.

“Ever since we started Moodstocks, our dream has been to give eyes to machines by turning cameras into smart sensors able to make sense of their surroundings,” Moodstock said on its website. “Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to join forces with Google in order to deploy our work at scale. We expect the acquisition to be completed in the next few weeks.”

Artificial intelligence is one of the focal points of the Google strategy moving forward, which was confirmed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s recent earnings call, though the focus can be dated back to the $625 million DeepMind acquisition in 2014. Although DeepMind is arguably the most advanced AI system in the industry, Telecoms.com readers recently confirmed in a poll Google was the leader in the AI segment, it has seemingly been playing catch up with the likes of Watson and AWS whose offerings have been in the public eye for a substantially longer period of time.

The recognition tools are most likely to be incorporated into the Android operating system, though Moodstocks customers will be able to continue to use the service until the end of their subscription. Moodstocks will be incorporated into Google’s R&D centre in France, where the team will work alongside engineers who are focusing on the development of Youtube and Chrome, two offerings where there could be a link to the Moodstocks technology.

“Many Google services use machine learning (or machine learning) to make them simpler and more useful in everyday life – such as Google Translate, Smart Reply Inbox, or the Google app,” said Vincent Simonet, Head of R&D centre of Google’s French unit. “We have made great strides in terms of visual recognition: now you can search in Google Pictures such as ‘party’ or ‘beach’ and the application will offer you good pictures without you and have never needed to categorize them manually.”

Last month, Google also announced it was expanding its machine research team by opening a dedicated office in Zurich. The team will focus on three areas specifically, machine intelligence, natural language processing & understanding, as well as machine perception.

Elsewhere in the industry, Twitter completed the acquisition of Magic Pony last month reportedly for $150 million. Magic Pony, which offers visual processing technology, was one of the more public moves made by the social media network, which could be seen as unusual as the platform lends itself well to the implementation of AI. Microsoft also announced the purchase of Wand Labs, building on the ‘Conversation-as-a-Platform’ proposition put forward by CEO Satya Nadella at Build 2016.

AI, Android, Artificial intelligence, Google, Machine learning, News & Analysis

Image recognition startup joins Google in France

Googlers having funGoogle has continued its charge on the artificial intelligence market through purchasing French image recognition startup Moodstocks, reports Telecoms.com.

Moodstocks, founded in 2008, develops machine-learning based image recognition technology for smartphones, which has been described by developers as the ‘Shazam for images’. Financials of the agreement have not been confirmed to date.

“Ever since we started Moodstocks, our dream has been to give eyes to machines by turning cameras into smart sensors able to make sense of their surroundings,” Moodstock said on its website. “Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to join forces with Google in order to deploy our work at scale. We expect the acquisition to be completed in the next few weeks.”

Artificial intelligence is one of the focal points of the Google strategy moving forward, which was confirmed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s recent earnings call, though the focus can be dated back to the $625 million DeepMind acquisition in 2014. Although DeepMind is arguably the most advanced AI system in the industry, Telecoms.com readers recently confirmed in a poll Google was the leader in the AI segment, it has seemingly been playing catch up with the likes of Watson and AWS whose offerings have been in the public eye for a substantially longer period of time.

The recognition tools are most likely to be incorporated into the Android operating system, though Moodstocks customers will be able to continue to use the service until the end of their subscription. Moodstocks will be incorporated into Google’s R&D centre in France, where the team will work alongside engineers who are focusing on the development of Youtube and Chrome, two offerings where there could be a link to the Moodstocks technology.

“Many Google services use machine learning (or machine learning) to make them simpler and more useful in everyday life – such as Google Translate, Smart Reply Inbox, or the Google app,” said Vincent Simonet, Head of R&D centre of Google’s French unit. “We have made great strides in terms of visual recognition: now you can search in Google Pictures such as ‘party’ or ‘beach’ and the application will offer you good pictures without you and have never needed to categorize them manually.”

Last month, Google also announced it was expanding its machine research team by opening a dedicated office in Zurich. The team will focus on three areas specifically, machine intelligence, natural language processing & understanding, as well as machine perception.

Elsewhere in the industry, Twitter completed the acquisition of Magic Pony last month reportedly for $150 million. Magic Pony, which offers visual processing technology, was one of the more public moves made by the social media network, which could be seen as unusual as the platform lends itself well to the implementation of AI. Microsoft also announced the purchase of Wand Labs, building on the ‘Conversation-as-a-Platform’ proposition put forward by CEO Satya Nadella at Build 2016.