The ongoing shift to cloud computing continues across the globe. The worldwide public cloud services market grew 28.6 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2017 (1H17) with revenues totaling $63.2 billion, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

"Public cloud adoption is accelerating in large part as enterprises recognize that the cloud has become the launchpad for virtually every new IT innovation in the last 24 months — including AI, blockchain, quantum computing and more," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.

Public cloud market development

While stronger than expected growth was seen across all regions, Asia-Pacific saw the highest regional growth at 38.9 percent and this market now represents 11.5 percent of all public cloud services revenues. Strong public cloud spending in China, which saw 55.6 percent year-over-year growth in the first half of 2017, is a key driver.

Among the three primary segments of public cloud services (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS), the SaaS segment, which holds 68.7 percent of overall market share, was the slowest growing segment with a 22.9 percent year-over-year growth rate.

More CIOs and CTOs now think 'cloud first' when it comes to their IT strategy and software footprint, since the benefits of cloud have been demonstrated in most industries. Many companies have picked the low-hanging fruit, in terms of apps that could be easily moved to the cloud, and are now evaluating the potential migration of their next set of larger strategic systems to a SaaS model.

That said, the smallest segment overall was PaaS, with 13.6 percent of the public cloud services market. However, the PaaS market continues to deliver stronger growth than the other two segments at 50.2 percent year-over-year in 1H17.

According to the IDC assessment, the rapid adoption of container technology in the PaaS segment has given developers additional tools to accelerate application development and deployment that is important in the typical enterprise digital transformation journey.

Outlook for private cloud applications

The IaaS segment represented 17.8 percent of the public cloud services market in 1H17, and continues to exhibit strong year-over-year growth at 38.1 percent. Growing interest from enterprises and continued investments by cloud service providers has resulted in enhancements in the IaaS segment across multiple dimensions.

The recent introduction of on-premises offerings into the market also enable easier hybrid IT models, and reduce the barrier to more cloud service adoption for enterprises. Cumulatively, these are paving the way for the next wave of enterprise application deployments on cloud computing IaaS.

Read more: IDC says global public cloud revenues hit $63 billion – with PaaS quickest growing segment

Recent survey done across top 500 fortune companies shows almost 70% of the CIO have either heard about IAC from their infrastructure head or they are on their way to implement IAC. Yet if you look under the hood while some level of automation has been done, most of the infrastructure is still managed in much tradition/legacy way. So, what is Infrastructure as Code? how do you determine if your IT infrastructure is truly automated?

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Nordstrom is transforming the way that they do business and the cloud is the key to enabling speed and hyper personalized customer experiences. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ken Schow, VP of Engineering at Nordstrom, discussed some of the key learnings and common pitfalls of large enterprises moving to the cloud. This includes strategies around choosing a cloud provider(s), architecture, and lessons learned. In addition, he covered some of the best practices for structured team migration and discussed ways to control cloud costs.

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The dynamic nature of the cloud means that change is a constant when it comes to modern cloud-based infrastructure. Delivering modern applications to end users, therefore, is a constantly shifting challenge. Delivery automation helps IT Ops teams ensure that apps are providing an optimal end user experience over hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments, no matter what the current state of the infrastructure is. To employ a delivery automation strategy that reflects your business rules, making real-time decisions based on a combination of real user monitoring, synthetic testing, APM, NGINX / local load balancers, and other data sources, is critical.

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When your correspondent wrote last week, to open the news that Google was becoming Salesforce’s preferred cloud provider, ‘meet the cloud’s newest strategic partners’, it was always going to be a short-lived title.

And so it has proved: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Rackspace have announced a partnership to offer what is claimed as the industry’s first pay as you go OpenStack private cloud.

The pay as you go pricing model will leverage HPE’s Flexible Capacity infrastructure service, with savings of 40% or more compared to leading public cloud vendors according to Rackspace internal pricing analysis. Aside from the pricing, other key features of the combined offering include instant scalability, enterprise-grade security, and managed services expertise.

Rackspace has been focusing many of its efforts on bolstering this expertise of late. The company acquired managed service provider Datapipe in September in what it called the ‘biggest acquisition by far’ in its history.

“With this innovative delivery model, Rackspace and HPE are removing the barriers to private cloud adoption, giving customers even more choice of technology platforms that best fit their application needs,” said Scott Crenshaw, Rackspace executive vice president of private cloud in a statement. “We are proud to partner with HPE to continue enabling customer success with private clouds.”

Michelle Bailey, group vice president at IDC Research, added: “The OpenStack Private Cloud offering from Rackspace and HPE specifically addresses organisations’ needs to provide security and performance benefits, the cornerstone of a private cloud environment.

“With Rackspace’s private cloud expertise and service-first culture, they are well positioned to address the needs of HPE’s large installed base of infrastructure customers and help reduce any cloud migration risk. This pay-per-use infrastructure is a new step forward in helping enterprises deploy private clouds with improved flexibility and cost transparency.”

The service will become generally available in all regions on November 28, with the two companies adding they plan to extend this model to Rackspace’s entire managed private cloud portfolio, including VMware and Microsoft Azure.

IBM has been solidly building its efforts in quantum computing over the past couple of years – and a new milestone has been reached with the launch of upgraded systems featuring 20 qubit processors, with 50 qubits on the way.

The company describes the latest news as “rapid advances in quantum hardware… as IBM continues to drive progress across the entire quantum computing technology stack, with focus on systems, software, applications and enablement.”

Quantum computing is gaining prominence as a significantly more powerful alternative to classical computing. The latter is based around bits which can only exist in 1 and 0 states, while the former, built on the principles of quantum mechanics, aims to take advantage of subatomic particles existing in more than one state at any time. A qubit is the quantum equivalent of the classical bit.

The idea therefore is that in this state, algorithms can be run and conclusions drawn which current computing methods simply cannot comprehend; ‘we expect them to open doors that we once thought would remain locked indefinitely’, as IBM itself puts it.

One issue in this is the concept of coherence, the amount of time machines can exist in this quantum state before reverting to their classical equivalents. Today, the maximum time available to researchers is 90 microseconds; not a huge amount one would normally think, but this does represent serious progress from even the past couple of years.

As this publication noted 18 months ago when IBM launched its five qubit quantum processor, the company stated that medium-sized quantum processors of 50-100 qubits will be possible ‘in the next decade.’

IBM added that the 50 qubit processor had been built and measured, adding that it will be made available in the next generation IBM Q systems, though not specifying a date.

“The ability to reliably operate several working quantum systems and putting them online was not possible just a few years ago. Now, we can scale IBM processors up to 50 qubits due to tremendous feats of science and engineering,” said Dario Gil, vice president of AI and IBM Q at IBM Research.

“These latest advances show that we are quickly making quantum systems and tools available that could offer an advantage for tackling problems outside the realm of classical machines,” Gil added.

You can find out more about the announcement here.

Read more: Why IBM believes quantum computing is the next big cloud hit after AI and blockchain

DevOps at Cloud Expo – being held June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY – announces that its Call for Papers is open. Born out of proven success in agile development, cloud computing, and process automation, DevOps is a macro trend you cannot afford to miss. From showcase success stories from early adopters and web-scale businesses, DevOps is expanding to organizations of all sizes, including the world’s largest enterprises – and delivering real results. Among the proven benefits, DevOps is correlated with 20% faster time-to-market, 22% improvement in quality, and 18% reduction in dev and ops costs, according to research firm Vanson-Bourne. It is changing the way IT works, how businesses interact with customers, and how organizations are buying, building, and delivering software.

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@DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo, taking place June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, is co-located with 22nd Cloud Expo | 1st DXWorld Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.
The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

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The “Digital Era” is forcing us to engage with new methods to build, operate and maintain applications. This transformation also implies an evolution to more and more intelligent applications to better engage with the customers, while creating significant market differentiators.
In both cases, the cloud has become a key enabler to embrace this digital revolution. So, moving to the cloud is no longer the question; the new questions are HOW and WHEN. To make this equation even more complex, most of the time we are dealing with complex portfolios, many including hundreds of legacy applications.

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