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Microsoft again secures strong revenues with ‘material growth’ in $10m Azure contracts noted

Microsoft has reported revenues of $33.1 billion (£25.7bn) for its most recent quarter, with CEO Satya Nadella emphasising the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in building out cloud applications.

Writing the headline for Microsoft’s quarterly earnings release requires conforming to some kind of template: ‘Microsoft Cloud [noun] [verb] [quarter] Results’. The noun, usually ‘growth’ or ‘strength’, is optional, as is the word ‘record’ when allowable, while the requisite verb will either be ‘powers’, ‘fuels’, or ‘drives.’

This time round, it is a no-frills “Microsoft Cloud Strength Drives First Quarter Results”, with solid increases across the board. Microsoft’s revenues are placed into three buckets; productivity and business processes, which hit $11 billion (£8.6bn) at a 13.3% increase, intelligent cloud, which was at $10.8bn at a 26.6% yearly increase, and ‘more personal computing’, at $11.1bn representing a 3.6% change. Specific Azure figures are as ever not disclosed, however chief financial officer Amy Hood told analysts there had been ‘material growth’ in the number of $10 million plus contracts in the quarter.

In prepared remarks, Nadella cited the continued growth of Azure powering the rest of Microsoft’s stack – although stopping short of using ‘the world’s computer’, as with the most recent results – yet added a warning. “Organisations today need a distributed computing fabric to meet their real world operational sovereignty and regulatory needs,” said Nadella.

“Every Fortune 500 customer today is on a cloud migration journey, and we are making it faster and easier. We are reimagining customers’ data estates with the cloud era with new limitless capabilities.

“We are accelerating our innovation across the entire technology stack to deliver new value for customers,” Nadella added. “We’re investing aggressively in large markets with significant growth potential, and it’s still early days.”

One area which appears to be gaining traction is through Microsoft 365, the name for the overall suite of ‘productivity cloud’ products. As reported by ZDnet, the company’s ‘Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue growth’ may be the indicator, with that category seeing a particular spike up 26% in Q120 compared to 12% the year before.

“Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud and the only comprehensive solution that empowers everyone from the C-suite to first line workers with an integrated secure experience on any device,” added Nadella. “We’re infusing AI across Microsoft 365 to help make work more intuitive and natural.”

Microsoft’s highlights from the most recent quarter were varied. The company expanded its cloud data centres to Germany and Switzerland, as well as India, where a major partnership with network operator Reliance Jio was announced in August. Microsoft announced the acquisition of cloud migration tool Movere in September, and most recently secured a partnership with SAP – putting them ahead of their hyperscaler rivals.  

You can read Microsoft’s full results here.

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Google and IBM debate «quantum supremacy» in academic spat


Bobby Hellard

24 Oct, 2019

Google and IBM have got into a «quantum supremacy» discourse with the later discrediting the claims of the former.

Google said its giant 53-qubit Sycamore quantum processor was able to perform a complex mathematical problem in 200 seconds, while the world’s most-powerful supercomputer would need 10,000 years to complete.

Quantum supremacy is a theory put forward by Caltech professor John Preskill who said ‘supremacy’ is achieved when a quantum computer can do something a normal computer cannot.

Google made its supremacy claim in a paper called «Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconductor processor» published in the research journal Nature.

But the accuracy of the experiment was quickly called out by IBM, which refuted the claims.

«We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity,» IBM said in a blog post. «This is, in fact, a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced.

«Because the original meaning of the term ‘quantum supremacy,’ as proposed by John Preskill in 2012, was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, this threshold has not been met.»

IBM’s research staff said that when Google’s comparison to classical computing was made, it relied on an advanced simulation that uses parallelism, fast and error-free computation, and large aggregate RAM. But, it failed to fully account for enough disk storage.

Big Blue, which is deep into its own quantum computing research, said that it’s «Schrödinger-style» classical simulation approach uses both RAM and hard drive space to store and manipulate the state vector.

The tech giant also suggested the term «supremacy» is misleading and has a negative connotation. The word, it explained, «exacerbates overhyped reporting» on the status of quantum technology and that «through its association with white supremacy, evokes a repugnant political stance». 

«A headline that includes some variation of ‘Quantum Supremacy Achieved’ is almost irresistible to print, but it will inevitably mislead the general public,» IBM said. «First because, as we argue above, by its strictest definition the goal has not been met. But more fundamentally, because quantum computers will never reign ‘supreme’ over classical computers, but will rather work in concert with them, since each have their unique strengths.»

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How cloud technologies continue to enable innovation in the pharmaceutical industry

The pharmaceutical world is in the midst of a sea change. As new deadlines approach for compliance with the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), pharmaceutical companies are racing — and struggling — to comply. The provisions’ end goal — creating an electronic database to identify and trace the distribution of prescription drugs throughout the U.S. and ensuring proper licensing — is clearly an important one for public safety. But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy transition.

Meanwhile, companies still are going about their regular business of developing life-changing pharmacological solutions. To be successful, organisations must maintain a delicate balancing act, and aren’t able to fully direct their attention to any one area.

Fortunately, modern cloud technology, including enterprise resource planning, stands to aid pharmaceutical executives with these challenges. Not only do cloud technologies help companies update their reporting and accounting processes to meet modern standards, they open up new internal efficiencies that allow for unprecedented innovation. Here are a few ways cloud solutions will benefit modern pharmaceutical companies.

Eliminating mindless tasks

Many people become fearful when they hear news reports of increasingly automated jobs. And it’s true that 38% of American jobs are at high risk of automation by 2030. But what that statistic doesn’t show is that many of these jobs don’t require human empathy, creativity and problem-solving skills in the first place. Processes like product tracking can and should be shifted to automated, cloud-based tools, freeing up human employees to concentrate on high-level innovation.

Enabling new technologies

Pharma companies have access to a mind-boggling supply of genomic data; the datasets available for research double in size every eight months and in the past 10 years, the Broad Institute alone has generated 70 petabytes of genomic data from 100,000 genomes — the equivalent of 1.2 billion hours of streaming music files.

There is no conceivable way any pharma organisation can efficiently store or utilise such a mountain of data without the help of cloud storage. And by pairing the cloud with an ERP solution, pharma companies gain even further benefit from the ability to scale large datasets when they connect artificial intelligence and machine-learning models. Cloud and ERP pairings also enable the Internet of Things (IoT) devices that automate processes like supply chain tracking, inventory management and serialisation.

Ensuring access to information

Nearly all companies that rely on computing, pharmaceutical or not, suffer from some sort of data siloing. Information isn’t readily accessible across departments, and employees often don’t know where to look for crucial documents. In fact, nearly half (43%) of workers have avoided sharing a document with a colleague because they couldn’t find it or believed it would take too long to find.

That’s an unacceptable figure, especially in pharma, where documentation and knowledge-sharing are critical for safety, as well as compliance with DSCSA database requirements. Pharmacy chains, hospital networks, regulators and other key parties need instantaneous access to this information — access that’s readily available when data lives in the cloud. Pharmaceutical professionals are able to collaborate across departments and access the information they need to innovate, while resting assured that external facing users have appropriate resources.

When pharmaceutical companies move to cloud-based solutions, including enterprise resource planning, the sky truly is the limit for innovation and discovery.

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Databricks raises $400m in series F funding and tops $6bn valuation

Big data and analytics platform provider Databricks has announced a $400 million (£310m) series F funding round – putting the company at a more than $6 billion valuation.

The San Francisco-based firm, which helped create big data processing framework Apache Spark, only closed its series E round to the tune of $250m back in February, revealing significant growth. The company’s remit is focused around ‘unified data analytics’, whereby artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are combined with data processing for more tangible, actionable results.

The series F round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) late stage venture fund, with a wide cast list of supporting players, including Coatue Management, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). a16z has long since been a supporter of Databricks, having claimed upon the series E funding that the company was the ‘clear winner in the big data platform race.’ This time round, a16z general partner David George claimed Databricks’ net revenue retention was ‘astounding.’

So why the additional funding? Like its open source heritage, Databricks has built three technologies based around data management and machine learning. Delta Lake is a storage layer which aims to bring reliability to data lakes, MLflow is a platform for the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, while Koalas aims to make Pandas, a Python data science tool, more compatible with big data sets.

Databricks is also looking to put €100 million towards its European centre in Amsterdam, with the company saying its engineering hub had already grown by three times over the past two years. The company is looking at further expansion in the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.

“Data teams at thousands of organisations globally are now leveraging our Unified Data Analytics Platform to solve their toughest problems,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks CEO and co-founder in a statement. “Our bets on massive data processing, machine learning, open source and the shift to the cloud are all playing out in the market and resulting in enormous and rapidly growing global customer demand.

“As a result, Databricks is among the fastest growing enterprise software cloud companies on record,” added Ghodsi.

Databricks was placed in the top 20 of the most recent Forbes Cloud 100, published in September.

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Databricks raises $400m in series F funding and tops $6bn valuation

Big data and analytics platform provider Databricks has announced a $400 million (£310m) series F funding round – putting the company at a more than $6 billion valuation.

The San Francisco-based firm, which helped create big data processing framework Apache Spark, only closed its series E round to the tune of $250m back in February, revealing significant growth. The company’s remit is focused around ‘unified data analytics’, whereby artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are combined with data processing for more tangible, actionable results.

The series F round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) late stage venture fund, with a wide cast list of supporting players, including Coatue Management, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). a16z has long since been a supporter of Databricks, having claimed upon the series E funding that the company was the ‘clear winner in the big data platform race.’ This time round, a16z general partner David George claimed Databricks’ net revenue retention was ‘astounding.’

So why the additional funding? Like its open source heritage, Databricks has built three technologies based around data management and machine learning. Delta Lake is a storage layer which aims to bring reliability to data lakes, MLflow is a platform for the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, while Koalas aims to make Pandas, a Python data science tool, more compatible with big data sets.

Databricks is also looking to put €100 million towards its European centre in Amsterdam, with the company saying its engineering hub had already grown by three times over the past two years. The company is looking at further expansion in the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.

“Data teams at thousands of organisations globally are now leveraging our Unified Data Analytics Platform to solve their toughest problems,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks CEO and co-founder in a statement. “Our bets on massive data processing, machine learning, open source and the shift to the cloud are all playing out in the market and resulting in enormous and rapidly growing global customer demand.

“As a result, Databricks is among the fastest growing enterprise software cloud companies on record,” added Ghodsi.

Databricks was placed in the top 20 of the most recent Forbes Cloud 100, published in September.

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AWS servers hit by sustained DDoS attack


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

23 Oct, 2019

Businesses were unable to service their customers for approximately eight hours yesterday after Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers were struck by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

After initially flagging DNS resolution errors, customers were informed that the Route 53 domain name system (DNS) was in the midst of an attack, according to statements from AWS Support circulating on social media.

From 6:30pm BST on Tuesday, a handful of customers suffered an outage to services while the attack persisted, lasting until approximately 2:30am on Wednesday morning, when services to the Route 53 DNS were restored. This was the equivalent of a full working day in some parts of the US.

«We are investigating reports of occasional DNS resolution errors. The AWS DNS servers are currently under a DDoS attack,» said a statement from AWS Support, circulated to customers and published across social media.

«Our DDoS mitigations are absorbing the vast majority of this traffic, but these mitigations are also flagging some legitimate customer queries at this time. We are actively working on additional mitigations, as well as tracking down the source of the attack to shut it down.»

The Route 53 system is a scalable DNS that AWS uses to give developers and businesses a method to route end users to internet applications by translating URLs into numeric IP addresses. This effectively connects users to infrastructure running in AWS, like EC2 instances, and S3 buckets.

During the attack, AWS advised customers to try to update the configuration of clients accessing S3 buckets to specify the region their bucket is in when making a request to mitigate the impact of the attack. SDK users were also asked to specify the region as part of the S3 configuration to ensure the endpoint name is region-specific.

Rather than infiltrating targeted software or devices, or exploiting vulnerabilities, a typical DDoS attack hinges on attackers bombarding a website or server with an excessive volume of access requests. This causes it to undergo service difficulties or go offline altogether.

All AWS services have been fully restored at the time of writing, however, the attack struck during a separate outage affecting Google Cloud Platform (GCP), although there’s no indication the two outages are connected.

From 12:30am GMT, GCP’s cloud networking system began experiencing issues in its US West region. Engineers then learned the issue had also affected a swathe of Google Cloud services, including Google Compute Engine, Cloud Memorystore, the Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable and Google Cloud Storage. All services were gradually repaired until they were fully restored by 4:30am GMT.

While outages on public cloud platforms are fairly common, they are rarely caused by DDoS attacks. Microsoft’s Azure and Office 365 services, for example, suffered a set of routine outages towards the end of last year and the beginning of 2019.

One instance includes a global incident with US government services and LinkedIn sustaining an authentication outage towards the end of January this year.

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View from the airport: Commvault GO 2019

22 Oct, 2019

Data and backup specialist Commvault devoted a large part of its annual GO conference redefining itself in the eyes of its partners and customers. Inevitably, there was a lot of buzz about what this ‘new Commvault’ actually meant.

The first and most obvious part of that mission was the company’s subtle rebrand, something it clearly hoped would serve as the signifier of a new chapter, and a move away from the recent stagnancy into which it had slipped. With slight changes to the colours and typeface – it improves the aesthetic somewhat. I have to say, though, it was a little underwhelming.

The second, more important aspect, was to use the event to address the growing unease among customers and partners. Our discussions with partners, by and large, suggest this was a moderate success, and there was certainly a sense of energy lacking in Nashville last year, beyond that emanating from the music scene.

This excitement was perhaps encapsulated most by the launch of Metallic, a standalone software as a service (SaaS) venture that pointedly departs from the Commvault brand and forges its own identity. I wasn’t the only one confused as to why Metallic wasn’t released under the wider product umbrella. The rationale was that it grew from within the company like a startup, with its own dedicated team, and that certainly adds up. Yet, reading between the lines, it’s clear the firm recognises it has work to do in addressing a set of issues tied to the Commvault identity.

Connotations that its technology is hard to use, that pricing is too high and confusing, and that Commvault itself is something of a throwback compared to the new kids on the block, are – as one partner put it – three fairly «crippling» attributes. This isn’t to say Commvault hasn’t moved to address these, with Mirchandani stressing numerous times the ‘complexity’ notion is a «myth» that he’s now striving to bust, given recent changes to the platform.

The firm as a whole must now face the reality of the hand it’s been dealt. It’s good, then, that we saw evidence of a strategy that could pave the way for a change in its fortunes. Recent changes to its channel programme, and new hires in the form of industry veterans Mercer Rowe and Edison Peres, should go some way towards addressing the barriers resellers face.

The new venture, Metallic, of course, smacks of a gimmick, but it actually addresses a gap in the market, and seemingly trumps alternative SaaS backup options. Its distribution, too, will be entirely channel-led, starting with select US partners, with successes fed back into Commvault’s existing programme.

Moreover, the broader idea to integrate data management with storage management was the real cornerstone of Mirchandani’s long-term vision. Following the Hedvig acquisition last month, Commvault laid out its ideas for the future, but we’ll have to reserve judgement on this front until a solid model for integration is released.

Broadly speaking, these sorts of ideas and announcements were what I expected to see from Commvault after a shaky 12 months; something shiny to get the conversation going, but reinforced with a sense of substance that partners, who deal with the technology day-in and day-out, can shout about too. 

Recognising the realities of an increasingly multi-cloud landscape was reassuring, as was Mirchandani’s statement that Commvault is happy to work with existing Hedvig customers who use rival backup services, such as those offered by Veeam. It must be said that there’s a risk that Commvault’s confidence, as it follows through on its strategy, may again slip into a familiar sense of complacency.

Persistent repetition, for instance, that Commvault sat at the pinnacle of the Gartner magic quadrant, as well as Forrester’s equivalent, grew fairly tedious. After all, Commvault’s standard of technology has never been a problem, rather, it’s the many elements that coalesce around it.

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Microsoft acquires Mover to ease cloud-based data migration


Bobby Hellard

22 Oct, 2019

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Mover, a cloud-based file migration company, as it looks to facilitate more ways for its customers to move data from other cloud services into the Microsoft 365 cloud suite.

Since its inception eight years ago, Mover has been used in data migration from over a dozen cloud service providers, including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive. And the Canadian-based startup counts companies such as AutoDesk, Symantec and Nike as its customers. Now Mover’s capabilities and expertise will be taken under Microsoft’s corporate wing. 

«As the world moves to Microsoft 365, it needs an excellent self-serve solution for migrating content,» said Eric Warnke, co-founder and CEO of Mover.

«Our technology makes us one of the fastest OneDrive and SharePoint document migrators in the world. My team has proven this time and time again by setting migration speed records for the industry, always meeting customer needs. Security, file fidelity, and transfer accuracy are core tenets of our company and we take pride in our reputation.»

The deal comes just a month after Microsoft acquired similar-sounding Movere, another cloud migration specialist and adds further to its already busy portfolio of cloud firms. In July, Microsoft snapped up BlueTalon, a software company that focuses on data-centric security and hybrid data environments. A month later, it acquired jClarity, a software company that specialises in Java installations.

While it still trails behind AWS, Microsoft’s cloud business is growing fast. The company reported Azure revenue grew 64% in the last quarter, while sales of AWS rose by 37%.

«Our goal is to help customers move to the cloud with confidence,» said Jeff Teper, CVP Office, SharePoint and OneDrive. «Today, we offer several options to support cloud file migrations, including FastTrack and offerings from trusted Microsoft partners, as well as the SharePoint Migration Tool for migrating content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to Microsoft 365. Mover will enhance these offerings with proven tools, plus more self-service options over time.»

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Transitions, tracking and teams: How to get your initiatives up to multi-cloud nine

At the most basic level, nearly every company now uses SaaS systems from different cloud providers. Hybrid private/public clouds are also becoming the preferred option for enterprises, and these networks are inherently distributed. This means most organisations are currently dealing with the challenges of managing networks and services from multiple vendors. They’re having multi-cloud headaches.

We all want complicated, hybrid environments to act like a single system. So, what’s a cloud management professional to do? Here’s a compilation of expert tips for succeeding with multi-cloud.

Understand the business needs

Focusing on why the business relies on this cloud-based CRM solution and needs that provider for big data analytics will enable better decisions. Also keep in mind that, despite they hype, there’s no need to put everything in the cloud all at once—or ever. It’s more appropriate to develop different goals for business units or applications, pointing the IT organisation at where cloud will be value-add. This involves working from the network up, not from the cloud down.

Integrate teams

Traditional siloes no longer apply in the multi-cloud era. Server, storage, network, security, operations, and development all need to work together.

Define natural transition times

Moving a relatively new in-house application to the cloud may not make sense. An older application ready for an overhaul? That one might be able to go cloud-native. There’s a lot of benefit in taking the easy route.

Remain user-centric

Understanding how users engage with applications—and how they want and need to do so—can provide insight into existing cloud services and emerging opportunities. Look at how users are accessing specific services (e.g., via desktop or mobile), for what reasons, and for how long. What works and what are their pain points? Auditing users’ access can also identify when multiple providers are performing the same function so redundancies can be eliminated.

Build for self-service

Empower developers to get the computational power they need and marketing professionals to build trial campaigns in the cloud with easy-access services that go through IT. Doing so will cut down on “shadow IT” and improve visibility and governance of all cloud usage.

Choose vendors and products carefully

Problems are to be expected, so look for partners willing to work with you. All the better if they can guide you toward the proper offerings, not just the ones most profitable for them. Taking VMware for example, there is the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud for traditional apps and Native Hybrid Cloud for microservices-based apps. Using the right one is key.

Automate and standardise

Get humans out of the way whenever possible by automating the monitoring, maintenance, and other tasks of multi-cloud, and even consider outsourcing whatever you can. Also be sure to use the same policies for workloads, data storage, etc., for each environment. One configuration applied across platforms is easier to update, automate, and move.

Track it all

TCO in the cloud can be hard to figure. It’s vital to keep a list of services and regularly evaluate the cost-benefit compared with alternatives. Network issues will also arise, so tracking performance can help target root causes and make the fix process less of a hunting expedition. Nirvana is a single-pane view covering downtime, error alerts, usage rates, and so on.

Foresee the end

Design a generic end-of-life procedure for phasing out a cloud service. It should ensure user accounts and subscriptions are deleted, company data is returned, and providers don’t retain confidential information.

Sound overwhelming? Multi-cloud remains complicated. One of the best ways to make room in the budget and on the agenda is to move non-strategic tasks off the IT team’s plate. Third party maintenance of private cloud, on-premises systems, and co-located assets is a tool that can help reduce the endless multitasking and bring the focus necessary to be effective in multi-cloud deployment and management.

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SAP embraces Microsoft for stronger preferred cloud partnership

SAP has announced the launch of a more detailed cloud partnership with Microsoft – showing how the German software giant’s Embrace project is gaining traction.

Embrace, first announced in May, is SAP’s blueprint to help customers become ‘intelligent enterprises’ by utilising the hyperscaler public clouds of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This includes reference architecture based on various industry verticals, as well as value added services for customers running a cloud-based or hybrid infrastructure on a hyperscaler platform.

This extended partnership with Microsoft, billed as a ‘preferred cloud’ deal, will aim to speed up customer adoption of app development product SAP Cloud Platform and ERP bulwark S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.

SAP confirmed to CloudTech that there were no similar programs planned with the other hyperscalers right now.

Project Embrace on Microsoft Azure will have a three-pronged strategy for customers; simplifying the move from SAP’s on-premise ERP to S/4HANA, creating a ‘roadmap to the cloud for customers in focused industries… with a path to streamline implementation’, providing a combined support model, alongside the reference architectures, put together with system integrator partners.

SAP – alongside other companies including VMware – have taken on board the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ adage around the largest public cloud providers. At VMworld back in August, VMware touted the fact it had partnerships set up with five of the biggest clouds, including IBM and Alibaba. Oracle came in the following month.

While the potential for collaboration between the Microsofts and Amazons to tap into VMware and SAP’s customer base is impressive, expect some jockeying for position within these frameworks going forward.

Bruce Milne, CMO at hyperconverged infrastructure provider Pivot3, told this publication immediately after the VMworld keynote in August: “There’s an obvious strategic tension in VMware’s collaboration with the hyperscale cloud providers, but for now it appears they’ve agreed to a collaborative détente. Watch this space because that friction is sure to generate sparks eventually.”

Microsoft had seen to be more active in promoting this initiative than others. A blog post from May 9, the day Embrace was first announced, said the Redmond firm would be the first global cloud provider to join the program. SAP’s official note on the same day cited all three hyperscalers, along with unnamed ‘global strategic service partners’.

SAP has also announced its third quarter 2019 results, with the gradual move from on-prem to cloud-based revenues continuing. Cloud revenue went up 37% year on year, while cloud and software revenues went up 12%, and total revenues 13%. A statement from chief financial officer Luka Mucic noted that “despite continued macro uncertainties we couldn’t be more confident to make 2019 another stellar year for SAP.”

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