OpenStack revenue will break the $6 billion barrier by 2021, with major advances in China and Asia Pacific being a contributory factor, according to the latest note from 451 Research.

Predictions concerning the overall market size have dipped slightly from the research firm’s previous analysis this time last year – the forecast for 2020 is now at $5.63bn, down from $5.75bn – yet 451 argues growth will remain strong (below) with a CAGR of 30% and an overall size of $6.73bn by 2021.

Service providers with OpenStack private cloud revenue will exceed revenue from those with OpenStack-based public cloud implementations as soon as 2018, according to the research. Deployments in China and Asia Pacific are now growing faster than in the rest of the world, with the research firm adding that part of this increase is down to the Chinese government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology advocating for OpenStack.

The research also assesses the growing prominence of containers and microservices technologies. According to Al Sadowski, 451 research vice president, OpenStack is no longer the ‘shiny new toy’ in the industry. Yet the most innovative and progressive OpenStack deployments feature the use of Docker and Kubernetes.

“While there is no clear answer yet about OpenStack coexistence with containers, it is worth noting that containers and container management are nascent markets in terms of production use cases,” added Sadowski.

The proclamation has been made to coincide with the latest OpenStack Summit, to be held in Sydney over the coming days. Before the festivities, the OpenStack Foundation announced it will use the event to help address how open source technologies can be integrated to solve real-world problems. This will be done in four parts; documenting cross-project use cases, collaborating across communities, fostering new projects at the OpenStack Foundation, and coordinating end to end testing across projects.

Of particular note is the recently announced Public Cloud Passport program. A global gaggle of public cloud providers, including OVH, Telefonica and UKCloud, are offering trials for users to ‘experience the freedom, performance and interoperability of open source infrastructure’, as OpenStack puts it.

• Worldwide public cloud services market revenue is projected to grow 18.5% in 2017 reaching $260.2B, up from $219.6B in 2016.
• 2016 worldwide SaaS revenue exceeded Gartner’s previous forecast by $48.2B.
• SaaS revenue is expected to grow 21% in 2017 reaching $58.6B by the end of this year.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is projected to grow 36.6% in 2017 alone, reaching $34.7B this year making this area the fastest growing of all cloud services today.

Gartner’s latest worldwide public cloud services revenue forecast published earlier this month predicts Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), currently growing at a 23.31% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), will outpace the overall market growth of 13.38% through 2020. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenue is predicted to grow from $58.6B in 2017 to $99.7B in 2020. Taking into account the entire forecast period of 2016 – 2020, SaaS is on pace to attain 15.65% compound annual growth throughout the forecast period, also outpacing the total cloud market. The following graphic compares revenue growth by cloud services category for the years 2016 through 2020. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

Catalysts driving greater adoption and correspondingly higher CAGRs include a shift Gartner sees in infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services spending. In 2016, Gartner estimates approximately 17% of the total market revenue for these areas had shifted to the cloud. Gartner predicts by 2021, 28% of all IT spending will be for cloud-based infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services.

Another factor is the adoption of platform as a service (PaaS). Gartner notes that enterprises are confident that PaaS can be a secure, scalable application development platform in the future.  The following graphic compares the compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) of each cloud service area including the total market. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

Source: Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Services Revenue to Reach $260 Billion in 2017

SYS-CON Events announced today that Google Cloud has been named “Keynote Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Companies come to Google Cloud to transform their businesses. Google Cloud’s comprehensive portfolio – from infrastructure to apps to devices – helps enterprises innovate faster, scale smarter, stay secure, and do more with data than ever before.

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DevOps is often described as a combination of technology and culture. Without both, DevOps isn’t complete. However, applying the culture to outdated technology is a recipe for disaster; as response times grow and connections between teams are delayed by technology, the culture will die. A Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has many benefits that provide the needed base for a true DevOps paradigm. In their Day 3 Keynote at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Brown, a Solutions Marketing Manager at Nutanix, and Mark Lavi, a Nutanix DevOps Solution Architect, explored the ways that Nutanix technologies empower teams to react faster than ever before and connect teams in ways that were either too complex or simply impossible with traditional infrastructures.

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Alibaba Group has recorded cloud revenues of RMB 2,975 million ($342.1m) for its most recent quarter, up 99% year on year, with CEO Daniel Zhang telling analysts its cloud business “continues to defy gravity.”

The company said it was seeing ‘significant traction and diversification of customers and revenue’ in its cloud service, and will ‘continue to invest to further expand the market through valuable services for our cloud customers.’

Total revenues for the quarter hit RMB 55,122m (£6.bn), with the vast majority of that through its ‘core commerce’ business at RMB 46,462m (£5.3bn). Other buckets include digital media and entertainment (£551m) and the vaguely worded ‘innovation initiatives and others’ (£102.5m).

Among the quarter’s highlights for Alibaba were 245 new products and features, alongside a variety of initiatives and customers. The majority of these were revealed at the company’s Computing Conference in Hangzhou. Customers include the Bank of Nanjing, Air Asia, State Administration Taxation and the IOC (International Olympic Committee), while products include the X-Dragon Cloud server, combining bare metal servers with VMs, and newly released relational database POLARDB.

The previous quarter saw revenues from cloud computing total RMB 2,431 million (£287m), and Zhang was in bullish mood in the earnings call. “Our cloud computing business continues to defy gravity,” said Zhang, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Revenue increased by 99% year over year. We continue to multiply our product portfolio, including the introduction of a new relational database and a state of the art server developed in-house that serve the needs of large enterprise customers.”

Alibaba’s cloud push appears to be paying off with the analysts. According to Gartner back in September, Alibaba has moved ahead of Google to take third place in the public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.

“Once again, we have delivered an outstanding quarter,” added Zhang. “The robust growth of our business speaks to the unique value proposition that we offer to customers through our strong execution and commitment to innovation.”

You can view the full financial statement here.

Research in quantum computing is closely tied to the discipline of information theory, a mathematical concept concerned with communication, coding, and encryption. Various applications of quantum information theory were developed in the last 50 years.

As a result, quantum computing has been high on the research agenda of governments and technology organisations worldwide. In a quantum computing model, the basic unit of information is called the quantum bit (qubit), which can be represented by photons.

Using qubits and quantum gates, the development of a quantum circuit model of computation has been made possible, enabling the use of algorithms to theoretically solve highly complex mathematical problems in a much shorter time frame than is currently possible.

Quantum computing market development

Most experts now agree that the creation of a quantum computer is simply a matter of engineering, and that the theoretical application will happen. Optimistic estimates for commercialisation by the private sector vary between 5 and 15 years, while more conservative estimates by academics put it at 15-25 years.

The drive to create the first quantum computer has been viewed as the new arms race. The milestone to reach is that of quantum supremacy, essentially the performance of computation that goes beyond the capability of the latest and best supercomputers in existence today. But this drive is underpinning another, more pressing race: quantum cybersecurity.

ABI Research forecasts that the first attack-capable quantum machines will make their market debut by 2030.  "When they do, even the latest and best in class cybersecurity technologies will be vulnerable," said Michela Menting, research director at ABI Research.

The race to quantum supremacy is real: governmental R&D is accelerating the crystallisation of the quantum computer, with more than $1.6 billion already invested globally. The potentially drastic repercussions on cybersecurity is equally real and has led to the focus on quantum-safe cryptography.

Also known as post quantum cryptography, such research looks to the development of new cryptographic algorithms that could withstand breaking by quantum computers, ideally before such computers become commercially available.

Outlook for quantum computing technologies

Beyond and ahead of quantum computers, the use of the theory has also aided in developing new cryptographic techniques, notably quantum key distribution (QKD). Considered as a type of quantum-safe cryptography, QKD will likely be commercialised before the advent of quantum computers, because it is achievable using current technologies such as lasers and fiber optics. In that sense, QKD is one of the first quantum theories to find real-world applications.

Heavy private sector investment is going into quantum R&D. Since 2012, venture capital funds have pumped over $334 million into companies specializing in the space. Clearly, this is an early-stage market development opportunity with lots of upside growth potential.