Recent research reports from around the industry saw a range of interesting cloud market results and predictions emerge, underlining the real world momentum behind the cloud story.  The big four – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – dominate the market and their fortunes drive much of the analysis.  But what’s also clear is that there’s still plenty of room for even more growth both domestically and internationally.

Public cloud – a thriving oligopoly

In the cloud infrastructure services (public cloud) market, the big four continue to prosper, according to market research firm, Synergy.

In a sector worth $11bn a quarter globally, AWS remains well out in front of its rivals, commanding a bigger market share than Microsoft, IBM and Google combined.

According to Synergy, market share among these four was largely unchanged in the last four quarters, with the exception of Microsoft who saw an increase of 3%. And despite being a dynamic industry, it’s a similar trend to two years ago when AWS held a similarly dominant position.

Neither Google or Microsoft break out the figures for their respective public cloud offerings, but Amazon does specify numbers for AWS.  In their 2017 Q2 figures recently released, AWS posted a $916m profit in the three months ending in June, against revenues of $4.1bn and a 58% sales growth.

Let’s give this some context – Alphabet’s entire Q1 2017 revenue (of which Google Cloud is a non-specific part) was $24.75bn.  So, while public cloud is big money, there’s almost certainly plenty more to be made, with Synergy expecting overall growth rates of over 40% per year going forward.

A booming global market

Global spending on public cloud services will reach $226bn by 2021, according to IDC.

These are huge numbers, but to put them in perspective, Apple, the most profitable company in the world, brought in revenues of $233bn, according to Forbes 2016 rankings. Microsoft, a massive worldwide success story and employer of nearly 100,000 people, generated $85.3bn in the same year, a figure just ahead of the entire revenue of the worldwide information security market. 

The US will account for 60% of worldwide public cloud revenues ($163bn in 2021).  The industry’s leading the charge are professional services (sector growing at 21.5% pa), media (21%), retail and telecoms (both 20.9% annual growth).

IDC say that much of the spending growth in these industries is coming from “new projects and initiatives from functional areas like customer service and sales”.

But the UK lags behind on cloud adoption… maybe

Research by Fuze suggests only 10% of UK businesses have successfully managed to move their entire organisation to the cloud.  That compares to 45% of US organisations, who have completed their cloud migration.

On the one hand, this perspective assumes that an ‘all in’ cloud strategy is the only desirable end game.  But earlier in the year, the Cloud Industry Forum found that the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK stood at 88%, but the vast majority of companies would follow a hybrid strategy for some time to come.

Allure of cloud causes skill shortages in ‘traditional’ IT roles

The momentum behind the cloud market also appears to be hovering up talent and skills from more traditional on-premises roles, according to 451 Research. More than 65% of organisations in the survey found recruiting for roles across traditional servers and converged infrastructure to be “increasingly difficult”.

451 expect the rise of cloud migration to further diminish the pool of people available for roles dedicated to server administration.  They report that, “69.7% of respondents said that current candidates lack skills and experience [for on-premises roles]; plus a lack of candidates by region and high salaries point to a shrinking set of available talent.”

All of this research confirms what we already know: the cloud market is gargantuan and the potential for expansion is constantly growing. As organisations continually look to adopt increase the rate of cloud adoption, the vendor choices are small, but as everyone will tell you the rewards can be endless. 

We’ve all read the dystopian fiction, watched those apocalyptic movies and heard a myriad of prophetic warnings heralding our obsolescence. Surely now we’re just a couple of years from flipping the switch on a Skynet of our own making and condemning mankind to the annals of history.
Actually, we’re not entirely sure what the future holds, but it’s probably not fire and brimstone. For detractors and naysayers of technology, could there be a more fitting image than Terminator 2’s opening shot? A hulking, skeletal, humanoid machine crushing a human skull beneath its foot. Listening to ‘techno-skeptics’ can sure make it feel as though that’s the end which inevitably awaits us. If we continue down our current path of imbuing machines with increasing levels of autonomy, learning abilities and artificial intelligence, eventually we’ll inadvertently construct our own obsolescence – if not destruction! We must be careful, unless we want to find ourselves subjugated by a machine army…

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First, let’s outline a frame of reference for multithreading and why we may need to use a thread pool.
A thread is an execution context that can run a set of instructions within a process – aka a running program. Multithreaded programming refers to using threads to execute multiple tasks concurrently. Of course, this paradigm is well supported on the JVM.
Although this brings several advantages, primarily regarding the performance of a program, multithreaded programming can also have disadvantages – such as increased complexity of the code, concurrency issues, unexpected results and adding the overhead of thread creation.
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at how the latter issue can be mitigated by using thread pools in Java.

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Billions of people around the world use the internet to share ideas and trade with one another. With worldwide internet penetration at nearly 50 percent, the global digital economy has become a space of immense opportunity.

It’s clear that business transactions are becoming heavily reliant on us being connected onlne. Digital flows are now responsible for more GDP growth globally than trade in traditional offline goods and services. Digital transformation is now driving globalization.

As such, achieving a competitive advantage in the global digital arena has become a key priority for governments and businesses who strive for inclusion and relevance. It is also clear that trust has a critical role to play when countries look to improve their eCommerce adoption.

It’s in this context that The Fletcher School at Tufts University, in partnership with MasterCard, present findings from the 2017 edition of the  ‘Digital Evolution Index’ (DEI 17).

Exploring national digital trust development

The DEI 17 includes analysis of each country’s DEI score and digital momentum – the rate at which countries have been developing their digital economies. To investors and businesses, momentum is indicative of market attractiveness and potential; to policymakers, it is a proxy for national competitiveness.

The DEI 17 reveals how a country measures up and also how it might take inspiration from techniques and initiatives that have proved successful elsewhere. This is essential knowledge in the changing digital landscape, and also for governments and policymakers overseeing digital transformation.

DEI 17 incorporates a framework for Digital Trust that includes:

• Trustworthiness of the digital environment and the users experience.
• Attitudes towards key institutions and commercial organizations.
• Citizen’s behavior when they interact with the digital world.

According to the global study findings, digital trust is rooted in relationships. The guarantors of digital trust form one axis: the institutions, businesses, individuals and governments that are responsible for creating and fostering a trustworthy digital environment.

The DEI 17 reveals the identities of the digital elites operating at this level. As a group, they are split in two. First, there are the international trade hubs of Hong Kong, Singapore and the UAE.  And second, there are the nation states of the UK, Estonia, Israel and New Zealand.

These four countries are powering ahead of their rivals thanks to a complex formula of IT and network infrastructure, incubating start-ups, a cultural commitment to innovation, and government support.

«The top five scoring countries in the DEI 17 – Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Finland – are all ‘Stall Out’ countries, reflecting the challenges of sustaining fast upward momentum,» says Dr Bhaskar Chakravorti, senior associate dean of International Business and Finance at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

One important indicator of a country’s digital potential is its uptake of mobile internet via tablets and smartphones. Countries that reached this stage through iterations of services originally aimed at traditional desktop computing. Others, however, have taken a more direct route, with a singular focus on internet access via mobile devices.

Outlook for digital trust advancements

«The U.S. and UK markets were introduced to the internet through desktops and laptops, but the 1.5 billion new internet users added in the past five years had their first brush with the internet on a mobile device,» said Dr Chakravorti.

Trust is becoming increasingly important to online transactions. But this isn’t universal. The DEI 17 study found major differences in the level of digital trust in different countries. In those nations undergoing rapid advances in digital tech – such as China, Malaysia, Bolivia, Kenya and Russia – individuals are more tolerant of slow and unreliable online technology.

By the time the next DEI comes around, we will know just how well they fared, as well as how insights gleaned from the DE1 2017 helped the developing nations to navigate a path forward.

Historically, some banking activities such as trading have been relying heavily on analytics and cutting edge algorithmic tools. The coming of age of powerful data analytics solutions combined with the development of intelligent algorithms have created new opportunities for financial institutions. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Sebastien Meunier, Head of Digital for North America at Chappuis Halder & Co., discussed how these tools can be leveraged to develop a lasting competitive advantage in priority areas: customer analytics, financial crime prevention, regulatory compliance and risk management.

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The convergence of rapid feature development, automation, continuous delivery, and the shifting makeup of modern tech stacks has pushed monitoring requirements to a potentially overwhelming scale. But while the systems you need to monitor are complex, your monitoring strategy doesn’t have to be. The scale and pace of change involved in ops today dictate a carefully crafted monitoring and incident response strategy. Keeping the strategy simple will take some of the pain out of monitoring.

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WebRTC is the future of browser-to-browser communications, and continues to make inroads into the traditional, difficult, plug-in web communications world. The 6th WebRTC Summit continues our tradition of delivering the latest and greatest presentations within the world of WebRTC. Topics include voice calling, video chat, P2P file sharing, and use cases that have already leveraged the power and convenience of WebRTC.

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Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann and Aruna Ravichandran have been named Co-Chairs of @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley which will take place Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. «DevOps is at the intersection of technology and business-optimizing tools, organizations and processes to bring measurable improvements in productivity and profitability,» said Aruna Ravichandran, vice president, DevOps product and solutions marketing, CA Technologies. «It’s this results-driven combination of technology and business that makes me so passionate about DevOps and its future in the industry. I am truly honored to take on this co-chair role, and look forward to working with the DevOps Summit team at Cloud Expo and attendees to advance DevOps.»

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