All clouds are not equal. To succeed in a DevOps context, organizations should plan to develop/deploy apps across a choice of on-premise and public clouds simultaneously depending on the business needs. This is where the concept of the Lean Cloud comes in – resting on the idea that you often need to relocate your app modules over their life cycles for both innovation and operational efficiency in the cloud.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that Vivint to exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. As a leading smart home technology provider, Vivint offers home security, energy management, home automation, local cloud storage, and high-speed Internet solutions to more than one million customers throughout the United States and Canada. The end result is a smart home solution that saves you time and money and ultimately simplifies your life.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that ECS Refining to exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. With rapid advances in technology, the proliferation of consumer and enterprise electronics, and the exposure of unethical e-waste disposal methods, there is an increasing demand for responsible electronics recycling and reuse services. As a pioneer in the electronics recycling and IT asset disposition space for over 36 years, ECS provides a broad spectrum of solutions to a variety of markets, including recyclers, large enterprises, OEMs, retailers, and consumers.

read more

Data protection solutions provider Datto has announced it is to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners, with the company being merged with IT business management provider Autotask, another horse in Vista’s stable.

The move is a large one in the managed service provider (MSP) space, with the companies in their own words ‘creating the only complete, global IT business management and business continuity platform built exclusively for MSPs.’

Datto offers business continuity, backup and disaster recovery and network continuity services, while Autotask has traditionally focused on endpoint management, remote monitoring and management, alongside providing cloud backup, and CRM and service desk offerings under the banner of professional services automation (PSA).

Mark Banfield, SVP and general manager of international at Autotask, said Vista has been looking for opportunities to expand Autotask’s vision for a unified platform for ‘some time’. “The merger of Autotask and Datto is a natural next step for both companies who can now deliver tremendous value to the IT channel by providing technology providers with services to increase recurring revenue, grow and expand – all from one company,” he told CloudTech.

Andrew Stuart, managing director of Datto’s EMEA arm, added the company previously had suitors but was unwilling to sell until they found a good fit. “When it came to Vista, they shared our vision to create something meaningful in the MSP market,” said Stuart. “They were already working with Autotask and understood the potential for future growth and that we could make a serious impact in the IT space by combining Datto and Autotask.

“Things went fairly quickly once we realised that Vista could really take Datto to the next level and essentially create the largest vendor in the MSP industry.”

According to the press materials, a combined management team will lead the merged entity, with Austin McChord, Datto founder and chief executive officer, leading the company. Mark Cattini, president and CEO of Autotask, will be a strategic advisor to the board of directors. Regarding future product strategy, it is still early days but according to Stuart, while there will ‘eventually’ be a joint product roadmap it is business as usual for the time being.

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2017. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cedexis will exhibit at 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. Cedexis is the leader in data-driven enterprise global traffic management. Whether optimizing traffic through datacenters, clouds, CDNs, or any combination, Cedexis solutions drive quality and cost-effectiveness.

For more information, please visit https://www.cedexis.com.

read more

Amazon and Microsoft have posted their most recent financial results, and again both have delivered with a focus on cloud.

Amazon posted total revenue across all segments of $43.74 billion for the quarter with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing just over 10% of that at $4.58bn. The AWS revenue represented at 41% increase from this time last year.

Microsoft posted total revenues of $24.5 billion – and while the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, the company’s ‘intelligent cloud’ segment went up 13% from this time last year at $6.9bn, and the ‘productivity and business processes’ segment going up 28% at $8.2bn. The former refers to Azure and server products, while the latter focuses more on Office 365. The other segment, ‘more personal computing’, saw a 0.1% dip from this this time last year at $9.4bn.

Speaking to analysts following the results, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Azure Compute usage more than doubled over the quarter, with revenue growing 90%, while the number of monthly active users of Office 365 Commercial moved to 120 million.

“To support the emerging intelligent cloud, intelligent edge application pattern, you need a consistent stack across the public cloud and the edge,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Merely providing colocation services or connectivity between on-premise data centres and the public cloud is not sufficient to meet customer needs. You need consistency across the development environment, operating models and technology stacks.

“Azure provides this consistency across the entire stack, inclusive of identity, data, app platform, security and management at the edge and in the cloud,” Nadella added. “Our hybrid cloud is one of the reasons nearly every Fortune 500 company has chosen to partner with Microsoft.”

Amazon, traditionally a little more reluctant to divulge on earnings day through prepared remarks, revealed some snippets though analyst questions. Brian T. Olsavsky, Amazon CFO, described the quarter as “very strong” for AWS and added the company expected a ‘strong’ Q4, taking into account the previous year focused on price reductions. “Price cuts, and not only price cuts but new products that have lower average cost and can cannabalise more expensive products, is pretty much a part of our business all the time in AWS,” said Olsavsky.

Naturally, the biggest concern for those analysing Amazon was around the company’s acquisition of Whole Foods in August. For the first time, Amazon put sales from ‘physical stores’ in a separate bucket, with that number clocking in at $1.28bn. Olsavsky confirmed this was where the Whole Foods revenue appeared.

So how should these results be analysed? Synergy Research says it is essentially the status quo. AWS remains ‘in a league of its own’, with Microsoft best of the rest, ahead of Google and Alibaba. Growth in the total market for 2017 is at 40%. “There’s still something a little shocking about seeing a business unit the size of AWS consistently growing its revenues by over 40%,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director.

“Microsoft and Google too deserve plaudits for the growth rates they are achieving, while IBM is gaining market share in its sweet spot of hosted private cloud services. It is becoming increasingly difficult for cloud providers outside of the leading pack to make an impression on the market share rankings.”

You can read Microsoft’s report here and Amazon’s report here.

Philip Hammond proclaimed in this year’s Spring Budget speech that the fourth industrial revolution is “well and truly under way.” Building on the third industrial revolution that saw the rise of electrons and IT to automate production, this new digital wave is characterised by a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.

As noted by Hammond, everyone will need to be “agile and bold” to embrace this revolution. But what does this really mean for companies and IT teams with regard to daily activities, and how might it affect the bottom line as budgets are being set for 2018 spending?

From a technology perspective, the far-flung-future forecast will see current emerging technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), automation and big data play a key part of this digitally-led revolution. The potential to transform business models as well as IT operations by changing the way we work and the applications on which we depend is tremendous.

In the more immediate future however, benefits of the ‘fourth wave’ that organisations can reap at an operational level will depend on their adoption and use of cloud technology. This is already happening – IDC forecasts that public cloud spending alone will reach $122.5 billion in 2017, which is a huge increase of 24.4% over 2016 and promises to continue expanding exponentially in 2018.

The transition and journey to cloud from the more ‘traditional’ technology is not one that happens overnight, and although Gartner’s latest CEO survey found that 42% of CEO’s have already begun their digital business transformation journeys, it’s important to still protect legacy infrastructures while integrating cloud implementations. That said, investing in cloud-first plans will go a long way towards future-proofing infrastructure. Gartner predicts that by 2020, a ‘no- cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today.

So with large, long-term investment in mind, which solutions may fulfill budget criteria and aid the transition to cloud while bridging this gap at the same time?

The cloud has come a long way in its evolution from a basic data storage model to a powerful, cost effective platform for increased agility and responsiveness. A technology expansion that started with mass adoption of virtualised environments over the last decade has now progressed to cloud infrastructure, and focuses on enabling IT to play a bigger part in overall business goals by leveraging scalability, performance, development and budgeting.

Many companies are however understandably cautious of fully depending on the cloud for IT requirements right from the get go, which could explain the current popularity of a cloud hybrid model. A hybrid model allows each workload to sit in the appropriate infrastructure – on-premises, private or public cloud – to optimise performance and meet budgetary requirements.

The adoption of cloud – and hybrid cloud environments in particular – brings about a new iteration of an age old IT issue, that of how to combine legacy infrastructure with new technologies. Whether it is because it takes time to fully migrate to the new technology or that the combination of new and old is the best plan moving forward, the process can be a complex, ongoing one to manage.

To combat this issue, businesses and CTOs must evaluate management tools for both current needs and future requirements, including considering vendor lock-in, development cycles of the product itself and the prospect of the vendor being at the forefront of supporting technology trends.

In summary, if the fourth industrial revolution really is well and truly upon us, then companies should align IT budgets to accommodate the new technology that will continue to penetrate both the business landscape and consumer markets. Hybrid cloud is an ideal IT model for cost saving and offers greater business benefits through its ability to scale and take advantage of the continuous data output of applications.

As we look forward to 2018, it is becoming increasingly important to invest in software that can support hybrid cloud models to deliver seamless delivery and continuous uptime. And possibly most importantly, organisations need to make provisions for the innovations of the far-flung-future, which may not be so far away.