Google has claimed that the number of its cloud deals exceeding $1 million has ‘more than doubled’ over the past 12 months in what it called a ‘strong’ year – yet remained reticent in disclosing details over run rates.

The company’s fourth quarter and fiscal year results, published late yesterday, saw Google’s ‘other’ revenues – of which Google Cloud is a part – hit $6.49 billion (£4.99bn) for the most recent quarter, representing a 30% increase from this time last year. Indeed, this quarterly figure was a 39% uptick from Q318. Total yearly revenues across the business went up 23% to $136.8bn.

“Google Cloud closed out [a] strong year with momentum across the business,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts in an earnings call. “Our focus on helping customers digitally transform their business is paying off.”

Here’s what we know from the call:

• Google has ‘more than doubled’ the number of both its $1 million cloud deals and multi-year contracts signed, while the number of blockbuster $100 million deals has also risen
• Google’s cloud arm saw the most new employees in this quarter for both technical and sales roles
• More than five million paying customers have signed up for collaboration tool G Suite

Yet responding to an analyst question, Google chief financial officer Ruth Porat did not go into more specific detail on Google’s cloudy revenues. “In terms of growth, cloud does continue to deliver sizeable revenues growth driven by [Google Cloud Platform] and GCP does remain one of the fastest-growing businesses across Alphabet,” said Purat, before emphasising the deals already outlined.

The biggest news by far from the most recent quarter was the departure of Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene after three years in the role, with Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian taking over. As Greene put it in her farewell letter, upon taking over in 2015 Google Cloud had ‘two significant customers and a collection of startups’, with the enterprise push ongoing.

Some have argued this push has not been fast enough, from analysts to former employees. In October Amir Hermelin, formerly product management lead at Google Cloud, argued the company’s two biggest mistakes during his tenure were dallying over the enterprise market and focusing too much on Amazon and Microsoft.

As Hermelin and Greene both noted, however, Google’s focus on machine learning was where it could differentiate. “There is an important long-term investment that lays the groundwork for our future computing needs, primarily to accelerate machine learning across our businesses – but also to support the opportunities we see in cloud, search, ads, and YouTube,” Pichai told analysts.

Nevertheless, a clear theme from the earnings call was around clearing the fog of obfuscation around its ‘other’ revenues. Amazon gives its AWS revenues clearly, as does Alibaba for Alibaba Cloud, while Microsoft gives percentage increases if not total specifics around Azure.

According to Synergy Research, in its figures analysing all the major cloud players for the most recent quarter, Google holds 7% market share alongside IBM. Amazon continues to hold more than one third (34%) of the market, with Microsoft a clear second on 15% and Alibaba on 5%. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba all increased market share over the past 12 months – though Synergy noted IBM’s focus differs given its strength in hosted private cloud services rather than public IaaS.

“Q4 tops off a banner year for the cloud market with the annual growth rate actually nudging up from the previous year, which is an unusual phenomenon for a high-growth market of this scale,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research.

“The rate at which the market leaders continue to expand is really rather impressive,” added Dinsdale, noting this continued performance has forced the analyst firm to review and increase its five-year market forecast. “Inevitably there will be a few road bumps along the way, but these will be minor relative to the factors that continue to drive the market.”

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

By Matt Piercy, VP and general manager, Zscaler EMEA

The business IT environment is changing rapidly and, as a result, today’s CIOs have to tackle a number of big challenges. 20 years ago, applications and data were stored on an individual’s computer. Today, cloud-delivered applications, services, and infrastructure are transforming business processes, services, and models.

Cloud transformation has turned what was once a predictable and tightly controlled ecosystem upside-down. In the midst of all this change, CIOs are under pressure to improve employee productivity, encourage standardisation throughout the organisation, and ensure any changes that are implemented drive cost savings. Indeed, CIOs have a big job on their hands as they attempt to recognise the importance of—and embrace—new technology that will help streamline business operations and keep the company competitive, while saving IT significant amounts of time and money.

Here are four key steps of a cloud transformation journey, and how CIOs can navigate these steps successfully:

Global collaboration

Improved collaboration is making its way into the CIO strategy, which isn’t surprising given the competitive advantage collaboration can bring. Creativity, innovation, and communication need to take place across the board. If a business doesn’t have the ability to share information and work amongst global teams, it is missing out on opportunities. Think of the ideas and knowledge that, if shared, could increase efficiencies, reduce costs, boost sales, and reduce customer churn. Collaboration is at the heart of today’s cutting-edge business, and CIOs need to ensure their technology encourages and simplifies collaboration at all levels.

Cloud security

Organisations everywhere are being challenged to reduce costs while increasing productivity and performance. To meet these challenges, CIOs are adopting a cloud-first strategy that utilises software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Motivated by the idea of migrating apps to public cloud providers like AWS and Azure and benefiting from increased accessibility, business productivity, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, cloud migration seems to be a relatively straightforward way of enhancing performance and reducing costs related to hardware inventory and maintenance.

However, the success of a cloud-first strategy is dependent on tools that make a company cloud-ready. Legacy hardware appliances within offices and branches have limitations which are quickly reached when relying on them to support cloud use. These limitations can leave a company vulnerable in terms of security and stifled performance. CIOs can overcome this challenge with a unified cloud security solution with a full range of security controls that enable both secure internet access and secure remote access. With visibility into all traffic that’s moving across the network, CIOs can gain insight into every request—by user, location, and device around the world—in seconds.

Mobility

The number of employee-owned and managed devices, also known as BYOD, being used for work continues to grow each year. According to recent research, BYOD and enterprise mobility in Europe is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 17 percent by 2023. The benefits of BYOD are well known. Not only does it enable and maximise a productive workforce, but it saves money by eliminating the need to buy individual employees their own devices. By allowing workers to use devices they enjoy and are comfortable with, BYOD also increases employee satisfaction. 

Bringing mobile devices into the workplace does, however, put pressure on CIOs to secure these devices as they access the internet, SaaS, and internal applications. Securing traffic to different types of apps is often complex for IT and forces end users to actually think about the location of apps and how to access them, which falls short of the seamless experience users have come to expect. CIOs need to ensure they are able to enforce security and access policies, regardless of device, location, and application.

Internet-first

Last on the list is an internet-first approach. The rapid proliferation of cloud services and SaaS applications is ultimately leading all businesses to rethink their traditional approach to web security. Moving to the cloud increasingly requires CIOs to create secure, direct-to-internet connections. As such, they are embracing software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to drive network simplicity and reduce costs.

SD-WAN works by simplifying how traffic is routed in the branch, which makes it easy to establish local internet breakouts. Software-defined policies are used to select the best path to route traffic connecting the branch to the internet, cloud applications, and the data centre. By defining policies for all branches, organisations can easily deploy new applications and services and manage policies across many locations. CIOs need to make sure they are able to prioritise critical applications such as Office 365 over the likes of YouTube and streaming media, and that they have the ability to leverage multiple branch connection types, including broadband, LTE, and VPN over broadband, to allow a seamless user experience.

Recognising the importance of globalisation and shifting to more mobile-, cloud- and internet-based workloads, all the while navigating network and security challenges and concerns, is a common balancing act for today’s CIOs. However, by successfully taking these steps, CIOs can streamline business processes, enhance the user experience and, ultimately, boost business productivity.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Cloud Pro

Today, Kubernetes is the defacto standard if you want to run container workloads in a production environment. As we set out to build our next generation of products, and run them smoothly in the cloud, we needed to move to Kubernetes too! In the process of building tools like KubeXray and GoCenter we learned a whole bunch.

Join this talk to learn how to get started with Kubernetes and how we got started at JFrog building our new tools. After the session you will know:
How we got to Kubernetes (and why we chose it)

read more

In 2017, Docker reached 24% adoption while Lambda reached 23.5% adoption among Amazon Web Services customers. Yet, the adoption rate of serverless and cost savings are dramatically better than what virtual containers can offer. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all pushing serverless because it’s easier and cheaper for their customers. Also, once apps are built using serverless frameworks, there’s a higher switch-over cost to go from one cloud to another. We’ll discuss this and also talk about how brand loyalty is something every subscription service is hoping to achieve. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are strengthening their offerings with serverless in the cloud.

read more

Poor data quality and analytics drive down business value. In fact, Gartner estimated that the average financial impact of poor data quality on organizations is $9.7 million per year. But bad data is much more than a cost center. By eroding trust in information, analytics and the business decisions based on these, it is a serious impediment to digital transformation.

Extract, transform and load (ETL) tools like AWC Glue bring much needed functionality. This tool enables new approaches to pulling, processing and pushing data from source to target, and introduces concepts such as performing data transformation tasks using SparkSQL scripts in Apache spark environment. However, there are shortcomings with AWS Glue, leading to a number of challenges and questions:

read more

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

read more

We at Capgemini have developed a cloud-native PaaS Solution called «Apollo». Apollo is built on top of following open source components. – Apache Mesos for cluster management, scheduling & resource isolation – Marathon or Kubernetes for Container orchestration – Docker for application container runtime, – Consul for service discovery via DNS – Weave for networking of Docker Containers – Traefik for application container load balancing

read more

Today, Kubernetes is the defacto standard if you want to run container workloads in a production environment. As we set out to build our next generation of products, and run them smoothly in the cloud, we needed to move to Kubernetes too! In the process of building tools like KubeXray and GoCenter we learned a whole bunch.

Join this talk to learn how to get started with Kubernetes and how we got started at JFrog building our new tools. After the session you will know:

How we got to Kubernetes (and why we chose it)

read more

Using serverless computing has a number of obvious benefits over traditional application infrastructure – you pay only for what you use, scale up or down immediately to match supply with demand, and avoid operating any server infrastructure at all.

However, implementing maintainable and scalable applications using serverless computing services like AWS Lambda poses a number of challenges. The absence of long-lived, user-managed servers means that states cannot be maintained by the service. Longer function invocation times (referred to as cold starts) become very important to track, because they impact the response time of the service and will impose additional cost. Additionally, the transition to smaller individual components (much like breaking a monolithic application into microservices) results in a simpler deployment model, but makes the system as a whole increasingly complex.

read more