In his Opening Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, John Considine, General Manager of IBM Cloud Infrastructure, will lead you through the exciting evolution of the cloud. He’ll look at this major disruption from the perspective of technology, business models, and what this means for enterprises of all sizes. John Considine is General Manager of Cloud Infrastructure Services at IBM. In that role he is responsible for leading IBM’s public cloud infrastructure including strategy, development, and offering management. To date, IBM has launched more than 50 cloud data centers that span the globe. He has been building advanced technology, delivering “as a service” solutions, and managing infrastructure services for the past 20 years.

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The session is centered around the tracing of systems on cloud using technologies like ebpf. The goal is to talk about what this technology is all about and what purpose it serves. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Shashank Jain, Development Architect at SAP, will touch upon concepts of observability in the cloud and also some of the challenges we have. Generally most cloud-based monitoring tools capture details at a very granular level. To troubleshoot problems this might not be good enough.

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Transforming cloud-based data into a reportable format can be a very expensive, time-intensive and complex operation. As a SaaS platform with more than 30 million global users, Cornerstone OnDemand’s challenge was to create a scalable solution that would improve the time it took customers to access their user data. Our Real-Time Data Warehouse (RTDW) process vastly reduced data time-to-availability from 24 hours to just 10 minutes.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Mark Goldin, Chief Technology Officer for Cornerstone OnDemand, will share his team’s learnings from this massive undertaking and relevant applications for other businesses.

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Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell.
In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, will discuss how from store operations and optimization to employee training and insights, all ultimately create the best customer experience both online and in-store.

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In the fast-paced advances and popularity in cloud technology, one of the most critical factors revolves around concerns for security of your critical data. How to assure both your company and your customers they can confidently trust and utilize your cloud environment is most often top on the list. There is a method to evaluating and providing security that exceeds conventional modes of protecting data both within the cloud as well externally on mobile and other devices. With the public failure of barrier type security, protecting data can now include encryption methods that protect it in storage as well as when exchanging it outside the confines of a secure cloud.

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GPUs are becoming ever more attractive to cloud service providers and customers as the demand for intensive computing increases – and UKCloud has become the first European cloud service provider to offer a cloud GPU computing service through NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 and M60 units.

UKCloud, formerly Skyscape, offers services for the public sector as well as healthcare. The company said the move for GPUs came about through its ‘maniacal focus’ on service excellence following customer demand through its UKCloud Ideas service.

“The public sector is driving more complex computational and visualisation intensive workloads than ever before, not only for CAD development packages, but also for tasks like the simulation of infrastructure changes in transport, for genetic sequencing in health or for battlefield simulation in defence,” said Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud in a statement. “In response to this demand, we have a greater focus on emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Other cloud providers are tapping into this resource; in March, Chinese vendor Tencent said its cloud computing services would be beefed up by NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture, as well as P100, P40 and M40 GPU accelerators, to ‘help advance artificial intelligence for enterprise customers’. IBM touted its cloud as the fastest for deep learning and AI in May, purporting to be the first of the large providers to offer NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers the P2 instance for graphics-heavy workloads.

Naturally, with these advancements, NVIDIA’s stock continues to soar. An article for Seeking Alpha noted how the company has had ‘one of the hottest stocks of the last few years’ and ‘is a leader in some of the largest megatrends that are likely to dominate the 21st century’, while Donna Fuscaldo, writing for Investopedia, said that though the company’s stock has already gone up 88% this year there was more room for the rally to continue.

You can find out more about UKCloud’s GPU service here.

IBM and SAP have both declared their most recent financials with cloud growth continuing on both sides, but still questions to be answered overall.

For IBM, overall revenues were again on the slide – $19.15 million (£14.5m) for the most recent quarter compared with $19.23m for this time last year – but cloud revenue was up 20% and overall results beat analyst expectations, seeing IBM’s shares surge as a result. According to MarketWatch, the stock’s one-day post-earnings percentage gain was the biggest since IBM reported fourth quarter 2008 results.

IBM cited the strength of embedded cloud and cognitive capabilities across their business as a key factor in the financials’ success, as Martin Schroeter, senior vice president and CFO, explained to analysts. “Our strategic imperatives, as we’ve said, are a signpost of the progress we’re making in helping our enterprise clients to extract value from data, and become digital businesses,” said Schroeter, “and so our strategic imperatives aren’t separate businesses, but a view of the revenue across our segments that provide our clients with analytics, cloud, security, mobile and social capabilities.”

Schroeter added that ‘as a service’ revenue was up 24% in the third quarter, and cloud revenue going up 20% translated to a $15.8bn revenue base over the past 12 months, representing 20% of IBM’s revenue.

With SAP, cloud subscriptions and support were at €937 million (£839.4m), up 22% from this time last year, with overall cloud and software and total revenues up 5% and 4% from Q316 respectively.

New cloud bookings were at €302m, an increase of 19% from this time last year, with the figure prompting questions from analysts over the state of the growth.

CEO Bill McDermott described the quarter overall as strong, noted S/4 HANA grew new cloud bookings ‘triple digit’ in Q3, and said Q4 will be stronger. “As you may recall from Q3 2016, we experienced some seasonality in our cloud business on a smaller base,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “When you think about SAP’s cloud growth, we increasingly see customers pursuing more large-scale transformations, which have a tendency to close in Q4.

“You can expect a dynamite Q4, and very consistent with our year to date growth rate in revenues,” McDermott added.

Responding to a specific question around confidence on cloud bookings rebounding in Q4, SAP CFO Luka Mucic said the company was ‘waiting for the big brands’ to come through, citing Shell as already on board and adding two ‘global brand[s] of massive significance’ will be announcing in the near future.

“I have total unequivocal unwavering confidence in the cloud bookings for Q4. It’s going to be a really strong Q4 bookings number. I’ll count on it. On Q1, especially, inspired by S/4 HANA in the public cloud. We’re winning deals everywhere. We have the perfect alignment between the innovation and the field execution now.”

You can read the IBM earnings statement here (pdf), and the SAP statement here (pdf).

Recently, REAN Cloud built a digital concierge for a North Carolina hospital that had observed that most patient call button questions were repetitive. In addition, the paper-based process used to measure patient health metrics was laborious, not in real-time and sometimes error-prone.
In their session at 21st Cloud Expo, Sean Finnerty, Executive Director, Practice Lead, Health Care & Life Science at REAN Cloud, and Dr. S.P.T. Krishnan, Principal Architect at REAN Cloud, will discuss how they built an Alexa-powered voice application for both patients and nurses. Patients got answers for common questions, it provided service feedback and registered complaints. Nurses can register patient health metrics. They were only able to do this because of cloud-based technologies. The cloud enabled them to complete this complex project while ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other privacy regulations.

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